Seven-Tenths

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  When Beebe’s accounts were not laconic they were filled with the excitement of a man who knows he is seeing things which no other human has ever seen and who responds with the keenest aesthetic pleasure. ‘If one dives and returns to the surface inarticulate with amazement and with a deep realization of the marvel of what he has seen and where he has been,’ Beebe wrote, ‘then he deserves to go again and again. If he is unmoved or disappointed, then there remains for him on earth only a longer or shorter period of waiting for death …’.* Beebe and Barton did go again and again. After their record descent, Beebe observed, ‘When once it has been seen, it will remain for ever the most vivid memory in life, solely because of its cosmic chill and isolation, the eternal and absolute darkness and the indescribable beauty of its inhabitants.’† He was particularly attentive to colour and the changes associated with depth. As the bathysphere was lowered through the fathoms Beebe relayed the vanishing of the comforting, warm rays of the spectrum as the colours from red through yellow to green were progressively filtered out, leaving the rest to ‘chill and night and death’. He tried to describe what was left, a paradoxical and strange illumination which was both twilight and brilliant.

  It was of an indefinable translucent blue quite unlike anything I have ever seen in the upper world, and it excited our optic nerves in a most confusing manner … the blueness of the blue, both outside and inside our sphere, seemed to pass materially through the eye into our very beings.‡

  I quote Beebe because he is both scrupulous and imaginative, and his text is full of small observations which anyone who is thoughtful about the sea will immediately recognise as authentic, such as that you don’t get wet when you dive, only when you surface. He was much taken by the luminous fish that swam past his window and lamented how much more he must be missing. Alexander the Great, scopic prodigy that he was, had watched a fish so huge it had taken three days to pass. Beebe merely records sadly, ‘A gigantic fish could tear past the window, and if unillumined might never be seen.’*

  Years later in 1949 Otis Barton made a descent off California which increased the world depth record to 4,500 feet, but the day of the bathysphere was done. The next step was taken by Auguste Piccard in his bathyscaphe. This device, which gave him the independence of not having to dangle helplessly on a hawser from a mother ship, was the undersea version of the balloons in which he had been setting world altitude records at the time Beebe was making his first pioneering descents. The bathyscaphe consisted of a pressurised chamber not unlike the bathysphere but slung beneath a large, lightly built tank full of petrol. Since petrol is lighter than water this was the equivalent of a gas envelope, and because the contents were incompressible there was no need for great strength and weight. Ballast took the bathyscaphe down and, once that had been released at the required depth, the flotation chamber brought it back up again. Piccard emphasised the ballooning pedigree by naming his first bathyscaphe the FNRS 2. (The original FNRS was a balloon named for the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research which had supported the project.) Piccard’s account is more technical than Beebe’s, mainly because the engineering problems he had to solve were far more complex.† Although its manoeuvrability was very limited, the bathyscaphe was untethered and independent of a mother ship. It might very easily have stuck on the bottom without the remotest hope of rescue, particularly if its flotation tank were holed. Its inventor’s story is a triumphant record of doggedly surmounting each new technical problem as it arose. His ingenious answer to the question of how to jettison ballast was a case in point. He needed to be able to dump weight in accurately controlled amounts but the pressure outside the capsule precluded any mechanical device passing through it. Apart from the additional danger of leaks, boring holes in the steel shell (which was cast and milled in two hemispheres) would weaken it. His solution was to use steel instead of lead shot as ballast and to jettison it through a separate chute around whose circumference were electromagnets. By pressing a switch Piccard could energise the magnets outside and lock the balls solid, blocking further release.

  The bravery of these men seems extraordinary now, and it would be churlish to complain that Piccard was no Beebe when it came to describing what he saw when he went down. The fact is, his brilliantly engineered invention took him down very much further. In 1960 the Trieste, the latest version of the original bathyscaphe, reached the bottom of the Marianas Trench at 10,916 metres, some 35,800 feet or better than 6.75 miles. This is as deep below the ocean’s surface as the highest-flying passenger aircraft leaving its white contrails is above it. Effectively, it was the deepest point in the oceans. Quite possibly there are places where this is exceeded by a few metres,* but to all intents and purposes man had gone as deep into the oceans as he ever would, just a century after Darwin’s The Origin of Species was first published. Since then, the technology of deep-sea descent has become ever more refined and flexible, permitting proper, if limited, exploration. As with air travel, systems have become very much safer. This is by no means to belittle the courage of men like Robert Ballard, since the possibilities for disaster are still endless, miles beneath the last glimmers of daylight and with prodigious pressures ready to slam shut the tiny bubble of living space at the first sign of a weakening rivet.

  *

  The pleasure Beebe took in the luminous fish he saw was mixed with wonder at this evidence of a rich and entirely alien way of life where ambient darkness was as little a problem as either cold or pressure. More than sixty years earlier when aboard Porcupine, shortly before the Challenger expedition, Wyville Thomson had noted the light given off by coelenterate fauna such as gorgonians and sea pens brought to the surface in the trawl, marvelling that it should be bright enough for him to be able to read his watch by it. On one occasion what he saw gave him a glimpse into that illuminated underworld.

  The trawl seemed to have gone over a regular field of a delicate, simple Gorgonid. … The stems, which were from 18′′ to 2 ft in length, were coiled in great hanks around the beam-trawl and engaged in masses in the net; and as they showed a most vivid phosphorescence of a pale lilac colour, their immense number suggested a wonderful state of things beneath – animated cornfields waving gently in a slow tidal current and glowing with a soft diffused light, scintillating and sparkling on the slightest touch, and now and again breaking into long avenues of vivid light indicating the paths of fishes or other wandering denizens of their enchanted region.*

  Much research has gone into the bioluminescence of different marine organisms, a subject made more complicated because the light has no unitary function. It seems that flashes of luminescence may be used variously as a defence, to entice prey, and as a sexual display. It may be seasonal or constant. It is even thought that some creatures may adroitly vary the wavelengths they emit, thereby using light itself as a method of camouflage. This is the same principle as the red colorations used by deeper reef creatures to make themselves look grey and stonelike, though beyond a limited depth there is little point in talking in terms of colour. The theory goes that an animal could camouflage itself by emitting low levels of light if it exactly replaced that lost by absorption on its upper surface. The light would have to be of precisely the right strength, at the right wavelengths and of the right angular distribution (since below about 400 metres the remaining light falls vertically and is no longer refracted at other angles). There is increasing evidence to support this theory, and certainly the eyes of many creatures of the deep twilight and lower zones are highly sensitive to light and to the subtlest variations in its intensity and wavelength. Animals such as squid and hatchet fish use amounts of daylight which would appear indistinguishably black to human eyes in order to regulate their vertical migrations.

  The discovery that vast numbers of animals rise to the upper waters at night and return to the depths during the day was surrounded by secrecy in World War II. Three scientists experimenting with sonar aboard the USS Jasper in 1942 had found a layer in the water at between 1,000 and
1,500 feet from which echoes bounced as if it were solid. This was not made public until 1946 because it was thought an enemy submarine might take advantage of the layer by hiding beneath it. In 1945 the Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that this layer moved up at night and down during the day and concluded it must be alive. Now known as the Deep Scattering Layer, its movement varies seasonally and from place to place. It consists of huge numbers of small animals migrating punctually up and down the water column, some by as much as 1,500 or 2,000 feet. The DSL is probably the chief cause of bogus sonar contacts, and many a ship has reported ‘lost’ land lurking just beneath the waves where later investigators have found only thousands of feet of water.

  The deeps triumphantly disclosed the consequences of Darwin’s ideas of natural selection in that the often bizarre colours and shapes of abyssal fauna emerged as exquisite adaptations to extreme circumstances. The ‘azoic’ theory had betrayed as nothing else the limits of understanding of the nature of life, and how erroneous all judgements were when based solely on human considerations of what might constitute a liveable environment.

  Where ‘monsters’ are concerned, they may yet be found, although it is unlikely, owing to scarcity of food, that they will be from the very deepest parts of the ocean. However, if the Kraken is mythical, the giant squid is not. Huge specimens – and fragments of even huger – have occasionally surfaced. It is clear from measuring the sucker marks on dead whales that immense battles must take place in the middle deeps involving squid of a size never yet seen. The great mass of the oceans remains unexplored, even as the contours of their beds are electronically surveyed. Their waters must hide many species strange to taxonomy, but this is hardly surprising. Letting down nets here and there may catch few creatures with acute sensory equipment and evasive powers. The world a mile or more down keeps its secrets well, with neither victors nor victims necessarily leaving the least trace of their lives. As regards the deepest trench faunas, there has been relatively little recent research because most of the effort and money has been directed towards studying the vent communities around ‘black smokers’, which have the required glamour to attract funding.

  As to geology, the seabed turns out to be of great use in climate modelling. It is possible to weigh the atoms of oxygen trapped in fossil shells brought up in sediment cores and determine what the temperature was when the creatures were alive. Such cores have also yielded information about monsoons and glaciation. It seems the present pattern of monsoons only started some 10 million years ago, and a theory has been put forward that they have been directly influenced by the vertical uplift of land masses (as a result, one should point out, of horizontal movement elsewhere). In the last million years alone the Himalayas have risen over 2 kilometres and it now seems likely that winds and precipitation have been directly influenced by this uplift, much as the construction of a groyne or breakwater can lead to the silting up or scouring of an adjoining bay.

  ‘There rolls the deep where grew the tree. …’ The last Ice Age locked up enormous volumes of water during the Pleistocene when what today is known as Dogger Bank in the North Sea emerged as land. It was boggy and forested and became full of men hunting animals with flint weapons, chasing deer and bear and wild ox among the willows and birches. None of this was known until the nineteenth century when widespread trawling started and to their surprise fishermen discovered a lumpy plateau almost the size of Holland lying only 60 feet below the sea’s surface. They inferred that this had once been land when they began netting bones and axeheads and moorlog (a kind of peat). The waning of the Ice Age, that era’s equivalent of the greenhouse effect, brought an endless close season to the Pleistocene hunt. There must have been a long, mournful period of many centuries as the ice melted and the sea level began to rise again to turn this land between East Anglia and the Netherlands into an archipelago, dozens of scattered islands with heterogeneous collections of hyenas, woolly rhinoceros and mammoth struggling for survival on ever-decreasing patches of territory. Then, at length, nothing but the deep. A mere 50,000 years ago and the forests of Dogger would have been visible from what is now the coast of Lincolnshire. Tennyson, fast in the grip of transience and loss and Charles Lyell’s bleak discoveries, had no need of them to complete his vision.

  The hills are shadows, and they flow

  From form to form, and nothing stands;

  They melt like mist, the solid lands,

  Like clouds they shape themselves and go.*

  * Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘The Kraken’ (1830).

  † Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850).

  * Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, 4th ed. (1835), Vol. I, p. 375.

  † E. A. Wallis Budge, trans. of the Ethiopic version of pseudo-Callisthenes (1933).

  * Anon., The Ocean, A Description of the Wonders and Important Products of the Sea, p. 17.

  * C. Wyville Thomson, The Depths of the Sea (London, 1874).

  * Margaret Deacon, Scientists and the Sea 1650–1900 (1971).

  * Wyville Thomson, The Depths of the Sea (1874).

  † Hansard, Vol. 638, p. 235.

  * Boyle Somerville, The Chart-Makers (1928).

  * Wyville Thomson, The Depths of the Sea (1874).

  † Ibid.

  * Susan Schlee, A History of Oceanography (1975). I am much indebted to this excellent work for many details in this and other chapters.

  * The first time a deep-sea creature was found to fit the fervid category of ‘living fossil’ was in 1938 with the catching of the first coelacanth. There are good reasons for disliking the whole notion of ‘living fossils’, some of which have been noted by Stephen Jay Gould with reference to horseshoe crabs. In taking issue with the meliorist view of evolution and with the tyranny of conventional iconographies – trees and ladders – he objects most to the idea that ‘old’ necessarily means ‘primitive’ or ‘simple’, as if always to imply the superiority of Homo sapiens sapiens. In addition he says, ‘We mistakenly regard horseshoe crabs as “living fossils” because the group has never produced many species, and therefore never developed much evolutionary potential for diversification; consequently, modern species are morphologically similar to early forms’ (Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life, 1990). Where the modern coelacanth is concerned it cannot be considered a ‘living fossil’ because no other members of the species Latimeria chalumnae have ever been found as fossils. Come to that, ‘no other species assignable to the genus Latimeria has been found as a fossil either’ (K. S. Thomson, Living Fossil, 1991).

  * An interesting postscript has recently been added to the Bathybius story by Dr A. L. Rice at IOS, suggesting that the seasonal nature of its original collection implies that some of it, at least, could have been detritus of the spring phytoplankton bloom forming a light, flocculent ‘fluff’ on the seabed. This would explain why the Challenger failed to find samples since, being the marine equivalent of thistledown, it simply puffs out of the way of dredges and epibenthic sledges. (See A. L. Rice, ‘Thomas Henry Huxley and the Strange Case of Bathybius Haeckelii …’, Archives of Natural History 2, no. 2 (1983, pp. 169–80).

  * William Beebe, Half Mile Down (New York, 1934).

  † Ibid., p. 175.

  ‡ Ibid., p. 109.

  * Ibid., p. 221.

  † Auguste Piccard, Au fond des mers en bathyscaphe (Paris, 1954).

  * In 1984 the Japanese survey vessel Takuyo used a multibeam echo sounder to record an extreme depth of 10,924 metres in the Marianas Trench.

  * C. Wyville Thomson, The Depths of the Sea (1874).

  * Tennyson, In Memoriam.

  II

  The monsters within

  On the coast of a Philippine province there is a small town. On the landward side of the road, set well back among coconut palms and jasmine, is a whitewashed church with a green tin roof, only one of several civic buildings including an elementary school and an abandoned health centre. A legend surrounds this church, one known to every fisherman in town and to every b
oy who ever jumped off the little coral pier clutching a speargun. The legend underlies the church rather than surrounds it, for the story goes that there is a passage leading from the sea to a cave deep beneath it which is the lair of a giant octopus. There certainly is a fissure in the thick cap of fossil coral which covers much of the volcanic basalt of the island’s coasts. Its mouth lies about 25 feet below the surface at high tide and at night a powerful underwater flashlight shone nervously in reveals no end to its interior.

  In the absence of scuba gear there is nothing to be done, since only a madman attempts to explore a submarine cave with a chestful of air. There would be nothing to be done in any case. Whether or not one has been worked on by the legend, this particular depth-less black slit does exude a peculiar aura of menace. The water around the mouth is always several degrees colder than elsewhere and very few fish appear ever to venture in. If there really were some great monster lying tucked away inside, a good deal of food would need to swim unwarily in for it to survive. On the other hand, it may be that one way or another much of the town’s drains seep into this crack and the creature survives on ordure. It might even have grown so fat it could no longer leave if it wanted to and is bottled up in its coral crypt. The thought of swimming up a sewer to confront a trapped monster is another good reason for not making the attempt.