A Brief History of Science with Levity

by Mike Bennett

  During this period of cost-cutting in the North Sea, there were other complications which caused difficulties for our operations. Shell, for example, virtually closed down the lower levels of its accounting department, outsourcing all of these activities to a local accounting company. I am convinced that the outsourced bean counters were paid bonuses for delaying the payment of approved invoices.

  At one stage, we had well in excess of $100,000 in approved yet unpaid invoices to Shell that were with this outsourcing firm awaiting payment. Some of our aged receivables on this list were in excess of ninety days overdue. Every week I would contact the accounting company regarding this and was given excuse after excuse. I was almost miming them to myself as this young man probably read them directly from his standard issue excuses list.

  They included, “We have a software fault in the system which we are trying to rectify”, “My supervisor is not available to sign the cheques as he is on vacation”, and the classic “The cheque was released last week and must be lost in the post. I will cancel it in seven days and then issue a new one.” The list went on. I finally ran out of patience and told him that I would contact Shell directly if they did not deliver a cheque to my office within forty-eight hours. He tried to call my bluff.

  I went to meet the group leader with Shell and explained the situation. The majority of these invoices were related to pioneering work we had performed using radioactive materials to detect and isolate leaks in the seabed oil storage cells of the Brent Bravo production platform. The success of this operation prevented the shutdown of the biggest UK oilfield, which would have been extremely costly to both Shell and the UK Inland Revenue. The Brent field is so significant that “Brent light” is a worldwide benchmark for crude oil prices. The entire technical staff at Shell were very pleased with our work.

  My thoughts were obviously relayed to the accounting company, as I had a cheque in my hand for all the outstanding invoices the following day. However a few weeks later when I needed to visit the accounting company on another matter, I was summoned into a meeting with the young man who handled my account and his boss. The young man was so angry that his face was red and he was physically shaking.

  He started to attempt to give me a dressing-down on how unprofessionally I had behaved. After a minute or so, I told him in front of his boss that he had stalled and lied to me again and again, and any unprofessional behaviour was on his side not mine. I also informed the pair of them that should this situation arise again in the future, the same thing would happen. That could well result in adverse consequences for both their company and the individuals who conduct themselves in this manner. I had no more problems with them after this, but it is a shame when people believe that they can get away with this type of behaviour.

  Following the sale of the Scotoil city centre site, we were all now looking for new jobs. Due to my experience in the handling of radioactive materials, and my knowledge of the waste disposal regulations in most countries, I was appointed as the technical director of a local company involved in waste management. They wanted to expand their business into radioactive waste management. In the North Sea, most of the radioactive waste is produced as a result of a scale known as NORM (Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material). This forms in oil reservoirs over millions of years, if the rock matrix within the reservoir originally contained any uranium or thorium.

  When reservoirs containing these materials are produced, the temperature of the fluids is reduced, causing the dissolved minerals in the already saturated fluid to plate out as solids. This causes low-level radioactive sulphates to be deposited onto everything that the fluid contacts.

  This scale material needs to be chipped away or blasted from the pipework, pumps etc., with which they come into contact. The resulting low-level waste was then just dumped into the North Sea. Due to the size of the North Sea, this was not a significant hazard in itself, but it was still a very unsatisfactory way of dealing with waste disposal when there are completely safe and environmentally friendly alternatives should the oil companies choose to use them.

  Our initial plan was to containerise this waste and ship it to a controlled site in Aberdeen. We then intended to encapsulate the material in molten glass, which would stabilise it and prevent it from leaching into the environment for thousands of years. Glass is very useful for this purpose. Even today, ancient wrecks are being discovered in the Mediterranean dating back to the days of the ancient Egyptians and Romans. Many of the vessels contain liquids stored in glass bottles, which have remained unbroken and sealed for millennia.

  This could have been a major PR coup for some of the oil companies, especially Shell who were still licking their wounds after the Brent Spar PR fiasco. This occurred when they decommissioned a floating oil-loading platform filled with low-level radioactive sludge. They were in the process of towing it out into the North Atlantic to sink it, when the story hit the news. There was such outrage in Europe that Shell were forced to abandon this disposal route, and needed to work very hard to rebuild their environmental reputation.

  The problem we encountered with our glass encapsulation proposal was that most of the decision-makers at the top of the oil companies were fairly elderly gentleman close to their retirement. Although they fully appreciated the environmental benefits of the system we were proposing, they did not want to rock the boat by introducing new techniques, and would rather go with the flow for a few more years and retire on a two-thirds final salary package.

  The board of my own company considered that this was such a good opportunity that they insisted on patenting the process. I was sceptical about this, as I have had some bitter experiences with patents before. When I ran my own business, I designed various new tools and equipment that were extremely successful. Although I patented these ideas and the equipment developed from them, I knew that unless you had the money to pay a High Court Queen’s Counsel (circa $10,000 per day) to fight a patent infringement suit, your patent was effectively worthless.

  This had happened to me before when a major oil service company saw my equipment in operation offshore, and they soon made a direct copy of it in blatant breach of my patents. When my solicitor contacted them regarding this, they promptly held an internal meeting. Their assistant district manager at the time rented a home from me in Aberdeen, and was therefore good enough to relay the results of the meeting back to me. He said that the final outcome was that the general manager authorised the release of $800,000 to their legal department, with the instructions “bury the little bastard”.

  CHAPTER 25

  In this final chapter, we will look at three mysterious lakes that are significant due to the modern scientific investigations that have taken place within their waters. These lakes are Loch Ness, Lake Toplitz, and in particular the extraordinary events and NSA involvement surrounding Lake Vostok in Antarctica.

  Firstly, Loch Ness. Scotland is both geographically and geologically split into four main sections, due to three large faults crossing the country in a south-west to northeast direction. These faults are the Southern Upland Fault, the Highland Boundary Fault and the Great Glen Fault. The two most southerly of these three faults, the Southern Upland and Highland Boundary, only have one or two small lakes and rivers along their course, but otherwise are not flooded.

  The Great Glen Fault, however, was affected by significant glacial erosion during the last Ice Age, and now virtually cuts Scotland in half with a series of lochs (lakes). The largest and most famous of these lakes is Loch Ness. This loch system is connected to the sea on either side of Scotland by the Caledonian Canal.

  When my children were younger, we used to take my boat around the north-east of Scotland and enter Loch Ness via the Caledonian Canal. We kept the boat on Loch Ness for the summer, as when the weather there is good it is great for the kids to picnic, play and visit attractions such as the ancient Urquhart Castle on the north-west shore of the loch.

  I remember when I was a small boy, my Grandma Lottie us
ed to tell me that Loch Ness was bottomless. Although I was very young at the time, I did wonder how, if that was the case, it managed to hold any water. However later in life we had many happy weekends on the loch. Prior to our first trip, I purchased an Admiralty chart covering the entire area from Inverness to Loch Linnie, which is the sea loch that connects the Caledonian Canal to the Atlantic.

  The chart showed that the greatest depth of the loch was just over 220 metres, and due to its surface area this made it the largest body of fresh water in the UK. The only other loch deeper than Loch Ness is Loch Morar, with a water depth of over 300 metres, which is the final loch in the Great Glen Fault before you descend the locks of the Caledonian Canal into the Atlantic.

  During all of this time we never saw a monster, but I did not believe the monster existed. This is for the simple reason that the streams and rivers feeding Loch Ness contain a lot of peat. This gives the water in the loch the colour of tea, and very little light penetrates more than a few metres below the surface. Because of this, there is virtually no plant life in the loch, which is the basis of the food chain. There are, therefore, very few fish in Loch Ness and there is certainly not enough food to support a breeding colony of large top predators.

  I believe that the legend of the Loch Ness monster is due to the winds and circulation patterns prevalent within the loch. As the prevailing winds in the UK come from the south-west, they tend to push the water up to the northeastern end of the loch during periods when the wind is strong. When the wind eases, the surface water then moves back towards the south-west end of the loch, even if a small south-westerly wind is still blowing. If any surface debris, such as a floating tree, is observed from the shore, it will be caught in this counterbalancing current, and therefore appear to be moving against the direction of the wind. I think this is what led some people to believe that, as they were moving in the wrong direction, they must therefore be some type of creature.

  The loch was extensively surveyed during the 1990s by many vessels deploying a curtain of the very latest technology in side-scanning sonar. These searches were carried out from one end of the loch to the other, but no monster has ever been found. However the monster legend makes a good deal of money for Scottish tourism.

  Before moving on to Lake Toplitz, I remember that I was tripped up once in a pub quiz regarding a question on the largest freshwater lake in the world. I asked the quizmaster if he was referring to the lake with the largest volume of freshwater in the world, or the lake with the largest surface area. He replied that he did not know, and he was just there to read out the questions! I then decided that our team answer would be Lake Baikal.

  Lake Baikal is a rift lake situated in the Russian region of Siberia. It has a surface area of around 32,000 square kilometres (less than that of Lake Superior), but it has an average water depth of nearly 750 metres, making it the largest body of unfrozen fresh water on the planet. Lake Baikal is also the world’s oldest and deepest freshwater lake, and contains a volume of around 5,500 cubic miles of freshwater. I lost our team a point on that one, as the “correct” answer was Lake Superior.

  Now we will move on to Lake Toplitz (Toplitzsee in German). This is a lake situated in a dense mountain forest high up in the Austrian Alps, 98 kilometres from Salzburg in western Austria. It is surrounded by cliffs and forests in a beautiful setting in the Salzkammergut lake district, within the Totes Gebirge (Dead Mountains).

  The Toplitzsee water contains no oxygen below a depth of 20 metres. Fish can survive only in the top 18m, as the water below 20m is salty, although bacteria and worms have been found below 20m that can live without oxygen.

  During 1943–44, the shore of Lake Toplitz served as a Nazi naval testing station. Using copper diaphragms, scientists experimented with different explosive types, detonating up to 4,000 kg charges at various depths. They also fired torpedoes from a launching pad in the lake into the Totes Mountains, producing vast holes in the canyon walls. The area is accessible only on foot by a mile-long path, as the K-Mautner-Weg is a private road that serves the Fisherman’s Hut restaurant at the western end.

  Lake Toplitz has inspired numerous expeditions causing several mysterious deaths. But seventy years after Nazi officers hid metal boxes in the depths of Lake Toplitz, a new attempt is being made to recover the Third Reich’s fabled lost gold. The Austrian government has given a US team permission to make an underwater expedition to the log-infested bottom of the lake. Treasure hunters have been flocking to Lake Toplitz ever since a group of diehard Nazis retreated to this picturesque part of the Austrian Alps in the final months of World War II.

  With US troops closing in and Germany on the brink of collapse, they transported the boxes to the edge of the lake, first by military vehicle and then by horse-drawn wagon, and sunk them. Nobody knows exactly what was inside. Some believe they contained gold looted by German troops throughout Europe and carried back to Germany. Others think that they contain documents showing where assets confiscated from Jewish victims were hidden in Swiss bank accounts.

  The state company which controls the lake, Bundesforste AG, has signed contracts with several treasure hunters who hope to solve the mystery. Detailed underwater surveys of the 107 metre (350ft) deep lake followed, although there is profound official scepticism that there is anything left to find.

  “I really don’t know if there is anything down there, but we want to resolve the mystery once and for all,” Irwin Klissenbauer, a director of Bundesforste AG, told the Guardian. “The aim at first is to map the lake floor.”

  He added: “This is a beautiful area. You have heard of Loch Ness. For Austrians this has been a bit like Loch Ness. Lots of people come here, and whether there is gold down there or not, the mystery has been very good for tourism.” Mr Klissenbauer said that under the terms of the deals, any treasure found would be divided between the recovery teams and the Austrian state. He added, “Obviously if they recover anything which has an identifiable owner, under Austrian law we have to give it back.”

  This was not the first time explorers had tried to retrieve the lake’s legendary lost gold. In 1947 a US Navy diver became entangled in Lake Toplitz’s many submerged logs and drowned. Then in 1959 a team financed by the German magazine Stern had more luck, retrieving £72 million in forged sterling currency hidden in boxes, and also recovered the printing press. The currency, it turned out, was part of a secret counterfeiting operation, “Operation Bernhard”, personally authorised by Adolf Hitler to weaken the British economy.

  Over 100 million counterfeit pound sterling notes were said to have been dumped in the lake after Operation Bernhard, which was never fully put into action. There is speculation that there might be other valuables to be recovered from the bottom of the Toplitzsee. The speculation is due to there being a layer of partly sunken logs suspended by a density boundary halfway to the bottom of the lake, making diving beyond it hazardous or impossible. Gerhard Zauner, one of the divers on the 1959 expedition, reports that he saw a sunken aircraft below this layer.

  Nazis and Nazi sympathisers who had retreated to the Austrian Alps intending to fight a last-ditch guerrilla battle apparently dumped the currency to prevent its discovery. In 1963 the Austrian government imposed a temporary ban on explorations after another diver, led to the lake by an ex-SS officer, drowned during an illegal dive. More recent expeditions have had mixed fortunes. In 1983 a German biologist accidentally discovered more forged British pounds, numerous Nazi-era rockets and missiles that had crashed into the lake, as well as a previously unknown type of worm.

  The last diving team to explore the lake, in 2000–01, had less luck. After a three-week search in an underwater diving capsule they came away with nothing more than a box full of beer caps, apparently dumped in the lake as a practical joke.

  Mr Scott, whose previous expeditions have included a search in the Atlantic for a steamer carrying gold coins which sank on the way to Panama, said he was confident he would find “something damn big”. “Until
now nobody has explored the lake using hi-tech equipment. We will be the first people to go to the right spot,” he told the Swiss news magazine Facts.

  Mr Scott claimed to have discovered fresh clues in archives in both Berlin and Washington pointing him towards the gold, although he refused to give details. Some experts believe he may be right. They point out that the bottom of the lake is encrusted with a thick carpet of logs. Any treasure could be stuck in the mud underneath, they suggest.

  “There is a lot of wood down there. We don’t know yet whether it is possible to get through it,” Mr Klissenbauer said. “You have to remember that the last lot who went down there with a mini U-boat didn’t find anything.” This attempt to pry loose the deep, dark secrets of Lake Toplitz and its legend of Nazi gold ended as mysteriously as it began.

  More recently, a high-tech team from Oceaneering Technologies has combed the 100 metre deep, mile-long lake bed from end to end searching for “Nazi treasures”, and has recovered “significant man-made objects”, the search team said. Did the team have more than wads of old forged currency or a promising-looking box that turned out to contain nothing but old beer bottle caps and a note saying, “Sorry, not this time”? They would not say.

  Ridge Albaugh, Oceaneering’s project manager, said he located many new items, but was not specific about his finds. Albaugh earned his spurs exploring the Titanic, and diving to resolve the sad mystery of what happened to John F. Kennedy Jnr. when his plane plunged into the sea. His high-tech approach tells him, he says, that he now knows the bottom of that lake better than the back of his own hand.

  However there were rumours that team members found boxes of old documents detailing property, cash and artefacts confiscated from mainly Jewish owners. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, the other backer of the project, is hoping for clues that will help Holocaust victims and their families get back all that stolen treasure.