Bill Bryson - A short history of nearly everything

After their record-breaking descent of 1934, Beebe lost interest in diving and moved on to other adventures, but Barton persevered. To his credit, Beebe always told anyone who asked that Barton was the real brains behind the enterprise, but Barton seemed unable to step from the shadows. He, too, wrote thrilling accounts of their underwater adventures and even starred in a Hollywood movie called Titans of the Deep , featuring a bathysphere and many exciting and largely fictionalized encounters with aggressive giant squid and the like. He even advertised Camel cigarettes (“They don’t give me jittery nerves”). In 1948 he increased the depth record by 50 percent, with a dive to 4,500 feet in the Pacific Ocean near California, but the world seemed determined to overlook him. One newspaper reviewer of Titans of the Deep actually thought the star of the film was Beebe. Nowadays, Barton is lucky to get a mention.

At all events, he was about to be comprehensively eclipsed by a father-and-son team from Switzerland, Auguste and Jacques Piccard, who were designing a new type of probe called a bathyscaphe (meaning “deep boat”). Christened Trieste , after the Italian city in which it was built, the new device maneuvered independently, though it did little more than just go up and down. On one of its first dives, in early 1954, it descended to below 13,287 feet, nearly three times Barton’s record-breaking dive of six years earlier. But deep-sea dives required a great deal of costly support, and the Piccards were gradually going broke.

In 1958, they did a deal with the U.S. Navy, which gave the Navy ownership but left them in control. Now flush with funds, the Piccards rebuilt the vessel, giving it walls five inches thick and shrinking the windows to just two inches in diameter-little more than peepholes. But it was now strong enough to withstand truly enormous pressures, and in January 1960 Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don Walsh of the U.S. Navy sank slowly to the bottom of the ocean’s deepest canyon, the Mariana Trench, some 250 miles off Guam in the western Pacific (and discovered, not incidentally, by Harry Hess with his fathometer). It took just under four hours to fall 35,820 feet, or almost seven miles. Although the pressure at that depth was nearly 17,000 pounds per square inch, they noticed with surprise that they disturbed a bottom-dwelling flatfish just as they touched down. They had no facilities for taking photographs, so there is no visual record of the event.

After just twenty minutes at the world’s deepest point, they returned to the surface. It was the only occasion on which human beings have gone so deep.

Forty years later, the question that naturally occurs is: Why has no one gone back since? To begin with, further dives were vigorously opposed by Vice Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, a man who had a lively temperament, forceful views, and, most pertinently, control of the departmental checkbook. He thought underwater exploration a waste of resources and pointed out that the Navy was not a research institute. The nation, moreover, was about to become fully preoccupied with space travel and the quest to send a man to the Moon, which made deep sea investigations seem unimportant and rather old-fashioned. But the decisive consideration was that the Trieste descent didn’t actually achieve much. As a Navy official explained years later: “We didn’t learn a hell of a lot from it, other than that we could do it. Why do it again?” It was, in short, a long way to go to find a flatfish, and expensive too. Repeating the exercise today, it has been estimated, would cost at least $100 million.

When underwater researchers realized that the Navy had no intention of pursuing a promised exploration program, there was a pained outcry. Partly to placate its critics, the Navy provided funding for a more advanced submersible, to be operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution of Massachusetts. Called Alvin, in somewhat contracted honor of the oceanographer Allyn C. Vine, it would be a fully maneuverable minisubmarine, though it wouldn’t go anywhere near as deep as the Trieste. There was just one problem: the designers couldn’t find anyone willing to build it. According to William J. Broad in The Universe Below : “No big company like General Dynamics, which made submarines for the Navy, wanted to take on a project disparaged by both the Bureau of Ships and Admiral Rickover, the gods of naval patronage.” Eventually, not to say improbably, Alvin was constructed by General Mills, the food company, at a factory where it made the machines to produce breakfast cereals.

As for what else was down there, people really had very little idea. Well into the 1950s, the best maps available to oceanographers were overwhelmingly based on a little detail from scattered surveys going back to 1929 grafted onto, essentially an ocean of guesswork. The Navy had excellent charts with which to guide submarines through canyons and around guyots, but it didn’t wish such information to fall into Soviet hands, so it kept its knowledge classified. Academics therefore had to make do with sketchy and antiquated surveys or rely on hopeful surmise. Even today our knowledge of the ocean floors remains remarkably low resolution. If you look at the Moon with a standard backyard telescope you will see substantial craters-Fracastorious, Blancanus, Zach, Planck, and many others familiar to any lunar scientist-that would be unknown if they were on our own ocean floors. We have better maps of Mars than we do of our own seabeds.

At the surface level, investigative techniques have also been a trifle ad hoc. In 1994, thirty-four thousand ice hockey gloves were swept overboard from a Korean cargo ship during a storm in the Pacific. The gloves washed up all over, from Vancouver to Vietnam, helping oceanographers to trace currents more accurately than they ever had before.

Today Alvin is nearly forty years old, but it still remains America’s premier research vessel. There are still no submersibles that can go anywhere near the depth of the Mariana Trench and only five, including Alvin, that can reach the depths of the “abyssal plain”-the deep ocean floor-that covers more than half the planet’s surface. A typical submersible costs about $25,000 a day to operate, so they are hardly dropped into the water on a whim, still less put to sea in the hope that they will randomly stumble on something of interest. It’s rather as if our firsthand experience of the surface world were based on the work of five guys exploring on garden tractors after dark. According to Robert Kunzig, humans may have scrutinized “perhaps a millionth or a billionth of the sea’s darkness. Maybe less. Maybe much less.”

But oceanographers are nothing if not industrious, and they have made several important discoveries with their limited resources-including, in 1977, one of the most important and startling biological discoveries of the twentieth century. In that year Alvin found teeming colonies of large organisms living on and around deep-sea vents off the Galápagos Islands-tube worms over ten feet long, clams a foot wide, shrimps and mussels in profusion, wriggling spaghetti worms. They all owed their existence to vast colonies of bacteria that were deriving their energy and sustenance from hydrogen sulfides-compounds profoundly toxic to surface creatures-that were pouring steadily from the vents. It was a world independent of sunlight, oxygen, or anything else normally associated with life. This was a living system based not on photosynthesis but on chemosynthesis, an arrangement that biologists would have dismissed as preposterous had anyone been imaginative enough to suggest it.

Huge amounts of heat and energy flow from these vents. Two dozen of them together will produce as much energy as a large power station, and the range of temperatures around them is enormous. The temperature at the point of outflow can be as much as 760 degrees Fahrenheit, while a few feet away the water may be only two or three degrees above freezing. A type of worm called an alvinellid was found living right on the margins, with the water temperature 140 degrees warmer at its head than at its tail. Before this it had been thought that no complex organisms could survive in water warmer than about 130 degrees, and here was one that was surviving warmer temperatures than that and extreme cold to boot. The discovery transformed our understanding of the requirements for life.