How Deep Is Your Love

Can love – for marine biology and the ocean’s strangest creatures – be enough to protect the planet’s hidden, undiscovered depths from the looming threat of exploitation?

Driven by a rush for metal-rich nodules, often marketed as fuel for “green” energy, deep-sea mining threatens one of the planet’s last untouched frontiers. Funded by mining corporations, a team of marine biologists sails to the Clarion Clipperton Fracture Zone to uncover and catalogue a never-before-seen ecosystem and its inhabitants. Barbie Pig, Psychedelic Elvis Worm, and Wedding Dress Star – the playful names hint at the creatures’ otherworldly forms and surreal behaviours. While their discoveries inspire awe, the film grapples with moral and political tensions, revealing the paradox of science: uncovering wonder while endangering fragile marine environments.

– Saulė Savanevičiūtė

TALK 

The deep sea: the last unknown territory on Earth. Here, biologists marvel over the enigmatic wildlife that looks like something from another planet: the depths of the world’s oceans resemble outer space. The alien and strange life forms down in the darkness send the imagination soaring. We know less about life in the dark and impassable depths than any other life form on the planet. Down here, intrepid biologists work to study the unknown creatures and ecosystems that thrive in isolation.

However, the days when the deep sea was the last wilderness on earth may be coming to an end as deep sea mining threatens the fragile ecosystems. As biologists work to map life in the deep, mining companies are preparing to extract the oceans’ precious resources. For the biologists, the battle against the elements suddenly becomes a battle against time.

How Deep is Your Love, the opening film of InScience, is both an adventurous journey into an unknown and breathtaking realm, and a call to respect nature – even that part of it that we rarely have access to. The documentary begs the question: would it be better if we stayed ignorant on certain things instead of endangering them with our knowledge?

Sociologist and climate activist Guus Dix and head of Greenpeace Netherlands Marieke Vellekoop will discuss the power of love, the politics of science and the ways science can help protect and preserve nature.

Can’t make it to this screening?

InScience 2026 continues from 11–15 March at Visum Mundi, Wageningen. Discover the full InScience Satellite programme here to find out when this film screens in Wageningen.