“In 1606 a devastating pestilence swept through London”
“a Greenland shark who is still alive today swam untroubled through the waters of the northern seas”
“Its parents would have been old enough to have lived alongside Dante; its great-great-grandparents alongside Julius Caesar. For thousands of years Greenland sharks have swum in silence, as above them the world has burned, rebuilt, burned again”
“The Greenland shark is the planet’s longest-lived vertebrate, but it was only recently that scientists were able to ascertain exactly how old they might be”
“The Greenland shark is not obviously beautiful. Its face is blunt, its fins stunted, and its eyes attract a long worm-like crustacean, ommatokoita elongata. These attach themselves to the cornea of the sharks’ eyes, fluttering from their eyeballs like paper streamers, rendering them both almost blind and more disgusting than seems fair. They smell, too. Their bodies have high concentrations of urea; a necessity, to ensure they maintain the same salt concentration as the ocean, preventing them from losing or gaining water through osmosis, but it is a necessity that means they smell of pee – so much so that, in Inuit legend, the shark is said to have arisen from the chamberpot of Sedna, goddess of the sea. The urea is also what makes them poisonous to humans when eaten fresh. If raw and untreated, the toxins in the flesh can render you ‘shark drunk’: giddy, staggering, slurring, vomiting. They become safe only if the meat is buried for several months and left to ferment, then hung out to dry for months more. Served in small chunks, and known as hákarl, it is considered, by some, a delicacy, and by others an abomination. Apparently it tastes like a very ripe cheese, left for a week in high summer in a teenage boy’s car”
“The Greenland shark is slow, as befits a fish so venerable. At full speed and with strenuous effort, it moves somewhere between 1.7 and 2.2 mph”
“Although one of the two largest flesh-eating creatures in the sea, it has an astonishingly slow metabolism; in order to survive, a 200-kilo shark has to consume the calorific equivalent of one and a half chocolate digestives a day”
“they eat whatever falls off the ice: reindeer, polar bears”
“They live deep down and lead secret lives. Although they have been seen at the water’s surface, they prefer to be close to the bottom of the ocean, where it’s dark and cold: they’ve been found as far down as 2200 meters”
“Nobody has ever seen one give birth; we have never seen them mate. Their invisibility to humans also means that we don’t know how endangered they are: they’re currently listed as ‘near threatened’, but they could be the most populous sharks in the world, or urgently at risk”
“They come to the surface only in the places where it is cold enough, in the Arctic, around Greenland and Iceland, but they have been found in the depths near France, Portugal, Scotland. Scientists say they may be everywhere the ocean goes deep and cold”
“They will see us pass through our current spinning apocalypse, and the crash that will come after it, and they will see the currently unimagined things that will come after that: the transformations, revelations, the possible liberations”
“That is their beauty, and it’s breathtaking: they go on”
“These slow, odorous, half-blind creatures are perhaps the closest thing to eternal this planet has to offer”