by Edith Widder
After those record-breaking dives, there were numerous advances in submersible technology, but the emphasis was on vessels designed for exploring the seafloor, where geologists could collect rocks and biologists could find animals, like deep-sea corals, that didn’t run away. Most ocean explorers viewed the midwater as a wasteland that had to be traversed to reach the interesting stuff on the bottom. The fact that net sampling and Beebe’s observations suggested otherwise was largely unappreciated, which is why Robi’s idea of adopting Wasp as a tool for exploring the midwater was not readily embraced. He had a tough time getting the project funded, but he persisted, and this expedition, which took place in the fall of 1982, was the payoff.
This was real pioneering stuff and I was going to be part of it, albeit in an ancillary role. I was invited along to measure the bioluminescent emission spectra of the midwater animals, especially any fragile deepwater jellies that they managed to capture with the Wasp.
It was thrilling to be included, but since I wasn’t trained to pilot the suit, I had to satisfy my curiosity by listening to verbal descriptions provided by those who were. Their work was focused primarily on observing and capturing animals with the Wasp’s lights on, but whenever I could, I would get on the headset and ask whoever was in the suit to turn out the lights and tell me exactly what they saw. Their scientific reports amounted mostly to exclamations of “Oh, wow! That is so cool!” I would beg them to be more specific but found their attempts less than satisfying.
Mostly, I was left with the knowledge that there was lots of light, but it was not bright enough to film with the underwater camera mounted on the Wasp. The only way to observe it was to go see for myself, which I couldn’t yet do. It was torture. Robi took pity on my obvious frustration and told me that in two years (1984) they were planning a second Wasp expedition, and if I was still around, maybe I could get trained as a pilot and go see for myself.
It was a phenomenal offer, but to turn down a plum postdoc in favor of the road less traveled—actually, the road not yet traveled—seemed insane. If I did this, I’d have no plan B. But, for the first time since getting out of the hospital, I didn’t care. The only thing that mattered to me was seeing what was down there, risks and consequences be damned!
* * *
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And so here it was two years later. In the interim, Jim Case had hired me as a postdoc so I could finish up the spectrometer work with the OMA. I had taken it on four major trawling expeditions—two off California, one off Hawaii, and one off the northwest coast of Africa. I so loved what I was doing, seeing and learning about the bioluminescence capabilities of all these amazing animals, that the two years had flown by. But now time seemed to have slowed to a stop, and I was on tenterhooks waiting for my first deep dive.
The goal for this initial day at sea was to accomplish the final stage of our instruction by giving each of the five of us who had been trained as pilots the experience of being lowered into the depths. This wasn’t so much a tech check as a psych check. Scooting around the fifteen-foot-deep sunlit tank we had trained in at Port Hueneme was a very different experience than being dropped through hundreds of feet of water into the dark, cold depths of the vast ocean, encased in an ill-fitting metal sheath. If anyone was going to have a claustrophobic meltdown, the Oceaneering team in charge of the Wasp wanted to know at the outset.
Oceaneering was the company that owned and operated the Wasp. Charlie Sandstrom, a weathered sea dog with many years of experience working around ships and oil fields, was their man in charge of this odd little endeavor. The other members of his team were young guys with backgrounds in diving, underwater salvage, and oil-rig work. Their mission was to keep the Wasp in working order and to try not to get any of the scientists killed. The scientists’ mission was to test the value of the suit as a tool for ocean exploration.
Most of us live our lives with our feet planted firmly on the ground and are out of touch with the true nature of our watery world. Only 29 percent of the surface area of Earth is land; the rest is water. Oceanographers often try to alert their fellow Earthlings to the significance of their research by using such numbers. Or they describe how we have better maps of the back side of the moon than we do of the bottom of the ocean. But even that disparity misses the point, because it’s thinking in just two dimensions. The three-dimensional reality is that, while living space on land extends into the tallest trees and many feet beneath the surface, it is still an absurdly thin layer and represents a tiny volume compared with the staggering enormity of the ocean, which encompasses more than 99.5 percent of the living space on the planet. And this is no empty void. These waters teem with life, but our experience of this largest of Earth’s ecosystems is scant and biased by the limitations of our tools for exploration.
It’s remarkable that the primary way we know about life in the midwater is by dragging nets behind ships. How many other branches of science can you name that still depend on technology thousands of years old to gather data? It’s an axiom among marine biologists that nets capture only the slow, the stupid, and the greedy: Some animals swim too slowly to get out of the way. Some don’t recognize the approaching net as a threat, but then, why should they? And still others are predators that dart into the net to grab what looks like an easy meal but don’t make it out and are therefore victims of their own gluttony. But how many are there that we don’t know about because they are simply too fast or too wily to be captured by such primitive means? And, aside from all the animals our nets miss, there are also the fragile, gelatinous forms that they shred. Until we were able to enter their world and observe them directly, scientists had no clue that the gelatinous goo seen in our trawl buckets came from a myriad of diaphanous life-forms that had been mauled beyond recognition.
My very limited understanding of life in the midwater was based on net-captured creatures. Observing them in the trawl bucket was like sifting through the remains of some ancient civilization and trying to imagine what the daily lives of the people of that world were like. Only now I wasn’t going to have to just imagine. I was about to see for myself—if José would just stop screwing around down there.
Just as I was beginning to think that Christmas would never come, I heard the whine of the hydraulics kicking on and saw the cable begin to rise. Robi came to join me on the fantail and watch the Wasp’s winch reel in the two-thirds-of-an-inch-thick steel-reinforced cable that carried power and communications between the ship and the suit. Known as the “umbilical” or “tether,” it attached to the top of the suit just above and behind the transparent acrylic hemisphere that was the Wasp’s view port.
At the moment when the top of the Wasp came into view, some sixty feet below the surface, a crew member who had been leaning over the back of the fantail to watch for it turned toward Charlie at the winch control console and used two fingers to point to his own eyes, the sign for “in sight.” The winch stopped and two scuba divers flipped backward out of the ship’s tender that had been drifting off the stern. They swam down to the Wasp and attached two snubber lines that were needed to assure that the two-thousand-pound suit didn’t swing on the end of its cable and smash into the back of the ship as it emerged from the water.
Once the divers were clear, we heard the winch start up again. As the suit appeared and the view port came even with the fantail, we could see José grinning back at us. Clearly, he had passed the psych test. As soon as the Wasp was lowered onto the metal frame that served as its docking station on deck, José was released from the confines of the suit, and he immediately clambered out, shouting, “That was awesome!”
As Robi and the others surrounded him to hear details of what he had seen, I began my pre-dive checks. I would have loved to hear what José had to say, but, besides being anxious to see for myself what was down there, I also bore the onus of being the only female and the youngest member of the team; I needed to prove I was up to the task, and I sure d
idn’t want to piss off Charlie by keeping him waiting.
Once the external inspection was complete and the floor had been pumped up to accommodate my height, I was given the go-ahead to enter. Retracing José’s exit path, I climbed up the stepladder, sat on the plywood that covered the acrylic hemisphere, swung my legs into the neck of the suit, and then twisted around to face forward, resting my hands on the metal arms where they attached just below the neck and supporting my weight with my hands and my toes, which I slid down the inside front of the suit until I made contact with the floor.
I went through the internal checks carefully but as quickly as I could, calling out gauge pressures, testing the thrusters, confirming the presence and functionality of all safety and emergency gear. We had been thoroughly drilled in emergency procedures during our training, so I was cognizant of the life-threatening implications of all this paraphernalia, but I was already fully committed to this adventure. No turning back now.
It was time to dive. I gave the thumbs-up and a crewman swung the view port up and locked it, sealing me inside. The instant the hatch closed, all the engine noise, which follows you everywhere aboard a research vessel, was muted and replaced by the soft whir of the scrubber fans. Throughout the dive, I would breathe air at atmospheric pressure, which meant that despite the immense depths to which I was descending, there would be no need for special gas mixtures, no danger of nitrogen narcosis or decompression sickness (“the bends”), and no need for decompression afterwards. An oxygen tank bled a slow stream of oxygen in while the scrubber fans pulled the air from inside the suit through an absorbent material that chemically extracted the CO2 I was exhaling. The ability of the pressure hull to keep the internal pressure at close to one atmosphere, even as outside pressures exceeded hundreds of pounds per square inch, is what qualified Wasp as an atmospheric diving suit, or ADS.
I felt the suit rock back as the winch lifted it clear of its support stand. The A-frame hoist rotated out, carrying me over the back of the ship, and as the winch paid out, I got a close-up view of the ship’s stern, with its name and port of registry—T. G. THOMPSON SEATTLE—displayed in black capital letters. The ship operated out of the University of Washington, but for this mission it would be plying the ocean off Santa Barbara, between the Channel Islands and the mainland. The islands offered some protection from bad weather, and since the channel waters were generally less than two thousand feet deep, the thinking was that if for some awful reason the suit became detached from the umbilical, it couldn’t sink below its operational depth limit. I was going only to eight hundred feet for this first dive—nowhere near the bottom—but for somebody who had never been deeper than ninety feet while scuba diving, that seemed like the abyss.
As the Wasp hit the water, I looked up and saw Robi staring down at me over the back of the ship; then water closed over the dome and he disappeared from view. As I had been trained to do, I checked for any sign of leaks around the perimeter of the view port, and when I saw none I called up to Charlie on the comms link, “I have a seal.” At thirty feet, Charlie braked the winch and put me through another obligatory checklist of gauge readings and a test of the through-water emergency communications system. Once that was completed, he had the snubber lines pulled free and then reengaged the winch, and I resumed my descent.
I pulled my arms out of the suit’s armored sleeves and rested on my forearms, my body tilted forward against the front of the suit. The articulating arms of the Wasp are hydraulically assisted, which makes it sound like I had cyborg superpowers, but the Wasp’s arms were mere decorations as far as I was concerned. I had had to lift weights for a year just to pass my pilot’s test. In the tank, I managed to make them work just enough that I could do up a shackle. Beyond that, they were useless. As the weight of the water increased, the arms became stiffer and less movable. We had been told to keep flexing them if we wanted them to stay operational, but operational for what, exactly? Oceaneering divers working on oil rigs needed to be able to use wrenches and turn valves; we had no such requirements. First and foremost, we were there to observe. The various scientific instruments that we had brought with us were designed to operate electronically, controlled by switches inside the suit. I let the arms lock up.
My nervousness subsided as I began to focus on the view outside. I felt no hint of claustrophobia. Compared with the guys, I had room to spare, and besides, all my attention was directed outward. With my face positioned in the center of the transparent observation dome, I felt completely immersed in the surrounding water. I was not thinking about the oxygen or CO2 levels, and it wasn’t cold enough yet to be bothered by the temperature. I was entirely absorbed in trying to assimilate what I was seeing.
As a scuba diver, my attention was always on the underwater landscape—rock outcroppings, seagrass meadows, kelp forests, or coral reefs and their associated flora and fauna—but now I felt my focus shifting to a very different kind of habitat: water, as far as my eyes could see in every direction. In the midwater, there are no surfaces for organisms to settle on. This is a world of gradients. Light, color, temperature, salinity, pressure, oxygen—they were all changing as I descended. According to the readout on the pressure gauge, the grip of the pressure monster was increasing by one atmosphere (14.7 pounds per square inch) for every thirty-three feet of descent, a squeeze that I was blissfully unaware of inside my protective shell. What I was aware of was the changes in the color and intensity of the sunlight from above.
On first passing through the boundary between air and water, there is an abrupt change in color, shifting from multicolored to predominantly blue-green. I was familiar with that shift from scuba diving, but now I was dropping at a speed that I could never have achieved with scuba, where changing pressure would have required distracting ear-clearing gambits to prevent a ruptured eardrum.*9 The color was shifting from aquamarine to a grayish cobalt blue, and coincident with that transition was a change in light intensity. Measured with a light meter, this change was even more dramatic than the color change; light diminishes exponentially with depth.
In the very clearest ocean water, sunlight decreases tenfold for approximately every 250 feet of descent, but these waters weren’t crystal clear, and so it was diminishing even faster because of the absorption and scattering by particles and dissolved organic matter in the water. Oddly, though, that’s not how it appeared. One of the remarkable things about eyes is that they are not linear, but rather logarithmic, sensors. In order to allow us to see over an enormous dynamic range, from brilliant sunlight at high noon to the dimmest of starlight on a forest floor, the eye’s measurement scale is compressed. It is a phenomenal capability, but to accomplish it, our eyes must lie to us, reporting a tenfold decrease in light intensity as a mere halving of available light. Consequently, I wasn’t conscious of how much the light had diminished until the Wasp’s small floodlights, called Snooperettes, started illuminating particles in the water. The lights had been on since the surface, but the sunlight was too bright for me to notice. Everything still looked blue overhead, but directly in front of me, beyond the penetration of my Snooperettes, it was now gray grading to black below.
I was just noting these changes when the suit descended into a layer of what looked like small red crabs. Crabs? They’re supposed to live on the ocean floor. I checked the depth gauge: I was at two hundred feet—nowhere near the bottom. The fact that this was more than twice as deep as I’d ever been in my life didn’t even register as I tried to wrap my head around the spectacle of all those crabs. The ones near me appeared red because of the reflected light from my Snooperettes, but those farther away looked gray—well matched to the gray light field behind them. There were hundreds of them—hanging there like an invading army of drones spaced a yard or two apart, above, below, and to the sides of the Wasp. But they weren’t expending energy to hover, as drones would; they were floating with claws splayed out, mostly not moving until one would tail-flip backwa
rd briefly before returning to float mode. I had never seen these guys while scuba diving or in net hauls. Was it normal for them to be here like this, and in such numbers?
I later learned that the presence of this crab swarm, which we saw routinely in our first few weeks of the expedition, was not common. Pleuroncodes planipes, also known as langostino or tuna crabs, are normally found in warm waters south of San Diego, but this was an El Niño year, characterized by warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures, which had apparently extended their range to the north.
As I continued my descent, the crabs disappeared and were replaced by more amazing creatures. There was a gooseberry comb jellyfish (Pleurobrachia bachei) with two incredibly long tentacles, each sporting a gauzy splay of hairlike tentilla that it rapidly retracted as it swam away after being disturbed by my bulky presence. A siphonophore called Nanomia swam downward, pulsing its transparent corncob of swimming bells while trailing a ropy tentacle tail. The speed and agility of these fragile manifestations of organized water was stunning, and their alternative modes of locomotion bizarre. The comb jelly moved by means of eight rows of paddles—called combs—beating in traveling waves that pushed the jelly forward or backward with equal ease, while the siphonophore pumped water from closely packed swimming bells that it contracted synchronously when moving in a straight line and asynchronously when making a turn. A little deeper, I spotted a six-inch silver-sided fish hanging vertically, head up. What is that about? I began to wonder how much of the animal behavior I was observing was influenced by my presence.
When I reached eight hundred feet, Charlie stopped paying out the umbilical and then briefly distracted me from my observations as he had me call off gauge readings to him. The suit oscillated slowly up and down like a tea bag on a string. For this, my first deep dive, the umbilical was a source of comfort, connecting me acoustically to Charlie and physically to the mother ship, which rocked in a gentle swell at the surface. Aside from power and communication, it provided the reassuring thought that, if anything went terribly wrong, I could be quickly hauled back from the abyss. But it also restricted my freedom to explore, as I was about to experience.
