Below the Edge of Darkness
A Memoir of Exploring Light and Life in the Deep Sea
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Narrated by:
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Allyson Ryan
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By:
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Edith Widder
About this listen
A pioneering marine biologist takes us down into the deep ocean to understand bioluminescence - the language of light that helps life communicate in the darkness - and what it tells us about the future of life on Earth in this “thrilling blend of hard science and high adventure” (The New York Times Book Review).
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by Booklist
“Edith Wilder's story is one of hardscrabble optimism, two-fisted exploration, and groundbreaking research. She’s done things I dream of doing.” (James Cameron)
Edith Widder’s childhood dream of becoming a marine biologist was almost derailed in college, when complications from a surgery gone wrong caused temporary blindness. A new reality of shifting shadows drew her fascination to the power of light - as well as the importance of optimism.
As her vision cleared, Widder found the intersection of her two passions in oceanic bioluminescence, a little-explored scientific field within Earth’s last great unknown frontier: the deep ocean. With little promise of funding or employment, she leaped at the first opportunity to train as a submersible pilot and dove into the darkness.
Widder’s first journey into the deep ocean, in a diving suit that resembled a suit of armor, took her to a depth of 800 feet. She turned off the lights and witnessed breathtaking underwater fireworks: explosions of bioluminescent activity. Concerns about her future career vanished. She only wanted to know one thing: Why was there so much light down there?
Below the Edge of Darkness takes listeners deep into our planet’s oceans as Widder pursues her questions about one of the most important and widely used forms of communication in nature. In the process, she reveals hidden worlds and a dazzling menagerie of behaviors and animals, from microbes to leviathans, many never before seen or, like the legendary giant squid, never before filmed in their deep-sea lairs. Alongside Widder, we experience life-and-death equipment malfunctions and witness breakthroughs in technology and understanding, all set against a growing awareness of the deteriorating health of our largest and least understood ecosystem.
A thrilling adventure story as well as a scientific revelation, Below the Edge of Darkness reckons with the complicated and sometimes dangerous realities of exploration. Widder shows us how when we push our boundaries and expand our worlds, discovery and wonder follow. These are the ultimate keys to the ocean’s salvation - and thus to our future on this planet.
©2021 Edith Widder, PhD (P)2021 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Gripping...Widder’s voice is in turns jaunty, precise and nerdily quippy.... The prose glints.... Widder [has] worked hard to bring the abyss to light. It is our duty, as clumsy land-bound dwellers of a water planet, to look, and to remember.” (The New York Times Book Review)
“Edith Widder’s story is one of hardscrabble optimism, two-fisted exploration, and groundbreaking research. She’s done things I dream of doing. I’d have wrapped my submersible, the Deepsea Challenger, in bacon if it would have lured the elusive giant squid from the depths. In Below the Edge of Darkness, Widder tells you how she did it.” (James Cameron)
“My experience of exploring the deep ocean and its alien life with Edie Widder was fabulous. She enthralls us with many such stories in her book. I recommend it.” (Ray Dalio)
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- Our Intimate Connection with Kinky Crustaceans, Sex-Changing Fish, Romantic Lobsters and Other Salty Erotica of the Deep
- By: Marah J. Hardt
- Narrated by: Carla Mercer-Meyer
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Forget the Kama Sutra. When it comes to inventive sex acts, just look to the sea. There we find the elaborate mating rituals of armored lobsters; giant right whales engaging in a lively threesome while holding their breath; full-moon sex parties of groupers; and daily mating blitzes by blueheaded wrasse. Deep-sea squid perform inverted 69s while hermaphrodite sea slugs link up in giant sex loops.
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How to laugh while learning/ learn while laughing
- By Miamigrrl on 07-27-16
By: Marah J. Hardt
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Proxima Rising
- Proxima, Book 1
- By: Brandon Q. Morris
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Late in the 21st century, Earth receives what looks like an urgent plea for help from planet Proxima Centauri b in the closest star system to the Sun. Astrophysicists suspect a massive solar flare is about to destroy this heretofore-unknown civilization. Earth's space programs are unequipped to help, but an unscrupulous Russian billionaire launches a secret and highly-specialized spaceship to Proxima b, over four light-years away.
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Story is great, format is not
- By Mike on 04-26-20
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The Secret Life of Lobsters
- By: Trevor Corson
- Narrated by: David Marantz
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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In this intimate portrait of an island lobstering community and an eccentric band of renegade biologists, journalist Trevor Corson escorts the listener onto the slippery decks of fishing boats, through danger-filled scuba dives, and deep into the churning currents of the Gulf of Maine to learn about the secret undersea lives of lobsters.
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Uninteresting and poorly written
- By Alexandra DuSablon on 01-10-20
By: Trevor Corson
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The Last Stargazers
- The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers
- By: Emily Levesque
- Narrated by: Janet Metzger
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Humans from the earliest civilizations were spellbound by the night sky - craning their necks each night, they used the stars to orient themselves in the large, strange world around them. Stargazing is a pursuit that continues to fascinate us: from Copernicus to Carl Sagan, astronomers throughout history have spent their lives trying to answer the biggest questions in the universe. Now, award-winning astronomer Emily Levesque shares the stories of modern-day stargazers.
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Searching for Stuff in the Darkness
- By Warpedland on 10-11-22
By: Emily Levesque
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How to Read Water
- By: Tristan Gooley
- Narrated by: Jeff Harding
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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A must-have audiobook for walkers, sailors, swimmers, anglers and everyone interested in the natural world, in How to Read Water, Natural Navigator Tristan Gooley shares knowledge, skills, tips and useful observations to help you enjoy the landscape around you. From wild swimming in Sussex to wayfinding off Oman, via the icy mysteries of the Arctic, Tristan Gooley draws on his own pioneering journeys to reveal the secrets of ponds, puddles, rivers, oceans and more to show us all the skills we need to read the water around us.
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Reasonably Interesting, Perhaps Better in Print
- By Alex Angel on 12-05-22
By: Tristan Gooley
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Confessions of an Alien Hunter
- A Scientist's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
- By: Seth Shostak
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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This engaging memoir reveals the true story of the Search for ExtraterrestrialIntelligence (SETI), and discloses what we may very soon discover. Chronicling the program’s history with insight and humor, SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak assures us that if there is sentient life in the universe, we are within decades of picking up its signal.
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Somewhat Disappointed...
- By Tim on 11-12-10
By: Seth Shostak
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Plastic Ocean
- By: Capt. Charles Moore, Cassandra Phillips
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 12 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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A prominent seafaring environmentalist and researcher shares his shocking discovery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the Pacific Ocean, which inspired a fundamental rethinking of the Plastic Age and a growing global health crisis.
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Informative
- By Paul on 01-30-23
By: Capt. Charles Moore, and others
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Deep Descent
- Adventure and Death Diving the Andrea Doria
- By: Kevin F. McMurray
- Narrated by: P. J. Ochlan
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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On a foggy July evening in 1956, the Italian cruise liner Andrea Doria, bound for New York, was struck broadside by another vessel. In eleven hours, she would sink nearly 250 feet to the murky Atlantic Ocean floor. Thanks to a daring rescue operation, only 51 of more than 1,700 people died in the tragedy. But the Andrea Doria is still taking lives. Considered the Mt. Everest of diving, the Andrea Doria is the ultimate deepwater wreck challenge.
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A must read for every deep diver
- By DocYinYang on 10-20-19
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To Be Taught, If Fortunate
- By: Becky Chambers
- Narrated by: Brittany Pressley
- Length: 4 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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At the turn of the 22nd century, scientists make a breakthrough in human spaceflight. Through a revolutionary method known as somaforming, astronauts can survive in hostile environments off Earth using synthetic biological supplementations. With the fragility of the body no longer a limiting factor, human beings are at last able to journey to neighboring exoplanets long known to harbor life. A team of these explorers, Ariadne O’Neill and her three crewmates, are hard at work in a planetary system 15 light-years from Sol, on a mission to ecologically survey four habitable worlds.
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"Gay & Lesbian"?!? This is solid Sci-Fi
- By Jennifer on 09-16-19
By: Becky Chambers
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War of the Whales
- A True Story
- By: Joshua Horwitz
- Narrated by: Holter Graham
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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War of the Whales is the gripping tale of a crusading attorney who stumbles on one of the US Navy’s best-kept secrets: a submarine detection system that floods entire ocean basins with high-intensity sound - and drives whales onto beaches. As Joel Reynolds launches a legal fight to expose and challenge the Navy program, marine biologist Ken Balcomb witnesses a mysterious mass stranding of whales near his research station in the Bahamas.
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Legal Drama - better than fiction
- By W. P. Brown on 08-23-14
By: Joshua Horwitz
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The Ocean of Life
- The Fate of Man and the Sea
- By: Callum Roberts
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 13 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Who can forget the sense of wonder with which they discovered the creatures of the deep? In this vibrant hymn to the sea, Callum Roberts - one of the world’s foremost conservation biologists - leads listeners on a fascinating tour of mankind’s relationship to the sea, from the earliest traces of water on Earth to the oceans as we know them today. In the process, Roberts looks at how the taming of the oceans has shaped human civilization and affected marine life. Like Four Fish and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, The Ocean of Life takes a long view to tell a story in which each one of us has a role to play.
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Immediate fan of Mr Roberts
- By Anna on 06-25-24
By: Callum Roberts
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The Complete (Short) Guide to Absolutely Everything
- Adventures in Math and Science
- By: Adam Rutherford, Hannah Fry
- Narrated by: Hannah Fry, Adam Rutherford
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Geneticist Adam Rutherford and mathematician Hannah Fry guide listeners through time and space, through our bodies and brains, showing how emotions shape our view of reality, how our minds tell us lies, and why a mostly bald and curious ape decided to begin poking at the fabric of the universe.
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Humour and understandability.
- By Chris B on 09-08-24
By: Adam Rutherford, and others
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Surface at the Pole
- The Extraordinary Voyages of the USS Skate
- By: James Calvert
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 7 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Under the guidance of James Calvert this nuclear submarine had navigated through polar ice packs, braved atrociously cold conditions, and broken through layers of thick ice to arrive at their destination; the northernmost point of the world. This mission, however, was not just about completing a seemingly impossibly feat of Arctic exploration. It also had huge implications for military strategy during the height of the Cold War.
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Great moments in Submarine history.
- By james on 05-06-24
By: James Calvert
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What listeners say about Below the Edge of Darkness
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- JohninMaine
- 01-26-22
Glad I gave it a try - it was a real pleasure
I know (knew) nothing about the subject matter but I liked the sample audio so I gave this audiobook a try. Wow, I really enjoyed it! The writing is quite good, entertaining, informative and well paced. She brings the reader behind the scenes to where scientists struggle with mechanical failures, lightning strikes, grant funding, and the occasional complete failure of Plan A. Still, her scientific zeal for exploring & understanding life in the deepest depths of the ocean keeps her going.
For me this was the perfect nonfiction experience: a book that brings me into a world I knew nothing about and tells an interesting (and true) story. Very enjoyable.
The narrator, Allyson Ryan, did an excellent job too. She brought the prose to life and also the moments of humor. Just right, I thought.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Amazon customer
- 06-24-23
A must read!
I got this book because I had an extra token and wasn't sure what to read. it seemed interesting. I am glad I got his book. This book offers a compelling story about the deep sea, bioluminescence, and the perseverance of humans and other animals. it warns of the negative impact humans have but also offers a new perspective on how to see the problem. It gave me a new perspective of optimism.
What I enjoyed the most was how everything is balanced in this book. You have Dr. Widder's mini biography, bioluminescence, fascinating facts about sealive, and the struggles of deep sea exploration. It blends scientific facts and data with relatable references. This book is definitely worth a listen/read.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Alex Mercier
- 09-27-22
Interesting and entertaining.
From her life changing medical situation to deep sea submarine exploration, this is a memoir of the incredible adventures and life of marine biologist Edith Widder. There is not a dull moment to be had!
Narrator was also solid enough to keep me engaged.
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- Pen Name
- 03-14-23
Great book for all aspiring marine biologists!
This book was a true beacon during hard times, it made me believe that I could do everything I’m trying to do as an undergrad student. A perfect mix of hope, triumph, and struggle associated with the field. Uses a combination of realism and wonder associated with scientific research. Follows the story of an amazing biologist, and what it took to get to where she is. Additionally, allows a first person view of the career and it’s complexity’s.
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