Thalassophobia

humans have been trying to scare each other through fiction for forever old stories of ghosts and monsters horror films horror video games there is a wide repertoire of things designed to scare us humans have gotten really good at it too and despite all the endless trash that seems to come from the horror genre there are still some real gems out there but as scary as these creations can be unfortunately when it comes to what scares me what truly keeps me up at night when it comes down to fiction versus reality fiction just can't compete what is the worst way to die you might cite radiation poisoning or some obscure medieval torture and those would be right to put high on the list but a far more likely and still considerably unpleasant way to die is drowning there's something eerie about drowning people who drown often do so alone people who know how to swim may be overconfident in their abilities and are more likely to swim alone or beyond their physical capabilities unsupervised children especially are at a great risk and it doesn't even take a large amount of water to drown when people who have drowned are pulled out from the water there's no purposeful signs of maliciousness even though bodies damaged by passing debris can cause wounds that seem intentional drowning is just a simple result of our biology subjected to environments we weren't built for corpses decompose far differently in water than in air the most well-known change is the wrinkling of skin but there's also things like discoloration and adiposery wax buildup gases are released during decomposition which causes bodies to bloat and rise to the surface the longer a body is not recovered the more distorted it will become and while that's all quite unpleasant i think the greatest factor to drowning's perceived eeriness is the tragedy of it all there's usually not someone or something to blame directly for the death it's more often than not accidental all it takes is one mishap one small lapse in judgment for fatal results it's likely you've tried to hold your breath underwater just to see how long you could last first you feel calm and collected you might be able to do this for a few minutes maybe you use this opportunity to dive deeper into the water but sooner rather than later you start to lose energy and then the pain starts that awful squeezing pain you feel it in your chest and your throat you start to feel dizzy your brain starts screaming at you that you need to ascend and descend quickly maybe you've gone down a bit too far and you look above and realize that you might be in trouble you start swimming you let the last of your air out and then the panic sets in it seems you can't ascend fast enough you're literally in too deep this is it but if you're listening to this video right now it means you made it that experience is frightening yes but if you're smart you never do it in places where there's serious danger you'll either do it around people in a public pool or in a relatively shallow body of water but in places where someone is really in too deep in scenarios where someone is truly trapped i can imagine that the panic you feel while voluntarily holding your breath for a bit too long isn't even one percent of the terror one feels when they are truly trapped and drowning in 2013 a nigerian tugboat sunk with 12 seamen on board after it had sunk the vessel's cook harrison o'kene managed to find an air pocket in the bow of the ship and through some ingenuity and luck managed to survive for three days in a cold dark room sustaining himself with a single can of coke rapidly running out of air and with the constant threat of the room suddenly filling with water but eventually he was miraculously rescued by divers when he reached out for them from his airtight room while the story itself is remarkable i cannot overstate how horrific that experience must have been throughout this man's ordeal i can only imagine the type of mental anguish he must have felt not only was it likely he was going to die either from hypothermia suffocation or drowning he got the rare opportunity to think about dying in those wonderful ways for 60 grueling hours it's no wonder he still has nightmares and vowed never to return to the sea this is a rare incidence of survival but it makes you wonder about if there are any other cases like this where people got trapped in an air pocket but they didn't get rescued but how would we be able to know i mean we can guess with probabilities and things like that but how can we truly know about any scenarios like this if we never eventually rescue them and hear their story right [Music] when the japanese attacked pearl harbor they destroyed or damaged 19 ships one of those ships was the uss west virginia which was struck by torpedoes seven times and sunk as the ship began to list prompt damage control efforts initiated by lieutenant john s harper saved it from capsizing this was done by closing all the hatch compartments and counterflooding the starboard side of the ship these actions undoubtedly saved hundreds of lives the uss west virginia burned for 30 hours then when the fires were extinguished on december 8th and things quieted down a noise could be heard there was a faint banging noise that among the chaos could have easily been mistaken for a piece of loose rigging slapping against the hole it soon dawned on shipmates near the scene that men were trapped 40 feet down in a closed airtight storeroom in the bow of the ship unfortunately any rescue efforts were near impossible cutting a hole would rapidly flood the room and using a torch would ignite trapped gases causing an explosion these sailors who were eventually revealed to be ronald endicott clifford olds and lewis costin were truly trapped when the wv was eventually salvaged six months later by pumping out enough water for it to partially float the three bodies were found in the small compartment however this scene was unlike most flashlight batteries and empty ration cans littered the floor but on the wall was the most haunting discovery a calendar covered in red x's starting from december 7th and ending on december 23rd these three men had sat trapped underwater in the bow of the ship slowly dying for 16 days the navy told the parents of the men that they had died on december 7th but after the discovery only some of the family members ever found out the information was purposefully withheld by some relatives to spare them the grief as of this video all their headstones say they die december 7th it's hard to imagine the anguish those men must have felt for that length of time it was also difficult for the men on guard duty to hear the banging noise day after day knowing nothing could be done but the level of suffering those men must have experienced is quite unthinkable not only were they truly trapped like o'kene once the thought crossed their minds that they might not be rescued they must have experienced psychological torture on a level i wouldn't wish on my worst enemies not only were they going to die they apparently got to think about dying in that small dark hole underwater for more than two weeks what is the worst way to die well i would certainly put that high on the list it's stories like this that make you wonder why thalassophobia isn't more common thalassophobia is an intense and persistent fear of the sea this can include the fear of deep bodies of water the vastness of the sea sea creatures and distance from land this is different from aquaphobia which is a fear of water itself drowning getting stranded or getting trapped underwater in the vast hostile environment of the sea are some of the many good reasons to fear it and while yes it wasn't the sea itself that killed those three men the sea certainly aided in their entrapment i don't believe i have thalassophobia while on occasion i do fear being stranded in the middle of the ocean or being attacked by a monstrous sea creature while swimming or somehow being sucked down to the bottom of the sea floor these feelings are neither intense nor persistent less intense when i'm on land and more so when i'm swimming in the ocean understandably if you got me thinking about it for a while i might get pretty anxious but my rational thinking is simply too overpowering for me to truly start to panic over those things i will likely never work on a battleship i doubt i'm going to pursue marine biology and get the opportunity to be in a submersible and the likelihood of getting swallowed by an enormous sea creature is well slim to say the least while the ocean is just a few hours from where i live when i swam in it my thoughts of danger are usually overpowered by the fact that hey playing in relatively shallow water is fun but that fear is still there it lingers in the back of my ape brain occasionally revealing itself anytime i see a particularly eerie deep water photo now don't get me wrong if you tried to put me in one of those submarines with the big glass domes that descend into the ocean a mile or two you'd better believe you'd get a fight from me but is that because i fear the ocean or more because i fear being crammed into a tiny vessel and descending into complete darkness where i face the possibility of the vessel and subsequently my own body being crushed like a soda can my relationship with the ocean in general is equal parts fascination and fear fear of the vast emptiness the otherworldly environment and fascination with those same things i haven't had any traumatic experiences with the ocean in the past so i always wondered precisely what might have given me such a fear even if it's mild i will probably never know exactly what it was that gave me this sense of anxiety but i can point to a few things i've always had a childlike fascination of the ocean ever since i was well a child i owe a lot of my knowledge and fear about the ocean to pbs documentaries there was something about exploring those deep isolated areas with strange futuristic technology and completely alien creatures that really roped me into whatever was happening which was quite a feat considering i was a very distracted child in most of the documentaries consisted of darkness there's something different about darkness in the deep ocean not all darkness is created equal the darkness of a cave is different from the darkness of a forest at night and the darkness of the vast empty universe is different from the darkness of the vast empty ocean sure it's mostly context dependent but the qualities are still almost mystical when you stare at the darkness of the deep ocean even if it's been compressed by several digital conversions you can still get that this is dangerous feeling you might be staring at miles and miles of water and sand or you might be staring at an utterly foreign predator both of these things hidden from view by the limitations of the camera and the limitations of your own eyes i've had experiences of being in deep water before in one such instance i went to an artificial pool filled with more natural elements like some small schools of fish and rocks on the floor the pool was huge by the way far larger than any pool you could find in suburbia or the ymca at some point i departed from the group and swam elsewhere i must have swam around 70 to 80 feet away because when i looked back i don't know if it was my warped sense of reality in my youth or what but i distinctly remember the group i momentarily swam away from looking tiny somehow tinier than if i was on land and then i looked down i was overcome with a great chilling sensation below me was what must have been 30 feet of water and at the bottom a rocky uneven floor before this i had never been in water this clear and deep so maybe that was the reason for the shock but somehow this felt more intense than it should have been the deepest i'd swam in regular pools was 14 feet and i could still descend to the bottom touch the chalky artificial floor with my hands and ascend before feeling too uncomfortable the thought must have crossed my mind that if i attempted that in this depth i might not come back up in time a similar occasion occurred in an island somewhere off the coast of mexico some years later in the same scenario i departed from the group and found myself someplace far away this time nothing was artificial there were light waves and an intense sun basking down on my neck and back once i was alone i looked down once again and a similar chill went up my spine this time i couldn't see the floor at least not clearly it might have been some dense seaweed that created the illusion and i doubt it dropped off that deep in still relatively shallow waters but i distinctly remember looking down and seeing a vast darkness there was a subtle gradation from the lip of the drop off to the darkness but not very much it really was a stare into the abyss and the abyss stares into you situation and that same thought occurred to me what's down there is unknown the depth is unknown the creatures are unknown if i try what i usually try in regular pools i may not come back up on top of pbs documentaries about the deep ocean some of my fear may also be attributed to another less physical experience while searching through the enigma that is my mind i suddenly remembered a part of the reason i might maybe perhaps appreciate the atmosphere and terror of the deep where was this early experience from that's right from lego again back in 2010 lego launched a short-lived atlantis theme being a bored internet savvy nine-year-old i often peruse their website not to buy anything i would if i could but to look at all the new sets videos and short video games one such piece of media was an animated short film and interactive video game combination and on the second section of the video game once you got past the crabs was this [Music] yep that's right this stupid maybe two minute long section that you could barely call a game where all you do is click on items contributed at least a small part to my fear of the deep ocean i will say that the section is still surprisingly atmospheric all you hear is the distant whining of whales and to my little child mind something seems scarier than they actually were oh god this is the headpiece to the suits that the other people use why is it abandoned here is it because they died oh my god they died it's the lego equivalent of finding abandoned cave divers equipment you just know something bad happened here despite how basic it is this small section encapsulates at least some of the layered atmospheric ghostliness of the ocean the ocean is a different planet and an inversion in many ways of being on land on land we are generally obsessed with ascending climbing mountains constructing taller and taller buildings getting so high that we ended up leaving our atmosphere but in the sea we're primarily concerned with descending if mount everest is at the top of the world at 29 000 feet then the mariana trench is at the bottom of it at 36 000 although the tallest mountain in the world from base to height is not really mount everest but mauna kea at 33 000 feet in hawaii if you count its underwater base the ocean is home to all kinds of geological formations that dwarf even the most extreme on land it's easy to forget just how vast deep and empty the ocean is most people know that the ocean covers 70 percent of the world's surface and makes up 97 percent of the world's water that's something you learn in elementary school but it's hard to truly understand and visualize that on land we have landmarks canyons mountains things that give us something to compare to we also spend most of our lives on land and thus have more experience if you drive for seven hours straight you may be able to cover around 500 miles even in sparse areas you'll still see fields trees and rock formations things that as you pass can give you a sense of scale but the ocean is just one enormous carpet of blue repetitive patterns of waves that seems endless if you've ever traveled on the ocean for a while on a cruise ship or some other vessel you can look out and get some idea of the sea but really you're only looking at a small part the sea quickly disappears from the curve of the earth and without any landmarks it's hard to tell how far you've been the pattern of the waves doesn't change the horizon never wavers it's almost like you never moved at all as for depth the ocean has an average depth of 2.3 miles just think about that for a second we're talking about four burj khalifas stacked on top of each other and we still have some room to spare and that's just average there are depths in the ocean that haven't been touched by sunlight for millions upon millions of years son when you're talking about deep you can't get much deeper than that when i was a kid i would try and imagine if all of a sudden the oceans were drained instantly of course with all the fish removed as well i imagined i would traverse this vast desert and find all kinds of things giant skeletons old boats treasures i would never have been able to discover otherwise but at least in the area around where i live it would likely be much more boring sure there would be places like dried out reefs and ravines but those would likely be hundreds of miles away and the vast majority of it would just be miles and miles of sand and worthless litter there's still that fantasy though there's still that fantasy of exploring a vast space without the barriers of natural growth or the barriers of human borders and restrictions to climb on sunken vessels now free in the open air to explore places that haven't been viewed by human eyes ever without the looming threat of a watery death while it's fun to entertain these physical impossibilities the ocean is still quite fascinating in its otherworldly features the less restrictive gravity of being underwater allows for the most bizarre creature as imaginable especially when you get deep enough where light becomes scarce syphonophores are a favorite of mine long chains of colonial organisms that work together to form a kind of organic ship there are also creatures who use bioluminescence not as a way to make themselves known but as a way to erase their silhouettes by matching their own light with the light above then there's this thing which i just love for some reason there's 500 year old greenland sharks that can live in depths over 7000 feet and look like death itself then there's magnapina squids which i mean just look at it also sperm whale noises can potentially vibrate human beings to death again how more people do not have thalassophobia i do not know there's all kinds of things to learn about the ocean marine biology ocean topography shipwrecks it really is the final frontier on earth as they say and there's a whole bunch of people who can teach you about it there's a lot of great videos on youtube about the ocean to really get invested into from national geographic documentaries to david attenborough but unfortunately as with anything intriguing there is also lots of click bait surrounding the deep ocean and with click bait comes endless [ __ ] there's this one pretty high production channel whose thumbnails are kind of off but at least they sort of eventually shows something similar to what's in the thumbnail but then you have stuff like this this statue is never seen in this video there isn't even a mention of an underwater statue period that certainly suggests that something crazy was going on as it appears there's a man being pulled out of a sunken ship okay that is a plane and this is a dummy come on man and it seems as if the man here is mummified and is there any chance that the guy being rescued is still alive is he still alive gee i don't know are mummies typically alive this video is probably my favorite thing i've discovered in my research while yes the video is filled with blatantly false information my favorite part of it is just the utter disaster that is the editing i swear to god they use every single transition effect they could possibly have in their editing program why do they put a graphic of the titanic in front of another image of the titanic just choose one whatever it is if there's a red circle and a creature that looks like it's straight out of a cartoon it's probably clickbait it's hard to overstate just how ill-equipped our bodies are for the ocean especially the deep ocean your sense of direction is distorted the pressures are unlike anything on land and of course breathable air is non-existent the environment is simply too hostile for our biology underwater cave diving provides us plenty of examples of the disorienting terrors of the deep underwater cave diving might be one of the most horrible things ever invented by man you know diving in open water i find pretty frightening itself but at least it provides you with plenty of escape routes with underwater cave diving you get to take all the claustrophobia disorientation darkness and physical exhaustion of exploring regular caves but then just add water because of this cave divers must follow strict safety protocols there's very little room for error and intense training is required an average of 10 cave divers out of a few thousand die every year compared to the 1 in 15 000 recreational divers that die a year it's so dangerous that you can have people die and then when people try to retrieve the body they also die it's one of the most dangerous activities out there but it also quite clearly shows just how unfit we are as a species to traverse deep bodies of water the ghostliness of the ocean i ascribe to its murkiness and effects of decay water tends to cloud your vision produce this misty haze over anything you encounter under it when things are left in the water either on purpose or by tragedy water greatly affects its decay things lose their color metal rusts and it always seems like the water produces growth like an alien fungus feeding on whatever is left behind shipwrecks are ghost ships literal shells of their former selves and if the ship had enough people on board and sunk in a hard to get to location or position the answer to are there still bodies in there is usually yes many people describe this additional fear of man-made underwater objects as sub-mechanophobia which sounds like a fake word but for the reasons i just mentioned and more i can totally understand this fear even a chain going down into the water and slowly fading from view as it descends can send chills up the back and produce all kinds of images in the mind there's the rational reason that when diving around large man-made objects there's always a risk of getting trapped or crushed but there's also that sense of eeriness who did this object belong to what was the story of how this thing got lost down here was it simply lost by accident or was it involved in something much more deadly shipwrecks and other man-made objects lost underwater are ghostly on a surface level they represent the forgotten the dead the decaying a signal of danger but on another level underwater technology no longer serving its purpose signifies humanity's failure to conquer the sea we can't swim to the depths no matter how hard we try and even if we could we would be crushed gradually by the pressure it's an inaccessible world only recently made accessible by advanced and even still delicate technology it doesn't help that people purposefully make the depth scarier for everyone either such as this jason statue placed 120 feet underwater in the cold and dark pit of a water filled iron mine or the hundreds of creepy underwater statues you can find that were put there because you know why not it's hard to talk about shipwrecks in the deep ocean without talking about the most famous deep shipwreck of them all the wreck of the rms titanic rapidly disintegrating down 12 500 feet on the ocean floor my curiosity of the titanic must have begun when i saw the image of the very front of the sunken ship in a national geographic magazine this wedge jutting out of the void covered in this alien growth immediately captured my imagination because of the oppressive darkness only this small section could be illuminated by the submersible taking the photo knowing that the rest of the ship was obscured it was like i was staring at the fingertip of a dormant giant online you can find titanic enthusiasts deeply passionate people who are fascinated not only with how the titanic sunk but also with the engineering and history you can find things like 3 hour real time sinking animations which at first you think you aren't going to watch the whole thing but before you know it you have there's even response videos debunking titanic sinking theories this quite succinctly demonstrates humanity's dual relationship with the ocean the tragedy of the titanic and its watery grave is saddening and frightening thinking about the victims and about how even very advanced technology can fail us takes us down existential roads but there is also that fascination with the forces at play the stories the theories the mightiness of the sea in media there aren't too many movies and games that meaningfully present these specific feelings but certainly one of the closest and most famous is subnautica besides being an inventive atmospheric and detailed underwater survival game the premise itself is kind of genius when there are already thousands of sea creature species in real life that look and behave like aliens making a game around someone crashing into a water covered alien planet is not only logical but brilliantly effective by setting the game in the sea with less restrictions on believable anatomy to account for gravity not only are the designs completely believable but there is plenty of opportunity for uniqueness the ocean seems like a different planet already so just make the ocean literally on a different planet and you don't have to push the suspension of disbelief too far in other words you can get away with a lot more there's also the constant anxiety of the absolutely enormous monsters that one can encounter in earth's ocean there are and have been creatures on a similar scale such as the blue whale megalodon and my personal favorite giant squid but the fictional creatures often seen in images related to thalassophobia are unbelievably huge at times so enormous that the amount of food they would have to consume on a daily basis to keep their bodies moving would simply not be possible but in subnautica that all changes as a player we don't have a complete understanding of the food chain or biology of these creatures and so in effect anything is possible and when anything is possible the unknown has even more terrible potential subnautica is dense with the atmosphere of the sea the wailing of far-off creatures the murkiness the pressure and the depth oh the depth without descending further and further down the game map into more and more unexplored areas into more and more danger and risk the experience that is subnautica would just not be the same in painting we've seen seascapes paintings of storms of ports of glistening ocean waves but these mostly describe the surface exploring what's deeper underneath is a relatively new development and so we've seen a lot of seascapes but not many deep seascapes at first you may think there's not much visual interest that can be gleaned from the deep ocean but i assure you the potential is out there this painting alone encapsulates a lot of what i'm talking about concerning the lassophobia this huge hole swallows nearly the entire composition it descends to an unknowable depth the tiny diver gives a sense of scale but the most frightening thing is that not only is this hole vast it exists in a landscape that is equally as vast and desolate as much as colorful reefs are a part of the sea so are the great stretches of watery void this sense of void can also be demonstrated by the work of hunter killer on deviantart whose submersion of giant machines and gaping chasms of water are a master class in scale and dominating compositions easily the most fascinating and frightening thing about the ocean is just how unknown it is after all i've talked about it makes sense that 95 of the ocean is unexplored our bodies are completely unable to traverse it in any meaningful way and our technology while astonishing is still severely limited while we have sort of mapped the surface of the ocean to a resolution of three miles by sonar these maps are not even close to the kinds of detail we have on land like every time there is a dive to a really deep area we find a new species it's insane the challenger deep located in the mariana trench is the deepest known point in the ocean at 36 200 feet deepest known james cameron you've been to the deepest place on the planet you funded an advanced deep sea technology there's practically real aliens down there why the hell are you working on four avatar sequels the ocean is a place that won't give up her secrets easily but it is more than ready to be explored and it would be nice if we keep it you know clean we've got sunken world war ii ships that are slowly but surely leaking pollution into the water we got giant islands of trash oil spills you know bad things i don't mean to get all political but maybe uh let's not needlessly waste things and dump them into bodies of water you know maybe we don't need all this excessive packaging maybe you can reuse that plastic cup you got from taco bell that's sitting on your desk right now like once or twice just you know a suggestion deep sea mining oh boy that sounds like it won't royally [ __ ] up everything that's beautiful down there despite the sheer enormity of the ocean there is still trash in it that can be found in nearly every part no matter how hard it is to get to it's really quite remarkable how much people suck the majesty of the ocean can be appreciated in a small part by the things we see online for someone without thalassophobia or even a hint of it it may seem odd that a barren picture with a few shades of dark tones can produce anxiety but it's only a reminder cameras can't do justice to the terror of staring into those deep dark blues while being vulnerable in the open ocean without that fear would the sea really be the same you may have heard religious people refer to the fear of god and this might refer to fear of divine judgment or punishment but they might also be referring to fear as a sort of sense of respect of awe there are many good self-preservation reasons to fear the ocean but there are also many good reasons to appreciate it once i've gotten over those initial instincts i began to fear the ocean the same way i fear the vastness of space as being part of something so large and mighty that i could never possibly hope to get a full understanding of it if you're a good swimmer you may find yourself separated from the pack in a part of the sea others have strayed away from you may look down and see the depths descend beneath the water and hover there like a balloon in the sky the true soul of the ocean is around you all you have to do is look out you

Channel: Solar Sands

Views: 3,911,675

Keywords: Solar Sands, Ocean, Deep Ocean, Art, Legos, Video Essay, Thalassophobia, Submechanophobia, Sea, Shipwrecks, Titanic, Fear, Phobia, James Cameron, Doc, Atlantis

Id: V2muPQ4tCJ8

Length: 33min 53sec (2033 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Inignot12]

Reposted with content warning.

Great exploration of thalassophobia by Solar Sands (he's made some excellent videos about liminal spaces and other online art phenomena)