Image: The Silent World
We'd all be hard pressed to find someone who would disagree that the oceans are anything but a beautiful mystery—a world more alien than alien worlds, as the cliché goes. But as we slowly peer further into the depths, we learn more and more just how much we've changed the marine environment without even realizing it.This week we're celebrating the world's oceans on Motherboard, and in looking for inspiration to write an intro to the Hell or Salt Water theme, I pulled up Jacques Cousteau's 1956 classic The Silent World, a work that's irreplaceable in both the oceanography and nature documentary worlds.The Silent World introduced audiences to the undersea world like no other work before it, and put Cousteau, whose innovation and outreach fundamentally changed marine research, on the global stage. Of course, 59 years later, plenty of the Calypso crew's antics—including riding a big old tortoise, plundering shipwrecks, and sawing off hunks of coral—would be decidedly (and correctly) gauche in any modern research setting.But there was one moment from the film that I'd entirely forgotten about: In a sequence starting at around the 46 minute mark, the Calypso crew manages to:
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- jokingly fail at harpooning a sperm whale;
- accidentally ram a sperm whale with the ship, whose distress calls cause other sperm whales to arrive;
- run over a juvenile sperm whale, which Cousteau says fell behind the pack with "childish carelessness";
- harpoon the juvenile and then shoot it with a rifle;
- use it as bait for sharks;
- harpoon some of the sharks and kill them too.