by Edith Widder
Both of HBOI’s JSLs were highly dependable research platforms, with one little idiosyncrasy in JSL 1: After a dive to three thousand feet, during the ascent, just as you were nearing the surface at around two hundred feet, the sub would sometimes produce a loud bang. The first time I heard it, the pilot had warned me we might hear a bang, but HOLY HEART FAILURE BATMAN! It was so loud I practically levitated. I later overheard the sub crew debating the possible cause. They were uncertain, which was not reassuring. In the end, it was determined to be a design flaw related to the compressibility of acrylic.
The fact that the acrylic sphere compressed under pressure meant that its diameter actually decreased by as much as half an inch at depth. I have never tried this, but I was told that if you stretched a string taut from one side of the sphere to the other, once you reached three thousand feet, it would be hanging loose—only to retighten when you returned to the surface. To deal with this compression, the aluminum hatch through which we entered at the top had beveled sides that sat in a beveled hole in the acrylic, surrounded by a nylon gasket ring that was supposed to allow the hatch to slide outward as the sphere compressed, and inward as it expanded.
The trouble was that it wasn’t sliding during the ascent, but rather sticking and then letting go all at once, with two unwanted results: the loud bang as it released, and the development of tiny shear cracks at the interface. By 1997, those cracks had grown to the size of quarters. Reducing the depth limit to two thousand feet eradicated the bang and the cracking, but the utility of the subs for deep-sea exploration was severely impeded. Eventually, the problem was solved with a new sphere designed with different interface angles, a thicker gasket, and a new lubricant. But all that happened after the Cuba mission.
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The Cuba expedition was not shaping up the way Lipscomb and Giddings had planned. They were getting good stuff, but, thanks to the depth limitations, most of it was shot during shallow-water dives or while ashore. Nothing terribly exciting had happened or been discovered, and the rarity of the locale was not shining through.
With the expedition drawing to a close, the New Year dawned with ten-to-twelve-foot seas and a stiff headwind as we steamed toward Havana Harbor, our final stop before making our way home. There were two big things that Giddings was hoping might happen once we got there. The first was for the sub to dive in what he called the “boneyard,” a six-hundred-foot-deep gully at the entrance to Havana Harbor, a place that had presumably collected a half century’s worth of relics and treasures from the trading vessels and treasure ships that plied these waters. The second was a visit from Castro.
The reason we had been able to get clearance to dive these waters was primarily because Al Giddings had a personal relationship with Fidel Castro—one that was based on their shared fondness for scuba diving and ocean exploration. They had bonded over their common love of the ocean when Giddings visited Cuba on filming expeditions in the late seventies and again in the early eighties, and from the outset of our expedition, Giddings had been talking about possibly taking Castro on a submersible dive.
Lipscomb was made practically apoplectic by the notion, and it had become a major point of friction between the two. The very idea of carrying the seventy-one-year-old dictator into the deep sea was problematic on many levels, but the worry Lipscomb raised that I found most compelling was “What if he had a heart attack while he was in the sub? There’s no way they would believe it was an accident. They’d never let us leave the country. For Christ’s sake, they’d kill us!”
Both the boneyard dive and Castro’s visit to the ship happened on the same day: January 2, 1998. The dive in the morning was a total bust, because as the sub descended the sloping wall of the gully, it got caught in a current and pushed into a snarl of heavy-duty undersea cables almost halfway down, at around 320 feet. For the sub crew, this was too reminiscent of the circumstances of “the accident,” and the decision to abort was immediate and nonnegotiable.
So Castro’s visit was Giddings and Lipscomb’s best hope for a grand finale. We still weren’t sure it was really going to happen. It was supposed to be a secret, for security reasons, but when we were all advised to remain on board that evening instead of going ashore to the wonderful outdoor cafés with their live music, we guessed the reason. Just after sunset, a gunboat quietly positioned itself off our port side, followed shortly after by three black Mercedeses speeding up to the end of the gangplank on our starboard side. With no fanfare, presidential guards in olive-green fatigues, packing automatic weapons, along with bodyguards in civilian garb with no visible weapons*9 spilled out as El Comandante emerged from the middle car. Dressed in his standard fatigues, his hair and beard showing very little gray, he looked a lot younger than seventy-one.
Giddings served as official greeter and master of ceremonies, ushering Castro aboard and making introductions. There was practically a scrum on the fantail as everyone clustered around, jockeying for position, while Giddings and the chief submersible pilot took turns describing the submersible and its many capabilities. A petite woman in a denim jacket served as simultaneous translator, a job she excelled at, even to the point of repeating the mannerisms and gestures of whomever she was translating at the moment. Much of the conversation was driven by Castro’s questions, of which there were many. He seemed intensely interested in all aspects of our operation.
Everyone, not just the film crews, wielded cameras. We all wanted to document this historic moment. I was holding the camcorder that I used in the sub, but most of my shots were from the back of the scrum. In hopes of getting some good close-ups, Tammy and I positioned ourselves in a doorway along the narrow hallway leading forward to the galley, figuring he would necessarily walk by that spot during the tour of the ship. He did come that way, and I was filming, but instead of just walking by, he stopped to talk.
I quickly dropped the camera to my side, freeing up my right hand to shake his. I was surprised at the softness of his grip. It seemed at odds with the persona. I was even more taken aback by the scientific depth of his questions to us both. He wasn’t just showing off what he knew—which was a great deal—he was trying to learn new things. In answer to his question “What do you study?” I had begun describing a world without sunlight, where animals still have eyes to see the light that they themselves make, when he broke in with what seemed to be a non sequitur: “Why don’t they freeze?” But further questions revealed that what he wanted to know was, if there was no sunlight to warm the depths and the temperatures were so close to freezing, why didn’t the fish freeze? It’s a smart question, with a complex answer having to do with the Earth’s hot core and thin oceanic crust, ocean circulation patterns, and how salt lowers the freezing point of water. He took that in, and then asked if there was evidence of El Niño and climate change in the deep sea. He spoke at length about climate change and its implications for island nations like the Maldives and about how agriculture and fisheries will be impacted worldwide. Finally, he talked about the decimation of shark populations because of finning. It was a wholly unexpected dialogue on many levels, and I was pleased to discover later that, because I had left the camera running, I had the whole thing on tape, along with what may be the most unusual footage of Fidel Castro ever shot. The way I was holding the camera, it was tilting straight up, affording a detailed view of the inside of the dictator’s nose.
Later during his visit, I scored another coup when I happened to be standing in the galley as Castro was coming down from the bridge and he stepped out of the procession to ask our cook about how he prepared lobster. I was filming as he then proceeded to give a lecture on how you mustn’t ruin lobster the way the French do. “You can’t even taste the lobster in lobster thermidor. It’s like mixing water with wine! Instead you just cut it open like a butterfly, add a little butter and onion, and cook it eleven minutes.” Lobster à la Comandante.
Castro touched on so many subject
s during his time on board the R/V Seward Johnson, most of it on camera, that Lipscomb and Giddings had a plethora of material they could use to flesh out their story. They had superb footage, for example, from one of the island’s spiny lobster fisheries that they could now intercut with Castro describing the life history of spiny lobster and the importance of maintaining a sustainable fishery. There was the backstory of how the lobsters were fresh-frozen and shipped to Europe, creating one of the country’s most valuable exports, but the Cuban people didn’t get to eat any of that harvest. And then there was the irony, or humor (depending on how they wanted to play it), of El Comandante providing recipes for food his own people weren’t allowed to eat. The point was that Castro’s visit offered the basis for some great storytelling. The question was, would they be allowed to use any of it?
The answer turned out to be no. Corporate was just too concerned about potential backlash from the anti-Castro community and they chose to play it safe. The two-hour documentary, which was narrated by Martin Sheen, made no mention of Castro. The title was changed from Cuba: Forbidden Waters to Cuba: Forbidden Depths, with the explanation that “forbidden” referred not to the political restrictions but to the “treacherous depths” we were exploring. This was especially ridiculous given that we were diving to only two-thirds of our usual depth limit.
In the end, no one was terribly happy with the outcome. Lipscomb was so dissatisfied that he never even watched the television broadcast. Corporate was unhappy because the documentary got poor ratings. And the scientists were frustrated because so little real science was accomplished. It was a very unusual trip, though, and when it was over I felt privileged to have been able to explore and experience Cuba from a unique perspective. But when I got home, I vowed to David that if I was ever given the opportunity for another television-sponsored expedition, I would never accept. It was a vow I would eventually break.
Skip Notes
*1 Castro claimed, “If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal.”
*2 Lasers project narrow beams of light, and light must reflect off something to be seen, so unless you’re in a smoke-filled dance club, the transmitted light is invisible until it hits its target—as anyone who has ever used a laser pointer well knows.
*3 Older blood turns brown from oxidation—as anyone who does laundry for “active” kids knows.
*4 Sound waves require a transmissive medium like air or water in order to stimulate your eardrum—as anyone who has survived time in a vacuum can tell you. This, of course, is sarcasm, but not because humans can’t survive a vacuum (you have fifteen seconds before you pass out) but because who do you know that’s ever actually been in a vacuum?
*5 Many scientists spoke out about the damage done by the Mermaids programs. One of these was marine biologist Andrew David Thaler, who wrote an article for Slate (“The Politics of Fake Documentaries,” August 31, 2016) in which he related this quote—which made my toes curl.
*6 They would sometimes caution first-timers to drink lots of coffee before the dive to help them stay warm. Then, when the victim arrived on deck after a typical three-and-a-half-hour dive with bladder bursting, as an added torture they would make sure the nearest head was occupied.
*7 The JSLs were designed for scientific research, which sometimes involved collecting water samples.
*8 Of the hundreds of thousands of dives made in research submersibles, there have been only two fatalities. It is far more dangerous to drive in Boston than to dive in a submersible.
*9 We later learned they each had a gun hidden under their untucked shirts—a fact that came to light during the ship’s tour, when someone made a too sudden move to open a drawer. The drawer contained a T-shirt intended as a gift, not a weapon, but although the security appeared relaxed, these guys weren’t.
Chapter 10
PLAN B
I typed in the command to retrieve the camera images. Nothing happened. I typed it in again. Still nothing. I felt my jaw clench but fought to keep my face from conveying the depth of my dismay. The inevitability of this moment seemed preordained. Murphy’s law is immutable: If anything can go wrong—it will. And so is its corollary: If there is a worst time for something to go wrong, it will happen then, which in this case was right now, on national television.
This was exactly the scenario I had envisioned when filmmaker David Clark contacted me in 2003 about the possibility of his coming along on this mission. An Emmy Award–winning independent filmmaker with a good reputation, Clark was someone with whom I normally would have been happy to work, and since he would be coming along as my guest, it wouldn’t be like the Cuba trip; I would be calling the shots. But this mission was special.
This was going to be the first field test of an instrument that I had been struggling to get funded for years. The possibility for failure is always high the first time you test a new instrument in the field, and I was less than thrilled at the notion of having such a failure made so very public. On the other hand, Clark wanted to focus the documentary on the importance of engineering in ocean exploration, which is something I feel strongly about. It was a fraught moment, but one that presented an opportunity to communicate crucial information to a large audience.
We must do a better job of helping people understand what it means to live on an ocean planet. More specifically: what it means to live on a few little dry islands surrounded by a vast watery world that we know surprisingly little about. We are overrunning the Earth with our population—now about to blow past eight billion. To feed our exploding numbers, we are intensively farming the land and stripping the ocean of its biomass while creating all manner of wastes, which spill off the land and into the water, overwhelming the complex life-support machinery that maintains us. This is not sustainable, and it is definitely not smart.
How is it possible, in this day and age, that we know so little about the workings of our own planet? The first step to knowing is exploration. So how much of the ocean have we actually explored? The answer you hear most often is 5 percent. The funny thing is, some will tell you that number is way too small, while others (me, for instance) will tell you that it’s way too large. It all depends on what you mean by “exploration.”
If a map is all you need to declare a region explored, then we can claim to have explored 100 percent of the ocean. However, that map was made from space, using satellites that scan the sea surface using radar. Radar doesn’t penetrate seawater; it bounces off, providing very accurate measurements of sea surface heights but not much else. By taking lots of measurements and averaging out the bumpiness and oscillations produced by waves and tides, we reveal bottom features like undersea mountain ranges and trenches. Unfortunately, the resolution of that map is so poor that it is impossible to discern anything smaller than three miles across; anything less would be undetectable. Smaller features associated with seamounts, deep-sea vents, and the hills, ridges, canyons, and valleys that provide critical habitats for animals are unresolved. We actually have more precise maps of the moon, Venus, and Mars.
Ships cruising along the surface using multibeam sonar projected in a narrow swath along the seafloor have produced higher-resolution maps of almost 30 percent of the ocean bottom. These maps provide a resolution of about a hundred yards, which is still not great. By comparison, the resolution of your house as seen on Google Earth is twenty-five inches.*1
To see at higher resolutions in the ocean, we must physically pierce the watery veil. So if your definition of exploration involves actually visiting a place, we have explored less than a paltry 0.05 percent of the deep ocean! That would be like reconnoitering a mere three city blocks out of the entire island of Manhattan—and only at ground level, because even that tiny percentage completely ignores the staggering volume of living space above the seafloor, which, at an average depth of 2.3 miles, is equ
ivalent to a building 1,207 stories tall.*2
So what is the big hang-up that has kept us from exploring the vast majority of our planet? As the saying goes, it ain’t rocket science. It’s chronic underfunding. The fact is, we have never had anything akin to a moon shot or a NASA for the ocean.
When President Kennedy made his famous moon-shot speech in 1962, he painted a picture of space as a beckoning frontier. He said, “We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won.” He focused on the need for the United States to establish a position of preeminence in order to protect ourselves “against the hostile misuse of space” and alluded to how we were losing the space race with the Soviet Union, with potentially scary consequences. His rhetoric went a long way toward selling the program, despite considerable pushback from those who felt it was a tremendous waste of money.
Kennedy’s predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, stated unequivocally that “to spend $40 billion to reach the moon is just nuts.” Looking back now, most people would disagree with that assessment. Walking on the moon is widely characterized as an enormous human achievement and a shining example of American exceptionalism.
In the absence of any comparable geopolitical drivers or clearly defined goals, there has never been any serious long-term financial commitment to ocean exploration. In 2013, the United States budgeted $3.8 billion for space exploration, but just 0.6 percent as much—$23.7 million—for ocean exploration. Looked at from a different perspective, for the cost of one shuttle launch (with payload, about $1 billion) we could have financed two deep submersible dives a day (at $12,500 each) every day for 110 years. That’s an enormous disparity that helps explain why we know so little about our ocean planet.
