Bill Bryson - A short history of nearly everything

It also answered one of the great puzzles of oceanography-something that many of us didn’t realize was a puzzle-namely, why the oceans don’t grow saltier with time. At the risk of stating the obvious, there is a lot of salt in the sea-enough to bury every bit of land on the planet to a depth of about five hundred feet. Millions of gallons of fresh water evaporate from the ocean daily, leaving all their salts behind, so logically the seas ought to grow more salty with the passing years, but they don’t. Something takes an amount of salt out of the water equivalent to the amount being put in. For the longest time, no one could figure out what could be responsible for this.

Alvin ’s discovery of the deep-sea vents provided the answer. Geophysicists realized that the vents were acting much like the filters in a fish tank. As water is taken down into the crust, salts are stripped from it, and eventually clean water is blown out again through the chimney stacks. The process is not swift-it can take up to ten million years to clean an ocean-but it is marvelously efficient as long as you are not in a hurry.

Perhaps nothing speaks more clearly of our psychological remoteness from the ocean depths than that the main expressed goal for oceanographers during International Geophysical Year of 1957-58 was to study “the use of ocean depths for the dumping of radioactive wastes.” This wasn’t a secret assignment, you understand, but a proud public boast. In fact, though it wasn’t much publicized, by 1957-58 the dumping of radioactive wastes had already been going on, with a certain appalling vigor, for over a decade. Since 1946, the United States had been ferrying fifty-five-gallon drums of radioactive gunk out to the Farallon Islands, some thirty miles off the California coast near San Francisco, where it simply threw them overboard.

It was all quite extraordinarily sloppy. Most of the drums were exactly the sort you see rusting behind gas stations or standing outside factories, with no protective linings of any type. When they failed to sink, which was usually, Navy gunners riddled them with bullets to let water in (and, of course, plutonium, uranium, and strontium out). Before it was halted in the 1990s, the United States had dumped many hundreds of thousands of drums into about fifty ocean sites-almost fifty thousand of them in the Farallons alone. But the U.S. was by no means alone. Among the other enthusiastic dumpers were Russia, China, Japan, New Zealand, and nearly all the nations of Europe.

And what effect might all this have had on life beneath the seas? Well, little, we hope, but we actually have no idea. We are astoundingly, sumptuously, radiantly ignorant of life beneath the seas. Even the most substantial ocean creatures are often remarkably little known to us-including the most mighty of them all, the great blue whale, a creature of such leviathan proportions that (to quote David Attenborough) its “tongue weighs as much as an elephant, its heart is the size of a car and some of its blood vessels are so wide that you could swim down them.” It is the most gargantuan beast that Earth has yet produced, bigger even than the most cumbrous dinosaurs. Yet the lives of blue whales are largely a mystery to us. Much of the time we have no idea where they are-where they go to breed, for instance, or what routes they follow to get there. What little we know of them comes almost entirely from eavesdropping on their songs, but even these are a mystery. Blue whales will sometimes break off a song, then pick it up again at the same spot six months later. Sometimes they strike up with a new song, which no member can have heard before but which each already knows. How they do this is not remotely understood. And these are animals that must routinely come to the surface to breathe.

For animals that need never surface, obscurity can be even more tantalizing. Consider the fabled giant squid. Though nothing on the scale of the blue whale, it is a decidedly substantial animal, with eyes the size of soccer balls and trailing tentacles that can reach lengths of sixty feet. It weighs nearly a ton and is Earth’s largest invertebrate. If you dumped one in a normal household swimming pool, there wouldn’t be much room for anything else. Yet no scientist-no person as far as we know-has ever seen a giant squid alive. Zoologists have devoted careers to trying to capture, or just glimpse, living giant squid and have always failed. They are known mostly from being washed up on beaches-particularly, for unknown reasons, the beaches of the South Island of New Zealand. They must exist in large numbers because they form a central part of the sperm whale’s diet, and sperm whales take a lot of feeding. [34]

According to one estimate, there could be as many as thirty million species of animals living in the sea, most still undiscovered. The first hint of how abundant life is in the deep seas didn’t come until as recently as the 1960s with the invention of the epibenthic sled, a dredging device that captures organisms not just on and near the seafloor but also buried in the sediments beneath. In a single one-hour trawl along the continental shelf, at a depth of just under a mile, Woods Hole oceanographers Howard Sandler and Robert Hessler netted over 25,000 creatures-worms, starfish, sea cucumbers, and the like-representing 365 species. Even at a depth of three miles, they found some 3,700 creatures representing almost 200 species of organism. But the dredge could only capture things that were too slow or stupid to get out of the way. In the late 1960s a marine biologist named John Isaacs got the idea to lower a camera with bait attached to it, and found still more, in particular dense swarms of writhing hagfish, a primitive eel-like creature, as well as darting shoals of grenadier fish. Where a good food source is suddenly available-for instance, when a whale dies and sinks to the bottom-as many as 390 species of marine creature have been found dining off it. Interestingly, many of these creatures were found to have come from vents up to a thousand miles distant. These included such types as mussels and clams, which are hardly known as great travelers. It is now thought that the larvae of certain organisms may drift through the water until, by some unknown chemical means, they detect that they have arrived at a food opportunity and fall onto it.

So why, if the seas are so vast, do we so easily overtax them? Well, to begin with, the world’s seas are not uniformly bounteous. Altogether less than a tenth of the ocean is considered naturally productive. Most aquatic species like to be in shallow waters where there is warmth and light and an abundance of organic matter to prime the food chain. Coral reefs, for instance, constitute well under 1 percent of the ocean’s space but are home to about 25 percent of its fish.

Elsewhere, the oceans aren’t nearly so rich. Take Australia. With over 20,000 miles of coastline and almost nine million square miles of territorial waters, it has more sea lapping its shores than any other country, yet, as Tim Flannery notes, it doesn’t even make it into the top fifty among fishing nations. Indeed, Australia is a large net importer of seafood. This is because much of Australia’s waters are, like much of Australia itself, essentially desert. (A notable exception is the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland, which is sumptuously fecund.) Because the soil is poor, it produces little in the way of nutrient-rich runoff.

Even where life thrives, it is often extremely sensitive to disturbance. In the 1970s, fishermen from Australia and, to a lesser extent, New Zealand discovered shoals of a little-known fish living at a depth of about half a mile on their continental shelves. They were known as orange roughy, they were delicious, and they existed in huge numbers. In no time at all, fishing fleets were hauling in forty thousand metric tons of roughy a year. Then marine biologists made some alarming discoveries. Roughy are extremely long lived and slow maturing. Some may be 150 years old; any roughy you have eaten may well have been born when Victoria was Queen. Roughy have adopted this exceedingly unhurried lifestyle because the waters they live in are so resource-poor. In such waters, some fish spawn just once in a lifetime. Clearly these are populations that cannot stand a great deal of disturbance. Unfortunately, by the time this was realized the stocks had been severely depleted. Even with careful management it will be decades before the populations recover, if they ever do.