Roughly 20% of the global seafloor has been mapped with high-resolution bathymetry¹, and even less has been biologically or chemically analysed. In the Clarion–Clipperton Zone alone, over 5,000 new species² are estimated to exist — the vast majority of which remain undescribed, unclassified, or poorly understood. We have long crossed the threshold. Past the stage of simply pointing to data voids, beyond the cartographer’s apology of “information not available.” We now stare into the deeper fracture — the unknowable unknowables.

It is the unutterability of what resists not only measurement, but even classification. What if the seabed hosts harms so thickly entangled with temporal and biological scales that they cannot be assimilated into a legend, a registry, a scientific appendix? These are not blank spots on the map awaiting expedition. These are phenomena that break the map — that refuse its gridded logic. In Morton’s sense, these oceanic unknowns behave like hyperobjects — massively distributed in time and space, yet impossible to fully perceive or contain³. To even consider them as data gaps is, as Haraway might note, a form of epistemological domestication — an attempt to tame unruly realities into neatly classifiable categories⁴.

This distortion finds its most perverse articulation in what criminology calls the dark figure — that which escapes official statistics. But here, in the ocean’s depth, it multiplies: dark data, dark acoustics, dark consequences. Not hidden by accident, but hidden by design. Instead, we receive noise. The kind of noise made by well-dressed Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs), where damage is pre-mitigated before it is recorded. Within this staged choreography, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) can act as an entity that writes the rules, sells the tickets, and referees the match. Harm is not denied — it is reformatted. Like changing the language of pain into a spreadsheet, or translating mortality into “low risk.”

Beneath this noise lies a deeper silence: a form of knowing that collapses under its own instruments. This is not a void that can be filled. It is an implosion. The very inability to translate these conditions into knowledge is what marks them. For Theodor W. Adorno, “the whole is the untrue.” Truth emerges where the system fails, where it cannot contain what it attempts to represent⁶. The deep sea, therefore, becomes a site where the very structure of knowing breaks down.

Faced with this collapse, representation is a failed project. My response is to develop a method of speculative sonification—not to illustrate or represent, but to unsettle, compress, and contour. Each sonified segment functions less like a caption and more like a fracture: an entry point into dimensions that evade textual or visual narrative. It is an attempt to use sound as a seismograph for epistemic collapse, to sonify the contours of our unknowing.

No waveform can bridge this collapse. Because collapse is the point. These sonifications are not endpoints. They are interferences—speculative probes that make palpable the profound ethical implications of acting in the absence of knowledge.

This is the catharsis: not a crescendo of knowing, but a quiet and devastating recognition of our epistemological limits. It is the spreadsheet corrupted. The signal lost. The sonar echo that never returns.

We are not listening to the ocean. We are listening to our own need to make it legible. And in doing so, we drown out the abyssal truths it might contain. This is not a call to find new tools. It is an invitation to sit with the failure of the old ones, to acknowledge that the unknowns may not be unveiled, and to sound out the contours of that very unknowing.