Record of the Sunken Abyss

Records of the Abyss: The Great South China Sea Tsunami

Far to the east of the Eastern Sea, countless millions of miles away, lies a great chasm. Its depths are bottomless, and it is called Guixu.

In the tenth lunar month of 1076, a muffled rumble sounded beneath the Bashi Channel. The tide surged inland, “destroying houses and drowning residents” in Haiyang and Chaoyang counties in Guangdong. The flora and fauna of East Island in the Xisha Islands were wiped out for a time. The History of Song left behind only the bland phrase “the sea tide overflowed,” but no one knew that on that same night, a fleet departing from Mingzhou Harbor, carrying blueprints for the Southern Song court's closely guarded “underwater city,” was swallowed by Guixu along with more than three hundred people aboard.

Eight hundred years later, a deep-sea probe at a depth of 1,600 meters in the South China Sea collides with a rotting whale