A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

  I hardly need point out that we would be lost without it. Deprived of water, the human body rapidly falls apart. Within days, the lips vanish "as if amputated, the gums blacken, the nose withers to half its length, and the skin so contracts around the eyes as to prevent blinking." Water is so vital to us that it is easy to overlook that all but the smallest fraction of the water on Earth is poisonous to us--deadly poisonous--because of the salts within it.

  We need salt to live, but only in very small amounts, and seawater contains way more--about seventy times more--salt than we can safely metabolize. A typical liter of seawater will contain only about 2.5 teaspoons of common salt--the kind we sprinkle on food--but much larger amounts of other elements, compounds, and other dissolved solids, which are collectively known as salts. The proportions of these salts and minerals in our tissues is uncannily similar to seawater--we sweat and cry seawater, as Margulis and Sagan have put it--but curiously we cannot tolerate them as an input. Take a lot of salt into your body and your metabolism very quickly goes into crisis. From every cell, water molecules rush off like so many volunteer firemen to try to dilute and carry off the sudden intake of salt. This leaves the cells dangerously short of the water they need to carry out their normal functions. They become, in a word, dehydrated. In extreme situations, dehydration will lead to seizures, unconsciousness, and brain damage. Meanwhile, the overworked blood cells carry the salt to the kidneys, which eventually become overwhelmed and shut down. Without functioning kidneys you die. That is why we don't drink seawater.

  There are 320 million cubic miles of water on Earth and that is all we're ever going to get. The system is closed: practically speaking, nothing can be added or subtracted. The water you drink has been around doing its job since the Earth was young. By 3.8 billion years ago, the oceans had (at least more or less) achieved their present volumes.

  The water realm is known as the hydrosphere and it is overwhelmingly oceanic. Ninety-seven percent of all the water on Earth is in the seas, the greater part of it in the Pacific, which covers half the planet and is bigger than all the landmasses put together. Altogether the Pacific holds just over half of all the ocean water (51.6 percent to be precise); the Atlantic has 23.6 percent and the Indian Ocean 21.2 percent, leaving just 3.6 percent to be accounted for by all the other seas. The average depth of the ocean is 2.4 miles, with the Pacific on average about a thousand feet deeper than the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Altogether 60 percent of the planet's surface is ocean more than a mile deep. As Philip Ball notes, we would better call our planet not Earth but Water.

  Of the 3 percent of Earth's water that is fresh, most exists as ice sheets. Only the tiniest amount--0.036 percent--is found in lakes, rivers, and reservoirs, and an even smaller part--just 0.001 percent--exists in clouds or as vapor. Nearly 90 percent of the planet's ice is in Antarctica, and most of the rest is in Greenland. Go to the South Pole and you will be standing on nearly two miles of ice, at the North Pole just fifteen feet of it. Antarctica alone has six million cubic miles of ice--enough to raise the oceans by a height of two hundred feet if it all melted. But if all the water in the atmosphere fell as rain, evenly everywhere, the oceans would deepen by only an inch.

  Sea level, incidentally, is an almost entirely notional concept. Seas are not level at all. Tides, winds, the Coriolis force, and other effects alter water levels considerably from one ocean to another and within oceans as well. The Pacific is about a foot and a half higher along its western edge--a consequence of the centrifugal force created by the Earth's spin. Just as when you pull on a tub of water the water tends to flow toward the other end, as if reluctant to come with you, so the eastward spin of Earth piles water up against the ocean's western margins.

  Considering the age-old importance of the seas to us, it is striking how long it took the world to take a scientific interest in them. Until well into the nineteenth century most of what was known about the oceans was based on what washed ashore or came up in fishing nets, and nearly all that was written was based more on anecdote and supposition than on physical evidence. In the 1830s, the British naturalist Edward Forbes surveyed ocean beds throughout the Atlantic and Mediterranean and declared that there was no life at all in the seas below 2,000 feet. It seemed a reasonable assumption. There was no light at that depth, so no plant life, and the pressures of water at such depths were known to be extreme. So it came as something of a surprise when, in 1860, one of the first transatlantic telegraph cables was hauled up for repairs from more than two miles down, and it was found to be thickly encrusted with corals, clams, and other living detritus.

  The first really organized investigation of the seas didn't come until 1872, when a joint expedition between the British Museum, the Royal Society, and the British government set forth from Portsmouth on a former warship called HMS Challenger . For three and a half years they sailed the world, sampling waters, netting fish, and hauling a dredge through sediments. It was evidently dreary work. Out of a complement of 240 scientists and crew, one in four jumped ship and eight more died or went mad--"driven to distraction by the mind-numbing routine of years of dredging" in the words of the historian Samantha Weinberg. But they sailed across almost 70,000 nautical miles of sea, collected over 4,700 new species of marine organisms, gathered enough information to create a fifty-volume report (which took nineteen years to put together), and gave the world the name of a new scientific discipline: oceanography . They also discovered, by means of depth measurements, that there appeared to be submerged mountains in the mid-Atlantic, prompting some excited observers to speculate that they had found the lost continent of Atlantis.

  Because the institutional world mostly ignored the seas, it fell to devoted--and very occasional--amateurs to tell us what was down there. Modern deep-water exploration begins with Charles William Beebe and Otis Barton in 1930. Although they were equal partners, the more colorful Beebe has always received far more written attention. Born in 1877 into a well-to-do family in New York City, Beebe studied zoology at Columbia University, then took a job as a birdkeeper at the New York Zoological Society. Tiring of that, he decided to adopt the life of an adventurer and for the next quarter century traveled extensively through Asia and South America with a succession of attractive female assistants whose jobs were inventively described as "historian and technicist" or "assistant in fish problems." He supported these endeavors with a succession of popular books with titles like Edge of the Jungle and Jungle Days , though he also produced some respectable books on wildlife and ornithology.

  In the mid-1920s, on a trip to the Galápagos Islands, he discovered "the delights of dangling," as he described deep-sea diving. Soon afterward he teamed up with Barton, who came from an even wealthier family, had also attended Columbia, and also longed for adventure. Although Beebe nearly always gets the credit, it was in fact Barton who designed the first bathysphere (from the Greek word for "deep") and funded the $12,000 cost of its construction. It was a tiny and necessarily robust chamber, made of cast iron 1.5 inches thick and with two small portholes containing quartz blocks three inches thick. It held two men, but only if they were prepared to become extremely well acquainted. Even by the standards of the age, the technology was unsophisticated. The sphere had no maneuverability--it simply hung on the end of a long cable--and only the most primitive breathing system: to neutralize their own carbon dioxide they set out open cans of soda lime, and to absorb moisture they opened a small tub of calcium chloride, over which they sometimes waved palm fronds to encourage chemical reactions.

  But the nameless little bathysphere did the job it was intended to do. On the first dive, in June 1930 in the Bahamas, Barton and Beebe set a world record by descending to 600 feet. By 1934, they had pushed the record to 3,028 feet, where it would stay until after the war. Barton was confident the device was safe to a depth of 4,500 feet, though the strain on every bolt and rivet was audibly evident with each fathom they descended. At any depth, it was brave and risky work. At 3,000 feet, their little po
rthole was subjected to nineteen tons of pressure per square inch. Death at such a depth would have been instantaneous, as Beebe never failed to observe in his many books, articles, and radio broadcasts. Their main concern, however, was that the shipboard winch, straining to hold on to a metal ball and two tons of steel cable, would snap and send the two men plunging to the seafloor. In such an event, nothing could have saved them.

  The one thing their descents didn't produce was a great deal of worthwhile science. Although they encountered many creatures that had not been seen before, the limits of visibility and the fact that neither of the intrepid aquanauts was a trained oceanographer meant they often weren't able to describe their findings in the kind of detail that real scientists craved. The sphere didn't carry an external light, merely a 250-watt bulb they could hold up to the window, but the water below five hundred feet was practically impenetrable anyway, and they were peering into it through three inches of quartz, so anything they hoped to view would have to be nearly as interested in them as they were in it. About all they could report, in consequence, was that there were a lot of strange things down there. On one dive in 1934, Beebe was startled to spy a giant serpent "more than twenty feet long and very wide." It passed too swiftly to be more than a shadow. Whatever it was, nothing like it has been seen by anyone since. Because of such vagueness their reports were generally ignored by academics.

  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 existe
nce 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.

  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.