This little light of mine | I'm gonna let it shine

What a lovely and powerful illustration of the deep, deep, depths under the seas, about which we know very little!

That image accompanied this essay by Elizabeth Kolbert, who writes: "We’ve barely explored the darkest realm of the ocean. With rare-metal mining on the rise, we’re already destroying it."

One of those awesome mysteries lies way down where the sun don't shine, as they say:

Only the top layers of the oceans are illuminated. The “sunlight zone” extends down about seven hundred feet, the “twilight zone” down another twenty-six hundred feet. Below that—in the “midnight zone,” the “abyssal zone,” and the “hadal zone”—there’s only blackness, and the light created by life itself.

Hadal zone.  I had never heard about this, until I read the essay.

In this zone, the only light is the light created by life.  Yes, created by life.

Bioluminescent creatures produce light via chemical reaction. They synthesize luciferins, compounds that, in the presence of certain enzymes, known as luciferases, oxidize and give off photons. ... In the case of bioluminescence, different groups of organisms produce very different luciferins, meaning that each has invented its own way to shine.

We have barely understood anything that deep down, but we know enough that there are precious and rare metals.  So, who cares for life in its variety and complexity, eh!  “Even if we found unicorns living on the seafloor, I don’t think that would necessarily stop mining.”

Such is our human behavior!

A later issue of The New Yorker includes a poem titled Bioluminescence.  Why the editors failed to pair it in the same issue that had Kolbert's essay is beyond me.  At least in my post, I can present them together.

Here is the poem Bioluminescence, by Paul Tran:

There’s a dark so deep beneath the sea the creatures beget their own
light. This feat, this fact of adaptation, I could say, is beautiful

though the creatures are hideous. Lanternfish. Hatchetfish. Viperfish.
I, not unlike them, forfeited beauty to glimpse the world hidden

by eternal darkness. I subsisted on falling matter, unaware
from where or why matter fell, and on weaker creatures beguiled

by my luminosity. My hideous face opening, suddenly, to take them
into a darkness darker and more eternal than this underworld

underwater. I swam and swam toward nowhere and nothing.
I, after so much isolation, so much indifference, kept going

even if going meant only waiting, hovering in place. So far below, so far
away from the rest of life, the terrestrial made possible by and thereby

dependent upon light, I did what I had to do. I stalked. I killed.
I wanted to feel in my body my body at work, working to stay

alive. I swam. I kept going. I waited. I found myself without meaning
to, without contriving meaning at the time, in time, in the company

of creatures who, hideous like me, had to be their own illumination.
Their own god. Their own genesis. Often we feuded. Often we fused

like anglerfish. Blood to blood. Desire to desire. We were wild. Bewildered.
Beautiful in our wilderness and wildness. In the most extreme conditions

we proved that life can exist. I exist. I am my life, I thought, approaching
at last the bottom of the sea. It wasn’t the bottom. It wasn’t the sea.