When vents were first discovered, less than 40 years ago, the world hailed them as wonders. Here, in what was once thought to be a cold and featureless desert, were strange, smoking oases populated by bizarre creatures that somehow thrived without access to what was understood to be the most basic necessity of life. (Because there is no light in the deep sea, there is no photosynthesis. The energy at the base of the food web comes not from the sun but from chemical reactions.) It was an astonishing reminder of how little we understood the sea: here we were, uncovering an entirely unknown way of life on our own planet nearly a decade after sending astronauts to the moon.
Today the deep sea remains a world of mystery and fantasy, less mapped—and perhaps less present in our collective thoughts—than the surface of Mars. By volume, the dark regions of the ocean comprise more than 98 percent of the planet’s habitat, yet we know exceptionally little about them: not the contours of their mountains and trenches, not the full life cycle of a single deep-sea species.
In Papua New Guinea opponents of seabed mining make a point of using the word experimental when referring to it; they also emphasize the difficulty of tracking or containing the impacts of industry in a shifting and difficult-to-study marine environment. But Nautilus and other companies argue that there are ways in which deep-ocean mining might be less damaging than terrestrial mining. Because minerals are on or fairly close to the seabed’s surface, there won’t be massive open-pit mines like you see on land, and therefore there will be less waste and perhaps less energy use. There won’t be roads and buildings and other infrastructure left behind; everything will be mobile, ready to move on to the next site. No human communities will be displaced. And even vent ecosystems, which are naturally dynamic, won’t face that much more change than they’re used to. Single vents are often active for considerably less than a century due to changes in geothermal activity, becoming clogged by their own deposits or getting destroyed by a volcanic eruption. Solwara 1 is located just over a mile away from an active volcano. This close proximity means the site may disappear soon enough on its own, making deliberate decimation of it somewhat less controversial. (Hydrothermal vents are not the only place to look for minerals: mining companies are also targeting the cobalt-rich crusts of underwater mountains as well as fields of potato-sized polymetallic nodules that form in the ocean’s deepest plains.)
Still, plenty of other concerns come with mining the deep ocean. Scientists worry about sediment, either kicked up off the seafloor or produced by cutting and grinding, mixing into the water and suffocating animals or disrupting filter feeders. If acidic vent fluid and metals aren’t handled carefully when they’re brought out of the deep, they could spill and kill reefs. Nodule mining will mean the destruction of formations that grow just a few millimeters every million years, and the mining of seamount crusts will be akin to underwater mountaintop removal on structures that serve as biological havens for fish and other animals in the open ocean.
But the biggest worry is that we may not yet know what to worry about. How do you do a risk-benefit analysis of something that’s never been done before? How do you decide what’s safe and what’s not in a place whose workings are opaque to you? We know, for example, that the seafloor plays an important role in the way the ocean cycles heat, chemicals, and nutrients—including, crucially, carbon—but not how this process works. We’re not sure how mining may compound other stressors the ocean is facing, from acidification to overfishing. The only way to know how well the deep ocean will recover from disturbance, notes Andrew Thaler, a marine ecologist who used to work in Van Dover’s lab, is to disturb it.
Van Dover has publicly said that she’d prefer vent mining not to happen at all, but she is also convinced that it can’t be stopped. Her best option, she believes, is to help shape how the new industry will be regulated. Given its novelty, deep-sea mining has no bad practices grandfathered in. “It’s a green field,” Van Dover says. “It’s another frontier. We could do it right. But my sense right now is, it’s a free-for-all.” Some colleagues objected when she first started working with Nautilus, but Van Dover says she’s recently seen other scientists working more closely with industry to develop baseline data or best practices, or to identify priority areas for protection. That shift, she says, is the result of a simple calculation with the weight of history behind it. When humans can take something we want, we usually do. And we really want minerals.
We made it to Messi the next day, but only after being turned back twice more by seemingly impassable rivers. Each time locals helped us find a way across, at one point helping us push the car out of deep mud.
Though the concerns I heard from New Irelanders were different from Van Dover’s, they exposed similarly uncomfortable contradictions. In Messi a woman named Ruby William told me that the seafloor minerals are masalai—sacred “old things from before”—and should not be harmed. In nearly the next breath she told me that the community could get behind mining if Nautilus agreed to build a processing plant in New Ireland, creating jobs and bringing money here instead of contracting with China. But aren’t the minerals sacred? I asked. She replied that Papua New Guinean workers would know which ones are sacred and which are not. (She also told me that development and money are the answer to the region’s recent problems with violence and drunkenness; a few houses down, another woman told me that development and money are the source of those problems.)
It eventually became clear that one of my basic questions—if you had a choice, would you want mining?—was confusingly hypothetical. Like Van Dover, William and her family didn’t see much choice. In Papua New Guinea, where most land is communally owned by extended families, villagers have real power as landowners but also know that it’s not enough to stop government officials and foreigners from eventually getting what they want. And so, in the face of inevitability, they negotiate, sorting out who will get how much in royalties or necessary services.
One of the justifications companies like Nautilus offers for seabed mining is that minerals are becoming increasingly more difficult to come by on land. But people began dreaming of mining the deep ocean almost as soon as minerals were discovered there. (During the Cold War, Howard Hughes claimed to be collecting seabed minerals while he teamed with the CIA to search for a sunken Russian nuclear sub; the misdirection was enough to kick off a wave of real commercial interest.) And it’s rarely mentioned that seabed mining will happen in addition to land-based mining, not instead of it, or that we could do a much better job of recycling metals and designing products to be less wasteful.
Deep-sea mining is just one version of a fairly ordinary decision: to weigh known benefits against unknown risks and choose to move ahead. Yet we squirm more than usual to learn that even the bottom of the ocean is no longer beyond the limits of human industry. This is the contradiction of the deep sea. However much it may seem to be a separate, alien world—however much we may like to think of it that way—it isn’t.
Years ago Van Dover began inviting artists on dives in the hope that one of them would be able to translate the strangeness of the abyssal wilderness to those of us who will never directly witness it. She got the idea from an oceanographer named John Delaney, an early mentor. In 1991, when Van Dover was still working as an Alvin pilot, Delaney invited Michael Collier, a rare nonscientist, aboard a deep-sea research cruise off the Washington coast. Delaney believed the deep sea needed to be seen, and felt, by someone with Collier’s area of expertise. Collier is a poet.
On the day of his scheduled dive, rough weather forced the crew to cancel Alvin’s descent. There was a good chance of another opportunity later in the cruise, but Collier felt he had to go home. The semester had begun, and he had classes to teach. When he told Van Dover, he remembers, “She looked at me, and she said, ‘Are you crazy? You’re going to go back? You can’t go back. A week doesn’t matter; another week out of your life doesn’t matter. You have to stay and go see the bottom of the ocean.’”
So he stayed
and made the dive, dropping through the vast darkness and the rafts of bioluminescence. When the pilot turned on the light, Collier recalls, he looked out his porthole at a field of hydrothermal vents that scientists had dubbed Krypto, Dante, and Hulk and thought to himself, This is what the beginning of the world looks like. He spotted giant clams, strange shrimp, and huge colonies of tubeworms, some beautiful and undulating, some scorched by the intensely hot vent water, looking “like wiring in your car that had melted.” He felt as though he were under a spell.
It’s been 23 years since that day on the seafloor, but Collier still feels the wonder of it. He’s followed the advent of mining with the luxury of less ambivalence than Van Dover. “I think it’s an awful idea,” he tells me.
For a while Collier visited schools with a slideshow about the deep ocean, but it was years before he published a poem about his dive. The deep sea, he discovered, is as confounding for a poet as it is for a scientist—it is so bizarre, so other, so alien. “I felt this inadequacy, this essential inadequacy, about how to describe what I was seeing,” he says. “As if what you had to do was create the language for it.”
SAM KEAN
Phineas Gage, Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient
FROM Slate
1. From a Virtuous Foreman to a Sociopathic Drifter
On September 13, 1848, at around 4:30 p.m., the time of day when the mind might start wandering, a railroad foreman named Phineas Gage filled a drill hole with gunpowder and turned his head to check on his men. It was the last normal moment of his life.
Other victims in the annals of medicine are almost always referred to by initials or pseudonyms. Not Gage: his is the most famous name in neuroscience. How ironic, then, that we know so little else about the man—and that much of what we think we know, especially about his life unraveling after his accident, is probably bunk.
The Rutland and Burlington Railroad had hired Gage’s crew that fall to clear away some tough black rock near Cavendish, Vermont, and it considered Gage the best foreman around. Among other tasks, a foreman sprinkled gunpowder into blasting holes and then tamped the powder down, gently, with an iron rod. This completed, an assistant poured in sand or clay, which got tamped down hard to confine the bang to a tiny space. Gage had specially commissioned his tamping iron from a blacksmith. Sleek like a javelin, it weighed 13¼ pounds and stretched 3 feet 7 inches long. (Gage stood five foot six.) At its widest the rod had a diameter of 1¼ inches, although the last foot—the part Gage held near his head when tamping—tapered to a point.
Gage’s crew members were loading some busted rock onto a cart, and they apparently distracted him. Accounts differ about what happened after Gage turned his head. One says Gage tried to tamp the gunpowder down with his head still turned and scraped his iron against the side of the hole, creating a spark. Another says Gage’s assistant (perhaps also distracted) failed to pour the sand in, and when Gage turned back, he smashed the rod down hard, thinking he was packing inert material. Regardless, a spark shot out somewhere in the dark cavity, igniting the gunpowder, and the tamping iron rocketed upward.
The iron entered Gage’s head point first, striking below the left cheekbone. It destroyed an upper molar, passed behind his left eye, and tore into the underbelly of his brain’s left frontal lobe. It then plowed through the top of his skull, exiting near the midline, just behind where his hairline started. After parabola-ing upward—one report claimed it whistled as it flew—the rod landed 25 yards away and stuck upright in the dirt, mumblety-peg-style. Witnesses described it as streaked with red and greasy to the touch, from fatty brain tissue.
The rod’s momentum threw Gage backward, and he landed hard. Amazingly, he claimed he never lost consciousness. He merely twitched a few times on the ground, and was talking and walking again within minutes. He felt steady enough to climb into an oxcart, and after someone grabbed the reins and giddyapped, he sat upright for the entire mile-long trip into Cavendish. At the hotel where he was lodging, he settled into a chair on the porch and chatted with passersby. The first doctor to arrive could see, even from his carriage, a volcano of upturned bone jutting out of Gage’s scalp. Gage greeted the doctor by angling his head and deadpanning, “Here’s business enough for you.” He had no idea how prophetic those words would be. The messy business of Gage continues to this day, 166 years later.
Most of us first encountered Gage in a neuroscience or psychology course, and the lesson of his story was both straightforward and stark: the frontal lobes house our highest faculties; they’re the essence of our humanity, the physical incarnation of our highest cognitive powers. So when Gage’s frontal lobes got pulped, he transformed from a clean-cut, virtuous foreman into a dirty, scary, sociopathic drifter. Simple as that. This story has had a huge influence on the scientific and popular understanding of the brain. Most uncomfortably, it implies that whenever people suffer grave damage to the frontal lobes—as soldiers might, or victims of strokes or Alzheimer’s disease—something essentially human can vanish.
Recent historical work, however, suggests that much of the canonical Gage story is hogwash, a mélange of scientific prejudice, artistic license, and outright fabrication. In truth each generation seems to remake Gage in its own image, and we know very few hard facts about his post-accident life and behavior. Some scientists now even argue that, far from turning toward the dark side, Gage recovered after his accident and resumed something like a normal life—a possibility that, if true, could transform our understanding of the brain’s ability to heal itself.
2. Gage “Was No Longer Gage”
The first story that appeared about Gage contained a mistake. The day after his accident, a local newspaper misstated the diameter of the rod. A small error, but an omen of much worse to come.
Psychologist and historian Malcolm Macmillan, currently at the University of Melbourne, has been chronicling mistakes about Gage for 40 years. He has had a peripatetic career: among other topics, he has studied disabled children, Scientology, hypnosis, and fascism. In the 1970s he got interested in Gage and decided to track down original material about the case. He turned up alarmingly little, and realized just how rickety the evidence was for most of the science about Gage.
Macmillan has been sifting fact from fiction ever since, and he eventually published a scholarly book about Gage’s story and its afterlife, An Odd Kind of Fame. Although slowed by a faulty hip replacement—he has trouble reaching books on the bottom shelves at libraries now—Macmillan continues to fight for Gage’s reputation, and he has gotten so involved with his subject that he now refers to him, familiarly, as Phineas. Above all, Macmillan stresses the mismatch between what we actually know about Gage and the popular understanding of him: “Despite there being no more than a couple hundred words attesting to how he changed, he came to dominate thinking about the function of the frontal lobes.”
The most important firsthand information comes from John Harlow, a self-described “obscure country physician” who was the second doctor to reach Gage the day of the accident, arriving around 6 p.m. Harlow watched Gage lumber upstairs to his hotel room and lie down on the bed—which pretty much ruined the linens, since Gage’s body was one big bloody mess. As for what happened next, readers with queasy stomachs should probably skip to the next paragraph. Harlow shaved Gage’s scalp and peeled off the dried blood and brains. He then extracted skull fragments from the wound by sticking his fingers in from both ends, Chinese-finger-trap-style. Throughout this all, Gage was retching every 20 minutes, because blood and greasy bits of brain reportedly kept slipping down the back of his throat and gagging him. Incredibly, Gage never got ruffled, remaining conscious and rational throughout. He even claimed he’d be back blasting rocks in two days.
The bleeding stopped around 11 p.m., and Gage rested that night. The next morning his head was heavily bandaged and his left eyeball was still protruding a good half-inch, but Harlow allowed him visitors, and Gage recognized his mother and uncle, a good sign. Within a few d
ays, however, his health deteriorated. His face puffed up, his brain swelled, and he started raving, at one point demanding that someone find his pants so he could go outside. His brain developed a fungal infection and he lapsed into a coma. A local cabinetmaker measured him for a coffin.
Fourteen days into the crisis, Harlow performed emergency surgery, puncturing the tissue inside Gage’s nose to drain the wound. Things were touch-and-go for weeks, and Gage did lose sight in his left eye, which remained sewn shut the rest of his life. But he eventually stabilized, and in late November he returned home to Lebanon, New Hampshire—along with his tamping iron, which he started carrying around with him everywhere. In his case report, Harlow modestly downplayed his role in the recovery: “I dressed him,” he wrote, “God healed him.”
During his convalescence stories about Gage started circulating in newspapers, with varying degrees of accuracy. Most gave Gage the tabloid treatment, emphasizing the sheer improbability of his survival. Doctors gabbed about the case too, albeit with a dose of skepticism. One physician dismissed Gage as “a Yankee invention,” and Harlow said that others, like Saint Thomas with Jesus, “refused to believe that the man had risen until they had thrust their fingers into the hole of his head.”
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015 Page 18
