Helen Scales > Quotes

“Which came first, the mollusc or the shell?”
― Helen Scales, Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells

“As soon as you stop thinking about it, the deep can so easily vanish out of mind — more so than that other great distant realm, outer space. The deep has no stars at night to remind us it is there, and no moon shining down. And yet, this hidden place reaches into our daily lives and makes vital things happen without our knowing. The deep, quite simply makes this planet habitable.”
― Helen Scales, The Brilliant Abyss

“Not so very long ago, the deep was a tremendous void containing myths, legends and endless unknowns.”
― Helen Scales, The Brilliant Abyss

“Molluscs aren’t mathematicians.”
― Helen Scales, Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells

“One of the new species is Alviniconcha strummeri, named as a joint tribute to the research submarine and to Joe Strummer, the lead vocalist and guitarist of the British punk band The Clash. It was a nod to these hard-as-nails snails that live in the most acidic, most sulphur-ridden hydrothermal vents in the Pacific Ocean, close to the islands of Fiji. And like many of the band’s 1970s punk followers, the snails have spiky hairdos in the form of a bristly layer of protein known as the periostracum, which covers their shells.”
― Helen Scales, Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells

“The oceans, it turns out, are full of bone-eating worms”
― Helen Scales, The Brilliant Abyss

“Some hexactinellids hold themselves aloft on long stalks and look like shocked sock puppets, mouths agape.”
― Helen Scales, The Brilliant Abyss

“The deep sea will never run out of things for us to dream about. Places will remain unseen and unvisited, fleeting moments will be missed, and nimble creatures, whose existence nobody can guess, will keep slipping out of sight. We need to do all we can to keep it that way.”
― Helen Scales, The Brilliant Abyss

“The deep has no stars at night to remind us it is there, and no moon shining down. And yet, this hidden place reaches into our daily lives and makes vital things happen without our knowing. The deep, quite simply, makes this planet habitable.”
― Helen Scales, The Brilliant Abyss

“The deep sea will never run out of things for us to dream about. Places will remain unseen and unvisited, fleeting moments will be missed, and nimble creatures, whose existence nobody can guess, will keep slipping out of sigh. We need to do all we can to keep it that way.”
― Helen Scales, The Brilliant Abyss

“In the abyss, the water pressure is 400 times greater than at the surface, or more than 150 times the pressure inside a car tire.”
― Helen Scales, The Brilliant Abyss

“The paper publishing their findings depicts these connections in a diagram, which the scientists call the "birthday party figure" because it's so colorful, with bright streamers looping between many different deep-sea animal groups. It shows something that doesn't normally happen at birthday parties: all the guests are eating each other.”
― Helen Scales, The Brilliant Abyss

“A long, ridged plastic tube, like a vacuum cleaner pipe, known as the slurp gun...”
― Helen Scales, The Brilliant Abyss

“There are no compelling reasons for exploiting the deep, just industry and politics vying to push into that last frontier.”
― Helen Scales, The Brilliant Abyss