ABSTRACT
Introduction Water is a totally alien environment for us humans. Few of us do more than enter the sea and, as we swim, dip our heads briefly beneath the surface to take a momentary glimpse of a blurred and strange world. Even the best-equipped Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus (SCUBA) divers can penetrate no more than a few tens of metres, for to go deeper requires highly specialised equipment or very sophisticated and expensive submersibles. But imagine that, like Captain Nemo and the crew of Jules Verne’s Nautilus, we could walk freely across the ocean floor and let us review what we might experience if we took the long journey across the Atlantic Ocean from Britain to the Bahamas.
