Modern Marine Science: Exploring the Deep (Milestones in Discovery and Invention)

Milestones in Discovery and Invention

$ MODERN MARINE SCIENCE EXPLORING THE DEEP

Lisa Yount

To Will, for calling me “psycholuminescent”

MODERN MARINE SCIENCE: Exploring the Deep Copyright © 2006 by Lisa Yount All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact: Chelsea House An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Yount, Lisa. Modern marine science : exploring the deep / Lisa Yount. p. cm. — (Milestones in discovery and invention) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8160-5747-8 1. Marine sciences—Juvenile literature. 2. Marine sciences—Research—Juvenile literature. I. Title. II. Series. GC21.5.Y68 2006 551.46—dc22 2005030562 Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Text design by James Scotto-Lavino Cover design by Dorothy M. Preston Illustrations by Melissa Ericksen Printed in the United States of America MP JSL 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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INTRODUCTION

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1 CHALLENGE OF THE DEEP: WYVILLE THOMSON AND THE CHALLENGER EXPEDITION Competing Theories A Unique Proposal A Demanding Program I Was There: From Excitement to Boredom Adventurous Voyage Homecoming Other Scientists: John Murray (1841–1914) Foundation of a Science Chronology Further Reading

1 1 3 5 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

2 HALF-MILE DOWN: WILLIAM BEEBE AND THE BATHYSPHERE Collector, Traveler, Writer Ecology and Adventures Desire for the Deep Building a Bathysphere First Dives I Was There: An Explosion of Water A Fantastic World Separate Careers Legacy of Inspiration Connections: Mentoring a Pioneer

17 17 19 20 21 22 24 26 27 28 29

Chronology Further Reading

30 32

3 HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS: AUGUSTE AND JACQUES PICCARD AND THE BATHYSCAPHE Talented Twins Reaching Great Heights The First Bathyscaphe The Trieste Other Scientists: Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910–1997) Joining the Navy Preparing for the Deepest Dive Underwater Everest Searching for Lost Submarines Beneath the Gulf Stream Connections: A Loss Becomes a Challenge Three Generations of Adventure Chronology Further Reading

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 42 42 45 46 47 48 49 51

4 THE WOUND THAT NEVER HEALS: BRUCE HEEZEN, MARIE THARP, AND MAPPING THE OCEAN FLOOR From Fossils to Undersea Mountains War Opens a Career Other Scientists: Maurice Ewing (1906–1974) A New Kind of Map “It Cannot Be” An Earth-Encircling Wound Other Scientists: Alfred Wegener (1880–1930) Works of Art More Than Mappers Chronology Further Reading

53 53 55 56 58 59 60 62 63 64 66 68

5 CREATION AND DESTRUCTION: HARRY HESS AND PLATE TECTONICS Sounding out Mountains A Crustal Conveyor Belt Magnetic Flip-Flops Shaking up Geology Social Impact: The Moving Earth Shapes Human Life The Plate Tectonics Revolution

70 70 72 74 77 78 79

Connections: Tectonics on Other Planets An Influential Career Chronology Further Reading

82 82 83 85

6 RIVERS OF THE DEEP: HENRY STOMMEL AND OCEAN CURRENTS 88 A Noisy Childhood 88 Whirling Waters 89 Explaining Surface Currents 92 Opposing Flows 94 The Great Conveyor Belt 95 Global and Local Studies 97 Social Impact: Global Warming and Ocean Circulation 98 Wide-Ranging Investigations 99 Chronology 100 Further Reading 101

7 FLYING THROUGH THE SEA: ALLYN VINE AND ALVIN Sound beneath the Sea The Seapup Building a Submersible Solving Problems: A Lightweight Foam Launching Alvin Hunt for a Bomb Sunken Sub Project FAMOUS Workhorse of Oceanography Trends: How Low Can They Go? Chronology Further Reading

104 104 106 107 108 109 110 112 113 115 116 118 120

8 TUBE WORMS AND TITANIC: ROBERT BALLARD AND UNDERSEA EXPLORATION California Dreamer Submersible Supporter Unexpected Oasis Black Smokers I Was There: An Alien World From Submersibles to Robots Issues: Presence or “Telepresence” Finding the Titanic

122 122 124 125 127 128 131 132 132

Underwater Archaeologist Issues: What Should Be Done with the Titanic? Explorer and Educator Chronology Further Reading

134 135 136 138 140

9 WATER AND FIRE: JOHN DELANEY AND SEAFLOOR VOLCANOES Explosive Background Exciting Eruptions Ancient Microbes Connections: Warm Sea on an Icy Moon Raising Black Smokers NEPTUNE Spark and Passion Parallels: Henry Stommel’s Undersea Network Chronology Further Reading

143 143 145 146 147 148 151 153 154 155 156

10 THE VAN DOVER GLOW: CINDY VAN DOVER AND LIGHT BENEATH THE SEA “Not College Material” A Life-Changing Cruise Not-so-Blind Shrimp Glowing Vents Alvin Pilot Harnessing Light Issues: Women on Oceanographic Cruises Studies of Diversity Solving Problems: OPUS and ALISS Chronology Further Reading

159 159 161 162 163 164 165 166 168 169 170 172

CHRONOLOGY

175

GLOSSARY

179

FURTHER RESOURCES

189

INDEX

197

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PREFACE

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he Milestones in Science and Discovery set is based on a simple but powerful idea—that science and technology are not separate from people’s daily lives. Rather, they are part of seeking to understand and reshape the world, an activity that virtually defines being human. More than a million years ago, the ancestors of modern humans began to shape stones into tools that helped them compete with the specialized predators around them. Starting about 35,000 years ago, the modern type of human, Homo sapiens, also created elaborate cave paintings and finely crafted art objects, showing that technology had been joined with imagination and language to compose a new and vibrant world of culture. Humans were not only shaping their world but representing it in art and thinking about its nature and meaning. Technology is a basic part of that culture. The mythologies of many peoples include a trickster figure, who upsets the settled order of things and brings forth new creative and destructive possibilities. In many myths, for instance, a trickster such as the Native Americans’ Coyote or Raven steals fire from the gods and gives it to human beings. All technology, whether it harnesses fire, electricity, or the energy locked in the heart of atoms or genes, partakes of the double-edged gift of the trickster, providing power to both hurt and heal. An inventor of technology is often inspired by the discoveries of scientists. Science as we know it today is younger than technology, dating back about 500 years to a period called the Renaissance. During the Renaissance, artists and thinkers began to explore nature systematically, and the first modern scientists, such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), vii

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used instruments and experiments to develop and test ideas about how objects in the universe behaved. A succession of revolutions followed, often introduced by individual geniuses: Isaac Newton (1643–1727) in mechanics and mathematics, Charles Darwin (1809–1882) in biological evolution, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) in relativity and quantum physics, James Watson (1928– ) and Francis Crick (1916–2004) in modern genetics. Today’s emerging fields of science and technology, such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, have their own inspiring leaders. The fact that particular names such as Newton, Darwin, and Einstein can be so easily associated with these revolutions suggests the importance of the individual in modern science and technology. Each book in this set thus focuses on the lives and achievements of eight to 10 individuals who together have revolutionized an aspect of science or technology. Each book presents a different field: marine science, genetics, astronomy and space science, forensic science, communications technology, robotics, artificial intelligence, and mathematical simulation. Although early pioneers are included where appropriate, the emphasis is generally on researchers who worked in the 20th century or are still working today. The biographies in each volume are placed in an order that reflects the flow of the individuals’ major achievements, but these life stories are often intertwined. The achievements of particular men and women cannot be understood without some knowledge of the times they lived in, the people they worked with, and developments that preceded their research. Newton famously remarked, “If I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Each scientist or inventor builds upon—or wrestles with—the work that has come before. Individual scientists and inventors also interact with others in their own laboratories and elsewhere, sometimes even partaking in vast collective efforts, such as the government and private projects that raced at the end of the 20th century to complete the description of the human genome. Scientists and inventors affect, and are affected by, economic, political, and social forces as well. The relationship between scientific and technical creativity and developments in social institutions is another important facet of this series.

PREFACE ix

A number of additional features provide further context for the biographies in these books. Each chapter includes a chronology and suggestions for further reading. In addition, a glossary and a general bibliography (including organizations and Web resources) appear at the end of each book. Several types of sidebars are also used in the text to explore particular aspects of the profiled scientists’ and inventors’ work: Connections Describes the relationship between the featured work and other scientific or technical developments. I Was There Presents first-hand accounts of discoveries or inventions. Issues Discusses scientific or ethical issues raised by the discovery or invention. Other Scientists (or Inventors) Describes other individuals who played an important part in the work being discussed. Parallels Shows parallel or related discoveries. Social Impact Suggests how the discovery or invention affects or might affect society and daily life. Solving Problems Explains how a scientist or inventor dealt with a particular technical problem or challenge. Trends Presents data or statistics showing how developments in a field changed over time. Our hope is that readers will be intrigued and inspired by these stories of the human quest for understanding, exploration, and innovation. We have tried to provide the context and tools to enable readers to forge their own connections and to further pursue their fields of interest.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS T

hanks to the scientists in this book who reviewed their chapters and answered questions, and to the many assistants-of-scientists who patiently conveyed messages and sent (and sometimes re-sent) photographs, permission forms, and other items. My thanks, too, to my editor, Frank K. Darmstadt, for his help and good humor; to copy editor Amy L. Conver; to my cats, for providing purrs and not knocking the computer off my lap (though they tried); and, above all, to my husband, Harry Henderson, for unending support, love, and everything else that makes life good.

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INTRODUCTION

“The deepest parts of the ocean are unknown to us. What goes on in these remote abysses? What creatures live beneath the surface of the waters? What is the constitution of these beings? We can hardly imagine.” —Professor Aronnax, a character in Jules Verne’s novel 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, published in 1871

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he deep sea—the part of the ocean lying below the depth of about 1,000 feet (305 m), where sunlight never penetrates— takes up almost 70 percent of the Earth’s surface and more than 97 percent, by volume, of the part of the planet available to living things. Earth’s crust is born here and comes here to die. The deep ocean’s mountains are longer than the Andes, the greatest of its canyons deeper than Mount Everest is tall. It is the home of animals whose appearance and body chemistry seem to belong on a different planet, and it may have been where life on Earth began. Nonetheless, humans know less about this mysterious environment than they know about the far side of the Moon. This lack of knowledge is not surprising. In addition to being unendingly dark and cold—only a few degrees above freezing in most places—the depths place everything under tremendous pressure. In the deepest part of the sea, this pressure is 1,200 times that of the Earth’s atmosphere, or 18,000 pounds per square inch (124,110 kilopascals). Only in the 20th century did humans develop the technology to venture more than a few hundred feet down into this forbidding world. This volume in the Milestones in Discovery and Invention set, Modern Marine Science: Exploring the Deep, tells the story of 12 pioneers who created and used this technology to establish deep-sea marine science. xiii

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First Steps Toward a Science Scientific interest in the deep sea—indeed, in the sea in general— began only in the mid-19th century. Before then, the few biologists who had investigated the ocean believed that no living things could survive below about 1,800 feet (540 m). Geologists had taken the first steps toward understanding the processes that had shaped the land, but they saw the floor of the sea as an unchanging wasteland. Curiosity about the deep sea began to grow in the 1860s, for both practical and philosophical reasons. On the practical side, entrepreneurs and government officials attempting to lay telegraph cables across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean between North America and Britain needed to know what conditions those cables would encounter. More abstractly, scientists and the educated public hoped that learning about the biology of the deep sea might settle some of the questions raised by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, first published in 1859. Evolution by natural selection, the controversial theory that Darwin proposed, was believed to have taken place much more slowly in the unchanging deep-ocean environment than on land or in shallow water. People therefore hoped that scientists would find types of living things in the depths that had long since become extinct in the shallows and that these “living fossils” would show how, or whether, evolution occurred. These converging interests led to the world’s first extensive seagoing scientific expedition, the global voyage of six scientists in a small British navy ship, HMS Challenger, between 1872 and 1876. The Challenger scientists, led by Scottish biologist Charles Wyville Thomson, made systematic measurements of depth, temperature, and other features of the ocean at hundreds of points around the world, essentially establishing the science of oceanography. Study of the innumerable animals captured by the researchers’ trawls and dredges did not end arguments about evolution, but the animals’ existence proved beyond question that the view of the deep sea as an “azoic zone,” unable to support life, was wrong. The scientists of the Challenger expedition, and others who made similar voyages in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, had to

INTRODUCTION xv

do all their sampling from the surface. Most of the animals they brought up from the depths were mangled and dying or dead. Seeing these animals, alive and healthy, in their natural habitat seemed beyond human powers until the early 1930s, when one of the world’s first ecologists, William Beebe, descended 3,028 feet (923 m), or about half a mile, into the sea in a cramped steel ball that he called the bathysphere. Accompanied by the bathysphere’s inventor, Otis Barton, Beebe observed fantastic creatures glowing with light made in their own bodies. Beebe and Barton’s widely publicized dives, far deeper than any human ever achieved before, aroused scientific and public curiosity about the deep sea once more.

Technological Dividends Modern deepwater marine science, which began in the mid-20th century, owes much of its existence to the United States Navy. The navy became interested in the depths as it worked with oceanographers to locate enemy submarines by sound during World War II, and that interest increased during the 1950s and 1960s, when competition with the Soviet Union in what came to be known as the cold war extended under the sea as well as on land and in space. Many vessels and devices that became mainstays of deep-sea oceanography grew out of attempts to spy on Russian submarines or undersea communications. The navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) worked closely with scientific organizations such as the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts and Columbia University’s Lamont Geological Observatory in New York to develop these new tools and increase knowledge of the deep sea. As part of its plan to extend the navy’s reach into the deep sea, the ONR purchased Auguste and Jacques Piccard’s bathyscaphe Trieste, an ungainly craft consisting of a Beebe-type sphere attached to a gigantic, blimp-like float filled with gasoline. The navy sent the Trieste to the deepest spot in the sea in 1960 as a way of increasing U.S. prestige. ONR also sponsored the development of small submersible vessels that were able to dive far deeper than submarines and that were much more maneuverable than the bathyscaphe. The best known of these submersibles, Alvin, went into service in June

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1964. Named after Allyn Vine, the man who had inspired submersible development, Alvin was operated by WHOI for 40 years and took part in most of the late-century advances in deep-sea oceanography. Robotic devices carrying cameras and other equipment, controlled remotely by scientists in surface ships, were also created during this time.

Mid-century Revolutions At the same time this new technology was developing, revolutions in scientific understanding of the sea were also taking place. WHOI scientist Henry Stommel, for instance, created major new models of ocean currents in the 1950s and 1960s. He showed how wind, friction, and the effects of the Earth’s rotation shape surface currents. He also proved the existence of deepwater currents for the first time and demonstrated the cycling of ocean water between surface and deep layers, driven by changes in temperature and salinity (dissolved salt and mineral content). More important still, in the course of making unprecedentedly detailed maps of the ocean floor during the early 1950s, Marie Tharp, Bruce Heezen, and Maurice Ewing of Lamont Geological Observatory (later Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, now part of the Earth Institute) discovered that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a range of undersea mountains first identified by the Challenger expedition, was part of a relatively continuous mountain chain that snakes through the world’s ocean basins like the seam on a baseball. This Mid-Ocean Ridge, in turn, was split lengthwise by a series of rift valleys, similar to one already known on land in East Africa. The discovery of this ridge-and-rift system, whose pattern matched the outlines of some of the continents, made geologists begin to reconsider the almost universally rejected theory of continental drift, which German meteorologist Alfred Wegener had first proposed in 1912. Wegener had stated that the continents had once been part of a single landmass but later moved apart and were still moving slowly through the Earth’s crust. In 1960, the existence of the mid-ocean rift valleys and other evidence suggested to Princeton University geologist Harry Hess

INTRODUCTION xvii

and (independently) to Robert Dietz, a geologist working for ONR, that new material for the planet’s crust is created when molten rock (magma) from the Earth’s mantle boils up to the surface through cracks in the rift valleys, pushing the sea floor away on either side to form the two halves of the ridge. The two scientists proposed that crust is destroyed (or rather recycled) when it is pulled back into the mantle within deep gashes in the seafloor called trenches. Evidence to support this theory, called seafloor spreading, accumulated from several different types of research during the early 1960s. A small group of geologists expanded seafloor spreading into a new theory called plate tectonics, a descendant of Wegener’s continental drift theory. Plate tectonics states that Earth’s crust is divided into rigid plates that move slowly above the molten mantle. The continents ride on top of the plates rather than moving on their own, as Wegener had proposed. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur where plates collide or rub against one another. Many earth scientists were reluctant to accept plate tectonics at first, but by the mid-1960s, evidence for the theory became so overwhelming that they had to change their minds. “The radical change in understanding forced upon the earth sciences” by the acceptance of plate tectonics “ranks with the intellectual upheavals caused by the ideas of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein,” David M. Lawrence wrote in Upheaval from the Abyss, his account of the plate tectonics revolution.

Unexpected Worlds During the 1970s, marine scientists used Alvin and other new tools to gather direct evidence of seafloor spreading and tectonic movement and to make astounding discoveries that no theory had predicted. Robert Ballard and others diving in a rift valley near Ecuador in 1977, for example, found hot-water (hydrothermal) vents in the seafloor surrounded by thriving colonies of animals unlike any ever observed. During a second expedition in 1979, researchers learned that all these creatures depended directly or indirectly on certain bacteria’s ability to make food from sulfur-containing compounds in the vent water—the first time that life-forms depending

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on anything other than the energy of the Sun had been discovered. Another 1979 expedition found a second type of vent, called “black smokers” because sulfide minerals darkened the superheated water that poured out of them. Scientists have continued to use human-carrying submersibles and robotic devices, often together, to explore different aspects of the deep sea. Robert Ballard has employed these two types of technology to discover and explore the remains of ships on the seafloor, including the famous luxury liner Titanic, which Ballard located in 1985. John Delaney, a marine geologist at the University of Washington, has used these technologies to study undersea volcanoes and black smokers. Cindy Van Dover, the first scientist and the first woman ever certified to pilot Alvin, has used them to show that undersea vents give off light and that some bacteria living at the vents can use the light for photosynthesis, a biochemical process formerly thought to require sunlight.

Outer and Inner Space The great advances in deep-sea marine science that took place in the 1950s and 1960s occurred alongside humanity’s first steps into outer space, and numerous writers have drawn parallels between the two. Some have said that probing the ocean depths was actually the harder task. “In many ways the ocean floor is more hostile and stranger than the moon,” Robert Ballard wrote in an article in the January 1987 issue of Discover magazine. Inspiring though it was to some, investigation of the oceans never caught public or government attention to the degree that space exploration did. “One of the reasons why it is so difficult for oceanography to be in the public eye,” David Fornari, a WHOI marine geologist, was quoted as saying in an article in the December 2001 Discover, “is that you can see millions of miles into space. It’s tangible. You look at the ocean surface, and you can’t get very far beneath it. . . . So it’s pretty tough to get somebody to understand how fantastic the surface of the Earth beneath the ocean is.” Commentators have claimed that this lack of interest is unfortunate—and not just for marine scientists. The oceans, they say,

INTRODUCTION xix

are far more likely to hold information and resources important to humans (at least in the near future) than outer space. The sea already helps to feed the world, and the ocean depths are likely sources of valuable minerals, energy, and lifesaving drugs. Indeed, humans’ very survival may depend on understanding the ocean. Learning more about the processes through which the Earth’s crust is born and dies beneath the sea could lead to better prediction and perhaps prevention of earthquakes and other natural disasters, such as the tsunami (tidal wave) that left an estimated 288,000 people dead or missing in Indonesia in December 2004. Finding out how to use the sea’s food resources efficiently without destroying them could reduce world hunger. Perhaps most important of all, learning how the ocean and atmosphere affect one another could lead to prevention of the worst effects of global warming. Alternatively, failure to understand how the sea and its ecosystems interact with the land and the air could lead to runaway climate change, a breakdown of ecological webs, and disaster for the entire planet.

1 CHALLENGE OF THE DEEP WYVILLE THOMSON AND THE CHALLENGER EXPEDITION

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n 1871, French writer Jules Verne published a book that was destined to become a best seller. Called 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, it portrayed an environment that no human being had ever actually seen: the deep sea. Verne peopled the depths with monsters, including a giant squid and an octopus powerful enough to kill a diver. Verne’s novel was a work of pure imagination. Just a year after the book appeared, however, six scientists and about 260 sailors on a small British navy ship called the HMS Challenger began a journey whose results would ultimately dwarf even the French author’s powers of invention. Using the best tools that the science of their day could offer, this group set out to learn what the floor of the world’s oceans was really like. What they found would drastically change people’s understanding of the deep sea and establish a new science, oceanography.

Competing Theories The Challenger expedition owed its birth to a determined Scotsman, Charles Wyville Thomson, born near Linlithgow on March 5, 1830. Thomson’s father was a physician, and the young man’s 1

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family expected him to become a doctor as well. Thomson enrolled in the University of Edinburgh as a medical student in 1846, but his health proved too poor for the strain of medical training. Instead, since nature interested him, he took classes in zoology, botany (the study of plants), and geology for several years. From 1850 to 1870, Thomson taught zoology and botany at various universities, chiefly in Ireland. During these years he married Jane Ramage Dawson and became fascinated with marine biology, especially the possible biology of the deep sea. His interest was unusual Scottish biologist Charles Wyville because most scientists of the time Thomson was the leader of six believed that there was no biology scientists who conducted the first systematic, worldwide oceanoin the deep sea because no living graphic expedition aboard HMS things could survive there. Challenger between 1872 and That idea came from another 1876. (National Library of Medicine, British scientist, Edward Forbes. photo B010959) In 1842, during an expedition to the Aegean Sea, an arm of the Mediterranean Sea that lies between Greece and Turkey, Forbes had found fewer and fewer animals as he drew up samples from deeper and deeper water. Building on this research, Forbes concluded that the ocean below 300 fathoms (1,800 feet, or 540 m) was an “azoic zone”—a place where no life existed. Most scientists found Forbes’s claim reasonable because sunlight, on which all known organisms directly or indirectly depended, was not thought to penetrate below 50 fathoms (300 feet, or 90 m), and pressure at 300 fathoms was about 600 pounds per square inch (56 lb/cm 2). Thomson, however, had seen Norwegian researchers dredge up the remains of animals from depths much greater than 300 fathoms, and he was certain that Forbes was wrong. Thomson later

CHALLENGE OF THE DEEP 3

wrote in The Depths of the Sea, an account of his early research, that, unlike Forbes, he saw the deep sea as “the land of promise for the naturalist, the only remaining region where there were endless novelties of extraordinary interest ready to hand.” With the help of William Carpenter, a biologist at the University of London and vice president of the Royal Society, Britain’s most eminent scientific organization, Thomson persuaded the Admiralty, the part of the British government that controlled the Royal Navy, to sponsor two short research expeditions, led by Thomson, to test Forbes’s theory. During these cruises, in 1868 and 1869, Thomson’s dredges brought up living organisms from a record depth of 2,435 fathoms (14,610 feet, or 4,427 m). He described both expeditions in The Depths of the Sea (1873). Thomson’s success on these two voyages persuaded the Royal Society to make him a member, a high honor, in 1869. A year later, he also became the chief professor of natural history at his old university, the University of Edinburgh.

A Unique Proposal Exciting as they were, Wyville Thomson’s expeditions had made only a few tests of a small area in a single ocean. Thomson knew he would need much more information if he really wanted to understand the seafloor. In 1871, therefore, again with Carpenter’s support, Thomson proposed to the Admiralty a new expedition that was unlike anything ever undertaken: a journey to learn about the physics, chemistry, and geology of the sea bottom and the biology of the creatures that might live there, not just in one or two places but around the world. The voyage Thomson outlined would take several years and require a great deal of equipment and money. In April 1872, nevertheless, the British Treasury agreed to fund the expedition, and the Admiralty promised to provide a ship for it. Thomson’s previous successes and the Royal Society’s prestige no doubt helped him gain this rapid approval. The government may also have supported the expedition because both political leaders and ordinary people of the time were greatly interested in science. The debate about evolution stirred up by the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859

4 Modern Marine Science

still raged, and many people hoped that studies of deep-sea life would reveal whether and how evolution had occurred. Richard Corfield, author of The Silent Landscape, a book about the Challenger expedition, thinks government officials may have accepted Thomson’s plan because they believed that “a scientific naval expedition . . . [would] enhance Britain’s prestige in the same way that America’s space program would do a century later.” The Admiralty also had a practical reason for granting the Scottish scientist’s request. Beginning in the 1850s, companies had tried to establish telegraph communication between Britain and North America by laying cables beneath the Atlantic Ocean. These efforts had met so far with limited success. Admiralty officials realized that in order to lay undersea cables that functioned properly, engineers would need to know how deep the sea was in various places, how cold the water became there (because temperature can affect cables

The HMS Challenger, a small British warship, had a steam engine for emergency power but depended mostly on its sails. (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce, ship3117)

CHALLENGE OF THE DEEP 5

and their coverings), and what living things in the depths might attack the cables. The Admiralty hoped that Thomson’s expedition would answer these questions. HMS Challenger, the ship that the navy gave Thomson, was a type of small warship called a corvette. About 225 feet (69 m) long and weighing 2,300 tons (2,006 metric tons), the Challenger possessed a 1,200-horsepower steam engine for emergencies, but it moved mostly under the power of wind captured by the four rows of square sails hung from each of its three masts. The Challenger was completely rebuilt for its new career as a research vessel. All but two of its 17 cannons were removed to make more space for the scientists, their laboratories and equipment, and the specimens they expected to collect. Rooms within the ship were turned into zoological and chemical laboratories, and platforms to hold dredges and other heavy equipment were added to the deck. A host of strange-looking gear was hoisted on board, including microscopes and chemical testing apparatus, thousands of bottles to hold preserved sea creatures and water samples, and hundreds of miles of rope to be used for determining depth and lowering equipment to the seafloor.

A Demanding Program The Challenger left Portsmouth, England, on December 21, 1872, with a crew of about 240 navy sailors and 23 officers. Its captain was George Strong Nares, who had had extensive experience as a surveyor on sea and land. Wyville Thomson headed the expedition’s six “scientifics,” or “philosophers,” as the crew jokingly called them. Besides Thomson, this international group included three biologists, or, as they were then termed, naturalists: Canadian-born John Murray, British scientist Henry Nottidge Moseley, and a young German, Rudolf von Willimöes-Suhm. The remaining team members were John Young Buchanan, a Scottish chemist and physicist, and Jean Jacques Wild, a Swiss man who was the expedition’s scientific artist and also served as Thomson’s secretary. The expedition’s work began on February 15, 1873, about 40 miles (64 km) south of the Canary Islands, near northwest Africa.

6 Modern Marine Science

This spot was the first of 362 “stations” that would be more or less evenly spaced, about two days’ sailing (200 miles, or 160 km) apart, along the voyage’s route through the Atlantic, Pacific, and Antarctic Oceans. At this and every other station, the ship’s crew carried out a program of activities that took most of a day. The first task was sounding, or determining depth. The crew did this by dropping a weight over the side at the end of a rope and finding out how much rope was required to reach the bottom. Flags had been attached to the rope, 25 fathoms (about 150 feet, or 45 m) apart. The crew noted how fast the flags entered the water, and when the speed changed abruptly, they knew that the bottom had been reached. The sounding apparatus also included a hollow tube that the device’s weight pushed into the seafloor when the apparatus landed. When the line was pulled back up, a valve in the tube closed to seal in the sample of bottom mud that the tube had collected. Also attached to the sounding line were a series of newly invented devices called reversing thermometers, which allowed the temperature of water at different depths to be measured accurately. In addition, the crew collected samples of water at various depths for John Buchanan, the chemist, to analyze. He determined how salty the samples were and what minerals or other chemicals they contained. At each station, the crew confirmed the direction of the current at the sea’s surface by throwing a log attached to a rope into the water from an anchored boat and seeing which way the log moved. They found the speed of the current by measuring the amount of rope that the log pulled overboard during a certain amount of time and then dividing the distance by the time. At a few stations, they used a weight hung below a float to determine the speed and direction of deeper currents as well. They also recorded the weather conditions at each station. More important for the biologists was dredging, which involved sending down a bucket-like bag to collect samples of mud and living things from the seafloor. This dredge, made of metal net with a bottom of tightly woven cloth, was so heavy when full that the crew had to use a winch powered by a small steam engine to drag it back up to the ship. Once the dredge was on board again, the

CHALLENGE OF THE DEEP 7

The Challenger was remodeled into a floating research laboratory before the expedition. This drawing shows the workroom that the three scientists who specialized in natural history (biology) used. (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce, ship3107)

scientists scooped out any large animals it contained and then passed the remaining material through a nested series of sieves, each with a mesh finer than that of the sieve above. The upper sieves caught rocks and large animals, while smaller creatures were captured at lower levels. The scientists also used trawls and tow nets, attached to the sounding line, to collect floating or slowly swimming organisms at various depths. Each creature brought aboard the Challenger, living or dead, was carefully described when it was taken from the nets. The scientists had to make their notes quickly because even those organisms hardy enough to survive their journey from the depths died soon afterward from the changes in pressure and environment that they had undergone. The scientists then bottled them in alcohol to preserve them for later study.

8 Modern Marine Science

I WAS THERE: FROM EXCITEMENT

TO

BOREDOM

Several of the scientists and naval officers on the Challenger later wrote books about the famous expedition. They reported that at the first few stations, almost everyone on the ship crowded around when the filled dredges were hauled aboard, eager to see what strange creatures from the depths had been captured. The thrill, however, did not last. One officer wrote: The romance of deep water trawling or dredging in the Challenger when repeated several hundred times, was regarded from two different points of view; the one was the officers who had to stand for ten to twelve hours at a stretch carrying on the work . . . and who did not know much about, or scientifically appreciate, the minute differences between one starfish, one shrimp, one sea cucumber, and another. The other point of view was the naturalists to whom some new worm, coral, or echinoderm [starfish or related animal] is a joy forever, who retires to a comfortable cabin to describe with enthusiasm this new animal, which we, with much weariness of spirit, to the tune of the donkey engine [the small steam engine used to raise the dredges and other heavy equipment] only, had dragged up for him from the bottom of the sea.

Even the scientists became bored after a while. One of the Challenger naturalists, Henry Nottidge Moseley, reported: At first, when the dredge came up, every man and boy in the ship who could possibly slip away, crowded round it, to see what had been fished up. Gradually, as the novelty of the thing wore off, the crowd became smaller and smaller, until at last only the scientific staff, and perhaps one or two other officers besides the one on duty, awaited the arrival of the net on the dredging bridge, and as the same tedious animals kept appearing from the depths in all parts of the world, the ardour [enthusiasm] of even the scientific staff abated [decreased] somewhat, and on some occasions the members were not all present at the critical moment, especially when this occurred in the middle of dinner-time, as it has an unfortunate propensity [habit] of doing. It is possible even for a naturalist to get weary even of deep-sea dredging.

CHALLENGE OF THE DEEP 9

Adventurous Voyage During the three and a half years of its voyage, the Challenger visited North and South America, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Japan, and numerous Atlantic and Pacific islands. (The expedition telegraphed regular reports of its adventures and discoveries back to an eager England, which followed its progress as closely as people in the late 1960s and early 1970s watched the Apollo astronauts’ Moon landings.) The ship crashed into icebergs in Antarctica, and the crew was nipped by penguins on islands in the South Atlantic. Ten people died, including the German naturalist, von WillemöesSuhm (from an infection), and 61 crew members deserted, apparently finding digging for gold in Australia more enjoyable than hauling up heavy dredges full of mud and strange-looking animals. The Challenger visited the shore often, spending almost half its time in harbors. During these stops, scientists and crew members met people ranging from the rulers of Portugal and Japan to islanders who had only recently given up cannibalism. Expedition members described,

This map shows the route the Challenger followed on its epic four-year journey.

10 Modern Marine Science

drew, and photographed the landscapes, plants, animals, and native peoples of many countries, some of which Europeans had seldom or never visited. The group also collected samples of plants, animals, and native crafts. Their observations became important records of the appearance, costumes, and activities of people whose cultures would soon be changed by widespread European contact. The group’s findings on land, however, were nothing compared to what they learned from the deep sea. They hauled up blind lobsters, transparent animals whose every internal organ showed clearly under the microscope, and fish that glowed with light made in their own bodies. They mapped an undersea mountain range that ran down the middle of the Atlantic, which commentators in England were sure was part of the mythical “lost continent” of Atlantis. They discovered the deepest area on the ocean floor, in the southwestern Pacific near Guam. This area, part of an undersea canyon called the Mariana trench, is now named the Challenger Deep in their honor. The expedition made its deepest sounding here, at 4,475 fathoms (5.1 miles, or 8.2 km), on March 23, 1875.

Homecoming After traveling 68,890 nautical miles (127,584 km), the Challenger and what was left of its weary crew returned to Spithead, England, on May 24, 1876. With them, in addition to the notes from their endless observations, were, Wyville Thomson reported a year later, “563 cases, containing 2,270 large glass jars with specimens in spirit of wine, 1,749 smaller stoppered bottles, 1,860 glass tubes, and 176 tin cases, all with specimens in spirit [alcohol, used as a preservative]; 180 tin cases with dried specimens; and 22 casks with specimens in brine [salt water, also a preservative].” He added that more than 5,000 other bottles and jars had been sent back to Edinburgh from different parts of the world during the trip. All in all, the expedition had collected about 13,000 different kinds of plants and animals and 1,441 water samples. Tired as they were, Thomson and the other scientists knew that their work was just beginning. Thomson set up an office in Edinburgh to coordinate the giant project of analyzing, writing,

CHALLENGE OF THE DEEP 11

and publishing the expedition’s data. He sent specimens of different animals to more than 100 experts from France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Scandinavia, and the United States. He published his own observations on the part of the Challenger journey that

OTHER SCIENTISTS: JOHN MURRAY (1841–1914) John Murray, born in Canada to Scottish emigrant parents on March 3, 1841, but raised in Scotland, became part of the Challenger’s scientific crew almost by accident. Shortly before the expedition began, one of the scientists whom Charles Wyville Thomson had asked to accompany him decided that he could not come after all. Murray, on the other hand, was available, and several scientific acquaintances recommended him, so Thomson hired him. It proved to be a very fortunate decision. Murray, like Thomson, had enrolled in the University of Edinburgh as a medical student but eventually left without completing a degree. Meanwhile, he developed an interest in oceanography. Murray collected information about currents, water temperatures, and movements of sea ice as part of a research cruise in the Arctic Ocean in 1868. That expedition was his only seagoing experience before the Challenger voyage. Murray’s special task aboard the Challenger was analyzing the mud-like sediment dredged up from the seafloor. He found that animal remains in the sediment consisted mostly of the shells of microscopic organisms that lived in surface waters. The rest of the sediment was a reddish clay containing dust and ash from volcanoes. Murray published a book describing his analyses in 1891. Murray’s greatest achievement was finishing the immense job of preparing and publishing the Challenger expedition’s scientific report, which he took over when Wyville Thomson became ill. “Edinburgh University, the Royal Societies of London and Edinburgh, and the Royal Navy can all claim credit for Challenger’s momentous voyage,” Eric Linklater wrote in The Voyage of the Challenger, “but he who ultimately gave to the world her great scientific cargo was Sir John Murray.” Murray died in an automobile accident in Kirkliston, Scotland, on March 16, 1914.

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covered the Atlantic Ocean in a two-volume work, The Voyage of the “Challenger,” in 1877. Thomson was knighted in the same year that Voyage of the “Challenger” appeared. He was in poor health by this time, and the work of managing the expedition’s scientific output soon proved too much for him. He gave it up in 1881 and returned to Scotland. He died there on March 10, 1882, in the family home where he had been born.

Foundation of a Science John Murray, one of the naturalists on the Challenger, took over the mammoth task of preparing the expedition’s full scientific report when Wyville Thomson’s health failed. The report eventually filled 50 thick, heavily illustrated volumes, some 29,522 pages in all. The first volume was published in 1885 and the last in 1895. The project proved so expensive that the government refused to pay for all of it, so Murray, who had become wealthy from a business that he started as a result of some of his Challenger observations, stepped in to make sure it would be finished. Historians who have studied the Challenger voyage agree generally that, as the first systematic, worldwide study of the ocean, this expedition essentially founded the science of oceanography. In particular, the expedition provided the first substantial examination of the deep sea. Even though the Challenger scientists and crew took only 362 “snapshots” of the 140 million square miles (350 million km 2) of the world’s oceans, they succeeded in identifying two major landmarks of the ocean floor, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the Mariana Trench. In Mapping the Deep, science writer Robert Kunzig calls these “the two most important geologic features of the planet.” The Challenger’s survey of the depths, temperatures, currents, and chemical composition of the world’s oceans also provided a start for understanding the physics and chemistry of the sea. The expedition proved conclusively that, as Wyville Thomson wrote in 1877, “Animal life is present on the bottom of the ocean at all depths.” The haul from the Challenger’s trawls and dredges included 4,417 species of living things previously unknown to sci-

CHALLENGE OF THE DEEP 13

ence. The expedition’s scientists found that deep-sea animals around the world were similar to one another and quite different from animals on land or in shallow water. Marine biologists still study the Challenger specimen collection, now at the British Museum of Natural History, and the expedition’s report. In his 1877 account of the Challenger voyage, Charles Wyville Thomson stated that “the objects [goals] of the expedition have been fully and faithfully carried out.” John Murray, in his conclusion to the complete Challenger papers, was less modest, calling the expedition “the greatest advance in the knowledge of our planet since the celebrated discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.” Most modern oceanographers would agree.

Chronology 1830

Charles Wyville Thomson born near Linlithgow, Scotland, on March 5

1842

Edward Forbes concludes that no life can exist in the sea below 300 fathoms (1,800 feet, or 540 m)

1846–49

Thomson takes classes in botany, zoology, and geology at University of Edinburgh

1850–70

Thomson teaches zoology and botany at various universities, chiefly in Ireland Companies attempt to connect Britain and North America by undersea telegraph cables, with limited success

1859

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species published

1868–69

Thomson finds animals living at 2,435 fathoms (14,610 feet, or 4,427 m)

1869

Thomson elected a member of the Royal Society

1870

Thomson becomes chief professor of natural history at the University of Edinburgh

1871

Jules Verne’s novel 20,000 Leagues under the Sea published

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Thomson asks the British Treasury and Admiralty to fund and provide a ship for an expedition to investigate deep water in seas around the world The Treasury and Admiralty agree in April to support Thomson’s expedition

1872

HMS Challenger rebuilt to house the expedition Challenger leaves Portsmouth on December 21 Expedition begins oceanographic research on February 15

1873

Thomson’s book on his earlier expeditions, The Depths of the Sea, published 1875

Challenger makes its deepest sounding, at 4,475 fathoms (5.1 miles, or 8.2 km), on March 23

1876

Challenger returns to Spithead, England, on May 24 Thomson begins overseeing the preparation of the expedition’s full scientific report Thomson’s two-volume description of the expedition’s research in the Atlantic, The Voyage of the “Challenger,” published

1877

Thomson is knighted 1881

Thomson gives up management of Challenger report preparation, which John Murray takes over

1882

Thomson dies in Scotland on March 10

1885

First volume of complete Challenger expedition report published

1895

Last (50th) volume of expedition report published

Further Reading Books Charton, Barbara. A to Z of Marine Scientists. New York: Facts On File, 2003. Contains biographical sketches of Charles Wyville Thomson and John Murray.

CHALLENGE OF THE DEEP 15

Corfield, Richard. The Silent Landscape: The Scientific Voyage of HMS Challenger. Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2003. Describes the Challenger voyage and compares the expedition’s findings with those made by modern oceanographic expeditions.

Kunzig, Robert. Mapping the Deep: The Extraordinary Story of Ocean Science. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. Contains part of a chapter on the Challenger expedition.

Linklater, Eric. The Voyage of the Challenger. London: John Murray, 1972. Detailed account of the voyage, including numerous illustrations from drawings or photographs made during the expedition.

Moseley, Henry Nottidge. Notes by a Naturalist on the “Challenger.” Rev. ed. London: John Murray, 1892. The British zoologist’s view of the voyage.

Murray, John, and others. The Report of the Scientific Results of the Exploring Voyage of the H.M.S. Challenger during the Years 1873–1876. London, 1885–95. The complete 50-volume set of the expedition’s findings, with illustrations and analysis by many scientists.

Rehbock, Philip F., ed. At Sea with the Scientifics: The Challenger Letters of Joseph Matkin. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992. Letters written to his family by the steward’s assistant aboard the Challenger present the voyage from a nonscientist’s point of view.

Thomson, Charles Wyville. The Depths of the Sea. London: Macmillan, 1873. Thomson’s account of his pre-Challenger voyages, investigating the deep seafloor off Britain.

———. The Voyage of the “Challenger.” The Atlantic, a Preliminary Account of the General Results of the Exploring Voyage of H.M.S. “Challenger” during the Year 1873 and the Early Part of the Year 1876. 2 vols. London: 1877. Thomson’s summary of the expedition’s findings in the Atlantic Ocean.

Articles “HMS Challenger.” Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. Available online. URL: http://aquarium. ucsd.edu/challenger. Accessed May 31, 2005.

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Extensive account of the Challenger voyage, featuring excerpts from the letters of Joseph Matkin. It includes a description of the expedition’s scientific equipment and activities but does not focus on science.

Huxley, Thomas Henry. “The First Volume of the Publications of the ‘Challenger.’ ” Nature 23 (November 1880): 1 ff. Available online. URL: http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/UnColl/Nature/ChalVol. html. Accessed June 4, 2005. Huxley, a strong supporter of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, describes and critiques C. Wyville Thomson’s conclusions about deep-sea biology and evolution based on the Challenger finds.

Kunzig, Robert. “Deep-Sea Biology: Living with the Endless Frontier.” Science 302 (November 7, 2003): 991. Places the Challenger discoveries in context by describing naturalist Edward Forbes’s conclusion that nothing could live on the deep seafloor and Charles Wyville Thomson’s determination to prove Forbes wrong.

Rice, Tony. “The HMS Challenger Expedition, 1892–1876.” Natural History Museum (Britain). Available online. URL: http://www. nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/science-of-natural-history/expeditionscollecting/fathom-challengervoyage/assets/44feat_challenger_ expid_1872.pdf. Accessed June 4, 2005. Excellent article describing the voyage and its context, illustrated with photographs.

Thomson, C. Wyville. “The Voyage of the Challenger—the Atlantic.” Underwater Naturalist 25 (December 2000): 3–14. Excerpts from Thomson’s account of the Challenger voyage explain how the voyage started and describe some of its findings.

Web Site H.M.S. Challenger Web site. College of Exploration. URL: http:// www.coexploration.org/hmschallenger. Accessed June 8, 2005. Developed by the College of Exploration in Potomac Falls, Virginia, this site provides lesson plans for use in middle school and high school classrooms, based on the Challenger voyage and its findings. The site includes descriptions of the ship and crew, the expedition’s findings, resources such as books and other Web sites, a photo gallery, a virtual exhibit, and a virtual field trip.

2 HALF-MILE DOWN WILLIAM BEEBE AND THE BATHYSPHERE

here shall come a certain day and hour and second when a human face will peer out through a tiny window and signals will be passed back to companions, or to breathlessly waiting hosts on earth, with such sentences as: ‘We are above the level of Everest.’ ‘Can now see the whole Atlantic coastline.’ ‘Clouds blot out the earth.’ ” William Beebe, the man who wrote those words in 1934, was 27 years ahead of his time in predicting humans’ first entrance into outer space. In the year in which he wrote, however, he and inventor Otis Barton became the first “astronauts” of the deep sea. Traveling in a steel ball that Barton had designed and Beebe had named the bathysphere (from a Greek word meaning “deep”), the two men descended six times as far into the ocean as any human had ever gone.

“T

Collector, Traveler, Writer Charles William Beebe grew up loving nature. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 29, 1877, but spent most of his childhood and teen years in East Orange, New Jersey, collecting birds’ eggs, fossils, insects, and other specimens with his friends. Beebe’s mother, Henrietta (Nettie) Younglove Beebe, led him on nature walks and took him to visit the huge new American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Charles Beebe, William’s father, 17

18 Modern Marine Science

was a traveling salesman for a paper company and therefore was seldom home. William wrote him daily letters describing his collections and adventures. Beebe decided to attend Columbia University, many members of whose faculty worked at the American Museum of Natural History. His grades in high school were so high that he entered the university as an advanced “special student” in 1896. He took courses at Columbia until 1899, but, according to most accounts, he never earned a degree. Beebe’s adviser at Columbia was Henry Fairfield Osborn, head of William Beebe was one of the first the university’s zoology departecologists as well as an explorer and ment. Osborn was also president of popular science writer. His most the American Museum and of the famous achievement was the dives New York Zoological Society (now he made in the bathysphere, the the Wildlife Conservation Society). steel ball behind him, in the early 1930s. (Wildlife Conservation Society) Osborn was so impressed by the knowledgeable young man that in 1899, just before the opening of the New York Zoological Park (also called the Bronx Zoo), he asked Beebe to become the zoo’s assistant curator of birds. The zoo’s director, William T. Hornaday, approved the appointment, and Beebe began work in October. Beebe became full curator of birds in 1902, and in August of the same year he married Mary Blair Rice, a young woman from a wealthy Virginia family. Beebe was very successful at keeping his flying charges healthy, but he did not want to spend his days at a desk, managing the lives of caged animals. Instead, he began organizing and leading expeditions to observe birds in their natural habitats and bring home specimens for the zoo. Hornaday objected to Beebe’s being away so much, but Osborn supported the young man’s urge to travel.

HALF-MILE DOWN 19

Beebe’s first extensive trip took him and his new wife to Mexico in 1904. On their return, Beebe (along with Blair, as she called herself; she later became a popular writer of travel books) began a second aspect of his career: writing about his adventures. The Beebes’ book about their journey, Two Bird Lovers in Mexico, was published in 1905. The couple wrote a second book about a trip to Venezuela in 1908, but their personal and literary collaboration ended with a highly publicized divorce in 1913.

Ecology and Adventures For the next 20 years, William Beebe gained fame as an explorer and biologist. He led expeditions to South America, Asia, and many other parts of the world. In 1919, he founded and directed the zoological society’s Department of Tropical Research and established the department’s first research station in British Guiana (now Guyana), a country in northern South America. In an era when most biologists studied dried specimens in museums or caged animals in zoos, Beebe insisted on observing living creatures carrying out their daily activities in their natural habitats. He also stressed the importance of studying the ways different species interacted with one another and their environment, a branch of science now called ecology. In Descent, a book about the bathysphere dives, Brad Matsen wrote, “Beebe’s legacy as a pioneering ecologist rivals that of his contributions to marine biology and oceanography. The notion that an organism can be understood only when its surroundings and neighbors are taken into account was so radical during his time as to have been completely absent from most scientific discussion.” Beebe also insisted on writing about what he learned, not only for other scientists, but also for the public. Some of his works, such as his four-volume A Monograph of the Pheasants, written after a trip he took to study these birds in southern Asia in 1909–11 and published between 1918 and 1922 (World War I delayed the publication), gained scientific respect. Many others, however, were aimed at a popular audience. People enjoyed reading about Beebe’s hair-raising adventures, such as his almost fainting from poisonous gases he

20 Modern Marine Science

breathed while climbing up an erupting volcano in the Galápagos Islands, and books such as Galápagos: World’s End became best sellers during the 1920s. Some of Beebe’s books were translated into several languages.

Desire for the Deep William Beebe’s attention turned from the land to the sea in the late 1920s. For about a decade, beginning in 1928, he made a systematic study of the sea life in an area only eight miles (12.8 km) across, near Nonsuch Island, a small island in the Atlantic Ocean near Bermuda. William J. Broad stated in The Universe Below, his book about scientific exploration of the deep sea, that at the time, Beebe’s work “represented some of the most comprehensive and methodical sampling of one part of the ocean that had ever been done.” During this period, Beebe and his assistants caught more than 115,000 animals, representing 220 species, many of them new to science. Beebe observed marine life by making relatively shallow dives (down to about 40 feet [12 m], while wearing a diving helmet) and by dragging trawling nets through the water at greater depths. Most of the animals his nets brought up from the deep sea, like the ones the Challenger scientists had observed almost 60 years before, were dead or mangled. Beebe wrote later that he felt an ever-stronger urge to see these animals alive in their own environment, just as he had done with birds in tropical rain forests. Water pressure increases by one atmosphere, or 14.6 pounds (6.6 kg) per square inch (6.4 cm 2), for every 33 feet (10 m) of depth. At a depth of 525 feet (15.9 m), the deepest any human had yet gone, a diver or submersible (a vehicle designed to travel underwater) was subjected to pressure about 2.5 times as great as the pressure at sea level. Beebe knew that if he wished to reach depths greater than this, he would have to travel in some container that could resist pressure better than any diving suit or submarine invented so far. Beebe talked about the possibility of a deep-diving submersible with former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, a friend who shared

HALF-MILE DOWN 21

his love of nature. Beebe thought that such a vehicle should have the shape of a cylinder, but Roosevelt recommended a sphere instead. A sphere’s perfectly round shape would work better than any other to withstand large, evenly applied pressures, Roosevelt pointed out.

Building a Bathysphere When Beebe wrote about his dream of deep-sea exploration in a newspaper article published in November 1928, self-styled inventors deluged him with ideas for possible submersibles. Beebe rejected all these plans because they made no sense to him or were too complicated for his taste. Indeed, he soon refused to even look at new proposals. One inventor frustrated by Beebe’s policy was Otis Barton, a wealthy young engineer who had graduated from Beebe’s former university, Columbia. Like Theodore Roosevelt, Barton believed that the best type of submersible would be a sphere. Barton wanted to build and dive in the craft himself, but he hoped that Beebe’s reputation and contacts with scientific societies could help him gain funding for a diving expedition. With the help of a reporter friend who knew Beebe, Barton finally obtained a chance to present his design to the famous explorer in late 1928 or early 1929. Once Beebe looked at Barton’s blueprints, he liked the simplicity of the younger man’s creation and became convinced that Barton’s invention, unlike the others he had seen, might actually function in the deep sea. In 1929, Beebe agreed to work with Barton and coined a name for Barton’s proposed craft: the bathysphere. Barton promised to pay to have the sphere built, and Beebe, for his part, persuaded the New York Zoological Society and the National Geographic Society to sponsor future dives in the vessel. Barton’s first bathysphere weighed five tons (10,000 pounds, or 4,500 kg), too much for the winch on the barge he had hired in Bermuda to lift. He therefore ordered the sphere melted down and designed a new one only half as heavy. Four feet nine inches (1.5 m) high, the sphere resisted the expected pressure of the deep sea with steel walls 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) thick. Barton kept the structure small,

22 Modern Marine Science

not only to reduce its weight, but also to increase its strength: Other factors (including the thickness of the wall) being equal, the smaller the sphere, the stronger it will be because the ratio of wall to hollow space will be greater. In The World beneath the Sea, Barton’s autobiography, he wrote that the bathysphere looked “like an enormously inflated and slightly cockeyed bullfrog.” The sphere had three cylinder-shaped window ports, projecting like miniature cannons from its surface. The round windows, each eight inches (20 cm) across and three inches (7.6 cm) thick, were made of fused quartz—essentially, melted sand—rather than glass. The quartz resisted pressure better than glass and also admitted light of a wider range of colors.

First Dives The bathysphere made its first test dive on June 3, 1930. The barge carried it into the sea near Nonsuch Island, where a block and tackle lowered the empty sphere into the water. Suspended from a steel cable 3,500 feet (1,060 m) long and 7⁄8 of an inch (2.29 cm) thick, the sphere was sent down to 2,000 feet (606 m). At first the cable twisted dangerously around the rubber hose carrying wires for a telephone line (to let the divers communicate with the crew on the barge) and electricity (for a spotlight that the divers could shine into the water). This problem was soon solved, however, and in a second test dive, on June 6, the bathysphere was successfully lowered to 1,500 feet (460 m). Later on June 6, Beebe and Barton prepared to dive inside the bathysphere for the first time. They squeezed themselves, one at a time and headfirst, through a 14-inch (35.5 cm)-wide circular opening in a steel door that would be secured by 10 heavy bolts. Beebe wrote later, “I . . . crawled painfully over the steel bolts, fell inside and curled up on the cold, hard bottom of the sphere. . . . Otis Barton climbed in after me, and we disentangled our legs and got set.” The two men huddled together in the 54-inch (137-cm)-wide space inside the sphere without so much as a pillow for comfort. (“The longer we were in [the bathysphere], the smaller it seemed to get,” Beebe said soon after the dive.) They

HALF-MILE DOWN 23

shared their cramped quarters with tanks of oxygen and trays of chemicals that absorbed moisture and carbon dioxide to keep their air breathable.

This drawing shows the cramped interior of the bathysphere, which was only 54 inches (137 cm) across. The chemicals listed on the left removed carbon dioxide and moisture from the vessel’s air supply, keeping the air breathable.

24 Modern Marine Science

Once the two men were inside, sailors on the barge sealed them in by putting a 400-pound (180-kg) steel cover over the bolts around the opening. The crew fastened down the cover by screwing and hammering large nuts onto the bolts, a noisy procedure that hurt the divers’ ears. Finally, the men used a huge wing nut to close a four-inch (10-cm) emergency opening in the center of the cover. The sailors then lowered the sphere, tethered by its steel cable and rubber hose, over the barge’s side. At a depth of 300 feet (91 m), Beebe and Barton were alarmed to see a trickle of water seeping through the door. Instead of asking to be returned to the surface, however, Beebe used the telephone to call

I WAS THERE: AN EXPLOSION

OF

WATER

When the bathysphere was returned to the deck of the barge Ready after having been lowered to 3,000 feet (909 m) in an unoccupied test dive in 1932, Beebe wrote in Half Mile Down, his account of the bathysphere dives: It was apparent that something was very wrong, and as the bathysphere swung clear I saw a needle of water shooting across the face of the port window. Weighing much more than she [the bathysphere] should have, she came over the side and was lowered to the deck. Looking through one of the . . . windows I could see that she was almost full of water. There were curious ripples on the top of the water, and I knew that the space above was filled with air, but such air as no human being could tolerate for a moment.

Beebe began to unscrew the giant wing nut that secured the small opening in the center of the bathysphere’s door. After the first few turns, he wrote, “a strange high singing came forth, then a fine mist, steam-like in consistency, shot out, a needle of steam, then another and another. This warned me that I should have sensed when I looked through the window that the contents of the bathysphere were under terrific pressure.”

HALF-MILE DOWN 25

for a faster descent because he believed that the increasing pressure at greater depths would seal the door more firmly. Luckily, he was right: The leak soon stopped. Following what he later said was an instinct, Beebe halted the dive at 800 feet (242 m). After about an hour underwater, the bathysphere was lifted back up to the deck of the barge. Beebe and Barton crawled numbly out of their globular prison, after which they, their assistants, and the ship’s crew had a small celebration. They had reason to celebrate: even this first dive, still basically a test, had taken the two explorers more than one and a half times deeper than any other human had gone.

The explorer made everyone on board stand well away from the door and rigged two movie cameras to record what might happen next. Carefully, little by little, two of us turned the brass handles, soaked with the spray, and I listened as the high, musical tone of impatient confined elements gradually descended the scale, a quarter tone or less at each slight turn. Realizing what might happen, we leaned back as far as possible from the line of fire. Suddenly without the slightest warning, the bolt was torn from our hands and the mass of heavy metal shot across the deck like a shell from a gun. The trajectory [path of the bolt] was almost straight and the brass bolt hurtled into the steel winch thirty feet [9 m] across the deck and sheared a half-inch [1.27-cm] notch gouged out by the harder metal. This was followed by a solid cylinder of water, which slackened after a while to a cataract, pouring out of the hole in the door. . . . If I had been in the way, I would have been decapitated.

After examining the bathysphere, Beebe concluded that the water had gotten in through one of the quartz windows. They reseated the window in its housing, and in a later test, the sphere was sent down to the same depth as before and came up dry.

26 Modern Marine Science

Engineer-inventor Otis Barton (right) designed the bathysphere and traveled with Beebe (left) on all the vessel’s human-carrying journeys, including its deepest dive, which descended 3,028 feet (923 m), or about half a mile, beneath the sea—far deeper than any living human had ever gone before—on August 15, 1934. (Wildlife Conservation Society)

A Fantastic World Beebe and Barton made 16 bathysphere dives between 1930 and 1934. During each, Beebe telephoned a stream of breathless comments up to Gloria Hollister, his assistant, who wrote them all down. On September 22, 1932, Beebe and Barton conveyed their excitement directly to a large audience in the United States and Britain through a radio broadcast made during the dive.

HALF-MILE DOWN 27

Beebe’s greatest thrill came from viewing the bizarre and beautiful life-forms of the deep sea through the bathysphere’s tiny window. He described strings of floating creatures called salps, “lovely as the finest lace,” and fish whose immense, always-open jaws were filled with needlelike teeth. Many of these living things glowed with light made in their own bodies through a process called bioluminescence. (This same process makes fireflies glow and flash.) For instance, Beebe wrote that during his seventh dive “I saw some creature, several feet long, dart toward the window, turn sideways and— explode. At the flash, which was so strong that it illumined my face and the inner sill of the window, I saw the great red shrimp and the outpouring fluid of flame.” He concluded that the shrimp sent out a cloud of bioluminescent liquid to confuse and frighten predators, just as octopuses in shallow water pour out a cloud of black “ink” when they are threatened. On August 15, 1934, Beebe and Barton made the deepest bathysphere dive of all: 3,028 feet (923 m), or about half a mile, down into the clear waters off Bermuda. At that depth, more than 1,360 pounds (612 kg) of pressure pushed against every square inch of the bathysphere’s surface. Beebe and Barton stayed at that extreme depth for only five minutes. By this time, the National Geographic Society had joined the New York Zoological Society in sponsoring the bathysphere dives, and Beebe described the undersea world in several articles that appeared in the society’s popular magazine, National Geographic. The articles were illustrated by artist Else Bostelmann, who used Beebe’s notes to draw the fantastic creatures he had seen. Beebe also described his dives in Adventuring with Beebe, which included accounts of other expeditions as well, and in Half Mile Down, which was devoted to the bathysphere dives.

Separate Careers Beebe and Barton made their last dive in the bathysphere (to a mere 1,403 feet [425 m]) on September 11, 1934. The New York Zoological Society kept the historic sphere, which is still on display at the New York Aquarium.

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Barton and Beebe were no longer friends by the time the dives ended. According to Brad Matsen, Barton felt that Beebe, in his many speeches and writings, did not give the engineer enough credit for designing the craft that had carried them to such amazing depths and for sharing the same dangers that Beebe described so vividly. Barton went on to make a movie called Titans of the Deep, released in the late 1930s. Posters claimed that the film was a documentary of the bathysphere dives, but Beebe insisted in letters to the New York Times and Science magazine that “neither I nor any member of my staff . . . had anything to do with it.” The movie was not a success. In the late 1940s, Barton designed a second undersea craft, which he called a benthoscope, a sturdier version of the bathysphere. He took it to 4,500 feet (1,370 m) below the sea in August 1949, breaking his and Beebe’s 1934 descent record. Barton published The World beneath the Sea, his autobiography and account of the bathysphere adventures, in 1953. Beebe, too, continued his adventures. In the late 1930s, he pursued his studies of undersea life in shallower water, helmet diving in Baja California and along the Pacific coast of Central America. He established his last home and research station, which he called Simla after a resort town in India, on the Caribbean island of Trinidad in 1949. He also went on with his writing career. He authored 24 books and more than 800 articles about natural history during his lifetime. Beebe retired from the Zoological Society on July 29, 1952, his 75th birthday. He lived 10 more years at Simla with Jocelyn Crane, a marine biologist who had been his assistant since his bathysphere days. (Beebe had married another writer, Elswyth Thane Ricker, in 1927. They were never divorced and remained friends all their lives, but they seldom lived together.) Beebe died of pneumonia at Simla on June 4, 1962.

Legacy of Inspiration Although William Beebe’s articles appeared often in scientific journals, his success as a popular writer made many scientists distrust him. Some reviewers of his books claimed that he had exaggerated his descriptions of deep-sea animals or even created them entirely

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CONNECTIONS: MENTORING

A

PIONEER

Throughout his career, William Beebe encouraged and helped younger scientists, including women. While editing an anthology of nature writing called The Book of Naturalists in 1944, he chose for the book’s final essay a description of the life cycle of eels, a snakelike type of fish, written by a then-unknown marine scientist named Rachel Carson (1907–64). This essay was Carson’s first major publication. In the years that followed, Beebe continued to aid Carson. In 1949, for instance, he helped her make a shallow dive with a diving helmet, something she had never done before. Beebe told her that all marine scientists should have the experience of observing sea life in its natural habitat firsthand. Carson eventually found that she was more interested in writing about science and nature than in doing original scientific work. When she needed income in order to be able to devote more time to writing, Beebe helped her obtain a Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Fellowship. With this grant, given to writers who show promise, Carson completed her first book, The Sea around Us. Published in 1951, it became a best seller. Carson went on to become a prolific writer and a famous pioneer of ecology and the environmental protection movement. Her bestknown book, Silent Spring (1962), warned of the dangers that (in her opinion) pesticides presented to the environment and human health. Like many other scientists, writers, and conservationists of her generation, Rachel Carson acknowledged the inspiration Beebe had given her. In the introduction to The Sea around Us, she wrote, “My absorption in the mystery and meaning of the sea have been stimulated and the writing of this book aided by the friendship and encouragement of William Beebe.”

from his imagination. In a review of Half Mile Down, for instance, John T. Nichols, curator of recent fishes at the American Museum of Natural History, wrote that Beebe’s book belonged on the fiction shelf. More recent critics have pointed out that some of the fish Beebe described have never been reported by anyone else.

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Other scientists, however, have vouched for Beebe’s honesty. James A. Oliver, former director of the American Museum of Natural History, told Edward Ricciuti in 1984, “I suspected Beebe exaggerated and extravagantly described his experiences until I went with him into the field.” Oliver said that Beebe pointed out animals and activities that Oliver, trained scientist though he was, had missed. Similarly, Fairfield Osborn, son of Beebe’s old mentor and, like his father before him, president of the New York Zoological Society, wrote in a eulogy after Beebe’s death (quoted in Brad Matsen’s Descent), “Only those who worked intimately with him [Beebe] realized how intensely he believed in accuracy and the provability of any observation. . . . He was a true scientist, superbly equipped with powers of observation which frequently were an amazement to his associates.” Colgate University (in Hamilton, New York) and Tufts University (in Boston, Massachusetts) awarded Beebe honorary doctorates in June 1928, and his book on pheasants won the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing in 1926. In any case, precise scientific description of individual deep-sea animals was not William Beebe’s greatest achievement. Beebe’s first accomplishment—and Barton’s—was possessing the courage to cram himself into a tiny, relatively fragile container and venture where no human had ever gone. His second was conveying the wonder and beauty of this new environment to a wide audience through his talks and writings. Numerous marine scientists, such as Sylvia Earle, who set deep-diving records of her own in the 1970s, have said that reading Beebe’s books inspired them to enter the field.

Chronology 1877

Charles William Beebe born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 29

1896–99

Beebe takes courses at Columbia University

1899

Beebe becomes assistant curator of birds at New York Zoological Park (Bronx Zoo) in October

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1902

Beebe becomes full curator of birds at Bronx Zoo Beebe marries Mary Blair Rice on August 6

1904

Beebe travels with his wife to Mexico to observe and collect birds

1905

Beebe’s first book, Two Bird Lovers in Mexico (cowritten with his wife), published

1909–11

Beebe travels to Asia to study pheasants

1913

Beebe and his wife divorce

1918–22

Four volumes of Beebe’s scientific work on pheasants published

1919

Beebe founds and becomes director of New York Zoological Society’s Department of Tropical Research Beebe establishes society’s first research station in British Guiana (Guyana)

1920s

Beebe writes popular books about his tropical explorations

1926

Beebe’s book on pheasants wins John Burroughs Medal

1927

Beebe marries Elswyth Thane Ricker, a writer, on September 22

1928–37

Beebe studies life in a small area of ocean near Nonsuch Island, off Bermuda

1928

Beebe receives honorary doctorates from Colgate and Tufts Universities in June In a newspaper article published in November, Beebe describes his dream of visiting the deep sea in a new type of submersible Beebe meets engineer and inventor Otis Barton

1929

Beebe agrees to work with Barton to dive in a submersible designed by Barton, which Beebe calls a bathysphere

1930

Bathysphere makes first test dive on June 3 Beebe and Barton descend in the bathysphere for the first time on June 6

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In a test dive, a leak in a window causes the bathysphere to fill with water under tremendous pressure; water shoots out explosively when the sphere is returned to the surface

1932

A bathysphere dive is broadcast live on radio in the United States and Great Britain on September 22 Beebe and Barton make their deepest dive in the bathysphere, to 3,028 feet (923 m), on August 15

1934

Last bathysphere dive made on September 11 1930s

Late in the decade, Barton makes Titans of the Deep, a film based on the bathysphere dives, and Beebe studies undersea life through helmet dives

1949

Barton sets a new depth record (4,500 feet, or 1,370 m) in a second craft of his design, the benthoscope, in August Beebe establishes Simla, a home and research station, on Trinidad

1952

Beebe retires from the Zoological Society on July 29, his 75th birthday

1962

Beebe dies at Simla on June 4

Further Reading Books Barton, Otis. The World beneath the Sea. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1953. Barton’s autobiography and description of the dives he made with William Beebe in the bathysphere, which Barton designed.

Beebe, William. Adventuring with Beebe. New York: Viking, 1951. A selection of Beebe’s writings, including some on the bathysphere dives.

———. Half Mile Down. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934. Most detailed account of the bathysphere dives and the deep-sea animals that Beebe observed.

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Broad, William J. The Universe Below: Discovering the Secrets of the Deep Sea. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. History of scientific investigation of the deep sea; includes material on Beebe.

Carson, Rachel. The Sea around Us. New York: Oxford University Press, 1951. This description of the physics and biology of the ocean, Carson’s first book, was produced with the inspiration and help of William Beebe.

Gould, Carol Grant. The Remarkable Life of William Beebe: Explorer and Naturalist. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004. Extensive biography based on newly released Beebe journals, letters, and photographs.

Matsen, Brad. Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss. New York: Pantheon, 2005. Book devoted to the bathysphere dives, including their background and significance.

Articles Pollard, Jean Ann. “Beebe Takes the Bathysphere.” Sea Frontiers 40 (August 1994): 41– 44. Describes the construction of the bathysphere and several of its dives.

Ricciuti, Edward R. “Swashbuckling Adventurer.” International Wildlife 14 (July–August 1984): 13–15. Surveys and evaluates Beebe’s career.

“William Beebe.” Encyclopedia of World Biography Supplement. Vol. 22. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale Group, 2002, n.p. Meaty biographical article about Beebe.

Web Site The Official William Beebe Web site. URL: http://hometown.aol.com/ chines6930/mw1/beebe1.htm. Accessed June 7, 2005. Maintained by Catharine L. Hines, this site includes a lengthy biographical sketch of Beebe and an account of his bathysphere adventures, illustrated by photos from the National Geographic Society and other sources. The site also contains an account of Beebe’s expedition to study pheasants around the world, pages devoted to Beebe’s two wives (both of whom were writers), a list of Beebe’s books, and a page of links and references.

3 HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS AUGUSTE AND JACQUES PICCARD AND THE BATHYSCAPHE

A

t the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933, the past and future of deep-sea exploration met one another. The past was represented by William Beebe, whose bathysphere was on display at the fair. Beebe and his diving partner, Otis Barton, had not yet made their deepest dive in the bathysphere, but that record-breaking feat was only about a year away. Even Barton’s later improved bathysphere, the benthoscope, would reach only 4,500 feet (1,370 m) in 1949. Engineers would recognize that tethered spheres able to survive at greater depths and the cables to hold them would be too heavy for shipboard winches to lift. The future lay with Swiss physicist and engineer Auguste Piccard. Like Beebe, Piccard was well known when the two men met. A few years before, Piccard had set a new record for travel in the opposite direction, to new heights in Earth’s atmosphere; the unique enclosed gondola (passenger compartment) of the balloon in which he had done so, his own invention, was also displayed at the fair. The Swiss scientist’s work on undersea vessels, however, was just beginning. In time, Piccard and his son, Jacques, still a child in 1933, would reach depths far greater than any plumbed by the bathysphere. The Piccard family would have the honor of having made both the highest flight (short of space travel) and the deepest dive in human history.

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HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS 35

Talented Twins Auguste Piccard and his twin brother, Jean-Félix Piccard, were born on January 28, 1884, in Basel, Switzerland. Their well-to-do and highly respected family included their father, Jules, head of the chemistry department at the University of Basel; their uncle, who owned a company in Geneva that made turbines for hydroelectric power plants; and their grandfather, who had been commissioner of the Basel region. Their mother was Helene Haltenhoff Piccard. The twins both attended the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, where Auguste majored in mechanical engineering and JeanFelix in chemical engineering. They earned their doctorates in 1907. Auguste Piccard began thinking about deep-sea exploration around 1906. As Otis Barton would do two decades later, Piccard pictured undersea explorers traveling in a sphere with metal walls thick and strong enough to withstand the deep ocean’s pressure. Unlike Barton, however, Piccard did not expect the sphere to be raised and lowered by a cable. Instead, Jacques Piccard (top) and U.S. just as huge balloons filled with Navy Lieutenant Donald Walsh hot air or hydrogen gas (both of (bottom) descended in the bathywhich are lighter than the cool air scaphe Trieste, designed by of the upper atmosphere) had car- Piccard and his father, Auguste, to ried human passengers, riding in the deepest spot in the ocean on basket-shaped gondolas, into the January 23, 1960. They are shown here inside the bathscaphe’s small sky since the late 1700s, Piccard passenger sphere. (National Oceanic thought that a balloon-like float and Atmospheric Administration/ containing some substance lighter Department of Commerce, ship3224)

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than water could be attached to the undersea sphere and used along with weights to lower and raise the metal ball. Substituting a float for a cable would make the sphere safer (because the sphere could surface without help) and a little more maneuverable. After Piccard obtained his doctorate, however, his attention turned from the sea to the sky. He and his brother became interested in cosmic rays, high-energy subatomic particles from space that strike Earth’s upper atmosphere. Hoping to study cosmic rays, the Piccard twins began making balloon trips from Zurich in 1913. When World War I began in 1914, both men enlisted in the balloon corps of the Swiss army, which (like similar groups belonging to other countries in the war) observed enemy troop movements from the air. The brothers served until 1915.

Reaching Great Heights Jean-Felix Piccard went on to become a chemistry professor, like his father. He eventually moved to the United States, becoming a naturalized citizen (in 1931) and a professor at the University of Minnesota. He died in Minneapolis on January 23, 1960. Auguste Piccard, by contrast, remained in Zurich, teaching physics. He gained a reputation as an inventor by helping Albert Einstein, a fellow Swiss, design instruments to measure radioactivity in cosmic rays. In 1922, Piccard moved to Brussels, Belgium, and continued his teaching career there. In Brussels, Piccard went on thinking about balloons. Scientists had sent instrument-carrying balloons to study cosmic rays and other phenomena in the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere that lies between 10.8 miles (18 km) and 54 miles (90 km) above sea level, since 1900. Piccard believed that human observers in balloons would learn much more than instruments alone, but no human being had ever reached the stratosphere because the air there contains too little oxygen for humans to survive. Humans lose consciousness at about 29,000 feet (8,788 m) above sea level. Remembering his plans for a deep-sea exploration vehicle, Auguste Piccard designed an enclosed gondola for a high-altitude balloon that would allow riders to bring a breathable atmosphere

HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS 37

with them. He obtained financing from the Belgian Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS, or National Fund for Scientific Research) for his proposed craft, which he called FNRS-1 in the group’s honor. FNRS-1, completed by 1930, was the first aircraft with a pressurized cabin, a standard feature on planes today. Its seven-foot (2.1m)-wide aluminum gondola was attached to a hydrogen balloon. Piccard and a German scientist, Paul Kipfer, flew the balloon to a record-setting height of 51,775 feet (15,785 m) from a meadow near Augsburg, Germany, on May 27, 1931, becoming the first people to reach the stratosphere and return alive. On August 18, 1932, Piccard and a different copilot, Max Cosyns, reached an even greater height of 53,139 feet (16,200 m) in a flight from Zurich. Piccard’s only child, Jacques, then a nine-year-old boy (he had been born on July 28, 1922), was one of the many people who watched the balloon take off. Auguste Piccard continued to make balloon ascensions, 27 in all, until 1937.

The First Bathyscaphe In 1937, several years after he had met Beebe in Chicago, Auguste Piccard turned his attention from the heights of the atmosphere to his first love, the depths of the sea. Adding what he had learned while designing the FNRS-1 gondola to his original plan, he developed a craft that he called a bathyscaphe, from Greek words meaning “deep boat.” Piccard’s early work on this new vessel was again supported by the Belgian science fund, so he named his first bathyscaphe FNRS-2. The part of the bathyscaphe in which humans would ride, like Beebe and Barton’s bathysphere, was spherical and made of cast steel. About 6.6 feet (2 m) across and with walls 3.5 inches (9 cm) thick, the 10-ton (9–metric ton) sphere was able to withstand pressures of 12,000 pounds per square inch (843.6 kg/cm2). The sphere was attached to a giant metal-walled float—essentially an underwater dirigible, or rigid balloon—22 feet (6.7 m) long. The float was filled with heptane, a high-octane gasoline used in aircraft.

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Gasoline is about 30 percent lighter than water, so the float made the craft buoyant. To sink the bathyscaphe, divers in the sphere would open valves in two chambers of the float. Gasoline would then pour out of the chambers and seawater would flood in, making the vessel heavier. Powerful electromagnets held two hopperfuls of iron pellets, together weighing several tons, in tubs under the float. When the divers wanted to return to the surface, they would turn off the electric current that activated the magnets. The pellets would drop out of the hoppers, reducing the bathyscaphe’s weight, and the float would quickly lift the sphere to the sea’s surface. Piccard’s work on the bathyscaphe was temporarily halted by World War II, but he began his research again in the late 1940s. FNRS-2 made its first deep dive, without passengers, in the Atlantic Ocean off Dakar, in the West African country of Senegal, on November 3, 1948. The bathyscaphe descended only 4,600 feet (1,394 m), far less than Piccard had hoped. The sphere survived the pressure of the deep sea, but heavy waves on the surface severely damaged the thin-walled float. Piccard saw that the bathyscaphe’s design would have to be improved before the craft could succeed.

The Trieste Media reports criticized the “failure” of Auguste Piccard’s FNRS-2 during its African test, but representatives of the French navy who saw the test were impressed. In 1950, they bought FNRS-2 from the Belgians and began redesigning it under the name FNRS-3. Piccard worked with the navy as a consultant at first, but he and navy officials did not get along, and he left after about a year. Other scientists completed the FRNS-3, which made several record-setting dives. By this time, Piccard had an important helper. His son, Jacques, had grown from the little boy who watched his father’s balloon flight into a young man with a doctorate in economics from the University of Geneva, obtained in 1946. Jacques taught at the university for two years after earning his degree, but he came to share his father’s fascination with the deep sea and left teaching to work full time with Auguste around the time of the FNRS-2 test.

HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS 39

OTHER SCIENTISTS: JACQUES-YVES COUSTEAU (1910–1997) One of the people who witnessed the test of the FNRS-2 in 1948 was Jacques-Yves Cousteau, a French navy officer. Cousteau later dived in the FNRS-3, the redesigned bathyscaphe that the navy made from FNRS-2. He went on to win fame as an inventor of equipment that greatly advanced undersea exploration and, even more, as an explorer, author, and television producer whose work introduced millions of people to the wonders and importance of the sea. Born on June 11, 1910, in Saint-André-de-Cubzac, France, Cousteau was introduced to the sea in 1936 when he looked underwater through goggles for the first time. His first major invention was the Aqualung, or scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus), which allowed divers to carry their air supply in tanks on their backs. He and a friend, Emile Gagnan, completed this device in 1943. With it, divers could remain submerged for relatively long periods while moving freely. In 1950, Cousteau bought a U.S. Navy minesweeper that he remodeled and named Calypso. During his first expedition on Calypso, about a year later, he also began designing a small submersible, which he called the Soucoupe (Saucer). The submersible, easy to maneuver in the water and small enough to be carried aboard a ship, was first tested in 1957. Submersibles based on Cousteau’s design were later used as research vessels. Cousteau’s explorations in Calypso took him all over the world. He filmed and wrote about them, and his books, movies, and television shows became extremely popular. In his later years, he worked to prevent environmental and social problems, including pollution of the oceans and nuclear war. Cousteau died on June 25, 1997.

At first the Piccards had trouble finding money to continue their bathyscaphe work, but eventually they obtained enough funding from individuals and groups in Switzerland and Italy to begin building a new bathyscaphe. They called it Trieste, after the Italian coastal city that provided some of its financial support.

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Trieste’s passenger sphere was made of forged rather than cast steel, so it was stronger than the sphere in FNRS-2. The sphere had several six-inch (15-cm)-thick, cone-shaped viewports, tapering from a width of 16 inches (41 cm) on the outside to four inches (10 cm) wide on the inside. The viewports were made of Plexiglas (methyl methacrylate), a tough new plastic that had been invented to make clear, shatterproof coverings for aircraft viewports during World War II. Plexiglas was far stronger than the brittle fused quartz that had been used in the bathysphere’s windows. The float of Trieste was 50 feet (15 m) long, more than twice the length of the float on FNRS-2. Tapered at each end, the rigid structure was divided into 12 segments so that if one part was damaged, others could still remain intact. The two segments at the ends contained air while the craft was on the surface, but they were filled with seawater to help the craft sink when a dive began. Auguste and Jacques Piccard descended together on the new bathyscaphe’s first undersea voyage, to a depth of 10,335 feet (3,151 m) in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Ponza, Italy, on September 30, 1953. This dive, which set a new depth record, was 69-year-old Auguste’s last. The elder Piccard retired from his teaching position in Belgium in 1954 and returned to Switzerland.

Joining the Navy In spite of the Mediterranean dive’s success, Jacques Piccard could not obtain financial support to continue the bathyscaphe’s development for several years. At a scientific meeting in London around 1955, however, Piccard met Robert Dietz, a geologist who worked for the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR). After Piccard described Trieste to him, Dietz became as enthusiastic about the craft as the young Swiss was. Dietz returned to the United States and began trying to gather support for the bathyscaphe, both among scientists interested in the deep sea and within the ONR. With the United States engaged in an increasingly antagonistic rivalry with the Soviet Union, termed the cold war, navy officials were excited by the idea of a craft that could, for instance, help them

HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS 41

learn more about the way sound traveled in the deep sea. This information could help the navy track Soviet submarines and eavesdrop on the Russians’ ship-to-shore communications. The ONR sponsored and observed a series of dives in the Mediterranean during the summer of 1957 to see what Trieste could do. Pleased with Piccard’s demonstrations of the craft, the ONR bought it for $250,000 in 1958 and began making arrangements to ship it to the United States. Piccard agreed to accompany the craft as a consultant after the navy promised to let him pilot the bathyscaphe on “dives presenting special problems.”

This diagram shows the structure of the Trieste. The passenger sphere (observation gondola) at the bottom is dwarfed by the craft’s gigantic float. The float’s cargo of gasoline, which is less dense and therefore lighter in weight than water, made the vessel rise to the surface when the iron ballast weights near its bottom were released.

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Preparing for the Deepest Dive Trieste arrived at the Naval Electronics Laboratory in San Diego, California, in August 1958. By this time, the navy was already planning to put the bathyscaphe to the ultimate test: a dive to the floor of the Challenger Deep, a spot in the Mariana Trench that the British research ship Challenger II had identified as the deepest point in the world’s oceans. (The original Challenger had made one of its many stops near this same location in 1875.) Navy leaders knew that the French were building a successor to FNRS-3, with the intention of making this same dive, and rumors hinted that the Soviets might be planning to try it as well. Reaching the goal first, the navy officials concluded, would provide a powerful boost in prestige for the United States. Although Trieste’s pressure sphere was a little larger than Beebe’s bathysphere, it still could hold only two people. At first the navy chose Lieutenant Donald Walsh, the experienced submarine officer in charge of the bathyscaphe project, and Andreas Rechnitzer, the project’s chief scientist, to make the record-setting dive. Jacques Piccard, however, had no intention of missing this historic adventure. He claimed that a dive to the deepest spot in the world definitely presented “special problems” and demanded his right to pilot the vessel. After much arguing, the navy agreed to let Piccard ride in the bathyscaphe instead of Rechnitzer. To prepare Trieste for its greatest challenge, the navy had a new, stronger pressure sphere built in Germany. Navy designers also lengthened the float by eight feet (2.4 m) and shrank the viewports to just two inches (5 cm) across—wide enough for only one eye. Then, after a series of test dives, the bathyscaphe was shipped to Guam, an island in the western Pacific Ocean used as an American military base, in October 1959.

Underwater Everest Trieste made its dive to what explorer-oceanographer Robert Ballard, in The Eternal Darkness: A Personal History of Deep-Sea

HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS 43

Exploration, called “the Mount Everest of the ocean” on January 23, 1960. The bathyscaphe had been towed to the dive site, about 200 miles (322 km) southwest of Guam, the night before. Rough seas had battered the craft, damaging some of its instruments, but no one wanted to delay the launch long enough to repair or replace

The Mariana (or Marianas) Trench, where Trieste made its record-breaking dive, follows the curve of the Mariana Islands (Marianas) in the western Pacific Ocean. The deepest spot in the trench, the Challenger Deep, is about 200 miles (322 km) southwest of Guam, the southernmost island in the chain.

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them. Early that morning, therefore, Piccard and Walsh climbed down through a tunnel in the float and entered the bathyscaphe’s pressure sphere. They began their descent at 8:23 A.M. In contrast to the stormy weather on the surface, “everything was very still and very beautiful” once the descent began, Piccard told interviewer Jan Sundberg in 1984. As Trieste reached a depth of about 32,500 feet (9,848 m), however, Piccard and Walsh heard an explosive cracking sound. Alarmed, they checked for signs of damage to the vessel. They found none, so they continued their descent. Trieste reached the ocean floor, a depth of 35,802 feet (6.8 miles, or 10,912 m)—a mile greater than the height of Mount Everest—at about 1 P.M. Soon after the craft’s echo sounder warned that the bottom was near, the bathyscaphe sank in a cloud of grayish ooze, the same kind of fine sediment that the Challenger expedition had studied so intensely. Walsh said later that being surrounded by the stirred-up sediment was like “being in a big bowl of milk.” Just as the bathyscaphe landed, Piccard and Walsh reported that they saw a foot (30.5-cm)-long flatfish, like a sole or flounder, lying on the bottom nearby. As the startled fish rose up and slowly flapped away, Piccard was amazed to notice that it had eyes—even though it was at a depth far below the level that sunlight could penetrate. Later scientists have disagreed, however, about whether the men actually saw a fish. Many believe that the animal they observed was a sea cucumber, a primitive creature common on deep-sea plains. Looking into the entry chamber through the sphere’s upper viewport, Walsh also found the explanation for the noise he and Piccard had heard during the dive. One of the Plexiglas windows in the chamber, which connected the sphere to the access tunnel, had cracked. Because the chamber had already been filled with seawater after the men had been sealed in the sphere, however, the crack presented no immediate threat. After spending about 20 minutes on the sea bottom, Piccard and Walsh dropped the iron pellets that acted as Trieste’s ballast, or extra weight, and began their rise to the surface. Like their descent, their return journey was uneventful. The bathyscaphe reached the surface at 4:56 P.M., having been underwater about eight and a half hours in all. As the two men emerged from the float tunnel, navy jets rocketed by overhead and dipped their wings in salute.

HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS 45

Shortly after Piccard and Walsh’s epic descent, President Dwight D. Eisenhower honored them by giving Piccard the Distinguished Public Service Award and Walsh the Legion of Merit. Piccard also won the Theodore Roosevelt Distinguished Service Award in 1960, a gold medal from the French Society of Arts, Sciences, and Letters in 1970, another from the Royal Geographic Society of Belgium in 1971, and the Order of Leopold from the Belgian government in 1972.

Searching for Lost Submarines Trieste made one more major expedition. On April 10, 1963, an American nuclear submarine, USS Thresher, vanished during exercises in the Atlantic Ocean 220 miles (352 km) off the coast of

The Trieste, shown here being lifted out of the water, reached the deepest part of the ocean, 35,802 feet (almost seven miles, or 10,912 m) below the surface, on January 23, 1960. (U.S. Navy photo 96801)

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Massachusetts. No one was sure what had happened to the submarine or its 129-person crew. The seafloor at that spot was 8,400 feet (2,545 m) below the surface, a depth that, at that time, only Trieste could reach. The navy therefore ordered the bathyscaphe, which had been inactive since the Challenger Deep dive, to be shipped to Boston on a freighter and sent down to look for the sub. After many unsuccessful dives, Trieste’s pilots, which did not include Piccard or Walsh, finally found the twisted remains of the submarine scattered on the bottom on August 18. Maneuvering the ungainly bathyscaphe as best they could, the pilots took extensive photographs of the wreckage. Investigators later concluded that a break in a pipe had allowed seawater under tremendous pressure to spray into the submarine, damaging it so badly that it sank to its “collapse depth” and imploded. After the Thresher dives, the Trieste was retired to the Navy Museum in Washington, D.C. It was replaced by an improved bathyscaphe, the Trieste II, near the end of 1963. The Trieste II, in turn, took part in a hunt for another lost navy submarine, the Scorpion, in 1969, spotting it on July 20 just as astronaut Neil Armstrong first stepped onto the Moon. This bathyscaphe, the last craft of its type, went out of service in 1984.

Beneath the Gulf Stream Although Jacques Piccard remained a consultant to the U.S. Navy until 1966, he returned to Switzerland soon after the Mariana dive and began working with his father on a different type of craft, which they called a mesoscaphe, or “middle boat.” The mesoscaphe, designed by Auguste Piccard, was intended to go down to only 2,000 feet (606 m). It therefore could be made larger and more comfortable than the bathyscaphe’s sphere, something like the inside of a small airliner. Jacques Piccard suggested to the planners of the upcoming Swiss National Exposition that a mesoscaphe be built to take visitors to the bottom of Lake Geneva during the exposition. The exposition executives agreed, and in 1964, when the fair was held in Lausanne, the mesoscaphe Auguste Piccard made 13,000 journeys, carrying a

HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS 47

total of 33,000 people more than 300 feet (91 m) down through the lake. The elder Piccard had died in Lausanne on March 25, 1962. Jacques Piccard saw the mesoscaphe as more than a tourist attraction, however. He persuaded the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, located near Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to sponsor a mesoscaphe expedition through the Gulf Stream, part of the Atlantic Ocean flowing along the east coast of the United States,

CONNECTIONS: A LOSS BECOMES

A

CHALLENGE

The loss of Thresher meant far more to the navy than regret for the deaths of the men aboard the vessel. Thresher was the military’s newest and most advanced model of nuclear attack submarine. Until the navy knew why the submarine had sunk, it could not build more ships of the same design without fear that they might be lost to the same mysterious cause. Also, as William J. Broad explains in The Universe Below, his history of deep-sea exploration, Thresher’s loss (which received substantial international publicity) did great damage to the prestige of the United States and the country’s position in the cold war. Two weeks after Thresher’s sinking, Navy Secretary Fred H. Korth appointed a panel of 58 experts to suggest ways that the navy might improve its knowledge of and ability to act in the deep sea. Excitement about deep-ocean research during the next decade was almost as great among scientists and government officials as excitement about the race to the Moon. Both government (including intelligence-gathering groups as well as the military) and private industry spent billions of dollars to develop submersibles, robotic underwater vehicles, cameras, underwater lasers, and other tools that could be used in the deep sea. Many of these tools were designed by (or with funding from) the military, for possible or actual use in spying or other cold war activities. Some were classified, or kept secret, for the duration of the cold war. Details of most were released in the 1990s, however, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Ultimately, the military interest in the deep sea spurred by the Thresher disaster greatly benefited oceanography as well as national security.

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to examine the deep currents and sea life of the stream. The 50-foot (15-m)-long vessel, completed in 1968, was named Ben Franklin, after the pioneer statesman and scientist (1706–90), whose many interests had included the Gulf Stream. The mesoscaphe had 25 viewports and four motorized propellers, one on each corner, which could move it up or down, forward or backward. Huge batteries in its keel provided enough energy for the craft to stay underwater for weeks. Piccard led the six-person Gulf Stream expedition, which traveled from West Palm Beach, Florida, to a spot 360 miles (576 km) southeast of Nova Scotia, Canada, between July 14 and August 14, 1969. Ben Franklin remained submerged for the entire journey. The expedition produced hundreds of hours of magnetic tapes, including some that provided sonar maps of the ocean floor, as well as numerous photographs of the sea bottom and other photos showing daily life inside the mesoscaphe.

Three Generations of Adventure In Jacques Piccard’s later life, his strongest interest was in protecting the ocean and its unique ecology from pollution, overfishing, and other damage caused by human activities. In an interview with Jan Sundberg in 1984, for example, Piccard pointed out the danger of using the deep sea as a dumping ground for radioactive material because, he said, scientists had discovered ocean currents that cycle between deep water and the surface. He established the Foundation for the Study and Preservation of Seas and Lakes in the 1970s. Piccard also continued to design submersibles. His threeperson submersible, the Forel, was used for more than 700 dives in European lakes for industrial, scientific, and salvage purposes. He invented several types of tourist submersibles as well. In 2005, he was living in Cully, Switzerland, a suburb of Lausanne. Piccard’s son, Bertrand, born in 1958, has continued the family legacy of record-setting voyages. Returning to the atmosphere that had intrigued his grandfather, Bertrand Piccard and his British copilot, Brian Jones, became the first people to travel around the world in a balloon without stopping. Their journey, made in March 1999, took 20 days.

HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS 49

In its famous January 1960 dive, Auguste and Jacques Piccard’s bathyscaphe set a depth record (32,500 feet, or 9,848 m) that can be equaled but never broken, because the craft reached the deepest spot in the world’s oceans. In addition, submersible designer Will Forman writes in The History of American Deep Submersible Operations, 1775–1995, the Piccards’ bathyscaphes “established many of the basic [submersible] design standards still in use today.” Nonetheless, the bathyscaphe, like Beebe’s bathysphere, was essentially a dead end. Although bathyscaphes were not attached to a cable, they could not maneuver easily; commentators such as Robert Ballard have said that the bathyscaphe was more like an elevator than like a true submersible. The vessel’s tiny, thick windows also made observation of the undersea world difficult, and its riders could not interact with that world at all. To truly explore the world that the bathyscaphe had plumbed, a quite different type of craft would be needed.

Chronology 1884

Auguste Piccard and twin brother, Jean-Félix, born in Basel, Switzerland, on January 28

1906

Auguste Piccard begins thinking about designs for vessels to explore the deep sea

1907

Piccard twins receive doctorates in engineering from Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich

1907–22

Auguste Piccard teaches physics in Zurich

1913

Auguste and Jean-Félix Piccard begin making balloon flights

1914–15

Piccard twins serve in the Swiss army’s balloon corps during World War I

1922

Auguste Piccard moves to Brussels, Belgium, and begins teaching physics at university there Piccard’s only child, Jacques Ernest-Jean, born on July 28

1930

Piccard completes FNRS-1, a high-altitude balloon with an enclosed gondola

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1931

Piccard and Paul Kipfer, flying FNRS-1 from Augsburg, Germany, on May 27, become first people to reach the stratosphere and return alive

1932

With Max Cosyns, Piccard sets new height record in flight from Zurich in FNRS-1 on August 18

1933

Piccard meets William Beebe at Chicago World’s Fair, where Piccard’s balloon gondola and Beebe’s bathysphere are both on display

1937

Piccard begins designing bathyscaphe FNRS-2

1946

Jacques Piccard obtains doctorate in economics from University of Geneva and begins teaching there

1948

First (passengerless) test of FNRS-2 takes place off West Africa on November 3 Jacques Piccard leaves teaching job to work with his father on bathyscaphes full time

1950

French navy buys FNRS-2 and begins redesigning it as FNRS-3

1953

Auguste and Jacques Piccard descend in bathyscaphe Trieste to 10,335 feet (3,151 m) off coast of Ponza, Italy, on September 30, Trieste’s first voyage with human passengers

1954

Auguste Piccard retires from teaching and active bathyscaphe work and returns to Switzerland

1955

Jacques Piccard meets U.S. geologist Robert Dietz in London and convinces him of the bathyscaphe’s usefulness for scientific exploration of the deep sea

1957

During the summer, the U.S. navy sponsors and observes dives of the Trieste in the Mediterranean

1958

Office of Naval Research buys Trieste and ships it to the United States Trieste rebuilt and improved in San Diego, California

1959

Trieste shipped to Guam in October

HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS 51

1960

Trieste dives to deepest spot in the ocean (35,802 feet, or 10,912 m) on January 23 Jacques Piccard wins Distinguished Public Service Award and Theodore Roosevelt Distinguished Service Award Piccard returns to Switzerland

1962

Auguste Piccard dies in Lausanne, Switzerland, on March 25

1963

Trieste finds remains of sunken navy submarine, Thresher, on August 18 Trieste is retired to Navy Museum in Washington, D.C. New navy bathyscaphe, Trieste II, goes into service

1964

Mesoscaphe Auguste Piccard carries tourists down into Lake Geneva during the Swiss National Exposition in Lausanne

1966

Jacques Piccard ceases to be a consultant for the navy

1968

Mesoscaphe Ben Franklin completed

1969

Ben Franklin travels underwater through the Gulf Stream between July 14 and August 14 Trieste II finds remains of navy submarine Scorpion on July 20

1970s

Jacques Piccard establishes Foundation for the Study and Preservation of Seas and Lakes

1984

Trieste II goes out of service

1999

In March, Bertrand Piccard, son of Jacques Piccard, and copilot Brian Jones become the first people to travel around the world nonstop in a balloon

Further Reading Books Ballard, Robert D., with Will Hively. The Eternal Darkness: A Personal History of Deep-Sea Exploration. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.

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Includes a chapter on the bathyscaphes designed by Auguste and Jacques Piccard.

Broad, William J. The Universe Below: Discovering the Secrets of the Deep Sea. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Includes information about the development of the bathyscaphe and the Thresher disaster.

Forman, Will. The History of American Deep Submersible Operations, 1775–1995. Flagstaff, Ariz.: Best Publishing Co., 1999. Includes a chapter on Trieste and the bathyscaphe’s importance in spurring the development of American submersibles.

Piccard, Auguste. Earth, Sky, and Sea. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. Description of the author’s record-breaking balloon ascents and development of the bathyscaphe.

Piccard, Jacques, and Robert S. Dietz. Seven Miles Down: The Story of the Bathyscaphe “Trieste.” New York: Putnam, 1961. Account of Trieste’s career, featuring its dive to the deepest spot in the ocean in 1960.

Articles “Auguste Piccard.” In Scientists: Their Lives and Works. Vols. 1–7. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2005. Biographical sketches of Auguste and Jacques Piccard.

Fields, Helen. “A Swiss Family’s Triple Crown.” U.S. News & World Report 136 (February 23, 2004): 79. Describes the achievements of Auguste, Jacques, and Bertrand Piccard, three generations of record-setting adventures in the heights of the atmosphere and the depths of the sea.

Sundberg, Jan. “Interview with Jacques Piccard.” Global Underwater Search Team. Available online. URL: http://user.bahnhof.se/~wizard/ GUSTeng03/artiklar_jacques_piccard.html. Accessed June 7, 2005. Interview made originally in 1984 focuses on the Challenger Deep dive in 1960 but also includes a discussion of dangers to the oceans.

4 THE WOUND THAT NEVER HEALS BRUCE HEEZEN, MARIE THARP, AND MAPPING THE OCEAN FLOOR

C

reators of ordinary maps have a relatively easy job. They can walk, drive, or fly over the land they plan to draw. They can see the territory and, usually, measure it with little difficulty. Mappers of the ocean floor are not so lucky. Their study subject is covered by hundreds or even thousands of feet of water. Mapping would be much more convenient if all the water disappeared. But what combination of science and imagination could make that happen? In the 1950s and 1960s, scientists in a converted mansion near New York’s Hudson River created the first maps that showed the world’s ocean floor as it would appear if the water were not there. While preparing these maps, the researchers discovered major new features of the Earth’s crust and began the transformation of scientists’ understanding of the way that crust forms and changes. The leaders of this mapping team were Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp.

From Fossils to Undersea Mountains In early 1947, while Jacques Piccard was still preparing his first tests of the vessel that would later dive to the deepest part of the ocean, Bruce Charles Heezen first felt the lure of undersea 53

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heights. Heezen, born in Vinton, Iowa, on April 11, 1924, had grown up on his family’s turkey farm near Muscatine, in the same state. He was a junior at the University of Iowa, considering a major in paleontology (the study of fossils), when he attended a lecture by Maurice Ewing, a geology professor at New York’s Columbia University, in 1947. That lecture, and a personal meeting with Ewing afterward, changed Heezen’s plans for his career. Ewing was already a leader in undersea geology. He was touring colleges in the hope of finding promising students who would work on his expeditions—preferably without pay. Heezen must have struck Ewing as the sort of recruit he had in mind because, according to David M. Lawrence’s book, Upheaval from the Abyss, Ewing asked him, “Young man, would you like to go on an expedition to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge? There are some mountains out Between the mid-1950s and there, and we don’t know which the mid-1970s, Bruce Heezen way they run.” The Mid-Atlantic of Columbia University’s Ridge is a gigantic mountain chain Lamont Geological Observatory (later Lamont-Doherty Earth that extends down the center of Observatory, now part of the the Atlantic Ocean like an invisEarth Institute), shown here, ible spine. The Challenger expediand Marie Tharp made the tion and others had identified the most complete and understandridge, but very little was known able maps of the world’s oceans about it. created up to that time. In the process, they identified new geoHeezen accepted Ewing’s offer— logical features that ultimately and changed his major to geology. changed scientists’ understanding In the summer of 1948, just after of the way Earth’s crust is crehe had graduated with a B.A. in ated and destroyed. (Woods Hole that subject, Heezen met Ewing at Oceanographic Institution)

THE WOUND THAT NEVER HEALS 55

the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. As they prepared for the Mid-Atlantic Ridge expedition, Heezen impressed Ewing by helping to build several deep-sea cameras. When Ewing had to leave their ship late in the cruise, he in turn startled Heezen by telling the young man to take his place as chief scientist for the rest of the voyage. Heezen began graduate work under Ewing that fall, earning an M.A. in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1957. In December 1948, just a few months after Heezen arrived at Maurice (“Doc”) Ewing began his career at the Woods Hole Columbia, he and other scientists Oceanographic Institution. Later, working with Ewing moved to a he founded and headed the Lamont mansion in Palisades, New York, Geological Observatory (now on the west bank of the Hudson part of Columbia University’s River about 20 miles (32 km) Earth Institute). The equipment he north of the main Columbia cam- designed, the research cruises he led, and the scientists he trained helped pus. Ewing converted the man- to revolutionize oceanography in sion, donated to Columbia by the the mid-20th century. (Woods Hole widow of banker Thomas Lamont, Oceanographic Institution) into the home of a new institution, which he called the Lamont Geological Observatory. Later renamed the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, this institution is now part of Columbia’s Earth Institute.

War Opens a Career By the early 1950s, Ewing, Heezen, and other scientists had gathered a great deal of data about the Atlantic floor. The person who transformed that data into a map was Marie Tharp.

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OTHER SCIENTISTS: MAURICE EWING (1906–1974) Most of the data that formed the basis for Bruce Heezen’s and Marie Tharp’s maps of the ocean floor—and for the “revolution” in the earth sciences in the 1960s that produced plate tectonics, a new theory of the way the Earth’s crust forms and changes—came from the unrelenting efforts of William Maurice (“Doc”) Ewing and the scientists who worked under him at the Lamont Geological Observatory. Ewing insisted that his research ships be at sea almost constantly and that the men who sailed on them (he did not allow women on the cruises) be on duty almost around the clock. None worked harder than Ewing himself. Ewing was born into a poor family in Lockney, Texas, on May 12, 1906. He received a scholarship to Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston, from which he graduated with honors in mathematics and physics in 1926. He earned an M.A. in 1927 and a Ph.D. in 1931, both in physics, from the same university. During the 1930s, Ewing made frequent cruises on research vessels such as WHOI’s Atlantis. On these expeditions, he measured such things as differences in gravity on the seafloor, which provided clues about the kinds of rocks the floor contains. During World War II, Ewing’s studies of the way sound is transmitted underwater led to the discovery of methods for detecting sounds, such as those made by submarines, over considerable distances. Ewing joined the geology department of Columbia University in 1944. He directed the Lamont Observatory for Columbia from its founding in 1949 until 1972. He also continued to do research for WHOI. In cruises on the Lamont research ship, Vema, during the 1950s and 1960s, Ewing and his team of scientists collected data on the seafloor both by echo sounding (sending sound waves into the water and recording their echoes) and by seismic mapping (dropping explosives overboard and recording echoes of the blasts). On one such cruise in 1947, Ewing found that the layer of rocky crust on the seafloor was much thinner than anyone had expected and that it contained fossils only from relatively recent geologic periods. This discovery proved important to other scientists trying to determine how the seafloor was formed. In 1972, Ewing left Lamont for the University of Texas, Galveston. He died there of a stroke on May 4, 1974.

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Maps were part of Tharp’s heritage. Her father, William Edgar Tharp, was a soil surveyor and cartographer, or mapmaker, for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Marie Tharp’s family moved frequently after her birth on July 30, 1920, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, because William Tharp’s work took him all over the country. William Tharp always told his daughter to choose as a career something she enjoyed doing. As an undergraduate at Ohio University in Athens, Marie was not sure what that would be, but she knew that it was not teaching, secretarial work, or nursing, the only professions usually open to women at the time. She finally majored in English and music, graduating in 1943. Marie Tharp often said that she owed her geology career to Pearl Harbor. After the Japanese attack on that Hawaiian military base launched the United States into World War II in 1941, young men flooded out of the universities and industry to join the armed forces. Desperate for science students who could take over jobs that the soldiers had left behind, many universities and university departments opened their doors to women for the first time. One of these was the geology department of the University of Michigan, which offered women students not only a degree but also a job with an oil company when they completed their course of study. Along with nine other young women, Tharp enrolled. Tharp graduated with a master’s degree in geology in 1944 and went to work for the Stanolind Oil and Gas Company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She found that, unlike male geology graduates, she was not allowed to go into the field. She was little more than a glorified clerk, sitting in an office and assembling data that the men sent. Even obtaining a second degree in mathematics from the University of Tulsa did not improve her position with the company. In 1948, the same year she earned her mathematics degree, Tharp left her oil company job and traveled to New York, hoping to obtain work as a researcher. One of the places Tharp visited was Columbia, which sent her to Maurice Ewing. Tharp explained to David Lawrence that the pioneer geologist “didn’t know quite what to do with” a woman with such an unusual background. “Finally he blurted out, ‘Can you draft [do precision or technical drawing]?’ ” When Tharp said

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she could (she had held a part-time drafting job at the University of Michigan), Ewing hired her as a research assistant.

A New Kind of Map At first, Marie Tharp assisted any graduate student in Ewing’s laboratory who asked for her help. Bruce Heezen was so impressed with her drawing, however, that he soon asked her to work only for him. They remained professional partners and close friends for the rest of Heezen’s life. Heezen and Tharp began the task that became their chief occupation, mapping the bottom of the world’s oceans, in 1952. Traditionally, seafloor maps—to the extent that they existed—had been issued as contour maps, showing the heights of different features. During the cold war era of the 1950s, however, the U.S. government concluded that contour maps of the ocean floor might be useful to Soviet submarines, so it classified all such maps, forbidding anyone to make or publish them. Prevented from making the standard type of map, Heezen decided instead to create physiographic maps, which would show ocean floors as they would look from above if all the water were removed. He drew a rough sketch of a physiographic map of the western North Atlantic as an example and asked Tharp to develop the idea more completely. Tharp told David Lawence that this form of map ultimately was a better choice than a contour map because “it allowed us to capture the sea floor’s many textured variations.” It also “allowed a much wider audience to visualize the sea floor” than would have been possible with contour maps. To make her map, Tharp first had to translate the tens of thousands of soundings (depth measurements) that Ewing, Heezen, and others had gathered for different parts of the North Atlantic into six transects, or cross sections, that ran from one side of the ocean to the other. Tharp and an assistant, Hester Haring, matched the soundings with the positions of the research ships at the time the soundings were taken, forming sections measuring one degree of latitude by one degree of longitude. They then made profiles of the seafloor in each section, all drawn to the same scale. Finally, after the profiles had been checked and sometimes redrawn, Tharp

THE WOUND THAT NEVER HEALS 59

arranged the sections in order from north to south and west to east, as if she were assembling the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The finished puzzles were the transects.

“It Cannot Be” As Tharp put her transects together, she noticed something strange: The northern part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge actually seemed to be two parallel ridges, with a long, narrow valley between. Although the V-shaped valley was less obvious in the southern part of the ridge, she could see it there as well—“as deep as the Grand Canyon, but much wider,” according to David Lawrence’s book. The valley reminded Tharp of a so-called rift valley that had been discovered in East Africa. When she showed her drawings to Bruce Heezen in 1953 and suggested that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge might have a rift valley, however, he rejected the idea. “I discounted it as girl talk and didn’t believe it for a year,” Heezen later told New Yorker science writer William Wertenbaker. Tharp recalled to David Lawrence that when she proposed the idea of an undersea rift valley to Heezen, he groaned, “It cannot be. It looks too much like continental drift.” Continental drift was a theory that German meteorologist (weather scientist) Alfred Wegener had first proposed in 1912. Wegener had claimed that Earth’s landmass was originally a single giant continent, which he called Pangaea (“all-Earth”). Pangaea had begun to break up about 200 million years ago, Wegener said. New oceans, including the Atlantic, formed between the separating pieces. The remains of that long-ago supercontinent—the present-day continents—were still drifting slowly through the planet’s crust, floating like icebergs in the sea of liquid rock that made up the Earth’s mantle. Wegener predicted that deep gashes, or rifts, in the crust would be found in places where the continents had separated from one another. Most geologists in the 1950s rejected Wegener’s theory. Their chief objection was that Wegener had not been able to explain what force could move the continents in the way he described or what would keep them from breaking up if they attempted to push through the seafloor.

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An Earth-Encircling Wound Even though Heezen had dismissed her suggestion, Marie Tharp was sure that the mid-Atlantic rift valley was real. Evidence to support her belief soon appeared, just a table away from her own. While Tharp had been assembling her transects, Bell Laboratories, the research division of the giant communications corporation, had asked Heezen to track breaks in transatlantic telephone and telegraph cables and compare this information with data about the epicenters of undersea earthquakes. The company was planning to lay new underwater cables, and it wanted to know how likely earthquakes were to damage them. Heezen assigned the earthquakemapping part of this task to Howard Foster, a graduate student, and told him to plot the quakes on the same distance scale that Tharp was using. Foster’s drafting table was next to Tharp’s, and one day in 1954 she noticed that Foster’s earthquake map was strikingly similar to her own map of the undersea rift valley. Furthermore, the map of cable breaks, drawn by another student, proved to match the first two. Seeing these overlaps finally convinced Heezen that Tharp had been right after all: The rift valley existed. Examining data from the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the eastern Pacific during 1955, Heezen, Ewing, and Tharp found evidence that chains of undersea mountains, split lengthwise by rift valleys torn by frequent earthquakes, existed in all these oceans. The earthquake belt in the Indian Ocean, furthermore, clearly joined the rift valley running down East Africa. That fact could mean only one thing, Tharp later told David Lawrence: “The mountain range with its central valley was more or less a continuous feature across the face of the earth.” About 40,000 miles (64,000 km) long and sometimes more than 500 miles (800 km) wide, with peaks up to 15,000 feet (4,545 m) high, snaking through every ocean like the curved seam on a baseball, this Mid-Ocean Ridge, as the group came to call it, proved to be the largest geological feature on the planet. Heezen now believed that the rift valley within the ridge was a crack in the Earth through which new crust was constantly being formed by volcanic activity that pushed hot lava up from the mantle layer beneath. He called the valley “the wound that never heals.”

THE WOUND THAT NEVER HEALS 61

Ewing first described the global ridge-and-rift system at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in 1956. Heezen presented the same conclusions during another meeting at Princeton University

German meteorologist (weather scientist) Alfred Wegener proposed in 1912 that all of Earth’s continents were once parts of a single landmass, Pangaea (“allEarth”), surrounded by a single ocean (Panthalassa, or “all-sea”), and later separated. Although geologists disproved parts of Wegener’s theory, known as continental drift, they accept the idea of a single ancient land mass. These drawings show stages in the breakup of Pangaea to form the continents that exist today.

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OTHER SCIENTISTS: ALFRED WEGENER (1880–1930) One of many reasons why geologists opposed Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift was that Wegener was not a geologist. Born on November 1, 1880, in Berlin, Germany, he had earned a Ph.D. in astronomy (in 1904) and had spent most of his working life as a meteorologist. He had written a highly regarded textbook about the atmosphere, but geologists did not see why that gave him a right to speculate about Earth’s past. Wegener did speculate, nonetheless, beginning around 1910. He noticed, as others had, that the east coast of South America looked as if it would fit into the west coast of Africa like two adjoining pieces of a puzzle. He read research stating that those two places contained fossils of the same animals, even though a broad stretch of the Atlantic Ocean lay between them. Based on these and other pieces of evidence, he concluded that these and the other continents had once been parts of a single landmass but had separated over the course of millions of years. He began lecturing about this idea, which came to be known as continental drift, in 1912. While recovering from a wound he received in battle during World War I, he wrote a book about his theory, Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (The Origin of Continents and Oceans). It was published in 1915 and reissued several times during the 1920s. Almost all geologists opposed Wegener’s theory, and Wegener did not live long enough to answer their objections. During an expedition to Greenland to study polar air currents in November 1930, he was caught in a snowstorm while attempting to bring food to stranded fellow scientists and froze to death. Without Wegener to argue for it, continental drift also seemed likely to freeze in the scorn of his scientific peers, but a few supporters, such as British geologist Arthur Holmes (1890–1965), kept it alive until a new generation of researchers began to discover unexpected evidence in its favor in the 1950s and 1960s.

in 1957. Geologists were stunned by this evidence that at least part of Wegener’s long-rejected theory must be right. After the Princeton meeting, Harry Hammond Hess, head of the university’s geology department, told Heezen, “Young man, you have shaken the foundations of geology!”

THE WOUND THAT NEVER HEALS 63

Works of Art Meanwhile, Heezen and Tharp continued their undersea mapping. Tharp prepared additional depth profiles for the North Atlantic, then made three-dimensional sketches of what the ocean floor would look like in the areas for which she had information. She and Heezen refined and revised the sketches, often several times. Once the two were as satisfied as they could be with the drawing for a particular area, they made a final chart. Bell Telephone Systems published Tharp and Heezen’s North Atlantic map in 1957, and the Geological Society of America reissued it for a wider audience two years later. The map, with its striking picture of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and rift valley taking up about a third of the seafloor, proved very popular. A second map, showing the South Atlantic, was published in 1961. This map showed that the shape of the undersea ridge lying between the coasts of East Africa and South America matched those

In the mid-1950s, Marie Tharp, Bruce Heezen, and Maurice Ewing showed that a single, more or less continuous system of mountains (ridges) and narrow rift valleys, which they called the Mid-Ocean Ridge, snakes through the floors of the world’s oceans like the seam on a baseball.

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other two “puzzle pieces” perfectly. The only possible explanation for three matching, parallel outlines seemed to be that all three had once been joined, just as Alfred Wegener had claimed. Tharp and Heezen completed their third map, showing the Indian Ocean, in 1964. Like the maps before it, this map was drawn in black and white, but the editors of National Geographic magazine decided that they wanted a version in color. They hired Heinrich Berann, an Austrian artist, to work with Heezen and Tharp to produce it. National Geographic published the full-color map in October 1967. During the next eight years, Tharp, Heezen, and Berann produced colored physiographic maps of the rest of the world’s oceans, all of which were printed by National Geographic. They finally assembled all their work into a single map, titled The World Ocean Floor, and National Geographic published this map in 1977. Marie Tharp told David Lawrence that The World Ocean Floor gave “scientists and the general public . . . their first relatively realistic image of a vast part of the planet that they could never see.” Lawrence himself feels that it did more than that. In an article in Mercator’s World, he wrote that the map “is a moving work of art that inspires in the viewer a sense of mystery and wonder, recalling the great explorers.”

More Than Mappers Although Bruce Heezen is best known for his mapping work with Marie Tharp, he was far more than just an undersea cartographer. He developed new equipment for deep-sea research, such as a device in which a camera, constructed to withstand great pressures, was combined with a corer, a tool for taking samples of seafloor sediment. He made numerous research trips to study turbidity currents, underwater “rivers” of sediment that shape the outer edges of continents. In 1971, with Charles D. Holloway, he wrote The Face of the Deep, a major work of descriptive geology that included hundreds of photos taken with cameras lowered from ships or attached to human-occupied or robotic submersibles. These photographs showed deep-sea animals in their natural habitat for the first time. The American Geographical Society awarded Heezen the Cullum Geographical Medal in 1973, and the

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American Geophysical Union gave him its Walter Bucher Medal in 1977. Heezen did not live to see the publication of the world map that he and Marie Tharp had worked on for so long. He had been a consultant for the navy on the development of deep-sea submersibles for some years, and early in 1977, just after he and Tharp had delivered the proofs of the world map to National Geographic, he boarded the NR-1, the navy’s first nuclear-powered research submarine, as part of an expedition to investigate the Reykjanes Ridge, off the coast of Iceland. Heezen died suddenly of a heart attack on June 21, 1977, while preparing to make a dive to explore the ridge. The navy honored Heezen in 1999 by naming an oceanic survey and research ship after him. Marie Tharp continued working for the Lamont Observatory until her retirement in 1983, after which she ran a private mapmaking and consultancy business from her home in South Nyack, New York. Always more protective of Bruce Heezen’s scientific reputation than her own, Tharp often did not receive the credit she deserved for her discovery of the rift valley in the MidAtlantic Ridge and her part in creating the physiographic maps of the seafloor. The Library of Congress made up for some of this past neglect in November 1997, however, when it honored Tharp as one of four people who had made major contributions to cartography. The library recognized her contributions again during 1998 as part of a celebration for the 100th anniversary of its Geography and Map Division. The Women’s Committee of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution gave Tharp its Women Pioneers in Oceanography Award in 1999, and the LamontDoherty Earth Observatory gave her its first Heritage Award in 2001 “for her life’s work as a pioneer of oceanography, and [as] a pioneering woman in a then very male field.” Heezen (posthumously) and Tharp were awarded the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal in 1978. More detailed and accurate maps of the seafloor than Tharp’s and Heezen’s exist today, but their maps provided the best codification of information about the geography of the ocean bottom that had been made up to that time. Those maps also provided new evidence for continental drift and inspired other scientists to investigate this once-discarded theory further. David Lawrence writes in

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Upheaval from the Abyss, “The World Ocean Floor map opened the eyes of scientists and the public, who have since viewed the earth in an entirely new way.”

Chronology 1912

German meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposes theory of continental drift

1920

Marie Tharp born in Ypsilanti, Michigan, on July 30

1924

Bruce Heezen born in Vinton, Iowa, on April 11

1943

Tharp earns B.A. in English and music from Ohio University

1944

Tharp earns M.A. in geology from University of Michigan Tharp begins working for Stanolind Oil and Gas Co. in Tulsa, Oklahoma

1947

Heezen becomes interested in undersea geology after hearing a lecture by Maurice Ewing

1948

Heezen graduates with B.A. in geology from University of Iowa Heezen goes on expedition with Maurice Ewing in the summer; acts as chief scientist for the later part of the expedition Tharp earns degree in mathematics from University of Tulsa Tharp leaves Stanolind and goes to New York to seek work as a researcher Ewing hires Tharp as a research assistant Ewing, Heezen, Tharp, and other scientists move into Lamont mansion and establish the Lamont Geological Observatory in December

1952

Heezen earns M.A. in geology from Columbia Heezen decides to create physiographic maps of the world’s ocean floors Tharp begins preparing transects (cross sections) of the North Atlantic

THE WOUND THAT NEVER HEALS 67

1953

Tharp suggests to Heezen that a rift valley lies along the center of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge; Heezen rejects the idea because it seems to support continental drift, a theory that most geologists of the time do not accept

1954

Tharp notices that almost all epicenters of undersea earthquakes are located within her proposed rift valley The earthquake evidence convinces Heezen of the rift valley’s existence

1955

Heezen, Ewing, and Tharp assemble evidence that a continuous ridge-and-valley system encircles the Earth, passing through every ocean

1956

Ewing describes the Mid-Ocean Ridge at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union

1957

Heezen presents the same information at a meeting in Princeton and is told that he has “shaken the foundations of geology” because the ridge’s existence provides convincing evidence for continental drift Heezen earns Ph.D. in geology from Columbia University Heezen and Tharp’s physiographic map of the North Atlantic first published

1959

Map of North Atlantic reissued for wider audience

1961

Map of South Atlantic published, showing clear relationships between shapes of Africa, South America, and Mid-Atlantic Ridge

1964

Indian Ocean map published

1967

National Geographic publishes color version of Indian Ocean map, painted by Austrian artist Heinrich Berann, in October

1971

Heezen and Charles D. Holloway write The Face of the Deep, containing photographs that show undersea life in its natural habitat for the first time

1977

Heezen dies of a heart attack during a submarine voyage to Iceland on June 21 National Geographic publishes Tharp, Heezen, and Berann’s color map of the world’s ocean floors

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1978

Heezen (posthumously) and Tharp are awarded the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal

1983

Tharp retires from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

1997

In November, the Library of Congress honors Tharp as one of four people who made major contributions to cartography

2001

Lamont-Doherty gives Tharp its first Heritage Award

Further Reading Books Charton, Barbara. A to Z of Marine Scientists. New York: Facts On File, 2003. Includes biographical sketches of Bruce Heezen, Marie Tharp, Maurice Ewing, and Alfred Wegener.

Heezen, Bruce C., and Charles D. Hollister. The Face of the Deep. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. A major work of descriptive geology, this book includes hundreds of photographs taken of the seafloor, revealing deepwater animals in their natural habitat for the first time.

Lawrence, David M. Upheaval from the Abyss: Ocean Floor Mapping and the Earth Science Revolution. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Describes mid-20th-century achievements in mapping the seafloor and shows how they led to the acceptance of plate tectonics as an explanation of the way Earth’s crust is formed and destroyed.

Wertenbaker, William. The Floor of the Sea: Maurice Ewing and the Search to Understand the Earth. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974. Focuses on Ewing’s work but also includes material on Heezen and Tharp.

Articles “A Brief Introduction to Plate Tectonics, Based on the Work of Alfred Wegener.” Eastern Illinois University. Available online. URL: http://

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www.ux1.eiu.edu/~cfjps/1300/cont_drift.html. Accessed December 5, 2005. Describes and illustrates the evidence that Alfred Wegener offered in 1915 to support his theory of continental drift, the ancestor of the theory now known as plate tectonics.

“Bruce C(harles) Heezen.” In Contemporary Authors Online. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2005. Brief biographical entry, followed by a list of Heezen’s writings and maps.

Ewing, Maurice, and Bruce C. Heezen. “Mid-Atlantic Ridge Seismic Belt.” Transactions of the American Geophysical Union 37 (1956): 343 ff. Scientific paper showing that the epicenters of earthquakes in the Atlantic Ocean lie along the center of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

Lawrence, David M. “Mountains under the Sea.” Mercator’s World 4 (November 1999): 36 ff. Focuses on Marie Tharp’s ocean maps and discovery of the rift valley within the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

Lippsett, Laurence. “Maurice Ewing and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.” Columbia Alumni Magazine, Winter 2001. Available online. URL: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/ Magazine/Winter2001/ewing.html. Accessed May 31, 2005. Long article describing Ewing’s career, inventions, and contributions to oceanography.

“Marie Tharp.” In Encyclopedia of World Biography. 2nd ed. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale Research, 1998, n.p. Summarizes Tharp’s life and achievements.

“Marie Tharp: Ocean Floor Mapping Pioneer.” The Earth Institute at Columbia University. Available online URL: http://www.earth institute.columbia.edu/library/TharpMapping.html. Accessed May 31, 2005. This site shows Heezen and Tharp’s North Atlantic and world seafloor maps as well as earlier and more recent maps of the same areas.

———. Available online. URL: http://www.earthinstitute.columbia. edu/library/MarieTharp.html. Accessed May 31, 2005. This page contains photographs of Tharp, Bruce Heezen, and others connected with Tharp’s work.

5 CREATION AND DESTRUCTION HARRY HESS AND PLATE TECTONICS

W

hen Harry Hess, then head of the geology department at Princeton University in New Jersey, heard Bruce Heezen describe the Mid-Ocean Ridge and its rift valley in 1957, Hess exclaimed, “Young man, you have shaken the foundations of geology!” In the years that followed, Hess himself became a leader in the process of rebuilding those foundations to provide a new theory of the way the Earth’s crust changes over time. That theory, plate tectonics, completely changed the way geologists view the planet.

Sounding out Mountains Harry Hammond Hess was born on May 24, 1906, in New York City and raised in Asbury Park, New Jersey. His parents, Julian and Elizabeth Hess, were fairly well off; his father was a member of the New York Stock Exchange. Hess entered Yale University in 1923. He majored in electrical engineering at first, then changed to geology. He graduated with a B.S. in that subject in 1927, then worked for two years as an exploration geologist for Anglo-American Mining in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). On returning to the United States, Hess began graduate studies at Princeton University, from which he earned a Ph.D. in 1932. He 70

CREATION AND DESTRUCTION 71

then taught for a year at Rutgers University, also in New Jersey, and did research for another year at the geophysical laboratory of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. In 1934, the same year he married Annette Burns, Hess joined the faculty of Princeton, where he remained for the rest of his life. He headed the university’s geology department from 1950 to 1966. Hess joined the Naval Reserve in 1934 as a lieutenant, junior grade. When World War II began, the navy put him to work in New York City, plotting the positions of German submarines. He disliked Harry Hess, head of the Princetone having a desk job, however, and University geology department asked to be sent to sea. In 1944, he from 1950 to 1966, proposed the theory of seafloor spreading, which became navigation officer of and, explains how Earth’s crust is creatlater, captain of Cape Johnson, a ed and destroyed beneath the ocean troop transport ship in the Pacific. floor. (Princeton University Library) Cape Johnson had a fathometer, or echo sounder, which measured the distance from the surface to the seafloor by sending sound waves down into the water and using acoustical equipment to record how long echoes of the sounds took to return. The device’s military purpose was to keep the ship from running aground in shallow water, but Hess kept the sounder running whenever the ship sailed, producing a continuous profile of the ocean floor. Among other things, he thereby obtained the first sounder survey of the ocean’s deepest point, the Mariana trench. In 1945, Hess’s sounder recordings helped him discover flattopped undersea mountains that he named guyots, after Arnold Henry Guyot (1807–84), Princeton’s first professor of geology. Hess concluded that the guyots were extinct volcanoes. Their flat tops suggested to him that the mountains had once risen above the ocean’s surface, where erosion could have worn their peaks away,

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yet the sounder placed them as much as 1.2 miles (2 km) below sea level. The guyots told Hess that the position of geological features in the ocean could change dramatically.

A Crustal Conveyor Belt Harry Hess continued to think about his guyots and about midocean ridges during his postwar years at Princeton. He noticed that the further away the guyots were from the Pacific’s ridge, which showed clearly in his wartime sound profiles, the deeper the mountains lay. After Hess heard Bruce Heezen describe the worldwide MidOcean Ridge and rift valley in 1957, Hess considered how this discovery might affect ideas about Earth’s development, especially Alfred Wegener’s universally criticized theory of continental drift. Geologists had rejected Wegener’s claim that the continents plowed through the solid seafloor. Around 1959, however, Hess drew on what he had learned about the guyots to reach a different conclusion: The floor itself was moving. Like Heezen and Maurice Ewing, Hess believed that the midocean rift valley is a weak spot in the Earth’s crust through which molten rock, or magma, boils up from the planet’s mantle. Hess suggested that convection currents in the mantle, like the currents that produce the rolling movement in boiling water, force the rock upward. As the rock hardens, Hess said, it pushes the existing seafloor apart, forming a ridge on either side of the rift. The ridge is usually in the middle of the ocean because the floor is pushed away at about the same rate on both sides. Heezen had seen a way for new crust to be created, but he could not imagine how crust could be destroyed. He therefore thought that Earth was slowly growing larger. Hess rejected this idea, proposing instead that the oldest seafloor sinks into the deep gashes called trenches and from there is absorbed into the mantle again. The crust thus is on a sort of conveyor belt that moves endlessly between the mantle and the planet’s surface, powered by rising and falling convection currents. Hess was the first scientist to describe a complete cycle for the seafloor’s movement.

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Hess’s conveyor belt theory answered geologists’ chief objection to continental drift. “The continents do not plow through oceanic crust impelled by unknown forces,” Hess wrote in “History of the Ocean Basins,” a formal description of his ideas published in 1962. “Rather, they ride passively on mantle material as it comes to the surface at the crest of the ridge and then moves laterally away from it.” The continents ride above the floor, Hess said, because they are

According to the theory of seafloor spreading, developed independently by Harry Hess and another geologist, Robert Dietz (who gave the theory its name), convection currents in the Earth’s mantle force the molten rock of the mantle upward into the crust through cracks in the seafloor at mid-ocean ridges. These currents, similar to the currents that produce the rolling motion in boiling water, are caused by uneven heating in the mantle. The solid rock of the crust’s outer layer, the lithosphere, is eventually pulled back into the mantle in ocean trenches.

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made of rocks that weigh less than the volcanic basalt that composes the sea bottom. Hess’s ideas also explained Maurice Ewing’s 1947 discovery that the layer of sediment above the seafloor in the Atlantic Ocean was much thinner than anyone expected and contained no fossils older than those of the Cretaceous Period, 144 to 65 million years ago, even though far older fossils had been found on land. Hess claimed that most of the seafloor was, in geologic terms, very young—200 to 300 million years old at the most. It therefore had not had time to accumulate a thick layer of sediment and fossils. Another geologist, Robert Dietz of the Office of Naval Research, thought of essentially the same idea as Hess. Dietz called his theory “seafloor spreading.” Hess is usually given more credit for the theory because he published it first, initially as a report to the Office of Naval Research in 1960, whereas Dietz did not publish his work until 1961. Dietz’s term, however, is commonly used for both theories.

Magnetic Flip-Flops Harry Hess called his seafloor spreading theory “an essay in geopoetry.” He offered little evidence to support it other than the position of the guyots. During the 1960s, however, proofs of Hess’s ideas accumulated from several different sources. One proof came through a study of magnetism in seafloor rocks. Some rocks, including volcanic basalt, contain crystals of the ironbearing mineral magnetite that align with the Earth’s magnetic field. In the early 20th century, scientists in France and Japan found evidence that during the geologic past, for unknown reasons, the planet’s magnetic field had reversed itself from time to time, sometimes centering on the South Pole instead of the North Pole. The magnetite crystals in volcanic rocks align themselves with the polarity that the field has at the time the rock forms. When the rock cools, that alignment becomes locked into place, forming what Robert Ballard, in The Eternal Darkness, calls “fossilized compass needles.” Sampling volcanic rocks on land that could be dated by other means, scientists in the early 1960s began to assemble a time line of past magnetic reversals.

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Magnetism in seafloor rocks can be detected without direct sampling by using a magnetometer, a device developed during World War II to locate enemy submarines. In 1955 and 1956, Ronald Mason and Arthur Raff of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, towed magnetometers behind research ships in the northeastern Pacific, off North America’s west coast. They found that rocks in the seafloor showed a pattern of magnetization in alternating directions, like stripes on a zebra. The stripes were offset along three known earthquake faults in the area and stopped at the continental shelves. Frederick Vine, a British geophysicist, heard about both seafloor spreading and what came to be called magnetic striping in 1962,

This diagram provides a closer look at seafloor spreading in a mid-oceanic ridge. Molten rock from the Earth’s mantle is forced upward to the surface of the crust at vents or fissures in the rift valley within the ridge. When the hot liquid rock contacts the icy ocean water, the rock solidifies, pushing away the seafloor on either side of it. As the seafloor moves away from the valley, it forms the mountains of the ridge.

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the year he graduated from Cambridge University. A year later, during his graduate work at the same university, Vine and his adviser, Drummond Matthews, found striping around the Carlsberg Ridge, in the Indian Ocean. The stripes ran parallel to the long axis of the ridge and formed mirror-image patterns on either side of it. In “Magnetic Anomalies over Oceanic Ridges,” a paper that appeared in Nature in September 1963, Vine and Matthews proposed a theory about the magnetic pattern that they said was consistent with, in fact virtually a corollary of, current ideas on ocean floor spreading and periodic reversals in the earth’s magnetic field. . . . If the main crustal layer . . . of the oceanic crust is formed over a convective up-current in the mantle at the centre of an oceanic ridge, it will be magnetized in the current direction of the earth’s field. . . . If spreading of the ocean floor occurs, blocks of alternatively normal and reversely magnetized material would drift away from the centre of the ridge and parallel to the crest of it.

The stripes match on either side of the ridge, Vine and Matthews said, because the rocks on both sides of the ridge are formed at the same times and places and pushed in opposite directions at about the same speed. Lawrence Morley, a Canadian geophysicist, independently developed a hypothesis similar to that of Vine and Matthews at about the same time, so the proposal of a relationship between seafloor spreading and magnetic striping became known as the VineMatthews-Morley hypothesis. Most geologists disbelieved the hypothesis at first because they were not yet sure that either magnetic reversal or seafloor spreading was real. However, different scientists, including several at Maurice Ewing’s Lamont Geological Observatory, soon found striping around other ridges. In 1965, the combination of a striking profile showing almost perfect symmetry around the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge, a more accurate magnetic reversal time line that correlated well with the striping patterns, and the finding of signs of magnetic reversals in deep-sea sediment convinced many researchers that the Vine-Matthews-Morley hypothesis was correct.

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Shaking up Geology A second line of support for seafloor spreading came from new information about undersea earthquakes. By the early 1960s, the epicenters of underwater quakes could be determined much more accurately than had been possible when Howard Foster made his map for Bruce Heezen a decade earlier. One scientist who studied undersea earthquakes, Canadian geophysicist J. Tuzo Wilson, proposed in 1965 that Earth’s crust is divided into large, rigid blocks that he called plates. He predicted three types of borders between plates: mid-ocean ridges between plates spreading

As early as the 1920s, scientists noticed that earthquakes are very common in some parts of the world but rare in others. This map shows the frequency of earthquakes in different parts of the world. The “earthquake zones” revealed on maps like this proved to outline the borders of the moving segments of the Earth’s crust, or plates, on which the continents ride. Evidence from the study of earthquakes helped to persuade geologists to accept the new theory of plate tectonics in the mid-1960s.

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SOCIAL IMPACT: THE MOVING EARTH SHAPES HUMAN LIFE An inch (2.54 cm) a year—the average speed of seafloor spreading and plate tectonic movement—might seem far too slow to have any impact within a human lifetime. Plate movements, however, have had major effects on human societies. The most obvious effects have come from natural disasters: volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis, the gigantic waves sometimes produced by undersea earthquakes. A tremendous (Richter 9.0) undersea quake in December 2004, for example, generated a tsunami more than 90 feet (27 m) high. The killer wave struck Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and nearby areas, wiping out coastal settlements and leaving an estimated 288,000 people dead or missing. California, Alaska, Japan, and many other land areas that lie on plate borders have suffered disastrous earthquakes. Areas prone to earthquakes often experience volcanic eruptions as well, since both earthquakes and volcanoes are signs of plates colliding or rubbing against one another. The plate borders around the Pacific Ocean have so many volcanoes that they are known as the “Ring of Fire.” Not all effects of plate tectonics are harmful. These earth movements also generate or bring to the surface many minerals on which technology depends. Most of the metals mined in the western United States, including gold, silver, copper, and lead, came from magma that leaked into a subduction zone. The fossil fuels—oil, natural gas, and coal—that most people count on for transportation, heating, and other uses also accumulate in geographical features formed by plate movements. The breakdown of volcanic rocks produces unusually fertile soil, which may explain why people have been willing to live near volcanoes that they know are active. Because plate tectonics can affect human life so strongly, the study of plate movements has many practical uses. It can help scientists predict when and where earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are likely to occur. It can help prospectors locate supplies of minerals, oil, and gas, as well as some forms of alternative energy, such as geothermal energy (produced by water that is warmed by the Earth’s internal heat). Above all, the study of plate tectonics helps scientists appreciate the Earth as a living, changing whole.

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apart, mountains or trenches between plates colliding head-on, and large earthquake faults moving horizontally between plates sliding past each other, a new type of fault that he called transform faults because they are transformed into either a ridge or a trench at their ends. Wilson predicted that earthquakes along a transform fault would be confined to the segment between the ridge and/ or trench at either end of the fault and that the plates on either side of the fault would be moving in opposite directions. Analyzing the earth movements in 12 quakes centered Jason Morgan of Princeton on undersea ridges, Lynn Sykes, a University provided the mathematiLamont researcher, showed later in cal underpinnings for the develop1965 that Wilson’s predictions were ing theory of plate tectonics in 1967 by showing how solid blocks would correct. Sykes also concluded that move and interact with one another the movements he saw were consis- on the surface of a sphere. (Trustees of Princeton University) tent with seafloor spreading. In the same year, Jack Oliver and Bryan Isacks, also working at Lamont, found evidence in data from deep earthquakes—those centered in the mantle rather than the crust—that a 60-mile-thick slab of crust was being pushed or pulled down into the mantle near the island of Tonga. This process, called subduction, was the end of the cycle that Harry Hess had described, destroying crust that seafloor spreading had created. Proof of subduction’s existence added greatly to support for Hess’s theory.

The Plate Tectonics Revolution Jason Morgan, a geologist who worked at Princeton near Hess and Frederick Vine (who had joined the Princeton faculty in 1965),

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put the pieces of the emerging understanding of the Earth together in 1967. Morgan approached crust movements as an exercise in geometry, determining how solid blocks (Wilson’s crustal plates) would move and interact with each other on a sphere. His work incorporated Tuzo Wilson’s transform faults as well as ridges and trenches. Dan McKenzie, a geophysicist from Vine’s former university, Cambridge, arrived at the same ideas around the same time. In early 1968, Lamont geologist Xavier Le Pichon used computer programs to compare Morgan’s predictions with what was known about magnetic striping, the earthquake data, and reconstruction of past plate motions. He found that the predictions and the data agreed. Morgan’s and Le Pichon’s work combined to provide a mathematical foundation for the new overarching theory of crust movement that was developing. That theory came to be known as plate tectonics, from tekton, a Greek word meaning “to build.” The plate tectonics theory holds that Earth’s crust is divided into seven large and about a dozen smaller plates. Islands and continents, made of relatively lightweight rock, are the parts of the plates that show above sea level. Impelled by convection currents in the mantle, gravity, and perhaps other forces that are still poorly understood, the plates move slowly around the Earth (and have done so ever since the planet’s crust was created). In some places they pull away from one another, and ridges of hot new seafloor are created as magma from the Earth’s mantle oozes into the gaps. Plates collide in other locations, either grinding against each other or sliding past one another. In some collisions, gravity drags one plate under another, sending its edge back into the mantle, while the edge of the other plate is pushed up, creating a mountain range. Earthquakes and volcanoes mark the edges of the plates, the spots where crust is violently created or destroyed. Papers presenting groundbreaking research on magnetic striping, earthquakes, and mathematical models of crust movement were presented at the 1966 and 1967 spring meetings of the American Geophysical Union and at a special symposium in November 1966. This cascade of evidence changed most earth scientists from doubters of plate tectonics to believers. “Some people think [these years were] the most remarkable period in the history of geology,”

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William Wertenbaker wrote in his 1974 book, The Floor of the Sea. By 1967, when Bryan Isacks, Jack Oliver, and Lynn Sykes published “Seismology and the New Global Tectonics,” an influential paper describing the new theory, almost everyone in the field had come to agree that this descendant of Alfred Wegener’s once-scorned theory of continental drift was essentially correct. Harry Hess’s theory of seafloor spreading, by then incorporated into plate tectonics, had been more than vindicated as well: At the 1967 meeting, Hess presided over a session on that topic for which more than 70 papers were submitted.

The theory of plate tectonics, an improved version of Wegener’s continental drift theory, became widely accepted in the mid-1960s. It states that the Earth’s crust is divided into seven large and about a dozen smaller plates, shown here. These plates are constantly in motion, pushed by currents and other forces in the mantle below. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur in places where plates collide or rub against one another.

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CONNECTIONS: TECTONICS

ON

OTHER PLANETS

A planet might seem to be better off if it had no plate tectonics. Its crust would not be ripped apart by earthquakes or erupting volcanoes, for instance. Scientists have concluded, however, that plate movement is what keeps the Earth “alive.” As far as researchers can tell, Earth is the only planet in the solar system that still has actively moving plates. To have moving plates and regenerating crust, a planet must have internal heat; the escape of this heat creates new seafloor and moves the plates. In the solar system’s early days, Mars, the Moon, and probably Mercury had enough internal heat to produce active volcanoes and perhaps moving plates. These bodies were too small to retain the heat, however, and they became inactive long ago. Venus may still be tectonically active, but scientists are not sure. The Pioneer Venus spacecraft detected large amounts of sulfur in the planet’s upper atmosphere in 1979, but the amount fell in later years, suggesting that a large volcanic eruption might have caused the high levels. Radar images of Venus made by the Magellan spacecraft in the 1990s showed features that looked like volcano chains and ocean trenches on Earth. No one can say whether they are really identical, however. Two moons of Jupiter, Io and Ganymede, show the most promising signs of being tectonically active. Voyager 1 detected volcanic eruptions on Io in 1979, and space scientists have speculated that large pools of boiling hot liquid sulfur exist there as well. Ganymede’s surface is broken into platelike blocks with cracks between them, but no one knows whether these plates are still actively moving. Even though Io and Ganymede are small, they may have a composition that would permit the convection currents that drive plate tectonics. Ganymede, for instance, may have a deep liquid ocean beneath its icy surface.

An Influential Career Unlike Alfred Wegener, Harry Hess lived to see his ideas accepted by the scientific community. He was honored for his theory of seafloor spreading and for his research on mountain ranges, island arcs, and several types of minerals. He received the Penrose Medal from

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the Geological Society of America in 1966, for example, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. President John F. Kennedy asked Hess to head the Space Science Board of the National Academy of Sciences, a group that advised the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in 1962. In this position, Hess helped to shape the United States space program during the 1960s, including humans’ first landing on the Moon. Hess died of a heart attack on August 25, 1969, a little more than a month after that great feat, during a meeting of the board at Woods Hole. NASA gave him a posthumous Distinguished Public Service Award. The revolution in geology that Hess helped to start has lived on. Science writers have compared the rise of plate tectonics in the mid1960s to the revolution in astronomy that occurred when scientists came to accept the theory of Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) that the Earth went around the Sun, or the one that took place in biology after British naturalist Charles Darwin (1809– 82) introduced the concept of evolution by natural selection. Plate tectonics offered, for the first time, a coherent explanation for most geologic events on the planet, from the rise of mountains and islands to destructive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. It also elevated oceanography by showing that the deep sea is both the cradle and the grave of all Earth’s landmasses. Above all, it showed, as the U.S. Geological Survey’s This Dynamic Earth quotes J. Tuzo Wilson as saying, that “the earth, instead of appearing as an inert statue, is a living, mobile thing.”

Chronology 1906

Harry Hammond Hess born in New York City on May 24

1927

Hess earns B.S. in geology from Yale University

1927–29

Hess works in Northern Rhodesia as an exploration geologist

1932

Hess earns Ph.D. in geology from Princeton University

1934

Hess joins faculty of Princeton

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1944

Hess becomes navigation officer of Cape Johnson and begins making continuous echo sounder profiles of the Pacific Ocean floor

1945

Hess discovers guyots, flat-topped undersea volcanoes

1950

Hess becomes head of Princeton geology department

1955–56

Ronald Mason and Arthur Raff find first evidence of magnetic striping around undersea ridges

1957

Hess hears Bruce Heezen describe the Mid-Ocean Ridge and rift valley

1959

Hess proposes theory later known as seafloor spreading

1960

Hess describes seafloor spreading theory in report to the Office of Naval Research

1962

Hess publishes “History of the Ocean Basins,” a formal explanation of seafloor spreading President John F. Kennedy asks Hess to head the Space Science Board of the National Academy of Sciences

1963

Frederick Vine, Drummond Matthews, and Lawrence Morley propose that magnetic striping is consistent with seafloor spreading

1965

Several lines of new evidence convince many geologists that the Vine-Matthews-Morley hypothesis is correct J. Tuzo Wilson proposes that Earth’s crust is divided into rigid plates, which meet at three types of boundaries Lynn Sykes confirms Wilson’s predictions about earthquake behavior at transform faults and concludes that the behavior is consistent with seafloor spreading Jack Oliver and Bryan Isacks find evidence of subduction in deep earthquakes off Tonga, confirming the destruction phase of Hess’s proposed cycle

1966

Important papers describing new research on magnetic striping, earthquakes, and other topics related to earth movement are presented at the spring meeting of the

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American Geophysical Union and at a special symposium in November Hess receives the Penrose Medal from Geological Society of America Jason Morgan proposes a geometrical model of plate activity, showing how solid blocks move on a sphere

1967

A paper by Isacks, Oliver, and Sykes presents the first complete scientific description of plate tectonics 1968

Xavier Le Pichon uses computer analysis to confirm Morgan’s model

1969

Hess dies of a heart attack on August 25

Further Reading Books Ballard, Robert D. The Eternal Darkness: A Personal History of Deep-Sea Exploration. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Contains material on the development of plate tectonics.

Kious, W. Jacqueline, and Robert I. Tilling. This Dynamic Earth: The Story of Plate Tectonics. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Geological Survey, 1996. Available online. URL: http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/ dynamic. Accessed June 6, 2005. Describes and illustrates the theory of plate tectonics, including the history of the theory’s development and the effects of plate movement on human society.

Lawrence, David M. Upheaval from the Abyss: Ocean Floor Mapping and the Earth Science Revolution. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Describes the accumulation of evidence that inspired the theory of plate tectonics and persuaded geologists to accept it in the 1960s. Includes material on Harry Hess and seafloor spreading.

Wertenbaker, William. The Floor of the Sea: Maurice Ewing and the Search to Understand the Earth. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974.

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Describes the discoveries that led to the acceptance of plate tectonics in the late 1960s.

Articles Archibald, Erika. “A Time of Revolution.” Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine, Winter 1998, n.p. Available online. URL: http:// gtalumni.org/Publications/magazine/win98/earthsci.html. Accessed June 5, 2005. Describes Princeton geophysicist Jason Morgan’s contribution to plate tectonics, a mathematical theory showing how rigid blocks (the plates that make up Earth’s crust) would move on a sphere.

Clark, Robert Dean. “J. Tuzo Wilson.” Society of Exploration Geophysicists, Virtual Geoscience Center. Available online. URL: http://www.mssu.edu/seg-vm/bio_j_tuzo_wilson.html. Accessed June 5, 2003. Extensive biographical sketch on Wilson, whose ideas about transform faults and striped patterns in the magnetism of undersea rocks contributed to the theory of plate tectonics.

Hamilton, Warren. “Plate Tectonics—Its Influence on Man.” California Geology 31 (October 1978): n.p. Available online. URL: http://www.johnmartin.com/earthquakes/eqpapers/00000037. htm. Accessed June 5, 2005. Describes concepts and development of plate tectonics theory and its effects on human society, for instance through deposition of valuable minerals and fossil fuels and, more negatively, through earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

“Harry Hammond Hess.” In Notable Scientists: From 1900 to the Present. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale Group, 2001, n.p. Concise but complete biographical sketch of Hess and description of his work.

Hess, Harry Hammond. “History of the Ocean Basins.” In Petrologic Studies: A Volume to Honor A. F. Buddington, edited by A. E. J. Engel, H. L. James, and B. F. Leonard, 599–620. New York: Geological Society of America, 1962. Hess’s scientific description of his theory of seafloor spreading.

Isacks, Bryan, Jack Oliver, and Lynn Sykes. “Seismology and the New Global Tectonics.” Journal of Geophysical Research 73 (September 1967): 5,855–5,899. First complete scientific summary of the theory of plate tectonics.

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Vine, F. J., and D. H. Matthews. “Magnetic Anomalies over Oceanic Ridges.” Nature 199 (September 1963): 947–949. Scientific paper showing how the existence of “stripes” of rock with different magnetic alignments on the seafloor supports the theory of seafloor spreading.

Web Sites “Ring of Fire,” Plate Tectonics, Sea-Floor Spreading, Subduction Zones, “Hot Spots.” U.S. Geological Survey. Available online. URL: http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Glossary/PlateTectonics/description_ plate_tectonics.html. Accessed July 22, 2005. A series of maps and brief descriptions on these topics.

The Story of Plate Tectonics. URL: http://www.platetectonics.com. Accessed July 22, 2005. This site includes a description of plate tectonics, an archive of articles and a book on the subject, and the Marie Tharp–Bruce Heezen maps of the ocean floor.

6 RIVERS OF THE DEEP HENRY STOMMEL AND OCEAN CURRENTS

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urrents, winds, tides, and other forces make the surface of the sea a complex pattern of moving water. Until the middle of the 20th century, however, most scientists believed that the deep sea was a quiet, changeless place, free of the currents that swirled through the oceans’ upper waters. The person who, perhaps more than any other, changed that picture was oceanographer Henry Stommel. Stommel worked out the behavior of major surface currents such as the Gulf Stream, mapped currents in the deep sea for the first time, and showed how currents constantly cycle ocean water between warm and cold, surface and deep, around the world. Scientists building on his work have shown important—and possibly dangerous—interactions between ocean currents and climate.

A Noisy Childhood Henry Melson Stommel was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on September 27, 1920, but his father, Walter Stommel, a German-born chemist, and his mother, the former Marian Melson, took him to Sweden as an infant. Mrs. Stommel disliked living there, so she left her husband and moved back to the United States in 1925. Henry and his younger sister, Anne, born soon after the family’s return, grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Their household included their mother, a divorced aunt and the aunt’s daughter, a grandmother, and a great-grandmother, a group that Stommel, in an autobiographical 88

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sketch published in his Collected Works, called “a bedlam of hot-tempered . . . contentious women.” He escaped the constant family arguments by talking to his grandfather, the only other male in the household, and reading about science. Stommel obtained a scholarship to go to Yale University, from which he earned a B.S. in 1942. After considering several possible careers, including ministry and the law, he began graduate work in astronomy. World War Henry Stommel worked out the patterns of the ocean’s major surface and II was then underway, however, deepwater currents between the late and he had no time to complete 1940s and the 1970s. (Woods Hole an advanced degree. A pacifist, Oceanographic Institution) Stommel registered as a conscientious objector and was assigned to teach analytic geometry and navigation to navy students instead of serving in the military. In 1944, Stommel joined the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, as a research associate. With Maurice Ewing, later head of Columbia University’s influential Lamont Geological Observatory (now part of the Earth Institute), Stommel improved sonar, the use of underwater sound to detect submarines. Stommel wrote in A View of the Sea that his wartime work at WHOI made him “so interested in the ocean that I decided to stay on” at the institution. He was especially interested in physical oceanography, the study of the physical properties of the sea. He married Elizabeth (“Chickie”) Brown in 1950, and they later had three children.

Whirling Waters Henry Stommel’s work at WHOI focused on ocean currents, streams of moving water within the sea. In the late 1940s, when

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he began his study, several major surface currents were known, including the Gulf Stream, which carries warm water north along the southeastern coast of North America and then turns eastward

The Gulf Stream, a swift, narrow surface current of warm water once called “a river in the ocean,” flows northward along the southeastern United States from the southern tip of Florida to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. It then turns east and flows across the Atlantic, where its waters contribute heat to western Europe.

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across the Atlantic, and the Kuroshio Current, which flows north along the western edge of the Pacific, passing the coasts of Japan and Siberia.

The combination of wind, friction, and the Coriolis force, an effect of Earth’s rotation, makes the surface waters of the ocean flow in great circles called gyres. This map shows the North Atlantic Gyre, which consists of the Gulf Stream, the North Atlantic Current, the Canary Current, and the North Equatorial Current. Westerly winds in the north and trade winds in the south help to drive this gyre. Like all gyres in the Northern Hemisphere, the North Atlantic Gyre flows clockwise; gyres flow counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.

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Since the late 19th century, scientists had recognized that the chief drivers of surface currents are winds and the rotation of the Earth. Trade winds near the equator push seawater westward, while westerly winds in the midlatitudes push it east. The planet’s turning on its axis creates an effect called the Coriolis force, which deflects wind and water to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern. The combination of these forces would push water toward the center of the ocean, but they are partly offset by the effects of the Sun’s heat, which makes water near the equator expand and produces a small rise in sea level there. Gravity pushes water away from this “hill,” making the water flow in a circle instead of moving toward the center. The result is great water movements called gyres, which whirl clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern. The best-known surface currents run along the edges of these gyres. In 1946, a WHOI colleague drew Stommel’s attention to a major mystery concerning surface currents. Currents on the western boundaries of gyres, such as the Gulf Stream and the Kuroshio Current, were known to be narrow and swift, but currents on the gyres’ east sides were wide and slow. No one had been able to explain why this difference exists. Attempting to solve this puzzle, Stommel used a simple mathematical model to analyze the movement of the currents, a technique he pioneered. His model showed how the Earth’s rotation, wind, and the friction (drag) of continental borders against water interact to create surface currents.

Explaining Surface Currents Stommel first examined the Gulf Stream, one of the most famous surface currents. Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) had studied this current and produced a map of it in 1770. In the mid-19th century, U.S. oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806–73) called the Gulf Stream a “river in the ocean” and wrote, “There is in the world no other such majestic flow of waters.” Scientists in the 1940s knew that the Gulf Stream marks the western boundary of the North Atlantic gyre. Stommel described the motion of the Gulf Stream and other wind-driven surface currents in a key paper, “The Westward

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Intensification of Wind-Driven Currents,” published in 1948. In a biographical memoir of Stommel in the collection of the National Academy of Sciences, Carl Wunsch, who knew Stommel later in that scientist’s career, says that this paper “marked the birth of dynamical oceanography”—the mathematical study of currents and other movements of ocean water. In this landmark paper, Stommel concluded that the effect of the Earth’s rotation on surface currents is different at different latitudes. The closer to the North Pole or South Pole a rotating column of water is, the more nearly parallel the axis of the water column (which is always perpendicular to the Earth’s surface) will be to the axis of the Earth, and the stronger the effect of the Coriolis force will therefore be. The total spin, or vorticity, of a water column comes from two factors, relative vorticity and planetary vorticity, Stommel wrote. Wind and friction combine to create relative vorticity. Planetary vorticity, which causes the Coriolis force, derives from the Earth’s rotation. Laws of physics state that the column’s total vorticity remains the same, no matter where on Earth the water is. If the planetary vorticity changes because of a change in latitude, therefore, the relative vorticity must also change by the same amount, but in the opposite direction. Stommel claimed that as water moves north along the west side of a gyre in the Northern Hemisphere, the water gains planetary vorticity, which pushes it counterclockwise. In order to keep its total vorticity the same, it must also gain relative vorticity, which pushes it clockwise. If some force did not offset these gains, the water in the western part of the gyre would spin faster and faster, causing something like a whirlpool or the oceanic equivalent of a tornado. This balancing force, according to Stommel, comes from the friction produced as seawater rubs against the edges of the continents. The faster the water moves, the more friction is created. Because a large amount of friction is needed to balance the other forces, currents on the western side of gyres, such as the Gulf Stream, must flow swiftly. Water moving south along the east side of a gyre, by contrast, loses planetary vorticity as it approaches the equator (where the planetary vorticity is zero). To conserve total vorticity, the current must also lose opposing relative vorticity. The combination of these forces slows the current.

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Opposing Flows Important as they are, currents such as the Gulf Stream affect only about 10 percent of the water in the sea—the portion extending down to about 1,320 feet (400 m) below the surface. In the 1950s, Stommel turned his attention to deepwater currents, which drive the rest of the ocean’s water. At the time he began his studies, most oceanographers doubted that deep-sea currents even existed. Researchers had found that a thin layer of water called the thermocline, in which temperature falls rapidly, exists just beneath the part of the ocean affected by surface currents. The fact that temperature changes abruptly in this way, rather than falling smoothly as depth increases, suggested to Stommel that some force must “prop up” the thermocline. That force, he concluded, was cold water rising up from the deep sea. Applying the ideas about vorticity that he had worked out in his 1948 paper, Stommel stated that rising upward through the ocean is like moving toward the equator in that both movements take water farther from Earth’s spin axis and thereby decrease its planetary vorticity. To keep overall vorticity the same, deep water has to counteract this effect on planetary vorticity by moving away from the equator. Relative vorticity would have little effect on such movement because winds do not reach deep water, and most ocean water is not in contact with the continents and therefore does not experience friction. Stommel drew on this theory to predict in 1955 that a current of cold water, following the same path as the Gulf Stream but moving in the opposite direction, would be found beneath the stream. At about the same time, John Swallow, a British researcher, invented a type of float that could be made to stay at a particular depth in the sea by adjusting the float’s density, which determines how far an object will sink. As the float drifted in whatever currents prevailed at the chosen depth, it made sounds that a following ship could detect and use to determine the speed and direction of the float’s movement. Swallow and Stommel joined forces in March 1957 to test Stommel’s prediction. Following the course of the Gulf Stream along the southeastern United States, Swallow lowered his floats to a level well below the depth affected by the stream. Just as Stommel

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Henry Stommel worked out the details of the thermohaline circulation, which moves the water of the world’s oceans on an endless “conveyor belt” between cold, salty, deep currents and warm, less salty currents near the surface.

had said, Swallow found that most of his floats moved southward at a relatively high rate of speed. Deep currents flowing toward the equator were later found along the western margins of ocean basins all over the world. Stommel described his ideas about the Gulf Stream and related currents in The Gulf Stream: A Physical and Dynamical Description, published in 1958. Carl Wunsch calls this book “probably the first true dynamical discussion of the ocean circulation.”

The Great Conveyor Belt Stommel left Woods Hole in 1959 because of disagreements with WHOI’s director, Paul Fye. Stommel taught oceanography at Harvard University for four years beginning in 1960, but he was not happy there. He wrote in the autobiographical essay in his Collected Works that he felt out of place and believed that other Harvard pro-

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fessors looked down on him because he did not have an advanced degree. In 1963, he transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he remained as a professor of physical oceanography in the Department of Meteorology until 1978. Stommel expanded on his theory of circulation between shallow and deep water during the 1960s. He concluded that density is at least as important as planetary vorticity in determining that circulation. The density of seawater is determined by the water’s temperature and its salinity, or the amount of salt and other dissolved inorganic chemicals that the water contains. The more of these chemicals a given volume of water holds, the more saline the water is. Cold water is denser than warm water, and more saline water is denser than less saline water. The denser water is, the heavier it is, so gravity will always make dense water sink below less dense water. Using these ideas, Stommel developed a description of what came to be called the thermohaline circulation, from Latin words meaning “heat” and “salt.” The most important thermohaline current, as worked out by Stommel and others, has been called “the great conveyor belt” because it endlessly cycles ocean water between the warm surface and the chilly depths and between the poles and the equator. The warm, salty water of the Gulf Stream starts its downward journey on the conveyor belt off the coast of Greenland, north of Iceland, in the Norwegian Sea. Icy west winds suck up heat from this surface water, making the water denser. The combination of cold and salinity make the water so dense that it sinks clear to the ocean floor. Eventually this cold, salty water fills the Greenland and Norwegian basins and overflows their sill, an undersea ridge connecting Greenland, Iceland, and Scotland. The water pours down into the Atlantic floor and begins a long journey south. This water, combined with other cold water from the Labrador Sea and swirls of warm, extremely salty water from the Mediterranean Sea, becomes known as the North Atlantic Deep Water. It continues past the equator and on into the South Atlantic. At the bottom of South America, the water is swept eastward into the Southern Ocean, where it is churned by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. The bulk of it, joined by the even colder

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Antarctic Bottom Water, passes below Australia and then moves north into the Pacific. Near the equator, the warm trade winds heat the water, making it expand and become less dense, and it rises to the surface. Passing among the many islands of Indonesia, the water, now part of a warm surface current, eventually reaches the Indian Ocean and heads westward toward Africa, collecting salt from the hot, shallow Arabian Sea on its way. It moves south past the island of Mozambique and the southeast coast of Africa, picking up speed. Continuing west past the Cape of Good Hope, the southernmost part of Africa, the warm current begins to turn north, working its way up the coasts of Brazil and Venezuela into the Caribbean Sea. Near Florida it once again becomes known as the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream continues its journey until it reaches the chilly latitudes from which it began, then sinks once more to start its migration all over. The water’s complete journey takes about a thousand years.

Global and Local Studies Henry Stommel always remembered fondly his early years as a seagoing oceanographer, in which he and other scientists invented most of their own equipment—what Carl Wunsch calls the “strings-andsealing-wax school of oceanography.” Nonetheless, as Stommel’s career advanced, he gained increasing respect for the computers and complex electronic devices that allowed scientists to obtain much more extensive and accurate data about the sea than had been possible with the old methods. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Stommel encouraged and sometimes organized large, international observational programs that used cutting-edge technology to test his theories and those of other scientists about water circulation in the world’s oceans. These included the Geochemical Sections Program (GEOSECS), the U.S.-British MidOcean Dynamics Experiments (MODE), and POLYMODE, a followup program carried out by the United States and the Soviet Union. Stommel’s own research during this period, by contrast, focused on circulation in particular places, such as the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea.

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SOCIAL IMPACT: GLOBAL WARMING

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OCEAN CIRCULATION

In the late 1950s, Henry Stommel performed an experiment that showed that if a container filled with warm, salty water was connected to one full of cold, less salty water, circulation between the two reservoirs could settle into either of two opposing patterns: It could flow either from salty to less salty or from cold to warm. Oceanographers have found evidence that the thermohaline circulation can do the same. The oceanic conveyor belt has, in fact, changed direction or even stopped entirely many times in the geologic past, and these changes have been associated with abrupt shifts in climate. Most scientists today agree that an increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) and certain other gases in the atmosphere, caused chiefly by human burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, is making the Earth warmer. Such heating can melt glaciers, causing a great increase in the amount of freshwater pouring into the Atlantic. Global warming can also make waters in tropical seas such as the Indian Ocean even warmer than normal, preventing them from sinking. Wallace S. Broecker of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, the physical oceanographer who first used the term “conveyor belt” for the worldwide thermohaline circulation, believes that these changes could stall the thermohaline circulation or make it change its direction of flow. The result, he says, could be a sudden large alteration in Earth’s climate—perhaps even a new ice age. “My . . . research shows that over the past tens of thousands of years the earth has been highly responsive to small nudges,” Broecker wrote in a 2004 letter to the Financial Times. The predicted rise in carbon dioxide levels, he said, “promises a large nudge.” By adding CO2 to the atmosphere, he warned, humans are “poking an angry beast” that might strike back in unexpected, terrible ways. Supporting Broecker’s theory, a group of British scientists announced in December 2005 that they had found evidence that the Gulf Stream and other thermohaline currents are weakening.

All these studies made Stommel and other physical oceanographers conclude that ocean circulation was much more complex and changeable than they had once believed. They found that, in addi-

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tion to large, permanent patterns such as the surface gyres and the thermohaline currents, oceans possess eddies, circling mini-currents with diameters of 10–100 miles (16–161 km). Eddies are long-lasting but not permanent, something like local weather systems in the atmosphere. Finer details of ocean circulation proved to change easily, often, and sometimes drastically with time, just as atmospheric weather changes from day to day.

Wide-Ranging Investigations Henry Stommel returned to WHOI in 1978, as soon as Paul Fye retired, and he continued to work there until his own death from a heart attack in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on January 17, 1992. In the early 1980s, Stommel and two other scientists developed an improved mathematical model of the liquid ocean’s structure. Stommel also produced a mathematical model to explain why ocean temperature and salinity are so closely related, a question that had puzzled him all his life. Although Stommel was best known for his work on ocean currents, he investigated almost every aspect of physical oceanography during his long career. For example, he studied cumulus clouds, tides, and the distribution of plankton, the tiny, floating plants and animals that provide the main food source for larger animals in the sea. Stommel received several prestigious awards for his work, including the National Medal of Science in 1989 and a share of the Crafoord Prize in 1983. The Crafoord Prize, which the Royal Swedish Academy awards to scientists working in fields not eligible for Nobel Prizes, is held to be the equivalent of a Nobel. Stommel also won the Agassiz Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, the Rosenstiel Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Sverdrup Gold Medal from the American Meteorological Society, and the Bigelow Medal from WHOI. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1959, the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1977, and the Royal Society of London in 1983. In his biographical memoir, Carl Wunsch calls Stommel “probably the most original and important physical oceanographer of all time.”

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Chronology 1920

Henry Melson Stommel born in Wilmington, Delaware, on September 27

1942

Stommel earns B.S. from Yale University

1942–44

Stommel teaches analytical geometry and navigation to navy students

1944

Stommel becomes a research associate at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)

1944–45

With Maurice Ewing, Stommel improves use of underwater sound to detect submarines

1946

Stommel begins considering movement of major surface currents in the ocean

1948

Stommel publishes paper explaining why the Gulf Stream and other wind-driven surface currents on the western side of gyres are narrower and move faster than currents on the eastern side of gyres

1955

Stommel predicts that a deep current will be found to lie beneath the Gulf Stream and flow in a direction opposite to that of the stream British oceanographer John Swallow invents a float that can be made to stay at a particular depth in the ocean and can be used to determine the speed and direction of currents at that depth

1957

In March, during a cruise following the Gulf Stream along the southeastern border of the United States, Stommel and Swallow test and verify Stommel’s prediction about a deep current underlying the stream

1958

Stommel publishes The Gulf Stream: A Physical and Dynamical Description, which describes how the Gulf Stream and other surface currents interact with deepwater currents

1959

Stommel leaves WHOI because of disputes with the institution’s director

1960–63

Stommel teaches oceanography at Harvard University

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1963–78

Stommel teaches physical oceanography at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

1960s, 1970s

Stommel develops theory of thermohaline circulation, including the “great conveyor belt,” early in the 1960s Stommel supports and sometimes organizes international scientific expeditions to study ocean circulation worldwide Stommel studies local currents in the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and elsewhere

1978

Stommel returns to WHOI

1980s

With two other scientists, Stommel develops an improved mathematical model of the liquid ocean’s structure early in the decade Stommel produces a mathematical model to explain why ocean temperature and salinity are closely related

1983

Stommel wins a share of the Crafoord Prize

1989

Stommel wins National Medal of Science

1992

Stommel dies of a heart attack in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on January 17

Further Reading Books Hogg, N. G., and R. X. Huang, eds. Collected Works of Henry Stommel. 3 vols. Boston: American Meteorological Society, 1996. Includes an extensive autobiographical essay by Stommel as well as his major writings, with introductions by other scientists.

Kunzig, Robert. Mapping the Deep: The Extraordinary Story of Ocean Science. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. Contains a chapter on Henry Stommel and the circulation of warm and cold seawater by means of surface and deep ocean currents.

Stommel, Henry. The Gulf Stream: A Physical and Dynamical Description. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958. Scientific explanation of the movement of the Gulf Stream and other major ocean currents.

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———. A View of the Sea. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987. Description of ocean surface circulation for nonscientists, set up as a conversation between an oceanographer (Stommel) and a fictional chief engineer on a research ship.

Articles Broecker, Wallace. “Think Ahead or We Risk Disaster.” Financial Times, November 22, 2004, p. 16. A professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute warns that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide could drastically alter the Earth’s climate by making the oceanic thermohaline circulation stop or reverse direction.

“Henry Stommel.” In Notable Scientists: From 1900 to the Present. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale Group, 2001, n.p. Short description of Stommel’s life and work.

Kunzig, Robert. “In Deep Water.” Discover 17 (December 1996): 86–96. Describes the thermohaline circulation and explains why scientists such as Wallace Broecker think that increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases might alter this circulation, producing a possible new ice age.

Stommel, Henry. “The Westward Intensification of Wind-Driven Currents.” Transactions of the American Geophysical Union 29 (1948): 202–206. Stommel’s first major scientific paper, which explains why the Gulf Stream and other surface currents on the west sides of ocean basins are narrower and move faster than currents on the east sides.

Wunsch, Carl. “Henry Stommel, September 27, 1920–January 17, 1992.” National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs. Available online. URL: http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/ biomems/hstommel.html. Accessed June 8, 2005. Detailed biographical profile of Stommel and his work, including a chronological list of his writings.

Yocum, Thomas. “The Gulf Stream: A River in the Ocean.” CoastalGuide. Available online. URL: http://coastalguide.com/ bearings/gulfstream.shtml. Accessed July 27, 2005. Provides background on the behavior of the Gulf Stream and the history of humans’ interactions with it.

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Web Sites Ocean Currents and Climate. University of Southern California. URL: http://earth.usc.edu/~stott/Catalina/Oceans.html. Accessed July 27, 2005. Clear, simple explanation of the world ocean circulation, the forces that drive it, and its interaction with the atmosphere. Illustrated with many diagrams.

Ocean Currents. Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. URL: http://fermi.jhuapl.edu/student/currents. Accessed July 27, 2005. For students and teachers. Describes and diagrams the Gulf Stream, the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt (thermohaline circulation), and Mediterranean currents.

7 FLYING THROUGH THE SEA ALLYN VINE AND ALVIN

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he submersible Alvin has been said to look like a white bathtub toy or Little Toot, the tugboat “hero” of a popular children’s story. Unimpressive as its appearance may be, this little vessel, so maneuverable that its pilots speak of flying it like a plane, has taken part in some of the greatest adventures and discoveries in late 20thcentury marine science. Passengers in Alvin have helped to recover a lost hydrogen bomb, collected conclusive evidence to support the theory of plate tectonics, explored the remains of the famed ocean liner RMS Titanic, and discovered bizarre life-forms that seem like creatures from another planet. Alvin, in turn, owes not only its name but also its existence to physical oceanographer and physicist Allyn Vine.

Sound beneath the Sea Allyn Collins Vine was born on June 1, 1914, in Garrettsville, Ohio, to Lulu Collins and Elmer Vine, a butcher. As a teenager, Vine built inventions from materials he scavenged from a nearby telephone company’s trash pile. He obtained a B.S. in physics from Hiram College, a small college in nearby Hiram, Ohio, in 1936, then earned a master’s degree in geophysics from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1940. (Lehigh also awarded him an 104

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honorary doctorate in 1973.) At Hiram College he met his future wife, Adelaide Holton. Vine’s adviser at Lehigh was Maurice Ewing, who later headed Columbia University’s Lamont Geological Observatory (now part of the Earth Institute), a leading center of oceanographic and geological research. During summers in the late 1930s, Vine accompanied Ewing on cruises aboard the Atlantis, a research vessel owned by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Vine joined the Allyn Vine was the “father” of the world’s best-known humanWHOI staff in 1940. operated research submersible, Vine’s first specialty was using Alvin. (Woods Hole Oceanographic sound to map the seafloor. During Institution) World War II, he applied this expertise to help the U.S. Navy exploit a relationship between sound transmission and ocean temperature. Vine and Ewing redesigned the bathythermograph, a device that continuously measures water temperature as it moves through different depths. Their improvements made the device both more accurate and usable by submarines and surface ships in motion. Submarines used the bathythermograph to locate thermoclines, layers of temperature change in the ocean. Surface ships spotted enemy submarines by employing sonar (sound navigation and ranging), in which sound waves are sent into the sea and their echoes analyzed, but sound waves bounce off thermoclines as if the thermoclines were solid objects. A submarine “hiding” beneath a thermocline thus cannot be detected by sonar. The improved bathythermograph also helped submariners determine the amount of ballast (extra weight) that they would need to remain at a given depth, which made submarines safer. In 1972, the navy awarded Vine a Navy Oceanographer’s Commendation for his bathythermograph work, saying that Vine’s inventiveness had

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resulted in “the saving of untold numbers of lives and millions of dollars in ships and equipment.” After the war ended, Vine worked part time for the navy until about 1950 (though his chief employer was WHOI) and often acted as a consultant after that. He devised so many pieces of oceanographic equipment and improvements in ship design that, according to Victoria A. Kaharl’s Water Baby: The Story of Alvin, “a naval officer once said about a third of the research the navy sponsored after the war sprang from a Vine idea.” Some of the ideas seemed strange, but Lamar Worzel, a friend of Vine’s, said after Vine’s death in 1994, “What seemed outrageous initially, usually turned out to be highly successful when actually accomplished.”

The Seapup Allyn Vine’s experience with submarines convinced him that a submarine or submarine-like craft—a submersible—would be ideal for oceanographic research. Wartime submarines had lacked viewports for safety reasons, but peacetime vessels would not need such protection, Vine noted. In a submarine with windows, human beings could observe the deep sea’s geological formations and living things directly. “A good instrument can measure almost anything better than a person can if you know what you want to measure,” Vine told a meeting of ocean scientists in Washington, D.C., on February 29, 1956, “but people are so versatile, they can sense things to be done and can investigate problems.” The silence that met Vine’s statement suggested that most of his audience did not agree. Vine soon found supporters for his ideas, however, among the men working with Jacques and Auguste Piccard’s bathyscaphe, Trieste. Vine was impressed by the bathyscaphe when the Office of Naval Research (ONR) sent him to observe its test dives in Italy in 1957, and he urged the ONR to buy it. He also saw the craft’s limitations, however: The bathyscaphe could go far deeper than any other vessel, but its viewports were small, and it had almost no ability to move from side to side. Both Donald Walsh, the officer that the navy put in charge of the bathyscaphe after buying it in 1958, and Andreas Rechnitzer, the bathyscaphe project’s chief

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scientist, told Vine that they would like to have a smaller, more maneuverable submersible with larger windows. Harold “Bud” Froehlich, the engineer in charge of building a mechanical arm for the Trieste, also liked the idea of a small submersible. Froehlich worked for General Mills, a large Minnesota corporation. The company was best known for making breakfast cereals, but it also had an engineering division that designed and manufactured complex equipment. After talking with Vine, Rechnitzer, and Walsh about what features an ideal scientific submersible would have, Froehlich sketched a design around 1958 for a craft he called Seapup. Seapup, he proposed, would have a steel passenger sphere, much like William Beebe’s bathysphere or the pressure sphere of Piccard’s bathyscaphe, encased in a hull tapered at both ends, like a fish. The whole vessel would be only about 18 feet (5.5 m) long. It would be able to go deeper than a conventional submarine, though not as deep as a bathyscaphe, and could travel underwater for relatively long distances.

Building a Submersible Early in 1962, Froehlich tried to interest Charles B. “Swede” Momsen, the head of ONR, in building the Seapup. Momsen had already considered a proposal for a larger submersible, the Aluminaut, offered by J. Louis Reynolds of the Reynolds Metal Company (later Reynolds Aluminum). In order to obtain navy funds to build the vessel, Momsen needed to find a research institution that would pay back some of the costs involved by renting the craft. At Vine’s urging, WHOI had offered to do so in 1958. Negotiations with Reynolds, however, had broken down. Both Momsen and the Woods Hole scientists, including Vine, liked Froehlich’s design. In spring 1962, Momsen and WHOI asked interested companies to bid on building the submersible. Froehlich’s own company, General Mills, submitted the winning bid, and WHOI signed a contract with the food giant on September 4, 1962. Even before the contract was signed, the WHOI team involved in the project, which called itself the Deep Submergence Group, had

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decided on a new name for their submersible-to-be: Alvin. Officially, the name was a shortened form of Al Vine, the man whose insistence on the usefulness of submersibles had led to the craft’s creation. A less official inspiration for the name, however, was shown in a drawing taped to an office door in the group’s headquarters. The drawing pictured a chipmunk, also called Alvin, who had been the main character in a popular novelty song and, later, a television cartoon.

SOLVING PROBLEMS: A LIGHTWEIGHT FOAM Alvin’s hull, or body, the part surrounding the submersible’s passenger sphere, needed to be filled with material that was light in weight, yet capable of resisting tremendous pressure. The designers chose a newly invented material called syntactic foam, which consists of millions of microscopic, hollow spheres glued together by epoxy resin to make a solid mass. Because the spheres are manufactured before being glued, their size and other characteristics can be controlled much more closely than the spheres in foams made by injecting a gas into a liquid, as when blowing soap bubbles. Syntactic foam is very buoyant—according to Robert Ballard, “a block [of foam] the size of a large refrigerator could buoy a ton of submerged weight”— but it is also hard and extremely resistant to being crushed. The bubbles in the syntactic foam used in Alvin were made of glass, but similar foams can also be made from ceramic (clay) and polymer (plastic) materials. Syntactic foams are now widely used in industry, playing a part in everything from high-performance aircraft to time-release capsules that deliver medicines. Not surprisingly, one of their most popular uses is in devices like Alvin that must be buoyant in water, ranging from marker buoys to offshore oil drilling rigs. In the near future, syntactic foams made of aluminum or other metals may exist as well. They are expected to be just as strong as solid metals but to weigh half as much, a very important consideration in the aircraft and aerospace industries. Syntactic metal foam may be as important to a future generation of inexpensive, reliable “workhorse” space shuttles as syntactic glass foam was to Alvin, the workhorse of deep-sea research.

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Litton Industries, which bought General Mills’s equipment division soon after General Mills signed the contract with WHOI, began building the submersible in late 1962. The company asked Hahn & Clay, a Texas firm, to make three possible passenger spheres from HY100, an exceptionally strong steel alloy. Each sphere was six feet 10 inches (2.06 m) across, with walls 1.33 inches (3.37 cm) thick. One of the spheres was tested for pressure resistance in a newly designed tank at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio in February 1964. The engineers planned to subject the sphere to increasing pressure in the tank until the sphere imploded and was destroyed. In fact, however, the tank gave way first. At pressure equivalent to that at a depth of 10,000 feet (3,030 m), the tank’s safety valve blew out, showering the frightened engineers with oil from the structure’s interior. The sphere was still sitting inside, almost completely unharmed.

Launching Alvin Alvin was finally finished in May 1964. The completed submersible was 22 feet (6.6 m) long and eight feet (2.4 m) wide. Made of fiberglass, a strong, lightweight material made from spun glass fibers, its white hull had a protruding top part called a conning tower or sail, a large propeller on the rear and two smaller ones on the sides, and a stainless steel manipulator arm, ending in a pincer or claw, on one side. The passenger sphere, which held three people, contained five windows: one looking ahead, two looking through the sides, one looking straight down, and one looking up into the hatch at the top of the sphere. Battery packs and ballast filled the lower part of the hull. Allyn Vine’s wife, Adelaide, “launched” Alvin at Woods Hole on June 5, in the time-honored fashion for christening ships, by breaking a bottle of champagne over its mechanical arm. (Vine had told her that the arm was the craft’s sturdiest outer part.) Vine himself was three miles (4.8 km) below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, on a research dive in the French bathyscaphe Archimède, when the champagne foamed over the vessel he had inspired. He returned to WHOI, however, in time to be a passenger on Alvin’s second human-carrying dive, which was made in August.

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During the 40 years of its career (1964–2004), Alvin made more than 1,000 dives and took part in most of the major discoveries about the deep sea made during that period. (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

The WHOI group’s next task was to build Alvin a mother ship, a surface vessel that could carry the submersible to its dive sites. Woods Hole engineer Dan Clark assembled the catamaran-style ship from two 96-foot (29-m) navy surplus pontoons, or flat-bottomed floats, and a host of other spare parts. The pontoons were connected by two steel arches, from which Alvin’s boxlike cradle was suspended. When the ship was finished in March 1965, the team named it Lulu, after Allyn Vine’s mother. In The Eternal Darkness: A Personal History of Deep-Sea Exploration, explorer-oceanographer Robert Ballard called Lulu “the oddest-looking ship I have ever seen.”

Hunt for a Bomb Alvin soon had a chance to make a dramatic demonstration of its powers. On January 17, 1966, a U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber carrying four hydrogen bombs, flying over the coast of Spain on a standard cold war patrol, collided accidentally with a tanker plane that

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was attempting to refuel it in the air. Both planes crashed, killing most of their crews, and the bombs, which carried real warheads but were not primed to explode, were released. Three fell on land and were quickly recovered. The fourth, however, could not be found. Military officials concluded that it must have fallen into the sea. Everyone agreed that retrieving the lost bomb immediately was essential. Press reports had stirred worldwide fear that the deadly weapon might go off, potentially destroying much of southern Spain. The military also worried that the Soviets might capture the bomb and learn the secrets of its construction or that terrorists might recover it and threaten to use it. The navy therefore arranged

This diagram shows the structure of Alvin as it was in 1975. A second manipulator arm and other features, as well as a stronger hull and passenger sphere, were added later.

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for cargo planes to carry both Alvin and its earlier rival-of-sorts, the Reynolds Aluminaut (which had been finished in 1964, the same year Alvin was launched), to Spain to help in the search. After a month of scanning the rugged seafloor, full of crags and canyons and packed with mud that was easily stirred up into blinding clouds, Alvin’s three-man crew finally found the bomb on March 15. Wrapped in its bulky parachute, it was perched on a steep slope 2,550 feet (758 m) below the surface. Alvin attached a lift line to the parachute, and the Mizar, a research ship aiding the expedition, attempted to haul up the weapon. The line broke, however, and the bomb dropped back into the sea. Alvin and Aluminaut had to hunt for nine more days before locating it again. They found that bomb had fallen 360 feet (109 m) farther down the canyon and lay near the edge of a cliff that dropped another 800 feet (242 m). Fearing that the bomb would be lost for good, the navy flew in a robot device designed to recover torpedoes, the Cable-controlled Underwater Recovery Vehicle (CURV). The first attempt to retrieve the bomb with CURV succeeded only in tangling the vehicle (and almost Alvin as well) in the bomb’s parachute. Not wanting to chance further failures, the operators on the surface ship decided to lift robot, bomb, and parachute together to the surface. To the great relief of everyone involved, the bomb was finally recovered on April 7, 1966, almost three months after it had been lost.

Sunken Sub Alvin had its own near-disaster in 1968. Two of Lulu’s cradle-support cables broke during a routine launch on October 16, dumping the submersible into the sea before its hatch had been shut. The three men inside escaped quickly, but ocean water poured into the craft, sinking it to the seafloor 5,000 feet (1,515 m) below. Thanks to stormy weather and other problems, the submersible was not even located until June 1969, when cameras lowered from the research ship Mizar spotted it. Alvin was finally rescued in September 1969, partly by the Mizar and partly by the submersible’s old diving partner, the Aluminaut.

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The Aluminaut crew had to break Alvin’s sail in order to insert a lifting bar into the submersible’s hatch. The bar was attached to a nylon line, which a winch on the Mizar reeled in to pull the waterlogged submersible up to 50 feet (15 m) below the surface. Alvin was too heavy to lift onto the ship’s deck, so divers wrapped it with lines and nets, and the Mizar towed it to the calm waters off Martha’s Vineyard. There a crane mounted on a barge finally pulled it out, and the barge carried it back to Woods Hole. Amazingly, the tough little vessel had suffered no major damage except for what Aluminaut did to its sail. Indeed, sandwiches that crew members had left behind, although water-soaked, were still edible. Parts of the men’s lunches, in fact, were better preserved than they would have been in a refrigerator. Scientists concluded that decay caused by bacteria occurs much more slowly in the oxygenless, near-freezing depths of the sea than on land. The idea of disposing of garbage by dumping it in the deep sea, which some people had proposed, therefore seemed a poor one because the garbage would not break down quickly. The 1968 sinking was Alvin’s worst crisis but not its only one. The submersible was attacked by a swordfish in 1967 and a marlin, another type of large fish, in 1971. Both fish did minor damage to the vessel’s hull and more serious damage to themselves. The swordfish, trapped when the “sword” on its nose became embedded in Alvin’s fiberglass skin, was hauled to the surface and became the crew’s dinner.

Project FAMOUS Alvin clearly demonstrated its usefulness to marine science when it took part in the French-American Mid-Ocean Undersea Study, or Project FAMOUS, in 1974. In this project, part of a worldwide research effort to better understand the movements of the Earth’s crust, Alvin joined two French submersibles, the Cyana (a descendant of Jacques Cousteau’s “diving saucer,” a submersible slightly smaller than Alvin that could dive to 10,000 feet [3,030 m]) and the Archimède (the bathyscaphe successor to the Piccards’ FNRS3) in exploring part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and rift valley, the

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gigantic undersea features made famous by Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp’s maps and the research that established plate tectonics in the mid-1960s. Project FAMOUS represented not only the first direct human exploration of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge but also the first time that human-carrying submersibles had worked together in such an extensive endeavor. The project’s organizers chose for exploration a portion of the ridge between 36 and 37 degrees north latitude, an area some 60 miles (96 km) square—about the size of the Grand Canyon. The spot they selected was 400 miles (640 km) southwest of the Azores, a group of islands that lies about halfway between New York and Lisbon, Portugal. This area was considered to be an average segment of the ridge, undergoing active seafloor spreading at the rate of about an inch (2.54 cm) a year. Before the submersibles began diving, surface ships spent several years making detailed sonar and seismic profiles of the area and photographing it with remote-controlled cameras. Xavier Le Pichon, France’s chief scientist for the mission, made the project’s first dive, in Archimède, on August 2, 1973. Alvin and Cyana joined the larger craft in June 1974. Alvin had recently obtained a new passenger sphere of the extremely strong, lightweight metal titanium, which allowed it to dive to 12,000 feet (3,636 m), twice as deep as it had been able to go with its original steel sphere. With this improvement, Alvin could join Cyana in exploring the deepest parts of the rift valley, whose average depth was 9,500 feet (2,879 m). In the center of the rift valley the FAMOUS scientists saw numerous cracks or fissures in the seafloor, almost all parallel to the ridge and varying from an inch (2.54 cm) to many yards wide. Magma had oozed through some of these cracks and then cooled, creating pillow lava, a type of lava that had never been seen on land. The researchers gave different forms of pillow lava picturesque names such as “haystacks,” “toothpaste,” and “broken eggs.” Beyond the narrow (1,000 to 1,600 feet [303 to 485 m]) zone of recent volcanism in the center of the rift valley, constant earthquakes had shattered the rocks into piles of debris. Samples of rock from the rift valley were later shown to be less than 100,000 years old, proof that they had been created (by geological standards) extremely recently.

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The three submersibles made a total of 44 dives that summer. They brought back more than 3,000 pounds (1,362 kg) of rock samples, numerous water samples, some sediment cores, and more than 100,000 photographs. This data, along with the crews’ observations, provided final confirmation of Harry Hess’s theory of seafloor spreading and expanded what scientists had learned about plate tectonics by more indirect means in the 1960s.

Workhorse of Oceanography During the 40 years it served marine science, Alvin carried innumerable researchers from many institutions to the depths of the world’s oceans, allowing them to make tremendous discoveries. Barrie Walden, WHOI’s manager of submersible engineering, told writer Joseph Wallace, author of The Deep Sea, in 1987, “Geologists use [Alvin] to study the composition of the ocean floor; microbiologists capture new types of deep-sea bacteria; chemists look for insights into the chemistry of the earth.” Although its basic design remained the same, Alvin was modified and improved many times in its career. Perhaps the greatest change was the building of its new titanium passenger sphere in 1973. In 1978, a new frame, also made of titanium, and a second manipulator arm were added. These improvements more than doubled the depth at which the vessel was considered safe to operate, from 6,000 feet (1,818 m) in the 1960s to 14,764 feet (4,500 m) in 1994. By that year, the 30th anniversary of Alvin’s launching, all of the submersible’s original parts had been replaced. Allyn Vine was not able to celebrate that momentous June birthday. He had had an illustrious career at Woods Hole, lasting almost 40 years. Beginning as a physicist, he was reclassified as an oceanographer in 1950 and a senior scientist in 1963. In the late 1960s, he helped to design additional oceanographic research vehicles and instruments, such as improved echo sounders and cameras designed to photograph the seafloor. In the early 1970s, he developed better ways of handling heavy instruments, submersibles, and small boats during bad weather.

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Vine was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1982 and received several awards for his work, including the Lockheed Award for Ocean Science and Engineering and the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers’ Blakely Smith Medal, both in

TRENDS: HOW LOW CAN THEY GO? This table shows maximum depths achieved by humans with different types of diving protection or traveling in different types of submersible vessels.

Diver or Diving Vessel

Greatest Achievable Depth

human diver with scuba gear

diving is considered unsafe below 100 feet (30 m) and very unsafe below 250 feet (76 m) because of nitrogen narcosis, mental confusion caused by nitrogen in the blood, but a scuba diver reached a record depth of 1,033 feet (313 m) in 2003

nuclear submarine 800–1,000 feet (242–300 m) human diver in armored diving suit (Jim suit)

1,968 feet (600 m)

bathysphere

3,028 feet (923 m), a record set on August 15, 1934

submersible Alvin

14,764 feet (4,500 m)

human-occupied submersible

21,414 feet (6,526 m), a record set by the Japanese three-person submersible Shinkai 6500 on August 11, 1989

bathyscaphe

35,802 feet (9,848 m), a record set by the Trieste on January 23, 1960

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This diagram illustrates the maximum depths reached by unaided humans, submersibles, and some animals. A sperm whale, for example, can reach 3,773 feet (1,150 m). According to a 1990s Smithsonian Institution exhibit called Ocean Planet, the deepest recorded fish was found at 27,460 feet (8,370 m) and the deepest recorded animal, an invertebrate, at 32,199 feet (9,789 m).

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1987. He retired from Woods Hole in 1979 but continued to work as an emeritus scientist. Vine died of heart failure on January 4, 1994, at his home in the town of Woods Hole. After his death, U.S. contemporary naval historian Gary Weir called him “a scientific hub of his time, a man of ideas who thought of connections and conjured ideas no one else could.” Alvin served for 10 years after its founder’s death, completing more than 4,000 dives in all. In October 2004, however, WHOI announced that the venerable submersible would soon be retired. A more up-to-date craft, as yet unnamed, is scheduled to replace it in 2008. The new submersible is expected to be able to dive to 21,450 feet (6,500 m), 6,600 feet (2,000 m) deeper than Alvin, which will give it access to 99 percent of the ocean floor. The new craft’s achievements will no doubt be great, but nothing will ever dwarf the impact of its predecessor, the odd-looking little vessel that gave humans their first detailed view of the deep sea.

Chronology 1914

Allyn Collins Vine born in Garrettsville, Ohio, on June 1

1936

Vine earns B.S. in physics from Hiram College

1940

Vine earns master’s degree in geophysics from Lehigh University Vine joins staff of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)

1940–45

Vine and Maurice Ewing improve the bathythermograph

1945–50

Vine works part time for the navy and part time for WHOI

1956

At a scientific meeting on February 29, Vine recommends developing a craft similar to a submarine (a submersible) that could take human beings into the deep sea

1958

Bud Froehlich designs a submersible he calls Seapup Office of Naval Research (ONR) and WHOI begin negotiations with Reynolds Metal Company for the building of a large submersible, Aluminaut

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1962

Negotiations with Reynolds break down In spring, WHOI calls for bids for building a Seapup-type submersible WHOI team decides to name the future submersible Alvin On September 4, General Mills signs a contract to build the submersible Litton Industries begins building the submersible

1963

Vine becomes a senior scientist at WHOI

1964

A pressure sphere for the submersible is tested in a tank at the Southwest Research Institute in February; the tank fails before the sphere does Alvin put into service at WHOI on June 5

1965

Lulu, Alvin’s first mother ship, completed in March

1966

A hydrogen bomb is lost in the sea near Spain after an air crash on January 17 Alvin crew locates the bomb on March 15 Bomb is retrieved on April 7

1967

Swordfish attacks Alvin

1968

Alvin sinks in 5,000 feet (1,515 m) of water after its cradle cables break on October 16

1969

Cameras lowered from Mizar locate Alvin on the seafloor in June Alvin is raised and brought back to Woods Hole in September

1972

Vine receives Navy Oceanographer’s Commendation

1973

Alvin receives new titanium passenger sphere First dive in Project FAMOUS (French-American Mid-Ocean Undersea Study), the first direct exploration of the MidAtlantic Ridge, takes place on August 2

1974

Alvin takes part in Project FAMOUS during the summer

1978

A titanium frame and a second manipulator arm are added to Alvin

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1979

Vine retires from WHOI

1982

Vine elected to the National Academy of Engineering

1987

Vine receives two awards

1994

Vine dies of heart failure in Woods Hole on January 4 The 30th anniversary of Alvin’s launching celebrated in June WHOI announces that Alvin will soon be retired

2004

Further Reading Books Ballard, Robert D., with Will Hively. The Eternal Darkness: A Personal History of Deep-Sea Exploration. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Contains substantial material on Alvin’s development and voyages.

Burgess, Robert F. Ships beneath the Sea: A History of Subs and Submersibles. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975. Includes detailed accounts of the hydrogen bomb rescue and Project FAMOUS.

Forman, Will. The History of American Deep Submersible Operations. Flagstaff, Ariz.: Best Publishing Co., 1999. Contains an extensive chapter on Alvin.

Gordon, Bernard L., ed. Man and the Sea: Classic Accounts of Marine Exploration. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday/American Museum of Natural History, 1972. Includes Alvin pilot William O. Rainnie, Jr.,’s account of the hydrogen bomb rescue.

Kaharl, Victoria A. Water Baby: The Story of Alvin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Describes the creation of Alvin and the submersible’s many dives and contributions to deep-sea exploration.

Wallace, Joseph. The Deep Sea. New York: Gallery Books, 1987. This well-illustrated book on different aspects of the deep sea and scientific exploration of this unusual environment includes material on Alvin.

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Articles Ballard, Robert D. “Dive into the Great Rift.” National Geographic 148 (May 1975): 604–615. Personal account of dives into the Mid-Atlantic Ridge rift valley in Alvin during Project FAMOUS (French-American Mid-Ocean Undersea Study) in 1974.

Dicke, William. “Allyn Vine, 79, Dies; Proponent of Submersibles.” New York Times, January 8, 1994, p. 30. Vine’s obituary provides details of his early life and achievements.

Hiertzler, J. R. “Where the Earth Turns Inside Out.” National Geographic 148 (May 1975): 586–603. Describes the geological features and theories that Project FAMOUS investigated.

“History of Alvin.” Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Available online. URL: http://www.whoi.edu/marops/vehicles/alvin/alvin_ history.html. Accessed July 7, 2005. Year-by-year history of Alvin’s dives and discoveries.

Osumi-Sutherland, David. “Venerable Deep-Sea Sub to Be Replaced.” Nature 430 (August 6, 2004): n.p. Announces Alvin’s planned retirement, describes the improved submersible scheduled to replace it, and compares the advantages of human-operated vessels like Alvin with those of robot-operated vehicles.

8 TUBE WORMS AND TITANIC ROBERT BALLARD AND UNDERSEA EXPLORATION

W

henever a great discovery in marine science was made in the late 20th century, Robert Ballard seems to have been there. Ballard was among the first people to explore the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and provide direct confirmation of the theory of plate tectonics. He was also one of the first to spot communities of strange organisms living around hot-water vents in the seafloor. He was on the expedition that found “black smokers,” volcano-like underwater chimneys emitting clouds of dark particles that build up the mineral riches of the Earth. Ballard has helped to develop both human-driven and robotic submersibles, as well as imaging equipment for the deep sea. Combining oceanography with archaeology, he used some of this equipment to find and explore the remains of the RMS Titanic, perhaps the most famous shipwreck of all time. He has discovered many other lost ships as well, essentially establishing the field of deepwater archaeology. Finally and perhaps most important, like William Beebe and Jacques Cousteau, Ballard has inspired a generation to explore and protect the ocean. He is probably the world’s best-known marine scientist.

California Dreamer Robert Duane Ballard was born in Wichita, Kansas, on June 30, 1942, but he grew up by the sea. His father, Chester Ballard, 122

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an aerospace executive and engineer, moved with Ballard’s mother, Harriet, and the couple’s three children to San Diego, California, soon after Robert Ballard’s birth. San Diego was filled with navy personnel during and after World War II, and Ballard heard many stories about the war’s naval battles as a child. When Ballard grew older, he read Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and imagined becoming an underwater explorer like Captain Nemo in the book. He fished, surfed, snorkeled, and eventually dived with scuba gear as a teenager. He also wrote to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in nearby La Jolla, asking what he could do to learn Robert Ballard found the remains more about the ocean. Impressed of the ocean liner Titanic and a by Ballard’s letter, Scripps scientist host of other deep-sea shipwrecks. He also took part in some of the Norris Rakestraw helped the young greatest discoveries of late 20thman enroll in a summer program century marine science, including at the institution in 1959. This pro- collection of direct evidence to gram, which included trips aboard prove the theory of place tectonics Scripps’s research vessels, cement- and discovery of hot-water vents in the ocean floor that were sured Ballard’s desire to become an rounded by colonies of animals oceanographer. unlike any creatures previously Following the advice of another known on Earth. (Institute for Scripps researcher, Ballard chose Exploration, Mystic, Connecticut) the University of California, Santa Barbara, for his college studies. (Santa Barbara, like San Diego, is a seaside city.) He took an unusual combined major of chemistry and geology, graduating in 1965. He then studied for a year at the University of Hawaii’s Institute of Geophysics, training porpoises (dolphins) and performing with them at a marine amusement park

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to pay some of his expenses, and went on to a second year of postgraduate work at the University of Southern California. He married Marjorie Jacobsen, a medical receptionist, in 1966, and in time they had two sons. (Ballard and his wife eventually divorced, and he married Barbara Earle in 1991. They had two more children.) Ballard, a member of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) in college, was called to active duty in 1967 after being transferred from the U.S. Army to the Navy. The navy assigned him to be a liaison officer between the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), a private nonprofit research organization on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Ballard stayed on at WHOI as a research associate in ocean engineering after he completed his navy service in 1970. He finished his graduate training at the University of Rhode Island, obtaining a Ph.D. in marine geology and geophysics in 1974 with a dissertation on plate tectonics, still a somewhat controversial theory at that time.

Submersible Supporter From his earliest days at WHOI as a young navy officer, Robert Ballard took every opportunity to explore the deep sea and try different submersible vessels, his special interest. He took his first underwater trip in the Ben Franklin, Jacques Piccard’s mesoscaphe, during the vessel’s monthlong cruise beneath the Gulf Stream in 1969. He later dived in the Trieste II, the navy-built successor to Piccard’s record-setting Trieste bathyscaphe, as well. At WHOI, Ballard became well acquainted with Alvin, the institution’s three-person submersible. Ballard first rode in Alvin in 1971, and by the end of 1972, he had made more dives in the vessel than any other scientist. In the early 1970s, when Alvin and other submersibles faced a financial crisis because government and scientific interest in undersea exploration was decreasing, Ballard helped WHOI find sponsoring agencies that would rent the craft. The most celebrated of the projects that Ballard procured for Alvin was Project FAMOUS (the French-American Mid-Ocean Undersea Study), in which the navy/WHOI submersible joined two French vessels, the bathyscaphe Archimède and the small “diving saucer”

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submersible Cyana, in exploring part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in 1973 and 1974. Ballard himself took part in this expedition, diving in both Archiméde and Alvin and also helping the crew on Lulu, Alvin’s mother ship. During their dives, he and the other FAMOUS scientists made observations that cemented earth scientists’ acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics.

Unexpected Oasis Of all the expeditions that Robert Ballard has joined, the one most important to marine science, ironically, affected a field in which he had no personal interest: biology. That expedition, part of the continued exploration of rift valleys in the Mid-Ocean Ridge that grew out of Project FAMOUS, traveled to the Galápagos Rift, off the same islands near Ecuador whose birds and animals had inspired Charles Darwin to develop his theory of evolution by natural selection. The expedition scientists, hoping to find the first direct evidence of volcanic activity on a mid-ocean ridge, planned to look for the source of unusually high deepwater temperatures that other researchers had reported in the area. Ballard was the group’s technical chief because of his expertise with deep-sea imaging equipment. Diving some 8,000 feet (2,440 m) into the rift valley in Alvin in February 1977, searching for the hot springs that they thought had produced the peculiar temperature readings, geologists Jack Corliss and Tjeerd Van Andel of Oregon State University and pilot Jack Donnelly detected a sudden rise in the temperature of the water around them. At the same moment, they found themselves surrounded by a jungle of bizarre life-forms, including purple sea anemones, balls of what looked like pink dandelion fluff, scuttling miniature lobsters and white crabs, and huge clams and mussels. Nothing like this deep-sea oasis had ever been reported. Although no biologists were on the cruise, the expedition scientists knew an amazing biological find when they saw one. Ballard wrote in Explorations, his autobiography, that Massachusetts Institute of Technology geologist John Edmond summed up the group’s feelings by saying, “This is what it must have been like sailing with Columbus.”

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The group took turns making dive after dive, and they found several other clusters of animals, each packed around a crack through which warm water poured through the seafloor. The water coming from some of these hydrothermal vents, as the fissures came to be called, was so hot that it shimmered like the air above heated pavement on a summer day. At some of the vents, in addition to the crabs, mussels, and other creatures they had seen at the first vent, the scientists observed giant worms whose feathery, blood-red tips protruded from the mouths of pale tubes as much as eight feet (2.4 m) tall. At first no one could imagine how so many animals obtained enough food to survive. As far as biologists knew, all deep-sea animals lived, directly or indirectly, on the remains of plants and surface-swimming animals that drifted into the depths. It seemed impossible that enough of this organic “snow” existed to sustain the vent communities. The scientists obtained one clue to the secret of the animals’ survival as soon as they captured some of the creatures with Alvin and brought them to the surface: The animals stank overwhelmingly of rotten eggs, revealing the presence of hydrogen sulfide gas. Water from the vents smelled just as bad, and it, too, proved to contain large amounts of hydrogen sulfide and other sulfur compounds. Sulfur compounds are poisonous to most organisms, but biologists knew that a few kinds of bacteria, usually found in swamps, could digest them. Biologists who later examined specimens of vent life from this cruise and a second one in 1979, sent out for the specific purpose of studying the vent animals, found masses of sulfureating microorganisms around the vents. The scientists concluded that these microbes support all the living things in the vent communities, just as green plants and plantlike microorganisms, which make their own food with energy from sunlight, support ecosystems on land and in shallow water. Some vent animals eat the microbes, or else eat other animals that do so, while other animals, including the tube worms, harbor the bacteria in their own bodies and absorb nourishment from them. In the decades that followed this groundbreaking find, researchers saw similar bizarre communities around hot- and cold-water deep-sea vents throughout the world. An article in the July 2000

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issue of American Scientist called the discovery of the vent ecosystems “the most important discovery in marine biology in 200 years.” Study of these amazing organisms, the only known creatures that do not depend on the Sun, has made biologists rethink the nature of life on Earth and the possibility that life exists on other planets.

Black Smokers Robert Ballard was also part of an expedition that made a second major discovery about vents and These tube worms, with blood-red tips rising out of tubes as much vent communities in 1979. In the as eight feet (2.4 m) tall, were Pacific Ocean off Baja California, the most striking of the animals a peninsula belonging to Mexico discovered around hydrotherthat extends from the lower part mal vents in the late 1970s. The of the state, he and other scientists worms were later found to obtain their nourishment from sulfurfound volcano-like chimneys, some digesting bacteria that live in their up to 30 feet (9.2 m) high. Instead bodies. (Van Dover laboratory) of lava, the open tops of the chimneys spewed water so blackened with sulfur compounds and other dissolved minerals that it looked like smoke. The researchers found that the water’s temperature was sometimes more than 650°F (392°C), hot enough to melt lead. Like the hydrothermal vents discovered in 1977, the flanks of these “black smokers,” as they came to be called, were covered with crabs, tube worms, and other vent animals. Ballard and other scientists have concluded that the black smoker chimneys are made from minerals that settle out of the vent water and harden when it meets the much colder ocean water as it returns to floor level in the form of hot springs. The chimneys eventually collapse under their own weight or are destroyed by earth tremors,

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I WAS THERE: AN ALIEN WORLD According to Water Baby, Victoria A. Kaharl’s history of Alvin, Jack Corliss was more puzzled than excited when he saw the hydrothermal vent communities for the first time. “Isn’t the deep ocean supposed to be like a desert?” he asked his graduate student, Debra Stakes, who was monitoring the underwater telephone on Lulu. “Yes,” said Stakes, trying to recall the few biology courses she had had in school. “Well, there’s all these animals down here.” Robert Ballard wrote of his own first view of the vent oases in Explorations, his autobiography: Suddenly, our floodlights revealed a swaying field of orangish pink dandelions, their puffy heads pulsing with fine webs of filaments in response to Alvin’s pressure wave. The lumped mounds of pillow lava were thick with jutting chalk white clam shells, some of them a foot in length. In a few isolated clusters, cocoa brown mussels had formed subcolonies. (When we opened the clams on the surface, to our amazement, the flesh inside the shells proved to be a rich, meaty red, like the face of a freshly cut steak.)

Strangest of all were the giant tube worms. “The tube feels like nylon pipe and is about 15 inches [38 cm] long,” Kaharl says that another expedition scientist, John Porteous, wrote to his girlfriend. “The gill plumes extend out of the tube for about a foot and are bright red.” No one had ever seen animals like these. It was little wonder that Jack Corliss named one of the most heavily populated vent sites “The Garden of Eden.”

leaving behind deposits that become the source of copper, iron, zinc, and other minerals that are valuable to humans if tectonic movements bring the deposits up to the land. Supporting this idea, researchers have found fragments of fossilized tube worms in ore from an ancient copper mine on the Arabian peninsula.

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This diagram contrasts the food chains near the surface of the sea and around hydrothermal vents. In both cases, the primary producers are living things that can make their own food: phytoplankton (tiny, floating plants and plantlike microorganisms) near the surface and chemosynthetic (sulfur-digesting) microbes at the vents. The second layer of the chain at the surface is herbivores such as copepods (small shrimplike animals), which eat the phytoplankton; at the vents, it is animals such as tube worms, which obtain their food from chemosynthetic bacteria living inside their bodies. In turn, primary carnivores at the surface eat the herbivores, while grazers at the vents scrape the bacteria and other minute creatures from the vent surfaces. Secondary carnivores eat the smaller primary carnivores and in turn are eaten by tertiary carnivores. At the vents, fish and crabs eat smaller animals that graze on the bacteria.

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The smokers and other vents also appear to be part of the Earth’s recycling system. In 1979, John Edmond and others concluded that all the water in the planet’s oceans circulates through sea-bottom

This diagram shows the chemistry of a black smoker. After seawater seeps into the crust (1), certain elements—first oxygen and potassium (2) and then calcium, sulfate, and magnesium (3), are removed from the water. As the water reaches the hot lower layer of the crust, the asthenosphere, and begins to heat up, sodium, potassium, and calcium from the crust dissolve and enter the water (4). Zinc, copper, and sulfur are also dissolved into the water as the water is heated further by contact with molten rock (magma) (5). The water then begins to rise toward the surface of the crust once more (6), eventually reemerging through a seafloor vent in a stream that is darkened by the many dissolved minerals it contains (7). As this extremely hot water contacts cold seawater above the vent, minerals (especially sulfur compounds) in the hot water become solid again, forming deposits that make up the chimney of the black smoker.

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hydrothermal vents on a cycle of approximately 10 million years. This circulation explains why the chemistry of seawater is nearly identical throughout the world.

From Submersibles to Robots During the 1970s, Robert Ballard supported direct human exploration of the deep sea in submersibles like Alvin. By the 1980s, however, he had concluded that robotic devices called ROVs (remotely operated vehicles), controlled from a surface ship, would be less expensive and more productive than human-operated submersibles under most conditions. Interested in engineering like his father, Ballard designed his own ROVs. His first one was ANGUS (Acoustically Navigated Geological Underwater Survey), a simple sled carrying three still cameras. ANGUS could stay submerged for 12 to 14 hours, about three times as long as Alvin, and could take up to 16,000 photographs in a single session as its mother ship towed it along on a cable. ANGUS took part in Project FAMOUS, scouting out and photographing areas of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge to help Alvin scientists decide where to send the submersible. ANGUS also provided the first photographic evidence of both hydrothermal vents and black smokers, leading the scientists in Alvin to direct observation of these unusual phenomena. In 1981, with funding from the navy and the National Science Foundation, Ballard established a new Deep Submergence Laboratory within WHOI’s ocean engineering department. There he designed an improved camera-carrying sled, Argo, to which a smaller robot with a camera lens and manipulator arms, called Jason, was tethered. (These names came from an ancient Greek myth about an explorer named Jason, who sailed a ship called Argo in search of a golden treasure.) The three video cameras aboard Argo were so sensitive that they could photograph in almost complete darkness. Their output was constantly broadcast in real time to monitors aboard their mother ship on the surface. If the cameras revealed something interesting, the scientists on the ship could send Jason to take a closer look.

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ISSUES: PRESENCE

OR

“TELEPRESENCE”

Robert Ballard has given several reasons for his claim that humanoperated vehicles (HOVs) such as Alvin are not the best way to explore the deep sea. Because HOVs’ batteries must be recharged frequently at the surface, he points out, these vehicles can dive for only a few hours at a time. They also move relatively slowly: Alvin “flies” at only about two miles (3.2 km) an hour. As a result, they cannot survey large areas effectively. They cannot go into places that might be dangerous to their human occupants, such as narrow fissures. “Manned submersibles are doomed,” Ballard told a reporter from the Cape Cod Times in 1979, according to Victoria Kaharl. Robots like Jason, on the other hand, permit what Ballard calls “telepresence,” which he defines as “being able to project your spirit to the bottom, your eyes, your mind, and being able to leave your body behind.” In spite of these objections, Ballard could not resist going down in Alvin to see firsthand the remains of the ocean liner RMS Titanic and some of the other sunken ships that he explored in his later career. Other scientists, such as Cindy Van Dover, the first woman to pilot Alvin, have also said that seeing the deep ocean for themselves was an essential part of their research experience. “There is an undefinable advantage to seeing the ocean bed with one’s own eyes,” Van Dover wrote in her memoir, The Octopus’s Garden. “As a colleague of mine once pointed out, no one who has a choice between watching a video of Paris or going there in person is going to opt for the armchair approach. The same holds true for the seafloor.” It seems likely that both HOVs and ROVs, often working together, will continue to play important parts in deep-sea exploration.

Finding the Titanic When Robert Ballard decided to seek a spectacular demonstration of ROVs’ usefulness, he knew exactly what he wanted to do the job: locating and exploring RMS Titanic, the best-known lost ship of the 20th century. On its first voyage, this luxury ocean liner, widely thought to be “unsinkable,” ran into an iceberg in the North

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Atlantic and sank during the night of April 14–15, 1912. Because the ship’s supply of lifeboats was inadequate, more than 1,500 of Titanic’s 2,200 passengers, including many members of American and British high society, drowned. The ship’s general position at the time of its disastrous end was known—in the Atlantic Ocean about 350 miles (563 km) southeast of Newfoundland, Canada—but the water there is very deep, and Titanic’s remains had never been found. Ballard had been hoping for a chance to look for the ship since the early 1970s. In August 1985, Ballard, accompanied by ANGUS and Argo, sailed on the research ship Knorr to the site of Titanic’s sinking. There, by prearrangement, he met a group of French scientists who had been at the site since June. Testing a new type of high-resolution shipboard sonar, the French researchers had systematically scanned the sea bottom in the 150-square-mile (239-km2) area that they and Ballard had decided to cover. Ballard and his crew (accompanied by three of the French scientists, who had transferred to Knorr) continued the search visually with Argo. In the early hours of the morning of September 1, the ship’s cook wakened Ballard from a nap and asked him to look at the screens showing input from Argo’s video cameras. Ballard threw a jumpsuit on over his pajamas and hurried to the control center. Familiar with every detail of the ill-fated ship from his extensive research, he recognized immediately what the screens were showing: one of Titanic’s boilers, lying on the seafloor 12,500 feet (3,813 m) below. Ballard, never shy about announcing his finds to the public, phoned the news media while he was still at sea, and his discovery made headlines around the world. He told the crowd of reporters waiting for him when he returned to Woods Hole that Titanic had broken in two as it sank. The boiler he had spotted was part of the front third of the ship, buried at a 45-degree angle in the seafloor sediment. The rear part, or stern, lay more than a mile away and faced in the opposite direction. Nothing remained of the midsection but scattered debris, he said. In the eight days since he had first seen the boiler, Ballard reported, the video and still cameras on Argo and ANGUS had taken more than 20,000 photographs of the wreck, revealing such artifacts as china dishes, wine bottles, a silver tray, and, most movingly, the liner’s empty lifeboat cranes.

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Bad weather kept Ballard from returning to the Titanic site that year, but in July 1986 he went back in Alvin with Jason Jr., a small Jason prototype that he called a “swimming eyeball.” In a video sequence that soon became famous, Ballard “flew” Jason Jr. down the path of the liner’s grand staircase for a spectacular inside view of the decaying ship, revealing needlelike formations of rust that hung from metal surfaces like stalactites in a cave. (The staircase itself, along with all the other wooden parts of the ship, had long since been destroyed by wood-boring organisms.) The little robot also photographed more artifacts left behind by the ship’s passengers, such as a man’s shoe and the head of a child’s doll. Ballard’s discovery and exploration of the Titanic became by far the best known of his many achievements.

Underwater Archaeologist After the Titanic discovery, underwater archaeology became Robert Ballard’s chief passion. Archaeologists previously had been able to study only ships that sank in water less than about 200 feet (61 m) deep, but Ballard planned to use the technology that he and others had developed to extend this exploration to wrecks in deep water. “There is more history preserved in the deep sea than in all the museums in the world combined,” he has said in numerous interviews. Ballard has found or explored several other shipwrecks almost as famous as Titanic. They include the German battleship Bismarck, sunk during World War II, which he located nearly three miles (4.8 km) down in the eastern Atlantic in June 1989; RMS Lusitania, a luxury liner sunk by a German submarine in 1915 (an event that helped to bring the United States into World War I), which he explored in 1993; and USS Yorktown, an aircraft carrier the Japanese sank in the Pacific during World War II, which he discovered in May 1998. In 1997, he explored eight ancient Roman shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea, and he later discovered two even older vessels, sailed by a people called the Phoenicians around 2,700 years ago, in the same sea near Israel. These are the oldest ships ever found in deep water.

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ISSUES: WHAT SHOULD BE DONE

WITH THE

TITANIC?

Beginning with his first talks to the news media after finding Titanic, Robert Ballard insisted that the liner’s remains should not be disturbed, except for the taking of photographs. Instead, he urged that the site be preserved as an underwater museum and memorial to the lives lost when the ship sank. No means existed to enforce Ballard’s proposal, however. The Titanic wreck lay in international waters, so no government could control what happened to it. In July 1987, a French group salvaged and sold some of the ship’s artifacts, a move criticized not only by Ballard but also by other scientists interested in underwater archaeology. As a countermeasure to such behavior, Ballard has supported allowing tourists to be taken on submersible dives to observe the ship, a procedure the salvage company opposed. “I strongly believe in the concept of visitation,” Ballard told freelance writer Michelle Laliberte in 2000, soon after a court ruled that the dives should be permitted. “It’s a perfect way to monitor what the salvager is doing.” In 1999, speaking of his many ventures into underwater archaeology, Ballard told Insight on the News writer Eli Lehrer, The idea in these searches is to retell history—to take a very, very good moment in human history and, by going out and finding the physical pieces, get people to watch and think about it. We take out survivors, show how things happened and allow viewers to share a cathartic experience. Through all this we are . . . bringing history to life. . . . I am committed to create museums in the deep sea.

Ballard has also investigated the Black Sea, a landlocked body of water surrounded by Russia, Ukraine, Maldova, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey. The Black Sea interests Ballard because there is no dissolved oxygen in its depths, as there is in most seawater. The woodboring organisms that destroy most wooden ships cannot survive without oxygen, so Ballard believes that ships sunk in the Black Sea should be exceptionally well preserved. He has located four 1,500-

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year-old wooden ships in this sea, and in 2004, he examined some of them with his latest ROV, Hercules. This was the first remotecontrolled excavation of an ancient shipwreck in deep water. Ballard has also searched for evidence that the Black Sea was created by a gigantic flood about 7,000 years ago, when the Mediterranean poured into what had been a freshwater lake. This flood may have inspired stories such as the tale of Noah’s Ark. After rising to become director of WHOI’s Center for Marine Exploration and a senior scientist in its department of applied physics and engineering, Ballard left that institution in 1997. In 1999, he established his own organization, the Institute for Exploration (IFE), as part of the Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, Connecticut. The IFE sponsors expeditions by Ballard and others who use combinations of robots, mapping and imaging systems, and human-carrying submersibles to extend underwater archaeology into the deep sea.

Explorer and Educator Robert Ballard sees himself as an educator as well as an explorer and scientist. He has written innumerable articles and books, lectured, and taken part in television specials that convey his fascination with the ocean and warn people of the dangers that growing human populations present to the sea and its ecosystems. He has been so successful in his popularization efforts that, according to Frederic Golden’s 1987 article about Ballard in Discover magazine, one colleague called him “Carl Sagan with gills.” (Sagan, an astronomer, hosted Cosmos, an extremely popular series of television documentaries, in the early 1980s.) Ballard especially wants to interest young people, like the eager boy he once was, in the sea and in science. In 1989, inspired by the thousands of letters that he received from children after his discovery of Titanic, he founded the JASON Project, which has allowed hundreds of thousands of children in schools across the country to watch real-time videos of scientists on oceanographic expeditions through telecommunications devices that he invented. He later expanded the project into the JASON Foundation for Education,

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which funds programs that encourage children’s interest in science and technology. As happened with William Beebe and Jacques Cousteau, some scientists have criticized Ballard for his popularizations. Ballard’s critics also claim that he has taken too much personal credit for discoveries that involved many scientists. For example, the French researchers involved in the first part of the hunt for the Titanic complained that Ballard seldom mentioned their role to reporters. Many scientists, however, have expressed respect for Ballard’s scientific work as well as his energy and enthusiasm. He has received numerous awards, including the Secretary of the Navy Research Chair in Oceanography (1985), the Westinghouse Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1990), the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal (1996), the Common Wealth Award from the Sigma Xi scientific research society (2000), and the National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2003). Discover magazine chose Ballard as its Scientist of the Year for 1986, and he has been an Explorer-in-Residence with the National Geographic Society since 2000. In 2001, President George W. Bush made Ballard one of the 16 members of the Commission on Ocean Policy, a group charged with recommending ways to improve management, conservation, and use of ocean resources, assessing ocean-related facilities and technologies, and suggesting ways to coordinate federal, state, and local governments’ planning activities related to the sea. Ballard also became the director of the Institute of Archaeological Oceanography, part of the graduate school of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, in 2002 and was named an adjunct professor of the University of California at Santa Barbara geology department in 2003. “By the time [Ballard] realizes one vision, he is already hatching the next one or the one after that,” Peter de Jonge wrote in a May 2004 National Geographic article about one of Ballard’s expeditions. Ballard himself told Michelle Laliberte in 2000 that he hopes to find at least one shipwreck from each century of shipping, creating a complete panorama of human seafaring history. If anyone can carry out such a grand design, Robert Ballard is likely to be the person to do it.

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Chronology 1942

Robert Ballard born in Wichita, Kansas, on June 30

1959

Ballard attends summer student program at Scripps Institution of Oceanography

1965

Ballard earns B.S. in chemistry and geology from University of California, Santa Barbara

1965–67

Ballard does graduate studies at University of Hawaii and University of Southern California

1967–70

Ballard serves as liaison officer between the Office of Naval Research and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)

1969

Ballard takes part in mesoscaphe Ben Franklin’s monthlong cruise beneath the Gulf Stream

1970

Ballard becomes research associate in ocean engineering at WHOI

1971

Ballard dives in Alvin for the first time

1973–74

Ballard takes part in Project FAMOUS

1974

Ballard obtains Ph.D. in marine geology and geophysics from University of Rhode Island

1977

Ballard is technical chief on expedition that discovers communities of bizarre animals living around hydrothermal vents on the deep seafloor near the Galápagos Islands in February

1979

Ballard accompanies expedition that discovers “black smokers,” vents and chimneys emitting dark clouds of hot, mineralladen water A second expedition to the Galápagos vents concludes that sulfur-eating bacteria are the basis of the vent ecosystems

1981

Ballard establishes Deep Submergence Laboratory at WHOI and designs the ROVs Argo and Jason

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1985

Using a new form of shipboard sonar, a French team begins searching for the wreckage of RMS Titanic in June Ballard, in the research ship Knorr, joins the French team in August Argo’s video camera spots Titanic’s boiler on September 1

1986

Ballard returns to the Titanic wreckage in July and takes photographs of the inside of the ship with Jason Jr., a tethered robot Discover magazine chooses Ballard as its Scientist of the Year

1989

Ballard finds remains of German battleship Bismarck in the Atlantic in June Ballard founds JASON Project

1993

Ballard explores remains of RMS Lusitania in the Celtic Sea

1996

Ballard wins National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal

1997

Ballard explores eight ancient Roman shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea Ballard resigns from WHOI

1998

Ballard finds wreckage of USS Yorktown in the Pacific in May

1999

Ballard establishes Institute for Exploration in Mystic, Connecticut

2000

Ballard becomes Explorer-in-Residence with National Geographic Society Ballard wins Common Wealth Award from Sigma Xi scientific research society

2001

President George W. Bush chooses Ballard to be a member of the Commission on Ocean Policy

2002

Ballard becomes director of the Institute of Archaeological Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island

2003

Ballard becomes adjunct professor in the geology department of the University of California, Santa Barbara

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Ballard wins medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities Ballard examines 1,500-year-old ships in the Black Sea with ROV Hercules

2004

Further Reading Books Ballard, Robert D., with Will Hively. The Eternal Darkness: A Personal History of Deep-Sea Exploration. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Describes early 20th-century explorations of the deep sea, including those of William Beebe and Jacques Piccard, but focuses on Ballard’s own career, including his discoveries of hydrothermal vent communities and the remains of the Titanic and other sunken ships.

———. Explorations: A Life of Underwater Adventure. New York: Hyperion Books, 1995. Ballard’s autobiography, providing details of his adventures, including struggles for funding and disagreements with other scientists and government officials.

Ellis, Richard. Deep Atlantic. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Includes material about Robert Ballard’s role in exploring the deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

Kaharl, Victoria A. Water Baby: The Story of Alvin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Contains substantial material about Ballard’s work with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution submersible, Alvin.

Kunzig, Robert. Mapping the Deep: The Extraordinary Story of Ocean Science. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. Contains material about the discovery of hydrothermal vent animals and black smokers.

Van Dover, Cindy. The Octopus’s Garden. New York: Perseus Books, 1996. (Reissued in paperback as Deep-Ocean Journeys in 1997.) Popular book describing Van Dover’s training and experiences as an Alvin pilot and her adventures and discoveries while studying the bizarre life-forms that live near deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

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Articles Ballard, Robert D. “A Celebration of the Sea.” Popular Science 246 (May 1995): 9–10. Ballard recalls the enthusiasm for deep-sea exploration in the 1960s and speculates on the sea’s future importance to humanity.

———. “Dive into the Great Rift.” National Geographic 148 (May 1975): 604–615. Ballard’s account of his dives into the Mid-Atlantic Ridge rift valley in Alvin during Project FAMOUS (French-American Mid-Ocean Undersea Study) in 1974.

“Ballard Receives Common Wealth Award.” American Scientist 88 (July 2000): 375. Briefly describes Ballard’s achievements on the occasion of his winning the award from Sigma Xi, a scientific research society.

De Jonge, Peter. “Being Bob Ballard.” National Geographic 206 (May 2004): 116–129. Description of a recent Ballard expedition to study ancient shipwrecks in the waters of the Middle East and Black Sea; includes comments about Ballard’s personality.

Friedrich, Otto, and Natalie Angier. “After 73 Years, a Titanic Find: Using an Underwater Marvel, Scientists Finally Locate the Great Ship.” Time 126 (September 16, 1985): 68–70. Describes Ballard’s discovery of the remains of the luxury ocean liner, sunk after a collision with an iceberg in 1912.

Golden, Frederic. “A Man with Titanic Vision.” Discover 8 (January 1987): 51–62. Lengthy, detailed article about Ballard and his work, published on the occasion of Ballard’s being named Discover’s Scientist of the Year for 1986.

Laliberte, Michelle. “Titanic Discoverer Robert Ballard: Taking Marine Archaeology to New Depths.” Odyssey 9 (February 2000): 28. Describes some of Ballard’s work in deepwater archaeology.

Lehrer, Eli. “Deep-Sea Explorer Brings History to Life.” Insight on the News 15 (May 3, 1999): 21. Interview with Ballard focuses on his interest in deep-sea archaeology and creation of undersea museums from famous shipwrecks.

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Mitchell, Jacqueline S. “Life above Boiling.” Scientific American Frontiers. Available online. URL: http://www.pbs.org/saf/1207/ features/113.htm. Accessed June 7, 2005. Interview with Carl O. Wirsen, a WHOI biologist, who discusses the importance and ecology of hydrothermal vents, with an emphasis on the sulfur-digesting bacteria that live there.

“Robert Ballard.” In Encyclopedia of World Biography Supplement. Vol. 19. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale Group, 1999, n.p. Detailed summary of Ballard’s career and discoveries.

9 WATER AND FIRE JOHN DELANEY AND SEAFLOOR VOLCANOES

O

n land, the eruption of a volcano often brings destruction. As red-hot lava pours down the volcano’s side, people flee, and farms and houses are lost forever. Under the sea, however, volcanoes are a source of birth rather than death. Molten rock from the Earth’s mantle pours from their vents, hardens, and becomes a new part of the planet’s crust. Mineral nutrients dissolved in the eruptions’ outflow trigger massive “blooms” of bacteria that, in turn, nurture a host of other life-forms. In fact, some scientists think that life on Earth arose around the vents of undersea volcanoes. To learn how seafloor volcanoes create new crust and support life, researchers need to be present when (or soon after) eruptions happen. Finding out when and where an eruption occurs is hard, however, and directing researchers and ships to the spot quickly is even harder. University of Washington geologist John Delaney, an expert on undersea volcanoes, hopes to set up a communication network that will let him and others unmask the secrets of these awesome natural forces.

Explosive Background John R. Delaney’s own birth took place in the wake of awesome explosions, caused in his case by humans rather than nature. He was born in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese bombing raid on that U.S. Navy base, which brought 143

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the United States into World War II. Delaney’s family was in Pearl Harbor because his father was a navy engineer. As a young man growing up in Charlotte, North Carolina, Delaney was more interested in sports than science. His skill in high-school basketball won him a scholarship to Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. While there he became interested in geology, and he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in that subject in 1964. To support himself while working on his master’s degree at the University of Virginia and, later, his Ph.D. at University of Washington underthe University of Arizona, Tucson, water volcano expert John Delaney worked as a prospector for Delaney has studied bacteria that mining firms. pour out of the seafloor immediDelaney’s research interests ately after volcanic eruptions. He changed when he made a research has also dissected the chimneys around black smoker vents and is trip to the Galápagos Islands, off working to establish a permanent the coast of Ecuador, as a doctoral undersea observatory and commustudent. After six months of livnication system that will allow sciing and working in and around entists to become aware of erupactive volcanoes there, he decided tions and other deep-sea events as soon as they happen. (University of to make volcanoes his specialty. Washington) He earned a Ph.D. in 1977 with a thesis on gases trapped in basalt, a rock made in undersea volcanoes. He joined the faculty of the University of Washington, Seattle, later that same year as a marine geologist. He has spent his career at that university, where he is now a professor of marine geology and geophysics in the school of oceanography. A dive to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in the submersible Alvin in 1980 cemented Delaney’s desire to investigate undersea volcanoes person-

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ally. “It changed my life,” he told Science magazine reporter David Malakoff in 2004. “I realized I wasn’t a laboratory researcher.” Studying seafloor rocks recovered on this trip, he recognized patterns of minerals identical to some he had studied earlier on land. Learning more about active underwater vent systems, he believed, would reveal much about the way minerals are formed and deposited. Since that time, Delaney has made many journeys in Alvin to explore undersea volcanoes, especially in the Juan de Fuca Plate, a small (80,000 square miles, or 207,200 km2) tectonic plate conveniently located about 200 miles (322 km) off the northwestern coast of North America, a day’s journey by ship from Delaney’s Seattle office. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions rip constantly through this plate, a site of both seafloor spreading and subduction. During the mid-1980s, Delaney helped to organize the RIDGE (Ridge Inter-Disciplinary Global Experiments) program, a multidisciplinary study of mid-ocean ridges funded by the National Science Foundation. The purpose of the program, which continues, is to explore the physical, chemical, and biological processes involved in moving mass and energy from the Earth’s interior to the planet’s crust along mid-ocean ridges and to do so in real time, rather than simply mapping the results of those processes. The RIDGE observatory that most interests Delaney is located on a part of the Juan de Fuca Plate called the Endeavor segment.

Exciting Eruptions Although John Delaney is not a biologist, he became very interested in the hydrothermal vent communities that Robert Ballard and others discovered in 1977. Later scientists learned that the animals living around the vents all depend directly or indirectly on bacteria that convert the sulfur-containing minerals dissolved in the superheated water into nutrients. Researchers had reported clouds of these microorganisms floating around recently erupted undersea volcanoes like heavy falls of snow. Delaney was intrigued to hear that scientists diving in Alvin on the East Pacific Rise, off the coast of Mexico, in April 1991 had found a site containing fresh pillow lava mixed with the burned

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bodies of tube worms and other vent animals. The researchers could make out few details at the site because the water was filled with a white blizzard of bacteria, shooting up in huge plumes from beneath the seafloor. The scientists concluded that a volcanic eruption had taken place at the site only a few days before. Delaney was even more excited to find out that on June 26, 1993, Christopher Fox of the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Newport Beach, California, and other scientists using SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System), a recently declassified underwater hydrophone network that the navy had developed to detect movements of enemy submarines during the cold war, had recorded a series of earthquakes migrating northward for about 30 miles (48 km) along the Juan de Fuca Ridge. Delaney knew that such earthquakes could signal an underwater eruption. Persuading oceanographers to give up research time or alter the course of scheduled cruises is not easy, but Delaney learned that Fox had managed to talk two groups of scientists working in the vicinity of the earthquakes into making a detour and investigating the possible eruption. These researchers found a large plume of hot water rising above the area where the earthquake series had stopped. Cameras towed from a remotely operated sled showed a volcanic fissure at least four miles (6.4 km) long. At one end, pictures showed fresh mounds of pillow lava already colonized by bright yellow mats of microorganisms and, nearby, floods of microbial “snow” pouring up from cracks in the seafloor, much like that seen by the scientists in 1991.

Ancient Microbes After hearing about these discoveries, Delaney wanted to see the site of the newborn eruption for himself. He and two coworkers at the University of Washington obtained a chance to dive at the site in Alvin in October 1993. Like the earlier scientists, Delaney’s group saw thick clouds of what appeared to be bacteria near the fresh lava. They captured some of this floating material and took it back to the surface, where microbiologists aboard the mother ship grew the microorganisms in laboratory dishes and, for the first time, succeeded in identifying them.

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By 1994, John Baross of the University of Washington and other scientists had shown that the vent microorganisms were not bacteria at all, but rather, members of a far older class of organisms called Archaea (“ancient ones”), first described by University of Illinois biologist Carl Woese in 1977. Archaea are thought to be the oldest and most primitive group of organisms on Earth. They are genetically more different from ordinary bacteria, let alone multicelled living things such as human beings, than plants are from animals.

CONNECTIONS: WARM SEA

ON AN ICY

MOON

John Delaney thinks that microbes like the ones he and others have found around hydrothermal vents might exist in an ocean under the icy shell covering Europa, one of the moons circling the planet Jupiter, or in other astronomical bodies that possess both volcanism and liquid water. In an article in the Fall–Winter 1998 issue of Oceanus, Delaney explains that space probes have found evidence that Europa has a rocky interior surrounded by a layer of water about 60 miles (100 km) thick, probably in liquid form, topped by a much thinner sheet of frozen slush and icebergs. Tides caused by the gravitational pulls of Jupiter and its other satellites could stretch and squeeze Europa enough, Delaney says, to produce heat through friction and perhaps generate volcanic action. (He points out that in 1979, the space probe Voyager 1 photographed active volcanoes on Io, another Jupiter moon.) Space scientists Stephen W. Squyres and Ray T. Reynolds first proposed in the early 1980s that if Europa is like Earth’s deep sea in containing both liquid water and heat from volcanism, it might also be similar in possessing microorganisms nurtured by this combination of forces, Delaney says. Believing that Squyres and Reynolds are correct, Delaney has urged further exploration of Europa to learn more about conditions there. Delaney was a visiting scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute and Johnson Space Center from 1977 to 1980, and he has served on a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) committee planning a probe to be sent to Europa and other moons of Jupiter.

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Many other known species of Archaea, just like these undersea microorganisms, thrive under conditions that would kill most living things, including extreme heat (up to 235°F, or 113°C, hotter than the temperature at which water boils at sea level), absence of oxygen, and exposure to hydrogen sulfide and other sulfur-containing compounds. In an article in the Fall–Winter 1998 issue of Oceanus, Delaney described the discovery of Archaea flowing out of erupting seafloor spreading centers as “one of RIDGE’s major successes.” He reported that since 1993, this same kind of outpouring has been observed at a number of other eruption sites. He and other scientists are not sure whether the eruptions provide pulses of nutrients that trigger rapid multiplication of the microbes or, instead, release existing microorganisms from potentially immense reservoirs beneath the seafloor. Delaney and some other scientists believe that the first living things on Earth may have been organisms like these deep-sea Archaea. The researchers say that life may have arisen around undersea vents and volcanoes early in the planet’s history, when eruptions are thought to have been far more common than they are today. Deep underwater, the microorganisms would have been protected from the constant lightning strikes and rains of comets and meteors that tore the young planet’s surface. Jack Corliss, Sarah Hoffman, and John Baross, all then at Oregon State University, first proposed this idea in the early 1980s.

Raising Black Smokers As a marine geologist, John Delaney was interested in the “black smokers” that Robert Ballard and other Alvin scientists had discovered in 1979. These dark chimneys are made from sulfide-containing minerals deposited as the hot water that contains the minerals, spewing up from the seafloor, contacts cold ocean water. Delaney saw his first black smoker during a dive in Alvin in 1984, an experience he described in an interview for a Public Broadcasting System Nova program as “absolutely awe-inspiring.” He himself discovered the world’s largest-known black smoker, as tall as a 15-story build-

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ing, on the Juan de Fuca Ridge in 1991. He named it Godzilla, after the famous Japanese movie monster. (Godzilla eventually collapsed under its own weight, as many large smoker chimneys do.) Delaney brought back parts of smoker chimneys from his Alvin dives and analyzed them in his laboratory, but he wanted to know more about their structure than mere pieces could show. He also wanted to find out what effect removing a chimney would have on the animals that lived near it. In June and July 1998, therefore, he and Edmond A. Mathez of the American Museum of Natural History led an expedition (with support from NASA) to raise several complete black smokers from the floor of the Juan de Fuca Ridge. The museum cosponsored the expedition in return for being allowed to install one of the smokers in its new Hall of Planet Earth. This project was the subject of the Nova documentary, which was first aired on March 30, 1999. Delaney and Mathez began by sending a tethered Jason robot down to photograph the area in which they expected to work. A computer combined tens of thousands of Jason’s digital photos, extensive sonar data, and position information from transponders (underwater sound beacons) to create the most detailed maps ever made of a section of seafloor up to that time. The scientists then used a robot called ROPOS (Remotely Operated The hot water pouring out of Platform for Ocean Science), wield- black smoker vents is colored ing an underwater chain saw, to dark because dissolved minerdetach four black smokers, each als in it begin to turn into solid about 10 feet (3 m) tall and weigh- particles when they contact the much colder water of the ing some 15,000 pounds (10,215 deep sea. (National Oceanic kg), from the ocean floor. After the and Atmospheric Administration/ robot fastened a metal mesh cage Department of Commerce, nur04506)

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around each heavy but fragile structure, complete with its cargo of tube worms, microbes, and other organisms, a powerful winch reeled in the 8,000 feet (2,440 m) of line attached to the cage and lifted the smoker to the surface.

This diagram shows the procedure that John Delaney’s expedition used to retrieve black smoker chimneys from the ocean floor with the help of a remotely controlled robot, ROPOS.

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“Scientifically, we’ve gotten absolutely everything we wanted,” Delaney said at the end of the expedition. John Baross, also part of the group, agreed. “We will have more samples, better collected samples, and better analyzed samples from these structures than we’ve ever had before,” Baross told the Nova narrator. “That has, for me, the same kind of fascination and sense of discovery . . . that I would have if I got to go to Mars and drill, let’s say, a kilometer down . . . and look for water and life there.”

NEPTUNE John Delaney’s latest project, begun around 2000, requires all the persistence and charisma for which he has become well known among other scientists. Called NEPTUNE (North-East Pacific Time-series Undersea Networked Experiments), it is a proposed undersea power and communications grid covering about 150,000 square miles (388,500 km 2) of the Juan de Fuca Plate. If completed, NEPTUNE will use 1,863 miles (3,000 km) of fiber-optic cable to link 30 to 50 nodes on the seafloor, together containing thousands of instruments that will provide a steady stream of physical, chemical, and biological information about the deep sea. The cable will provide electric power to the instruments and, at the same time, transmit information between the nodes and scientists on shore. During its 30-year expected lifetime, NEPTUNE will act as a permanent seafloor observatory—what Delaney and Alan D. Chave, in an article published in the Spring–Summer 2000 issue of Oceanus, called “a fiber-optic ‘telescope’ to inner space.” In contrast to current deep-sea exploration, in which scientists using robots or submersibles like Alvin can study only small areas for short periods, the NEPTUNE system will allow researchers to observe a large area constantly over a long period of time. They can also use the network to dispatch robotic submersibles carrying cameras and other equipment to the site of an undersea eruption or other short-lived event. Finally, somewhat like Robert Ballard’s JASON Project, NEPTUNE will use the Internet to let students and the public as well as scientists tune in to what Delaney terms “the heartbeat of the planet.” He

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NEPTUNE (North-East Pacific Time-series Undersea Networked Experiments), a proposed undersea observatory and communications network designed by John Delaney and others, will use 1,863 miles (3,000 km) of fiber-optic cable to link 30 to 50 observation nodes in a pattern that encircles and crosses the Juan de Fuca Plate, a small tectonic plate that lies off the northwest coast of the United States and the southwest coast of Canada. Each node will contain instruments that record physical, chemical, and biological changes in the sea and send the information to scientists on shore in real time.

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hopes that this opportunity will increase people’s interest in studying and preserving the ocean environment. Delaney and Chave explained in the Oceanus article that NEPTUNE “will let us examine in detail the complexity of interactions that mold the seafloor, generate earthquakes and volcanoes, form ore and oil deposits, transport sediments, circulate currents, cause climate shifts, affect fish populations, or support life in extreme environments on and below the seafloor.” NEPTUNE will also provide a place to test new developments in deep submergence technology and robotic exploration of extreme environments, including tools that might be used to explore other planets. Building NEPTUNE is projected to cost about $200 million. As of late 2005, the United States had not funded NEPTUNE, but Canada had funded and begun work on its share of the project. The NEPTUNE group is constructing two demonstration projects, one (VENUS) off Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, and another (MARS) in Monterey Bay, California. The first VENUS instruments went into operation in February 2006. Although they may have to settle for a smaller network than they had wished for, Delaney and the other program scientists still hope to obtain funding from the National Science Foundation that will allow them to begin building the complete network in 2007. If the project proceeds on schedule, it will be completed in 2012. Some scientists fear that NEPTUNE will face insoluble technical problems or draw scarce funds away from potentially more useful efforts, but Delaney, who is program director of the project and the chair of its executive team, is working hard to convince everyone of its value. Fellow scientists say that Delaney’s persistence has been a major factor in bringing NEPTUNE close to reality. “He kept going, cajoling, long after most people would have given up and gone away,” Kendra Daly, a biological oceanographer at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, told David Malakoff in 2004.

Spark and Passion John Delaney has been honored for his volcano research. In 1991, the University of Washington gave him a Distinguished Research Award.

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PARALLELS: HENRY STOMMEL’S UNDERSEA NETWORK John Delaney is not the first person to try to construct an undersea oceanographic observatory network. In the early 1950s, Henry Stommel, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientist who worked out the major patterns of water circulation in the world’s oceans, designed a system that, like Delaney’s NEPTUNE, was intended to provide a steady, long-term stream of data about the sea. The heart of Stommel’s network, a less complicated project than NEPTUNE, was Hydrostation S, a site 12.4 miles (20 km) southeast of Bermuda and 9,840 feet (3,000 m) beneath the sea. Like NEPTUNE’s proposed nodes, Hydrostation S contained instruments that measured salinity (salt and mineral content), temperature, and dissolved oxygen at several levels between the surface and the seafloor. As is also planned for NEPTUNE, a cable provided both electrical power and communication between the deep-sea instruments and the surface. In addition to Hydrostation S, Stommel’s network included a group of drifting buoys containing radio transmitters, which tracked water movements. Carl Wunsch, a physical oceanographer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who was once a student of Stommel’s, told David Malakoff that a combination of technical problems and financial difficulties soon spoiled Stommel’s dream. The weather was bad, electrical connectors leaked and failed, and Stommel could not obtain the funding or personnel needed to maintain the observatory. As a result, most of Stommel’s network had to be abandoned within a few years of its construction. Hydrostation S, however, continued to operate and was still doing so in 2004, thereby becoming one of the world’s few sources of long-term data about the changing ocean. The story of Stommel’s network both warns of problems that NEPTUNE may encounter and offers hope that, in some form, John Delaney’s ambitious project will nonetheless succeed.

Known for his thrilling lectures, Delaney won an award from the university for his teaching as well, in 1980. He was elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 1995.

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“John’s a dreamer, an instigator. . . . He rejects limits,” Margaret Tivey, a geochemist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said to David Malakoff in 2004. MIT physical oceanographer Carl Wunsch told Malakoff that he does not support all of Delaney’s ideas but respects him nonetheless. “John may not be the world’s greatest marine geologist,” Wunsch said, “but he’s got this spark and passion that we [scientists] as a community sometimes lack.”

Chronology 1941

John R. Delaney born in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 8

1964

Delaney earns B.S. in geology from Lehigh University

1970s

Early in the decade, Delaney becomes interested in volcanoes after a research trip to the Galápagos Islands

1977

Delaney earns Ph.D. from University of Arizona, Tucson Delaney joins faculty of University of Washington, Seattle Scientists discover ecosystems around hydrothermal vents in the deep sea Carl Woese identifies Archaea, a group of very ancient types of microorganisms

1977–80

Delaney is a visiting scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute and Johnson Space Center

1979

Scientists find first “black smokers” Voyager 1 photographs erupting volcanoes on Io, one of Jupiter’s moons

1980

Delaney realizes after a dive in Alvin that he prefers to work in the field rather than in a laboratory Delaney receives teaching award from University of Washington

1980s

Early in the decade, Jack Corliss, Sarah Hoffman, and John Baross propose that life on Earth may have originated around deep-sea hydrothermal vents

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Also early in the decade, space scientists speculate that Europa, another Jupiter moon, may have a shell of relatively thin ice overlying a warm ocean that possibly contains microbes like those found around hydrothermal vents on Earth In mid-decade, Delaney helps to organize the RIDGE (Ridge Inter-Disciplinary Global Experiments) program 1984

Delaney sees his first black smoker during a dive in Alvin

1991

Scientists discover site of a very recent volcanic eruption on the East Pacific Rise and find the water around it filled with snowlike clumps of microorganisms Delaney finds the world’s largest-known black smoker Delaney wins Distinguished Research Award from University of Washington

1993

On June 26, Christopher Fox detects earthquakes moving along the Juan de Fuca Ridge, suggesting an eruption in progress Scientists arriving at the spot where the earthquakes ended find fresh lava and floods of microorganisms pouring up In October, Delaney and coworkers dive to the site in Alvin and collect clumps of microorganisms

1994

Microorganisms from the 1993 eruption are identified as Archaea, the oldest group of living things on Earth

1998

Delaney and Edmond A. Mathez lead an expedition that brings four black smokers to the surface in June and July

2000

Planning for NEPTUNE undersea sensing network begins

2006

First instruments for VENUS, part of NEPTUNE, go into operation in February

Further Reading Books Broad, William J. The Universe Below: Discovering the Secrets of the Deep Sea. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

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Contains a long chapter about John Delaney’s 1993 trip with Atlantis II and Alvin to study bacteria around deep-sea volcanoes.

Articles Delaney, John R. “Life on the Seafloor and Elsewhere in the Solar System.” Oceanus 41 (Fall–Winter 1998): 10–13. Describes discovery of huge colonies of microorganisms living on or beneath the seafloor near erupting volcanoes and discusses the possibility that similar organisms may exist beneath the surface of other astronomical bodies, such as Europa, a moon of Jupiter.

———, and Alan D. Chave. “NEPTUNE: A Fiber-Optic ‘Telescope’ to Inner Space.” Oceanus 42 (Spring–Summer 2000): 10. Describes the North-East Pacific Time-series Undersea Networked Experiments (NEPTUNE), a proposed project to implant a permanent network of sensors and cables in the Juan de Fuca Plate, off the western coast of North America.

Fairley, Peter. “Neptune Rising.” IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] Spectrum. Available online. URL: http://www. spectrum.ieee.org/nov05/2164. Posted November 2005. Update on John Delaney’s NEPTUNE project.

Malakoff, David. “Marine Geologist Hopes to Hear the Heartbeat of the Planet.” Science 303 (February 6, 2004): 751–752. This profile of John Delaney describes his background, research on undersea volcanoes, and plans for NEPTUNE.

Web Sites Black Smokers. American Museum of Natural History Expeditions. URL: http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/expeditions. Accessed June 6, 2005. This site describes a summer 1998 expedition, co-led by John Delaney of the University of Washington and Edmond A. Mathez of the American Museum of Natural History, which brought four “black smoker” undersea sulfide vent chimneys to the surface.

Into the Abyss. PBS Online. URL: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ abyss. Accessed May 17, 2005. This site, published by Boston Public Broadcasting System station WGBH in connection with a Nova television program aired on March 30, 1999, describes Delaney’s 1998 expedition to bring “black

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smoker” sulfide chimneys to the surface. The site includes a long interview with Delaney as well as background information on the expedition and the equipment it used, descriptions of hydrothermal vent life, dispatches from the expedition, resources (links and books), and a transcript of the program.

NEPTUNE. URL: http://www.neptune.washington.edu. Accessed August 19, 2005. This site, devoted to John R. Delaney’s NEPTUNE (North-East Pacific Time-series Undersea Networked Experiments) project, describes the project’s goals, management, nature, uses for science and education, costs, and history.

10 THE VAN DOVER GLOW CINDY VAN DOVER AND LIGHT BENEATH THE SEA

S

cientists who explore the deep sea in Alvin, the famous Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) submersible, often know little about the craft beyond what they have been told in required briefings. They depend on the submersible’s pilot to bring them to the sites they wish to examine, maneuver the vessel’s arms and equipment to gather the samples they want, and, above all, bring them safely back to the surface. Only one researcher has known the nuts and bolts of Alvin as well as the submersible’s pilots—because she was an Alvin pilot. Cindy Van Dover is the only scientist, and the only woman, ever certified by the navy to be a pilot for Alvin. Van Dover’s dual career as academic and submersible pilot is far from her only achievement. Following a hunch about strange markings on the backs of shrimp found at deep-sea vents, she demonstrated that these “blind” shrimp possess a kind of eye and that, more surprising still, the abyssal depths contain light for those eyes to see. Her discovery of what has come to be called the “Van Dover glow” around such vents supports the theory that photosynthesis, a basic biochemical process that was thought to require sunlight, may have begun in the deep sea.

“Not College Material” Cindy Lee Van Dover was born on May 16, 1954, in Red Bank, New Jersey, and grew up in that state, about five miles from the 159

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sea. Her parents were James K. Van Dover, an electronics technician who worked for the government, and Virginia Van Dover, a housewife. Van Dover has said that her upbringing and her parents’ expectations for her were conventional, but her plans for herself were not. As a child she investigated almost every aspect of nature, from birds to insects to trees, and she especially enjoyed summer days at the beach. In the late 1960s, when she was still in grade school, she read about Alvin and dreamed of diving in the vessel, but at the time, she wrote in The Octopus’s Garden, Cindy Van Dover, the first scienher memoir of her career as a deeptist and the first woman certified to pilot the submersible Alvin, sea scientist, she “thought that was revealed that undersea vents about as likely as my going to the give off a visible glow and that moon.” some bacteria and animals livIn a 2001 interview published on ing near the vents can detect this the Ocean Explorer Web site of the light. (Christie K. Buie, C. Ritchie Photography) National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Van Dover said that she decided to become a scientist in 1970, after she worked in a marine biology research laboratory during a summer course in high school. She kept to her plans in spite of—or, she thinks, perhaps because of—her high-school guidance counselor’s telling her that she was “not college material.” “I have often sought to accomplish what others tell me I cannot,” she told the NOAA interviewer. Rutgers University sponsored the laboratory that Van Dover worked in, and she was so impressed with the people she met there that she chose that university for her college training. After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in zoology from Rutgers in 1977, she applied for what she felt was the ideal graduate program in deep-

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sea research, sponsored jointly by WHOI and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). To her disappointment, the program rejected her.

A Life-Changing Cruise Unsure how she wanted to proceed with her scientific career, Cindy Van Dover worked for several years as a technician at various institutions, doing everything from studying crab hatchlings under a microscope to translating articles written in Russian. She began to think about academic advancement again in 1982, however, after she went on her first oceanographic expedition. Van Dover came to be on the expedition because she had heard about a new species of crab, one of the many unusual creatures that scientists had recently discovered around warm-water (hydrothermal) vents in the deep sea. She had worked with crabs in the past, so she wanted a chance to study these new animals. With the help of one of the scientists who had found the crabs, she obtained a position on a research cruise to vent sites on the East Pacific Rise. On this trip she saw Alvin in person for the first time, though she did not dive in the submersible. Van Dover said in a 2001 interview published on WHOI’s Dive and Discover Web site that the cruise was “heaven” to her, even though she had never been on a ship before. “By the time the cruise was over, I knew I could never return to my old life,” Van Dover wrote in The Octopus’s Garden. “I was driven: I needed to know more about the seafloor and its ecology.” She went back to school at the University of California, Los Angeles, to learn mathematical aspects of science that she had avoided earlier. After earning a master’s degree in ecology in 1985, she applied again to the WHOI-MIT program, and this time she was accepted. Van Dover made her first dive in Alvin and saw her first hydrothermal vent in the same year she completed her master’s degree. The vent, called the Rose Garden, had been one of the most spectacular sites in the Galápagos Rift, but by the time Van Dover saw it, most of its forests of giant, red-tipped tube worms had been replaced by less spectacular beds of mussels. Curious about why this change had

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occurred, Van Dover decided to make hydrothermal vent ecosystems her main subject of study.

Not-so-Blind Shrimp Van Dover made her groundbreaking discovery about the vent shrimp in 1986 while she was still studying for her doctorate. The two-inch (5-cm)-long shrimp, first seen only a year before on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, belonged to a species that had been given the name Rimicaris exoculata (“rift shrimp without eyes”) because they lack the eyestalks that their shallow-water cousins possess. When Van Dover watched live shrimp of this species in videotapes made at the vents, she noticed two bright lines running down the upper third of the animals’ backs. The lines had faded to invisibility on preserved specimens, but Van Dover dissected the area where the markings should have been and found two strips of tissue connected to a large nerve. The presence of the nerve made her suspect that the tissue was a sense organ. In spite of the fact that, as far as was known, the vent world was completely dark, she guessed that the organ might be a type of eye. “I recognized it for what it was because I was well trained as an invertebrate zoologist and I’m curious,” she later told journalistexplorer Phil Trupp. Looking for evidence to support her seemingly strange idea, Van Dover sent some of her shrimp specimens to Steven Chamberlain of Syracuse University in New York, a specialist in the eyes of invertebrates (animals without backbones). The shrimp were poorly preserved, but Chamberlain saw some eyelike qualities in the organs when he examined them under a microscope. “If you destroyed an eye, this is what it would look like,” he told Van Dover. Van Dover then gave some of the shrimp tissue to Ete Szuts, a sensory physiologist at WHOI. Szuts found a compound in the tissue that absorbed light in almost exactly the same way as rhodopsin, the light-sensitive pigment found in most animal eyes. The shrimp organ had no lens, so Van Dover knew it could not form images, but the presence of the rhodopsin-like substance suggested that the tissue could detect light. Indeed, the organ contained so much of

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the chemical that it was likely to be far more sensitive to light than an ordinary eye. Steven Chamberlain and his coworkers made further studies of the shrimp organs in later years. In 1993, working with better specimens, they found that the organs were perfectly designed to detect dim light, with oversize photoreceptors taking up most of the tissue. The researchers also found that the organs contained neurotransmitters—chemicals that carry messages in nerves—of a type that shallow-water shrimp have only in their eyes. Chamberlain thinks that the shrimp, crawling up and down the vent chimneys to feed on the bacteria that grow there, use these organs to keep track of their position so that they move neither too far from the vents nor too near the dangerously high temperatures at the vents’ tops. Similar organs have been found on at least two other vent creatures, another shrimp species and a crab.

Glowing Vents After showing that her vent shrimp had light-sensing organs, Cindy Van Dover’s next question was obvious: What light could the shrimp be sensing? Hydrothermal vents are far below the depth to which sunlight can penetrate, but Van Dover knew that objects heated to high temperatures can give off visible light. Hot coils in electric heaters and stoves, for instance, glow red. Other physical and chemical processes around the vents might also create dim light. No one had reported light coming from hydrothermal vents, but Van Dover suspected that this might be because no one had ever looked for it. If such light existed, she expected it to be very dim, so Alvin’s bright outside lights would easily drown it out. Van Dover learned that University of Washington underwater volcano specialist John Delaney was planning to test an ultrasensitive digital camera during an Alvin dive in June 1988. At her request, after the submersible had parked about 18 inches (46 cm) from an undersea vent, Delaney had the pilot turn off all of Alvin’s outside lights and black out the interior ones. The volcanologist then photographed the vent with his new camera for 10 seconds. Shortly afterward, as the craft began to make its way back to the

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surface, Delaney sent back a terse message to Van Dover, waiting anxiously above on Atlantis II, Alvin’s mother ship: “VENTS GLOW.” Van Dover wrote in The Octopus’s Garden that when the submersible returned and she examined the camera’s images on Atlantis II’s computer screen, I expected to see some ambiguous hint of a fuzz which, if one was willing to stretch the imagination, might be called a glow. . . . But what came up on the screen instead was a dramatic, unequivocal glow with a sharply defined edge at the interface between the sulfide chimney and the jet of hot water.

This “Van Dover glow” was later found around many undersea vents.

Alvin Pilot In 1989, on the day after Cindy Van Dover earned a doctorate with her research on the “eyeless” shrimp, she put her scientific career on hold in order to pursue another dream. Not content to dive in Alvin once or twice a year like other scientists who used the submersible, she had decided that she wanted to learn to pilot the vessel so she could visit the deep sea almost every day. “I’m an ecologist, and as an ecologist you want to be in the environment you’re studying,” she explained in the Dive and Discover interview. Becoming an Alvin pilot was a demanding task at best, requiring at least nine months of on-the-job training followed by a series of difficult oral examinations. No scientist, and no woman, had ever attempted it—and many of Van Dover’s coworkers thought that none ever should. Some members of the Alvin support team believed that scientists paying to use Alvin would see a scientist-pilot as competition, while others feared that Van Dover’s two interests would compete dangerously for her own attention. (“You can’t do science and run the boat,” one later told Phil Trupp.) Some crew members also did not welcome a woman’s entry into the “man’s world” of the Alvin group.

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Because of the opposition Van Dover faced, she wrote in The Octopus’s Garden, her months of pilot training were not only “intense and challenging” but also “sometimes cruel.” She was distressed to learn that some of her fellow scientists had said they would not dive with her if she became a pilot. Some crew members tried to blame her for any problems that arose or gave her false information in the hope that she would make a serious mistake. This opposition and her own fear of failure, however, simply made her more determined to succeed. Several of the older pilots also supported her, and even her critics were impressed with her willingness to do the hardest and dirtiest work, such as stacking the submersible’s heavy ballast weights. She qualified as an Alvin pilot in 1990. Van Dover was Alvin’s pilot in command on 48 dives during the year and a half that she worked as a submersible pilot. She has said in many interviews that she was seldom afraid during that time. She was well aware of the dangers that the vessel and its passengers always faced, but she also knew the many safety features and procedures that would protect them under most circumstances. Much as Van Dover enjoyed piloting Alvin, she found that she missed being able to learn more about the environment that the submersible visited, so she decided to return to science. She made her last dive as a pilot in December 1991. In the years that followed, she wrote in The Octopus’s Garden, the Alvin group asked her “more than once” to become a pilot again. “So far I have declined,” she said, “but always with regret.”

Harnessing Light In 1993, building on her earlier research, Cindy Van Dover began pursuing another idea that at first seemed as improbable as her theories about the shrimp and the vent light. All vent microorganisms known at the time supported themselves by digesting hydrogen sulfide or methane (a compound of carbon and hydrogen) found in the vents. As soon as Van Dover learned that some vents produce light, however, she began to suspect that a few types of microbes might base their metabolism on another process, far better known but seemingly unimaginable in the deep sea: photosynthesis.

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ISSUES: WOMEN

ON

OCEANOGRAPHIC CRUISES

Until the 1970s, women were seldom allowed to take part in oceanographic cruises, no matter how well qualified they were as scientists. Part of the prohibition, Victoria A. Kaharl writes in Water Baby: The Story of Alvin, could be traced to an ancient sailors’ superstition that women aboard a ship brought bad luck. In addition, The all-male camaraderie of research cruises had a long tradition. Seagoing oceanography was intrinsically macho. It was strenuous and often dangerous—launching heavy equipment (to say nothing of TNT [an explosive used in making seismic profiles of the seafloor]) over the side of a bobbing platform; operating machinery; getting filthy dirty, bruised, and wet; and tossing in a narrow bunk, too miserable with nausea to be scared out of your wits by the fury of a storm.

Even men who did not share (or would not admit to sharing) these feelings rationalized their prohibition of women with the excuses that women might be exposed to danger (from either nature or male crew members) or that setting up acceptable sleeping and bathroom arrangements was simply too much trouble. WHOI was somewhat more progressive than most other institutions in its policy toward women, Kaharl says. It allowed geophysicist Betty Bunce to act as chief scientist on a cruise in 1959, for example, and it regularly permitted women on its ships in the 1960s as long as at least two women were on board at the same time. (The reason given for this rule was that if one woman became ill, the other woman could take care of her.) Dives in Alvin remained an exclusively male privilege for a longer period, however. Bunce and a woman newspaper reporter made brief dives in the submersible in the 1960s, but women scientists were not allowed to make research dives until 1971.

In photosynthesis, plants and some bacteria use chlorophyll or other pigment molecules to capture energy from light, then apply this energy to chemical reactions that make food. All known photosynthetic organisms obtained their energy from sunlight. Nonetheless, Van Dover had heard of certain types of bacteria that

THE VAN DOVER GLOW 167

could perform photosynthesis in light as dim as the vent light, so she wondered whether microorganisms might be able to harness light from the hydrothermal vents for this purpose. Indeed, in 1994,

Cindy Van Dover and Euan Nisbet proposed in the mid-1990s that photosynthesis might have originated at deep-sea hydrothermal vents and moved to shallow water later. According to their theory, certain bacteria living around the vents developed the ability to sense dim light coming from the vents and used that information to adjust their position on the vents in order to obtain the best combination of temperature and food (dissolved chemicals from the vents). Some of the bacteria later washed up into shallow water and reestablished themselves around hot springs, which contain some of the same chemicals as the vents. Either before or after this change of location, the bacteria’s light-sensing mechanism evolved into a mechanism that allowed the microorganisms to harness energy from light for use in their bodies—the process of photosynthesis.

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she and University of London paleontologist Euan Nisbet even proposed that photosynthesis might have originated at deep-sea vents and adapted to sunlight later. During the late 1990s, Van Dover gathered evidence that helped to support her theory that photosynthesis could take place at hydrothermal vents. She and others showed that the most primitive forms of bacterial chlorophyll absorb light with frequencies that match those of the light at hydrothermal vents, for instance. They also pointed out that photosynthesis uses several elements present in large amounts around vents, including iron, manganese, and sulfur. In the early 2000s, Van Dover and Robert Blankenship of Arizona State University, Tempe, finally proved Van Dover’s theory by discovering bacteria that can perform photosynthesis growing around “black smoker” vents in the East Pacific Rise. These microorganisms, members of a group called green sulfur bacteria, are closely related to the bacteria Van Dover had heard about earlier that could carry out photosynthesis in very dim light, but they are a new species. They possess a cell component called a chlorosome, which steers photons (units of light energy) directly to the molecules that begin the photosynthetic reaction. These newfound bacteria are the only photosynthetic organisms known to use light from a source other than the Sun.

Studies of Diversity In the mid-1990s, Cindy Van Dover began branching out from Woods Hole. She was a visiting scholar at Duke University in North Carolina (1994–95), an associate professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (1995–98), and science director of the West Coast National Undersea Research Center. In 1998, she became an assistant professor at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. She is now Marjorie S. Curtis Associate Professor at that institution. Van Dover has received several awards for her work. Ms. magazine chose her as its Woman of the Year in 1988, for example. Her scientific prizes include the Vetlesen Award from WHOI (1990) and the NOAA/MAB Research Award (1996). The Cook College

THE VAN DOVER GLOW 169

SOLVING PROBLEMS: OPUS

AND

ALISS

Before Cindy Van Dover could find out whether photosynthesis took place around hydrothermal vents, she needed more information about the vent light. She obtained it in dives between 1993 and 1997 with a device called OPUS (Optical Properties Underwater Sensor). OPUS, invented by WHOI marine physicist Alan Chave, had four photodiodes for detecting light. Chave put a different filter in front of each photodiode so that the sensor could measure light in four different frequency bands at the same time. Useful as it was, OPUS could not form images and therefore could not show exactly which parts of the vents were glowing. To remedy this problem, WHOI built a second device in the late 1990s that it called ALISS, or Ambient Light Imaging and Spectral System. Like John Delaney’s digital camera and OPUS, ALISS uses charge-coupled devices (CCDs), which are far more sensitive to light than film. ALISS has two arrays, each with nine lenses and filters, which allows it to obtain images in 18 different frequencies of light at the same time. A computer can combine the data later to produce composite images. ALISS was deployed on the East Pacific Rise in 1997 and the Juan de Fuca Ridge in 1998. The results from both devices suggested to Van Dover and her coworkers that although heat is the major source of the vent light, it is not the only source. Several physical processes, including the formation and cracking of crystals and the collapse of small bubbles, can give off light, and these processes could occur around the vents. No one is yet sure of all the causes of the Van Dover glow. In an article in the Fall–Winter 1998 issue of Oceanus, the WHOI magazine, Chave and Sheri N. White point out that ALISS has many potential uses. ALISS images can be used to create thermal maps of vent plumes, for example, showing how heat is distributed in the plumes. Such maps might literally shed light on the vents’ chemistry and reveal much about the way vent fluids and seawater mix. Images from ALISS might also help scientists find out the purpose for which Van Dover’s shrimp and some other vent creatures use their ability to detect light.

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Alumni Association of Rutgers University gave her a George Hammel Cook Distinguished Alumni Award in 2004. A press release issued when she received this award said that Van Dover was “recognized world-wide as one of the true pioneers of deep-sea hydrothermal vent ecology.” Van Dover has continued and expanded her studies of hydrothermal vent ecosystems, for example acting as chief scientist on a 2001 cruise that was the first to explore vents in the Indian Ocean. She and the other expedition scientists found that most of the animals living around the Indian Ocean vents were related to species found in the Pacific, but the numerous shrimp there resembled the Atlantic species that Van Dover had studied. On another cruise in 2005, which took Alvin farther south than the submersible had ever been before, Van Dover’s group made the first search for vents on the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge. Van Dover wrote a book based on her studies, The Ecology of Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vents (2000). Van Dover’s specialty is now mussels and the small invertebrates that live in mussel beds, especially those around hydrothermal vents. She tries to find out which species occur at which vents and in what numbers. “My laboratory is interested in patterns in distributions of species—in biogeography and biodiversity—and in gaining some understanding of why species occur where they do,” she said in the 2001 NOAA interview. In lectures and popular writing such as The Octopus’s Garden, Cindy Van Dover has tried to increase support for exploring the deep sea and arouse concern about human pollution of this extremely rich but possibly fragile environment. “We actually know more about the surface of Mars and Venus . . . than we know about the topography of our own seafloor,” she wrote in her memoir, yet the health of the communities of creatures that live there “may be critical to the balance of the world’s oceans” and to life on land as well.

Chronology 1954

Cindy Lee Van Dover born in Red Bank, New Jersey, on May 16

THE VAN DOVER GLOW 171

1970

Van Dover works in a marine biology laboratory as part of a high school summer course and decides to become a scientist

1977

Van Dover obtains bachelor’s degree in zoology from Rutgers University

1982

Van Dover goes on first oceanographic expedition

1985

Van Dover obtains master’s degree in ecology from University of California, Los Angeles Van Dover begins doctoral program sponsored by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Van Dover dives in Alvin for the first time and sees first hydrothermal vent Scientists discover Rimicaris exoculata, a seemingly blind species of shrimp, living near vents on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge

1986

Van Dover obtains evidence that tissue on the back of Rimicaris exoculata is a light-sensing organ

1988

In June, following a suggestion by Van Dover, John Delaney photographs a glow around a hydrothermal vent Ms. magazine chooses Van Dover as Woman of the Year

1989

Van Dover earns Ph.D. with research on vent shrimps’ light organs Van Dover begins training to become a pilot for Alvin

1990

Van Dover qualifies as an Alvin pilot

1991

Van Dover makes last dive as Alvin pilot in December

1993

Van Dover begins investigating the possibility that bacteria around vents use the vent light for photosynthesis Other researchers find additional evidence that several kinds of vent animals possess sensitive light-sensing organs

1993–97

Van Dover and others analyze vent light with OPUS (Optical Properties Underwater Sensor)

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1994

Van Dover and Euan Nisbet propose that photosynthesis may have originated at hydrothermal vents

1994–95

Van Dover is a visiting professor at Duke University

1995–98

Van Dover works as associate professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks

1996

Van Dover receives NOAA/MAB Research Award

1997–98

Van Dover and others analyze vent light with ALISS (Ambient Light Imaging and Spectral System)

1998

Van Dover joins faculty of College of William and Mary

2001

Van Dover is chief scientist on cruise that explores vents in Indian Ocean for the first time

2003–05

Van Dover and Robert Blankenship find vent bacteria that can perform photosynthesis

2005

Van Dover takes part in expedition that looks for hydrothermal vents on the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge

Further Reading Books Kaharl, Victoria A. Water Baby: The Story of Alvin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Contains material on the experiences of Cindy Van Dover and other women during oceanographic cruises involving Alvin.

Trupp, Phil. Sea of Dreamers: Travels with Famous Ocean Explorers. Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum Publishing Co., 1998. A chapter describes the author’s meetings with Van Dover and quotes extensively from The Octopus’s Garden.

Van Dover, Cindy Lee. The Ecology of Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vents. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Scientific textbook on hydrothermal vent ecosystems.

———. The Octopus’s Garden. New York: Perseus Books, 1996. (Reissued in paperback as Deep-Ocean Journeys in 1997.)

THE VAN DOVER GLOW 173

Popular book describing Van Dover’s training and experiences as an Alvin pilot and her adventures and discoveries while studying the bizarre life-forms that cluster around deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

Articles “Distinguished Alumni to Be Honored at Cook College Graduation Ceremony.” Rutgers News press release, May 20, 2004. Provides a brief biographical sketch of Van Dover in connection with her receiving a Distinguished Alumni Award from the Cook College (Rutgers) Alumni Association.

Hart, Stephen. “Photosynthesis in the Abyss.” Astrobiology, May 5, 2003, n.p. Reports discovery of hydrothermal vent bacteria that can carry on photosynthesis, using light from the vents.

“Interview with Dr. Cindy Lee Van Dover.” Ocean Explorer Web site, National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration. Available online. URL: http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explor ations/deepeast01/background/explorers/interview_vandover.html. Accessed June 8, 2005. Interview published in connection with a 2001 expedition to a site off the southeast coast of the United States that contains supplies of methane, which some bacteria that live inside mussels can use as an energy source.

“Interviews: Chief Scientist Cindy Van Dover.” Dive and Discover Web site, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Available online. URL: http://www.divediscover.whoi.edu/expedition4/interviews/ vandover.html. Accessed June 8, 2005. Interview published in connection with an expedition to the Indian Ocean that Van Dover made in 2001.

Kunzig, Robert. “Between Home and the Abyss.” Discover 14 (December 1993): 66–75. Account of a 1991 expedition in which Van Dover served as Alvin’s pilot.

———. “Expedition to the Bottom of the Deep Blue Sea.” Discover 22 (December 2001): 40–47. Describes a 2001 expedition in which Van Dover, as chief scientist, and other researchers used a Jason robot to search for hydrothermal vents in the Indian Ocean.

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Moreira, Naila. “Grow in the Dark: Bottom-dwelling Bacterium Survives on Geothermal Glow.” Science News 167 (June 25, 2005): 405. Brief article describes further discoveries about photosynthetic bacteria that Van Dover and others found around hydrothermal vents in the Pacific Ocean.

Van Dover, Cindy Lee. “Depths of Ignorance.” Discover 14 (September 1993): 37–39. Describes some of the remarkable discoveries made about the deep sea during recent decades and laments public ignorance and lack of interest in this vital environment.

White, Sheri N., and Alan D. Chave. “ALISS in Wonderland: Imaging Ambient Light at Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vents.” Oceanus 41 (Fall–Winter 1998): 14–17. Describes OPUS and ALISS, two tools developed during the 1990s for imaging and analyzing the light around hydrothermal vents that Van Dover discovered.

Zimmer, Carl. “The Light at the Bottom of the Sea.” Discover 17 (November 1996): 62–73. Account of Van Dover’s discovery that some vent animals can perceive light and that hydrothermal vents glow, as well as her suggestion that some bacteria may be able to use the vent light for photosynthesis.

e

CHRONOLOGY

1842

Edward Forbes concludes that no life exists in the deep sea

1850s–60s American entrepreneur Cyrus Field and others lay first transatlantic telegraph cables 1859

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species published

1871

Jules Verne’s science fiction novel 20,000 Leagues under the Sea published

1872–76

Charles Wyville Thomson leads Challenger expedition, which systematically samples the chemistry, geology, and biology of the deep sea for the first time, discovering major geographical features of the seafloor and proving that life exists at great depths

1912

Alfred Wegener proposes that all the Earth’s continents were once part of a single landmass but have drifted apart and are still moving through the planet’s crust, a theory called continental drift; most geologists reject the theory “Unsinkable” ocean liner RMS Titanic sinks on the night of April 14–15 after colliding with an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean, killing more than 1,500 people

1934

William Beebe and Otis Barton dive to 3,028 feet (about half a mile, or 923 m) in the bathysphere, a tethered steel pressure sphere designed by Barton, on August 15

1948

Henry Stommel explains why the Gulf Stream and other ocean surface currents on the western side of gyres are narrower and move faster than currents on the eastern side of gyres Auguste Piccard tests his first bathyscaphe, a pressure sphere attached to a large float containing gasoline, on November 3 175

176 Modern Marine Science

1953–54

Marie Tharp shows that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is divided by a rift valley, an idea that supports Wegener’s theory of continental drift

1955–57

Marie Tharp, Bruce Heezen, and Maurice Ewing demonstrate that a continuous ridge-and-rift system, which they call the Mid-Ocean Ridge, curves through the centers of the Earth’s oceans

1956–58

Allyn Vine gathers support for building a small, maneuverable vessel (a submersible) that can carry humans through the deep sea

1958

The U.S. Navy buys Trieste, an improved bathyscaphe designed by Auguste Piccard and his son, Jacques Piccard Henry Stommel explains how the Gulf Stream and other surface currents in the ocean interact with deepwater currents

1959

Harry Hess and Robert Dietz independently propose theory of seafloor spreading, which states that new planetary crust is created when molten rock from the Earth’s mantle rises up through cracks in the seafloor and is destroyed by sinking into other cracks, called trenches, and being reabsorbed into the mantle

1960

Trieste, copiloted by Jacques Piccard and navy lieutenant Donald Walsh, descends 35,802 feet (almost seven miles, or 10,912 m) to the deepest spot in the ocean, in the Mariana Trench, on January 23

1960s

Early in the decade, Henry Stommel describes thermohaline circulation, the worldwide “conveyor belt” that moves ocean water between surface and depth, warm and cold, and salty (saline) and less salty

1963

U.S. Navy nuclear submarine Thresher sinks unexpectedly on April 10, arousing military concern that leads to increased development of deep-sea technology; Trieste locates remains of Thresher in August

1964

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) submersible Alvin, named after Allyn Vine, goes into service on June 5

CHRONOLOGY 177

1965–68

Evidence from magnetic reversals in rocks, undersea earthquakes, and other sources convinces most geologists to accept the theory of plate tectonics; this theory, a descendant of Wegener’s continental drift theory, states that Earth’s crust is divided into a number of plates that move slowly, impelled by convection currents in the mantle, and sometimes collide or scrape against one another

1966

During March and April, submersibles Alvin and Aluminaut and robotic vehicle CURV retrieve a hydrogen bomb lost off the coast of Spain during a plane crash

1969

Mesoscaphe Ben Franklin, designed by Jacques Piccard, carries six scientists on an expedition beneath the Gulf Stream that lasts from July 14 to August 14

1973–74

During Project FAMOUS (French-American Mid-Ocean Undersea Study), scientists in the submersibles Alvin and Cyana and the bathyscaphe Archimède explore part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and obtain direct evidence that supports the theories of seafloor spreading and plate tectonics

1977

In February, scientists diving in Alvin near the Galápagos Islands discover clusters of unusual animals living around warm-water (hydrothermal) vents in the deep sea National Geographic magazine publishes a color physiographic map made by Bruce Heezen, Marie Tharp, and artist Heinrich Berann that shows the world’s ocean floors as they would appear if all the water were removed

1979

“Black smokers,” mineral chimneys from which extremely hot, sulfur-laden water erupts, are discovered in the deep sea After an expedition studies the hydrothermal vent animals at the Galápagos Rift in more detail, scientists conclude that bacteria that can make food from sulfur compounds are the basis of the vent ecosystems

1980s

Early in the decade, Jack Corliss, Sarah Hoffman, and John Baross propose that life on Earth may have originated around deep-sea hydrothermal vents

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Also early in the decade, space scientists speculate that Europa, a moon of Jupiter, may possess a warm ocean, possibly containing microbes like those found around hydrothermal vents on Earth, beneath a relatively thin shell of ice 1985

Using robotic vehicles, Robert Ballard discovers the wreckage of the RMS Titanic on September 1

1986

Cindy Van Dover shows that a type of shrimp living around hydrothermal vents possesses an organ that can detect light

1988

At Cindy Van Dover’s suggestion, John Delaney takes photographs showing light around a hydrothermal vent

1990

Cindy Van Dover becomes the first woman and the first scientist certified as a pilot for Alvin

1993

Cindy Van Dover suggests that some bacteria may use the light around hydrothermal vents as a source of energy for photosynthesis

1994

Microorganisms emerging seemingly from beneath the seafloor after an underwater volcanic eruption are identified as Archaea, an extremely old type of life-form

1998

John Delaney and Edmond Mathez lead an expedition that brings up four black smokers from the ocean floor in June and July

2000

John Delaney and other scientists begin planning NEPTUNE (North-East Pacific Time-series Undersea Networked Experiments), a permanent undersea observatory and communications network

2003–05

Cindy Van Dover and Robert Blankenship discover hydrothermal vent bacteria that can perform photosynthesis

2004

WHOI announces that Alvin will soon be retired and replaced with a more advanced submersible

e

GLOSSARY

ALISS short for Ambient Light Imaging and Spectral System, a device built at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the late 1990s that used charge-coupled devices with arrays of lenses and filters to make images of the light around hydrothermal vents in 18 frequencies Alvin a submersible operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, put in service in 1964; it has taken part in many of the advances in late 20th-century marine science. See also SUBMERSIBLE ANGUS short for Acoustically Navigated Geological Underwater Survey, a camera-carrying towed sled that Robert Ballard and others used for remotely operated investigation of deep-sea sites beginning in the 1970s Aqualung a device invented by Jacques-Yves Cousteau in 1943 that allows divers to carry their air supply in tanks on their backs so that they can swim freely for relatively long periods. See also SCUBA

Archaea a group of extremely primitive microorganisms discovered by University of Illinois biologist Carl Woese in 1977; some types of microorganisms found in large quantities around fresh eruptions of undersea volcanoes belong to this group Argo a remotely controlled sled, carrying video cameras that can photograph in almost complete darkness, designed by Robert Ballard in 1981 asthenosphere the lower layer of Earth’s crust, lying between the lithosphere (upper layer) and the Earth’s mantle. Rock in the asthenosphere, like that in the mantle, exists in molten or liquid form. See also LITHOSPHERE, MANTLE azoic zone an area in which no living things exist; in 1842, British biologist Edward Forbes called the deep sea an azoic zone 179

180 Modern Marine Science

ballast heavy material used to provide increased stability for a ship or to help a submersible remain at a given depth by adding weight to the craft basalt dark volcanic rock, made of solidified lava; much of the ocean floor is made of this kind of rock bathyscaphe a submersible invented by Auguste Piccard in the 1940s and improved by his son, Jacques Piccard; it consists of a steel passenger sphere suspended from a large float that contains gasoline for buoyancy. See also TRIESTE bathysphere a tethered steel sphere invented by Otis Barton, in which Barton and William Beebe made dives up to 3,028 feet (923 m) below the sea’s surface in the early 1930s bathythermograph a device used to measure water temperature continuously at changing depths benthoscope an improved bathysphere invented by Otis Barton, in which Barton made a dive to 4,500 feet (1,370 m) below the surface in August 1949, breaking his and William Beebe’s depth record. See also BATHYSPHERE bioluminescence the ability to make light inside the body by means of a chemical reaction; many animals that live in the moderately deep ocean possess this ability black smoker a chimney on the seafloor, made of sulfide and other minerals, through which rises very hot water that appears dark because it contains large amounts of dissolved minerals buoyant able to float in a liquid because it is less dense than the liquid cartography the science of mapmaking Challenger Deep the deepest part of the ocean, extending to 35,802 feet (6.8 miles, or 10,912 m) below the surface, part of the Mariana trench. See also MARIANA TRENCH Challenger expedition a scientific expedition aboard HMS Challenger, conducted between 1872 and 1876, that made the first systematic, worldwide survey of physical, chemical, and biological conditions in the deep sea charge-coupled device a sensor that can convert light into electronic signals chemosynthesis the process of harnessing energy in certain chemicals, usually sulfur compounds or methane, to make food within a living thing’s body. Compare PHOTOSYNTHESIS

GLOSSARY 181

chlorophyll a pigment in green plants and some microorganisms that captures energy from light, usually sunlight, and uses it in photosynthesis. See also PHOTOSYNTHESIS chlorosome a body in the cells of certain bacteria that concentrates light and directs it to the molecules that carry on photosynthesis collapse depth the depth at which the pressure of the sea will crush a submarine or submersible continental drift a theory, proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1912, that says the continents were once part of a single landmass but have drifted apart and are still moving through the Earth’s crust. See also PLATE TECTONICS contour map a map that shows the height of geographic features by means of lines that connect points with the same elevation convection current a current of movement in a liquid or gas, caused by uneven heating Coriolis force an effect caused by the Earth’s turning on its axis, which deflects wind and water to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere crust the outermost layer of the Earth, consisting of an upper sublayer called the lithosphere and a lower sublayer called the asthenosphere. See also ASTHENOSPHERE, LITHOSPHERE, MANTLE current a continuous, directed flow of liquid, such as ocean water deep earthquake an earthquake centered in the Earth’s mantle rather than the crust density the amount of mass or number of particles per unit of volume diving saucer a type of small, maneuverable submersible invented by Jacques-Yves Cousteau in the early 1950s dredge a bucket-like device, consisting of a net attached to a frame, that is used to collect animals or material from the seafloor dynamical oceanography the mathematical study of currents and other movements of ocean water echinoderms a group of animals that includes starfish, sea urchins, and sand dollars echo sounder a device, invented in the early 20th century, that determines depth in water by sending out sound waves and measuring how long the waves take to reach the seafloor and return to the surface; also sometimes called a fathometer ecology the branch of science that studies the relationships among living things and between living things and their environment

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eddy a circular movement of water within or associated with a current epicenter the spot on the Earth’s surface directly above the center of an earthquake Europa a moon of Jupiter with an icy crust and, possibly, a warm ocean of liquid water beneath; some scientists think that this ocean may contain microorganisms similar to those found around hydrothermal vents fathometer See ECHO SOUNDER fault a crack in the Earth’s surface caused by displacement of one side relative to the other; faults usually occur on the boundaries of plates fiberglass a strong, lightweight material made from spun-glass fibers fossil the mineralized remains of a living thing that died long ago friction the resistance encountered when one or more bodies move while in contact with one another green sulfur bacteria a group of bacteria that can exist without oxygen and can carry on photosynthesis in extremely dim light; some bacteria that live near hydrothermal vents have been found to belong to this group Gulf Stream a swift, narrow surface current of warm water that flows north along the southeastern part of the United States from Florida to North Carolina and then turns east guyot a type of flat-topped undersea mountain discovered by Harry Hess in the mid-1940s; it was once above the surface of the sea, where erosion wore away its top, and then sank beneath the water gyre a large circular movement of water in an ocean, caused by a combination of winds and the Coriolis force; gyres turn clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere heptane a high-octane gasoline used in aircraft and in the floats of bathyscaphes HOV short for Human-Operated Vehicle. Compare ROV hydrogen sulfide a compound of hydrogen and sulfur (H2S) that usually exists as a poisonous gas with a rotten-egg smell hydrothermal vent a crack or fissure in the seafloor from which water heated by rock in the Earth’s mantle pours up

GLOSSARY 183

invertebrate an animal without a backbone Io a moon of Jupiter on which volcanic eruptions have been observed Jason a type of small, tethered robot, invented by Robert Ballard in 1981 and used for remote-controlled exploration of the deep sea; it contains a camera lens and manipulator arms Jim suit an armored diving suit that allows its wearer to go deeper than is possible with any other kind of suit Juan de Fuca Plate a small tectonic plate off the northwest coast of the United States and southwestern Canada Kuroshio Current a swift, narrow current, equivalent to the Gulf Stream, which flows north along the western edge of the Pacific, passing the coasts of Japan and Siberia lithosphere the upper layer of Earth’s crust, consisting of solid rock magma molten rock beneath the surface of the Earth magnetic striping strips of rock on the seafloor with alternating magnetic polarities, caused by interaction of seafloor spreading with periodic reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field magnetite an iron oxide mineral with magnetic properties magnetometer an instrument that measures the direction or intensity of a magnetic field mantle the layer of the Earth that lies below the crust Mariana Trench a deep fissure in the floor of the Pacific Ocean that contains the deepest spot in the world’s oceans mesoscaphe a large submersible, invented by Auguste and Jacques Piccard, that is capable of carrying relatively large numbers of people to moderate depths and remaining submerged for weeks at a time methane a compound of carbon and hydrogen (CH4), often found as a component of natural gas; some underwater vents give off methane, and some bacteria can digest it Mid-Atlantic Ridge an undersea mountain range running north to south down the center of the Atlantic Ocean Mid-Ocean Ridge a continuous system of undersea ridges and rift valleys running through the world’s oceans, discovered by Bruce Heezen, Marie Tharp, and Maurice Ewing in the mid-1950s mother ship a surface ship with facilities for carrying and keeping in contact with a submersible

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naturalist an old term for a scientist who studies nature in general, especially plants and animals NEPTUNE short for North-East Pacific Time-series Undersea Networked Experiments, a proposed undersea observatory and communications network off the northwestern United States and southwestern Canada neurotransmitter a chemical that conducts messages (electrical signals) between nerves oceanography the study of the physics, chemistry, biology, and geology of the sea OPUS short for Optical Properties Underwater Sensor, a device invented at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the early 1990s that could detect and measure light at four frequency bands at the same time. Compare ALISS Pangaea the name given to the single landmass from which, according to Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift, all present-day continents derived; it means “all-Earth” Panthalassa the name given to the single ocean that surrounded Pangaea; it means “all-ocean” photodiode a semiconductor device that turns light into an electrical current photon a unit or particle of light photoreceptor a cell that uses pigment to absorb light and convert it into a nerve signal photosynthesis the process by which green plants and some microorganisms capture light energy, usually from sunlight, and use it in chemical reactions that produce nourishment. Compare CHEMOSYNTHESIS

physical oceanography the study of the dynamics and physical properties of the ocean, including temperature, salinity, and ocean currents physiographic map a map that shows land or undersea geographical features as they would appear from the air (and, in the case of undersea features, with the overlying water removed) phytoplankton the portion of plankton made up of plants and plantlike organisms, which can make their own food. See also PLANKTON pillow lava a type of lava formation found only under the sea, produced by the hardening of molten rock rising up from the Earth’s mantle during seafloor spreading

GLOSSARY 185

planetary vorticity a spinning movement of water caused by the Earth’s rotation. See also RELATIVE VORTICITY, VORTICITY plankton tiny, floating plants and animals that make up the basis of the food chain in most parts of the sea plate one of about seven large and 12 smaller segments into which the Earth’s crust is divided, according to the theory of plate tectonics plate tectonics a theory developed in the mid-1960s to explain how Earth’s crust is created and destroyed and how portions of the crust (plates) move relative to one another; this theory is an improved descendant of Wegener’s theory of continental drift. See also CONTINENTAL DRIFT Plexiglas a type of tough plastic (methylmethacrylate), invented to make clear, shatterproof coverings for aircraft viewports during World War II; it was also used in the windows of bathyscaphes pontoon a flat-bottomed float that is a part of some boats and aircraft capable of landing on water Project FAMOUS short for the French-American Mid-Ocean Undersea Study, an expedition in which scientists in three submersibles studied the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in 1973 and 1974 relative vorticity the spinning movement of ocean water caused by wind and friction with the coasts of continents. See also PLANETARY VORTICITY, VORTICITY reversing thermometer a type of thermometer invented in the late 19th century that allowed the temperature of seawater at various depths to be measured accurately rhodopsin a light-sensitive pigment found in eyes and other organs that can detect light RIDGE program short for the Ridge Inter-Disciplinary Global Experiments program, a multidisciplinary study of mid-ocean ridges funded by the National Science Foundation and organized by John Delaney and others during the mid-1980s rift a crack or fissure in the surface of the Earth rift valley a large, steep-sided valley made when crust subsides between two tectonic faults Rimicaris exoculata a type of shrimp living near hydrothermal vents; it lacks eyes but possesses light-sensitive organs on its back Ring of Fire a zone around the rim of the Pacific Ocean that contains two-thirds of the world’s active volcanoes

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ROPOS short for Remotely Operated Platform for Ocean Science, a remotely operated vehicle used in deep-sea exploration ROV short for Remotely Operated Vehicle, a robotic device controlled from a distance that is used to explore inhospitable environments such as the deep sea. Compare HOV salinity the quantity of dissolved salts or minerals in water scuba short for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus, a device that allows divers to carry their air supply in tanks on their backs so that they can swim freely for relatively long periods. See also AQUALUNG seafloor spreading the term coined by Robert Dietz for the theory that he and Harry Hess developed independently around 1960, which states that new planetary crust is created when molten rock rises into cracks in the existing crust and hardens; crust is destroyed by being drawn back into the Earth through other cracks Seapup the name that Harold “Bud” Froehlich gave to a proposed small submersible for which he developed a design in 1958; a modified form of this design became Alvin. See also ALVIN sediment particles of organic or inorganic matter deposited on a surface, such as the seafloor seismic mapping a means of determining the composition of the ocean floor by dropping explosives overboard and recording echoes of the blasts sonar short for sound navigation and ranging, a tool that detects objects underwater by sending out high-frequency sound waves and measuring the length of time the sound takes to return. See also ECHO SOUNDER SOSUS short for Sound Surveillance System, an underwater hydrophone network that the navy developed to detect movements of Soviet submarines during the 1960s; it was declassified and made available to oceanographers in the early 1990s sound to measure the depth of water; sounding was first done simply by tying a cannonball or other weight to the end of a long line and determining how much line let out before the bottom was reached subduction the process by which crust at the edge of a plate is pulled under another plate and drawn back into Earth’s mantle at undersea trenches

GLOSSARY 187

submersible a vehicle designed to operate underwater, especially a small, untethered, human-carrying vehicle that is lowered from a mother ship and recalled to the ship each night syntactic foam a foam made of premanufactured microscopic spheres of glass, ceramic, or polymer (plastic) embedded in an epoxy glue matrix to form a solid that is very light in weight yet extremely resistant to pressure telepresence the use of remotely controlled vehicles and devices to image and manipulate objects at a distance thermocline a layer in water in which the temperature drops much more rapidly with increasing depth than in the layers above or below it thermohaline circulation the circulation of ocean water between deep and surface layers, driven by changes in density caused by changes in temperature and salinity; sometimes called the “conveyor belt” titanium a metallic element or alloy that is extremely strong but also very light in weight trade winds warm winds that blow steadily near the equator, moving northeasterly in the Northern Hemisphere and southeasterly in the Southern Hemisphere. Compare WESTERLY WINDS transect a straight line or narrow strip extending across an area (cross section), along which samples or measurements are made at regular intervals transform fault a type of earthquake fault, first identified by J. Tuzo Wilson in the mid-1960s, that is transformed into a ridge or a trench at each end transponder a device that is set to a specific radio or sound frequency and broadcasts directional signals that can be tracked to determine the device’s location trawl a bag or net that can be dragged through the water or along the ocean bottom to collect fish and other animals; to drag a trawl through the water trench an extremely deep valley in the ocean floor, where one plate is diving beneath another at a subduction zone Trieste the best-known bathyscaphe, invented by Auguste and Jacques Piccard; piloted by Jacques Piccard and Donald Walsh, it dived to the deepest part of the ocean in 1960

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tsunami a gigantic wave caused by an undersea earthquake, volcanic eruption, or landslide; sometimes called tidal wave, although tides do not cause it tube worms marine worms that live in hard or leathery tubes that they make to protect themselves; the most spectacular species live around hydrothermal vents, extend blood-red tips or plumes into the water, and obtain nourishment from sulfur-digesting bacteria that live in their bodies turbidity currents underwater “rivers” of sediment and water that flow downhill because they are denser than the water above them; they shape the outer edges of continents Vine-Matthews-Morley hypothesis the proposal, developed in the early 1960s by Frederick Vine and Drummond Matthews and, independently, by Lawrence Morley, that magnetic striping in seafloor rocks is related to seafloor spreading. See also MAGNETIC STRIPING

vorticity the total spin of a water column, determined by a combination of relative vorticity and planetary vorticity; the column’s total vorticity remains the same, no matter where on Earth the column is. See also PLANETARY VORTICITY, RELATIVE VORTICITY water column an imaginary cylinder extending from the top of a body of water to the bottom westerly winds wind systems blowing steadily from the west between latitudes 30 degrees and 60 degrees (approximately) north and south; they are southwesterly in the Northern Hemisphere and northwesterly in the Southern Hemisphere winch a device to increase power for hauling up lines; for instance, for pulling heavy weights up from the sea

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FURTHER RESOURCES Books Ballard, Robert D., with Malcolm McConnell. Adventures in Ocean Exploration: From the Discovery of the Titanic to the Search for Noah’s Flood. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2001. Lavishly illustrated book portrays the history of seafaring exploration and scientific study of the ocean.

———, with Will Hively. The Eternal Darkness: A Personal History of Deep-Sea Exploration. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Describes scientific exploration of the ocean in the 20th century, beginning with William Beebe’s bathysphere; emphasizes events in which Ballard played a part.

Broad, William J. The Universe Below: Discovering the Secrets of the Deep Sea. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. History of scientific investigation of the deep ocean describes discoveries made about this mysterious realm.

Burgess, Robert F. Ships beneath the Sea: A History of Subs and Submersibles. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975. Examines the development of submarines and submersibles, beginning with submarines used in the Revolutionary War and ending with the submersibles that played roles in the recovery of a hydrogen bomb in 1966 and Project FAMOUS, an exploration of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, in 1973–74.

Charton, Barbara. A to Z of Marine Scientists. New York: Facts On File, 2003. Biographical encyclopedia of major figures in marine science.

Ellis, Richard. Deep Atlantic: Life, Death, and Exploration in the Abyss. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Book is divided between a history of the exploration of the deep Atlantic and a description of the unusual animals found there.

Forman, Will. The History of American Deep Submersible Operations. Flagstaff, Ariz.: Best Publishing Co., 1999. 189

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Illustrated with diagrams of the vessels, the book provides details of the development and structure of Trieste, Alvin, and many other military and scientific submersibles.

Gordon, Bernard L., ed. Man and the Sea: Classic Accounts of Marine Explorations. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday/American Museum of Natural History, 1972. Firsthand accounts of scientific and other explorations of the sea’s surface and the deep sea include William Beebe’s description of a bathysphere dive and Donald Walsh’s account of his and Jacques Piccard’s dive to the deepest part of the sea in the bathyscaphe Trieste in 1960.

Idyll, C. P. Abyss: The Deep Sea and the Creatures That Live in It. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1964. Focuses on deep-sea biology, including animals that make their own light and animals that could be considered “sea monsters.”

Kunzig, Robert. Mapping the Deep: The Extraordinary Story of Ocean Science. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. Covers discoveries about plate tectonics, ocean currents, deep-sea life-forms, and interactions between ocean and climate.

Lawrence, David M. Upheaval from the Abyss: Ocean Floor Mapping and the Earth Science Revolution. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Focuses on discoveries and theories by Maurice Ewing, Marie Tharp, Bruce Heezen, Harry Hess, and others in the 1950s and 1960s that led to the development and acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics.

Rice, Tony. Deep Ocean. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2000. Extensive color photographs and descriptions of deep-sea life, with background on development of oceanography and marine biology.

Internet Resources Dive and Discover. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Available online. URL: http://www.divediscover.whoi.edu. Accessed June 8, 2005. Describes about 10 previous and current oceanographic research expeditions, provides background information for students on a variety of marine science topics, and offers links and ideas for teachers.

Into the Abyss. NOVA/WGBH/Public Broadcasting System. Available online. URL: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/abyss. Accessed June 6, 2005. This site was built in connection with “Volcanoes of the Deep,” a Nova television program aired on March 30, 1999, which described John Delaney’s 1998 expedition to bring “black smoker” sulfide vent chimneys to the surface. The site features a long interview with Delaney as well as background on the expedition

FURTHER RESOURCES 191

and the equipment it used, dispatches from the expedition, descriptions of hydrothermal vents and vent life, an extensive chronology of marine science discoveries, resources (links and books), and a transcript of the program.

Into the Deep. Fulton County Schools, Roswell, Georgia. Available online. URL: http://www.promotega.org/ksu00019. Accessed June 7, 2005. Student-created Web site shows the vertical layers of the ocean; profiles of oceanographic explorers, vessels, and tools; unusual living things in the mid-ocean “twilight zone,” in the deep sea, and in trenches and vents; human activities that may endanger the ocean; and a glossary, student activities, and resources.

Mar-Eco. Census of Marine Life. Available online. URL: http://www.mar-eco. no/about. Accessed May 17, 2005. Describes an international research project, coordinated by Norway, to enhance understanding of the occurrence, distribution, and ecology of animals and animal communities along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The project is a pilot program for the Census of Marine Life, a larger project that uses the latest technology to learn more about marine ecosystems worldwide in the hope of preserving them. The site, divided into sections for the public, students, and scientists, includes a description of a 2004 research expedition.

Monterey Canyon and the Deep Sea. Monterey Bay Aquarium. Available online. URL: http://www.mbayaq.org/efc/efc_mbh/dsc.asp?bhcp=1. Accessed May 17, 2005. Outlines some of the aquarium’s research in nearby Monterey Canyon, where water more than 10,000 feet (3,048 m) deep lies close to the shore. Includes information on the deep sea, the animals that live there, their unusual methods of survival, and exploration of the deep sea.

New Millennium Observatory (NeMO). Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. Available online. URL: http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents/ nemo. Accessed September 4, 2005. The NeMO project observes the Axial Seamount, a site on the Juan de Fuca Ridge (off the northwest coast of the United States) that contains active volcanoes and seafloor hot springs. The Web site includes updates from expeditions, background information, a real-time communication link to the seafloor, virtual tours and interactive dives, and suggestions for teachers.

Ocean AdVENTure. Thinkquest. Available online. URL: http://library.think quest.org/18828. Accessed June 8, 2005. Interactive site provides a journey to deep-sea hydrothermal vents. It covers basic facts about the vents, ethics of vent exploration, vent scientists’ research tools, unsolved mysteries of the vents, scientists who explore the vents, animals that live at the vents, geology of the vents, significance of the vents, as well as student activities, a glossary, resources, and a forum for expressing opinions about vent exploration.

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Ocean Currents, Climate, Weather, and Sea Life. Chris Carter, Saddleback Unified School District, Orange County, CA. Available online. URL: http://can-do.com/uci/lessons98/Raft.html. Accessed July 27, 2005. Provides links to sites that offer images and information about physical features of the ocean, interactions between ocean and climate, the Gulf Stream and other ocean surface currents, hurricanes, sea temperatures, climate prediction, marine life, and other resources.

Ocean Explorer. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Available online. URL: http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov. Accessed September 4, 2005. NOAA’s ocean education site includes lesson plans, a gallery of photos and videos, accounts of scientific expeditions, descriptions and pictures of oceanographic technology and history, and many other resources.

OceanLink. Anne Stewart. Available online. URL: http://oceanlink.island. net. Accessed September 4, 2005. Ocean education site for students includes information about unusual ocean animals, careers in ocean science, and students acting to protect or investigate the oceans.

Oceanography for K-12. Marine Institute of Memorial University of Newfoundland. Available online. URL: http://www.mi.mun.ca/mi-net/ ocean. Accessed September 4, 2005. Provides student and teacher activities, links, and resources concerning physics, chemistry, weather, technology, biology, and geology related to the world’s oceans.

Savage Seas. Public Broadcasting System and Thirteen/WNET. Available online. URL: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/savageseas. Accessed June 7, 2005. Site produced in connection with a documentary television series presented on PBS by Thirteen/WNET in New York includes animations and videos, facts about physical features of the ocean’s surface, surviving in stormy seas, interactions between ocean and atmosphere that affect climate, “black smoker” vents and other features of the deep sea, and additional resources.

Vents Program. Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL). Available online. http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents. Accessed June 6, 2005. PMEL, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, conducts research on the impact of submarine volcanoes and hydrothermal venting on the global ocean. Its Web site contains information about the program’s expeditions (which focus on chemical, geological, and physical aspects of the vents), sounds and videos, and an interactive dive to an active underwater volcano.

FURTHER RESOURCES 193

Venture Deep Ocean. Ridge 2000 Program, National Science Foundation. Available online. http://venturedeepocean.org. Accessed August 26, 2005. Site describes expeditions to discover how seafloor volcanoes and vents create environments for extraordinary life-forms. It includes background on volcanoes and vents, vent communities, tools and techniques, scientists who study vents and vent life, the tools and techniques they use, quizzes and games, and images.

Periodicals Discover Published by the Walt Disney Company 114 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10011 Telephone: (212) 633-4400 Includes articles about oceanography and deep-sea explorations.

National Geographic Published by the National Geographic Society P.O. Box 98199 Washington, DC 20090-8199 Telephone: (800) 647-5463 Includes articles about deep-sea exploration; illustrated with diagrams, maps, and spectacular photographs.

Nature Published by Nature Publishing Group 968 National Press Building 529 14th Street NW Washington, DC 20045-1938 Telephone: (202) 737-2355 www.nature.com/nature A prestigious source of scientific papers, originally published in Europe.

Oceanus Published by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Mail Stop 40 Woods Hole, MA 02543

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Telephone: (508) 289-2990 Describes ocean research done at WHOI and elsewhere.

Oceanography Published by the Oceanography Society P.O. Box 1931 Rockville, MD 20849-1931 Telephone: (301) 251-7708 Professional magazine for the oceanography community, reporting news and research.

Science Published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science 1200 New York Avenue NW Washington, DC 20005 Telephone: (202) 326-6400 www.sciencemag.org Prestigious American source of scientific papers, including some on marine science.

Science News Published by Science Service 1719 N Street NW Washington, DC 20036 Telephone: (202) 785-2255 www.sciencenews.org Weekly newsletter contains brief descriptions of current scientific advances, including advances in marine science.

Societies and Organizations National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA; http://www. noaa.gov/ocean.html) 14th Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Room 6217, Washington, DC 20230. Telephone: (202) 482-6090. Monterey Bay Aquarium (http://www.mbayaq.org) 886 Cannery Row, Monterey, CA 93940. Telephone: (831) 648-4800. Mystic Aquarium and Institute for Exploration (http://www.mystic aquarium.org) 55 Coogan Boulevard, Mystic, CT 06355-1997. Telephone: (860) 572-5955.

FURTHER RESOURCES 195

Office of Naval Research (ONR; http://www.onr.navy.mil) One Liberty Center, 875 North Randolph Street, Suite 1425, Arlington, VA 222031995. Telephone: (703) 696-5031. Scripps Institution of Oceanography (http://www.sio.ucsd.edu) 8602 La Jolla Shores Drive, La Jolla, CA 92037. Telephone: not listed. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI; http://www.whoi.edu) Information Office, Co-op Building, Mailstop 16, Woods Hole, MA 02543. Telephone: (508) 548-1400.

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INDEX

Italic page numbers indicate illustrations.

A Adventuring with Beebe (Beebe) 27 Africa, East xvi, 59–60 Agassiz Medal 99 Alaska, University of 168 ALISS (Ambient Light Imaging and Spectral System) 169 Aluminaut 107, 112–113 Alvin xv, xvii, 104–121, 110, 111, 124, 148, 151, 160 achievements 115 Ballard, Robert, and 124–125, 131–132, 134 compared to remotely operated vehicles 132 creation 107–109 Delaney, John, and 144–146, 148–149, 163–164 hydrogen bomb recovery 104, 110–112 in Project FAMOUS 113–115, 125, 131 piloting xviii, 104, 159, 164–165 retirement 118 sinking 112–113 structure 108–109, 111, 115 undersea vent discovery 125–128, 131 Van Dover, Cindy, and xviii, 159–161, 164– 165, 170

women on 164–166 American Association for the Advancement of Science 99, 137 American Geographical Society 64 American Geophysical Union 61, 65, 80, 154 American Meteorological Society 99 American Museum of Natural History 17, 18, 29, 30, 149 ANGUS (Acoustically Navigated Geological Underwater Survey) 131, 133 Aqualung 39 Archaea 147–148 archaeology, deepwater 122–123, 134, 137 Archimède 109, 113–115, 124–125 Argo 131, 133 Arizona, University of 144, 168 asthenosphere 73, 75, 130 Atlantic Ocean 54–55, 62, 74, 90, 98, 109, 133 maps of 58–59, 63–64 telegraph cables under xiv, 4–5 Atlantis 56, 105 Atlantis II 164 azoic zone xiv, 2

B bacteria at hydrothermal vents xvii–xviii, 126–127, 129, 145, 167–168 green sulfur 168

197

in undersea volcanic eruptions 143–146 photosynthetic 167–168, 167 Ballard, Robert 42, 49, 74, 108, 110, 122–142, 123 and discovery of undersea vents xvii, 125, 127–128, 145, 148 archaeology, deepwater, discoveries xviii, 134–137 chronology 138–140 educational activities 136–137 evaluation of 137 further reading 140–142 on Project FAMOUS 124–125, 131 remotely operated vehicles, design of 131– 132 submersibles, support for 124, 131 Titanic discovery and exploration xviii, 104, 122–123, 132–135 youth and education 122–124 balloon flights 34, 36–37, 48 Baross, John 147–148, 151 Barton, Otis xv, 17, 21–28, 26, 34–35, 37 basalt 74, 144 bathyscaphes 37–46, 49, 106–107, 113, 116, 117, 124 bathysphere craft 21–22, 23, 26, 34, 37, 40, 107

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bathysphere (continued) dives in xv, 17, 22–28, 116 bathythermograph 105 Beebe, William xv, 17–33, 18, 26, 34, 37, 122 accuracy 28–30 as ecologist 19 bathysphere dives 22–28 Bronx Zoo, work at 18 chronology 30–32 expeditions 19–20, 28 further reading 32–33 later years 28 mentoring activities 29 oceanographic research 20, 27–28 writings 19–20, 28–30, 137 youth and education 17–18 Bell Laboratories 60 Bell Telephone Systems 63 Ben Franklin 48, 124 benthoscope 28, 34 Berann, Heinrich 64 Bigelow Medal 99 bioluminescence 27 Bismarck 134 Black Sea shipwrecks 135–136 black smokers xviii, 128, 130, 130–131, 148–151, 149, 168 discovery xviii, 122, 127–128 retrieving and dissecting 144, 149–151, 150 Blankenship, Robert 168 Book of Naturalists (Beebe) 29 Bostelmann, Else 27 Broecker, Wallace S. 98 Bronx Zoo 18 Brown, Elizabeth 89 Buchanan, John Young 5–6 Bucher, Walter, Medal 65 Bunce, Betty 166 Burns, Annette 71 Burroughs, John, Medal 30

C Cable-controlled Underwater Recovery Vehicle (CURV) 112 California, University of 123, 137, 161 Calypso 39 Cambridge University 76, 80 Cape Johnson 71 carbon dioxide 98 Carnegie Institution 71 Carpenter, William 3 Carson, Rachel 29 Challenger, HMS xiv, 1–2, 4, 5, 7–11, 42 Challenger II 42 Challenger Deep 10, 42–43, 46 Challenger expedition xiv, xvi, 1–16, 20, 44, 54 crew and scientists 5, 9 equipment and laboratories 5, 7 government support for 4–5 importance of 12–13 proposed 3 research activities 6–10 route 9 scientific report 10–13 Chamberlain, Steven 162– 163 Chave, Alan D. 151–152, 169 chlorophyll 166, 168 chlorosome 168 Chicago World’s Fair 34 Clark, Dan 110 climate, interaction with ocean currents 88, 98 cold war xv, 40, 47, 58, 146 Colgate University 30 Collected Works (Stommel) 89, 95 Columbia University xv, 18, 21, 54–58, 89, 98, 105 Commission on Ocean Policy 137 Common Wealth Award 137 convection currents 72–73, 76, 80, 82

continental drift theory xvi– xvii, 59, 61, 61–62, 64–65, 72–73, 81 continents, movement of xvi–xvii, 59, 61, 62, 73, 80 Cook, George Hammel, Distinguished Alumni Award 170 Copernicus, Nicolaus xvii, 83 Coriolis force 91–93 Corliss, Jack 125, 128, 148 cosmic rays 36 Cosyns, Max 37 Cousteau, Jacques-Yves 39, 113, 122, 137 Crafoord Prize 99 Crane, Jocelyn 28 crust of Earth, creation and destruction xvii, xix, 60, 71–73, 73, 75, 79–80 Cullum Geographical Medal 64 currents, ocean xvi, 88–103 deepwater xvi, 88–89, 94–97 movement between ocean layers xvi, 48, 88, 95, 96–98 surface xvi, 6, 88–97 turbidity 64 Cyana 113–115, 125

D Daly, Kendra 153 Darwin, Charles xiv, xvii, 3, 83, 125 Dawson, Jane Ramage 2 deep sea biology of xiii, xiv, xvii, 2 currents in xvi, 88, 94–97 deepest part of xiii, xv, 10, 42–44, 43, 71 defined xiii evolution in xiv importance of xix, 83, 170 inaccessibility of xiii, xv, xviii marine science, establishment of xv

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maximum depths achievable by humans 116, 117 19th-century views of xiv pressure in xiii, 20 temperature of xiii Deep Sea, The (Wallace) 115 Delaney, John xviii, 143– 158, 144, 163–164 chronology 155–156 further reading 156–158 investigates undersea volcanic eruptions 144–147 plans undersea communication network 143–144, 151–154 retrieves black smokers 144, 147–151 youth and education 143–144 density, ocean, effect on currents 96 Department of Agriculture (U.S.) 57 Depths of the Sea, The (Thomson) 3 Descent (Matsen) 19, 30 Dietz, Robert xvii, 40, 73–74 Distinguished Public Service Award 45 Donnelly, Jack 125 dredging 6–8 Duke University 168

E Earle, Barbara 124 Earle, Sylvia 30 Earth Institute xvi, 54–55, 89, 98, 105 earthquakes xvii, xix, 77– 83, 145, 146, 153 faults 75, 79 undersea 60, 77–78, 114 zones 77 East Pacific Rise 161, 168, 169 ecology 19, 29, 30, 161– 162, 164, 170 Ecology of Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vents (Van Dover) 170

eddies 99 Edinburgh, University of 2–3, 11 Edmond, John 125, 130 Einstein, Albert xvii, 36 Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane, Die (Wegener) 62 Eternal Darkness, The (Ballard) 42, 74, 110 Europa 147 evolution by natural selection xiv, 3–4, 83, 125 Explorations (Ballard) 125, 128 Ewing, Maurice xvi, 54–58, 55, 74, 76, 89, 105 and Mid–Ocean Ridge 60–61, 63, 72

F Face of the Deep, The (Heezen, Holloway) 64 fathometer 71 Federal Institute of Technology (Zurich) 35 Floor of the Sea, The (Wertenbaker) 81 FNRS-1 (balloon) 37 FNRS-2 (bathyscaphe) 37–40 FNRS-3 (bathyscaphe) 38–39, 42, 113 Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique 37 food chains, surface and vent 129 Forbes, Edward 2–3, 13 Forel 48 Fornari, David xviii fossil fuels 78, 98 fossils 56, 62, 74 Foster, Howard 60, 77 Foundation for the Study and Preservation of Seas and Lakes 48 Fox, Christopher 146 Franklin, Benjamin 48, 92 French-American MidOcean Undersea Study (FAMOUS) 113–115, 124–125, 131 French Society of Arts, Sciences, and Letters 45

friction, effect on ocean surface currents xvi, 91–93 Froehlich, Harold 107 Fye, Paul 95, 99

G Gagnan, Emile 39 Galápagos Islands 20, 125, 144 Galápagos Rift 125, 161 Galápagos: World’s End (Beebe) 20 Ganymede 82 gasoline in bathyscaphes 37–38, 41 General Mills 107–108 Geneva, University of 38 Geochemical Sections Program 97 Geological Society of America 63, 83 geothermal energy 78 global warming xix, 98 gravity differences on seafloor 56 effect on ocean currents 92, 96 Guam 42–43 Gulf Stream 88, 90–98, 90 current patterns 90–97 mesoscaphe voyage through 47–48, 124 Gulf Stream, The (Stommel) 95 Guyot, Henry 71 guyots 71–72, 74 gyres 91–93, 91, 99

H Hahn & Clay 109 Half Mile Down (Beebe) 24, 27, 29 Haring, Hester 58 Harvard University 95 Hawaii, University of 123 Heezen, Bruce xvi, 53–56, 54, 58–69, 70, 72, 114 and rift valley discovery 59–60 chronology 65–68 codiscovers Mid–Ocean Ridge 60–62 death 65

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Heezen, Bruce (continued) expedition with Ewing 54–55 further reading 68–69 maps of seafloor 58, 63–64 other achievements 64 youth and education 54–55 Hercules 136 Hess, Harry xvi, 62, 70–74, 71, 79, 81–87, 115 chronology 83–85 early career 71–72 further reading 85–87 later years 82–83 seafloor spreading theory 72–74, 79, 81 youth and education 70 Hiram College 104–105 History of American Deep Submersible Operations (Forman) 49 “History of the Ocean Basins” (Hess) 73 Hoffman, Sarah 148 Hollister, Gloria 26 Holloway, Charles D. 64 Holmes, Arthur 62 Holton, Adelaide 105, 109 Hornaday, William T. 18 HOVs (human-operated vehicles) 132 Hubbard Medal 65, 137 hydrogen bomb recovery 104, 110–112 Hydrostation S 154

I Illinois, University of 147 Indian Ocean 64, 170 Indonesia tsunami xix, 78 Institute for Exploration 136 Institute of Archaeological Oceanography 137 Io 82, 147 Iowa, University of 54 Isacks, Bryan 79, 81

J Jacobson, Marjorie 124 Jason 131–132, 149

JASON Foundation for Education 136–137 Jason Jr. 134 JASON Project 136, 151 Jim suit 116, 117 Jones, Brian 48 Juan de Fuca Plate 145, 151, 152 Juan de Fuca Ridge 146, 149, 169 Jupiter 147 K Kennedy, John F. 83 Kipfer, Paul 37 Knorr 133 Korth, Fred H. 47 Kuroshio Current 91–92

L Lamont (-Doherty) Geological Observatory xv–xvi, 54–56, 65, 76, 79–80, 89, 105 Legion of Merit 45 Lehigh University 104–105, 144 Leopold, Order of 45 Le Pichon, Xavier 80, 114 Library of Congress 65 life on Earth, origin of xiii, 143, 148 light at undersea vents 159– 160, 163–165, 167–169 light-detecting organs in vent animals 162–163, 169 light-sensing equipment 169 lithosphere 73, 75 Litton Industries 109 Lockheed Award for Ocean Science and Engineering 116 London, University of 3 Lulu 110, 112, 125, 128 Lusitania, RMS 134

M McKenzie, Dan 80 Magellan 82 magma 72, 78, 80, 114, 130 “Magnetic Anomalies over Oceanic Ridges” (Vine, Matthews) 76

magnetic field, Earth’s, reversals 74–76 magnetic striping 75–76, 80 magnetism in seafloor 74–76 magnetite 74 magnetometer 75 mantle, Earth’s xvii, 72–73, 73, 75, 76, 79–81 Mapping the Deep (Kunzig) 12 maps of seafloor xvi, 53–56, 58–60, 63–66, 105, 149 Mariana Islands 43 Mariana Trench 10, 12, 42–44, 43, 46, 71 marine science. See also oceanography deepwater, establishment of xv establishment of xiv, 1, 12 importance of xix MARS (undersea network) 153 Mason, Ronald 75 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 96, 125, 154, 161 Mathez, Edmond A. 149 Matthews, Drummond 76 Maury, Matthew Fountaine 92 mesoscaphe 46–48, 124 methane 165 Michigan, University of 57–58 Mid-Atlantic Ridge xvi, 54–55, 63, 144, 162 discovery 10, 12 exploration 113–114, 122, 125, 131 rift valley 59–60, 63, 72, 113–114 Mid-Ocean Dynamics Experiments (MODE) 97 Mid-Ocean Ridge xvi, 60– 63, 63, 70, 72, 75, 125 minerals from ocean 78, 128 Minnesota, University of 36 Mizar 112–113 Momsen, Charles B. 107

INDEX 201

Monograph of the Pheasants, A (Beebe) 19 Morgan, Jason 79–80, 79 Morley, Lawrence 76 Moseley, Henry Nottidge 5, 8 mountains, undersea xiii, xvi, 10, 54, 60–63, 71–72 Murray, John 5, 11–13 mussels 170 Mystic Aquarium 136

N Nares, George Strong 5 National Academy of Engineering 116 National Academy of Sciences (U.S.) 83, 93, 99 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 83, 147, 149 National Endowment for the Humanities 137 National Geographic 27, 64–65, 137 National Geographic Society 21, 27, 65, 137 National Humanities Medal 137 National Medal of Science 99 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) 160, 170 National Science Foundation 131, 145, 153 Navy, U.S., role in modern marine science xv, 47 Navy Oceanographer’s Commendation 105 NEPTUNE (North-East Pacific Time-series Undersea Networked Experiments) 151–154, 152 neurotransmitters 163 Newton, Isaac xvii New York Aquarium 27 New York Zoological Park 18 New York Zoological Society 18, 19, 21, 27, 28, 30

Nichols, John T. 29 Nisbet, Euan 167–168 NOAA/MAB Award 168 Noah’s Ark 136 Nonsuch Island 20, 22 NR-1 65

O oceanography. See also marine science dynamical 93 founding of xiv, 1, 12 physical 89, 99 women in 166 oceans, value of xix Octopus’s Garden, The (Van Dover) 132, 160–161, 164–165, 170 Office of Naval Research (ONR) xv, xvi, 40–41, 74, 106, 124 Ohio University, Athens 57 Oliver, Jack 79, 81 Oliver, James A. 30 On the Origin of Species (Darwin) xiv, 3 OPUS (Optical Properties Underwater Sensor) 169 Oregon State University 125, 148 Osborn, Fairfield 30 Osborn, Henry Fairfield 18

P Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory 146 Pangaea 59, 61 Penrose Medal 82 physiographic maps 58, 65 Phoenician shipwrecks 134 photosynthesis at deep-sea vents xviii, 159, 165–169, 167 Piccard, Auguste xv, 34–40, 46–47, 49–52, 106–107, 113 balloon flights 34, 36–37 bathyscaphe tests 38, 40 chronology 49–51 death 47 designs bathyscaphe 35–38

designs mesoscaphe 46 further reading 51–52 youth and education 35 Piccard, Bertrand 48 Piccard, Jacques xv, 34, 35, 37–53, 106–107, 113, 124 awards 45 and mesoscaphe 46–48 and Trieste 38–42, 44 chronology 49–51 education 38 further reading 51–52 Gulf Stream expedition 48 later years 48 Mariana Trench dive 42–44, 49 Piccard, Jean-Félix 35–36 pillow lava 114, 128, 145, 146 Pioneer Venus 82 planets, other 153 life on 127, 147 plate tectonics on 82 plankton 99, 129 plates, crustal xvii, 77–81, 81 plate tectonics xvii, 56, 70, 77–83, 81 evidence supporting xvii, 77, 79–80, 104, 114– 115, 122–123, 125 Plexiglas 40, 44 POLYMODE program 97 Porteous, John 128 Princeton University xvi, 61–62, 70–72, 79 Project FAMOUS 113–115, 124–125, 131

R Raff, Arthur 75 Rakestraw, Norris 123 Rechnitzer, Andreas 42, 106–107 Reynolds, J. Louis 107 Reynolds, Ray T. 147 Reynolds Aluminum 107 Rhode Island, University of 124, 137 rhodopsin 162 Rice, Mary Blair 18–19 Rice University 56 Ricker, Elswyth Thane 28

202 Modern Marine Science

Ridge Inter-Disciplinary Global Experiments (RIDGE) Program 145, 148 rift valley in Mid-Ocean Ridge xvi, 60–61, 63, 113–114, 125 seafloor spreading, role in xvii, 72, 75 Rimicaris exoculata 162– 163 Ring of Fire 78 robotic vehicles in undersea archaeology xviii, 134, 136 in undersea exploration xvi, 47, 64, 122, 131–132, 151 Roman shipwrecks 134 Roosevelt, Theodore 20–21 Award 45 ROPOS (Remotely Operated Platform for Ocean Science) 149–150, 150 Rosenstiel Award 99 rotation of Earth, effect on ocean surface currents xvi, 91–93 ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles) 131–132 Royal Society (Belgium) 45 Royal Society (Britain) 3, 99 Royal Swedish Academy 99 Rutgers University 71, 160, 170

S Sagan, Carl 136 salinity xvi, 96–97, 99, 154 Scorpion, USS 46 Scripps Institution of Oceanography 75, 123 scuba 39, 116, 117 Sea around Us, The (Carson) 29 sea cucumber 44 seafloor maps of xvi, 53–56, 58–60, 63–66 spreading xvii, 71–77, 73, 75, 79–81, 114– 115, 145

Seapup 107 seismic mapping 56, 114, 166 “Seismology and the New Global Tectonics” (Isacks, Oliver, Sykes) 81 Shinkai 116, 117 Sigma Xi 137 Silent Spring (Carson) 29 Silent Landscape, The (Corfield) 4 Smith, Blakely, Medal 116 Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers 116 sonar 89, 105, 114, 133 SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System) 146 Soucoupe (Saucer) 39 sound, travel underwater 41, 56, 105 sounding (determining depth) 6, 58 echo 56, 71–72, 115 Southern California, University of 124 South Florida, University of 153 Southwest Research Institute 109 Soviet Academy of Sciences 99 Soviet Union xv, 40–41, 47, 58, 97, 111 space exploration, compared to deep-sea exploration xviii, 4, 9, 17, 47, 83, 170 Squyres, Stephen W. 147 Stakes, Debra 128 Stommel, Henry xvi, 88–90, 89, 92–99, 154 awards 99 chronology 100–101 deepwater currents, study of 94–95 further reading 101–103 Gulf Stream, study of 92, 94–95 later years 97–99 surface currents, study of 92–93 thermohaline circulation, study of 95–97

undersea observatory network 154 youth and education 88–89 stratosphere 36–37 subduction 78–79, 145 submarines 47, 58, 106– 107, 116, 117 detection of xv, 41, 71, 75, 89, 105, 146 submersibles xv–xvi, xviii, 20–21, 47, 65, 114, 124 advantages and disadvantages 49, 106–107, 131–132 designers of 39, 48, 107, 122 sulfur compounds xvii, 126–127, 130, 148, 165 sulfur–digesting bacteria xvii, 126–127, 129, 145 Sverdrup Gold Medal 99 Swallow, John 94–95 Swiss National Exposition 46–47 Sykes, Lynn 79, 81 syntactic foams 108 Syracuse University 162 Szuts, Ete 162

T telegraph, undersea cables xiv, 4–5, 60 telepresence 132 temperature, ocean 99, 154 and sound 105 at deep–sea vents 127 effect on currents xvi, 96–97 in deep sea xiii, 6, 125 Texas, University of, Galveston 56 Tharp, Marie xvi, 53–55, 57–60, 63–69, 114 awards 65 chronology 66–68 codiscovers Mid–Ocean Ridge 60 discovers Mid–Atlantic rift valley 59–60, 65 further reading 68–69 maps of seafloor 58–60, 63–65

INDEX 203

oil company job 57 youth and education 57 thermocline 94, 105 thermohaline circulation 95–99, 95 This Dynamic Earth (USGS) 83 Thomson, Charles Wyville See Wyville Thomson, Charles Thresher, USS 45–47 Titanic, RMS xviii, 104, 122–123, 132–137 discovery 133 exploration 134 sinking 132–133 uses of remains 135 titanium 114–115 Titans of the Deep (Barton) 28 Tivey, Margaret 155 trenches, deepwater xvii, 10, 72 Trieste xv, 35, 39–46, 41, 45, 106–107, 124 Trieste II 46, 124 tsunamis xix, 78 tube worms 126, 127, 128, 129, 146, 161 Tufts University 30 Tulsa, University of 57 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Verne) 1, 123 Two Bird Lovers in Mexico (Beebe) 19

U Universe Below, The (Broad) 20, 47 Upheaval from the Abyss (Lawrence) xvii, 54, 66 U.S. Geological Survey 83

V Van Andel, Tjeerd 125 Van Dover, Cindy xviii, 132, 159–174, 160 awards 168 chronology 170–172 discovers glow around vents 159–160, 163– 164, 169 discovers that vent shrimp detect light 159–160, 162–164

further reading 172–174 pilots Alvin 159–160, 164–165 predicts photosynthesis at deep–sea vents 166–168 vent ecology studies 170 youth and education 159–161 Van Dover glow 159–160, 164, 169 Vema 56 vents, undersea black smokers xviii, 128, 130, 130–131, 148–151, 149, 168 discovery xviii, 122, 127–128 retrieving and dissecting 144, 149–151, 150 discovery of 125–128, 145 life around 104, 122– 123, 125–129, 145, 147–150, 161–163, 165–170 light given off by xviii, 159–160, 163–164, 167–169 photosynthesis at xviii, 159, 165–169, 167 water cycling through 130–131 VENUS (undersea network) 153 Venus (planet) 82 Verne, Jules xiii, 1, 123 Vetlesen Award 168 View of the Sea, A (Stommel) 89 Vine, Allyn xvi, 104–110, 105, 115–116, 118 chronology 118–120 further reading 120–121 inspires Alvin 107–109 later years and death 115–116, 118 navy, work for 105–106 submersibles, support for 106–108 youth and education 104–105

Vine, Frederick 75–76, 79–80 Vine-Matthews-Morley hypothesis 76 Virginia, University of 144 volcanoes 153 land xvii, 78, 80–83, 143, 145 on other planets 147 undersea xviii, 11, 71, 114, 125, 143–146, 148 vorticity 93–94, 96 Voyage of the Challenger, The (Linklater) 11 Voyager 1 82, 147

W Walden, Barrie 115 Walsh, Donald 35, 42, 44–46, 106–107 Washington, University of xviii, 143–144, 146–147, 153, 163 Water Baby (Kaharl) 106, 128, 166 Wegener, Alfred xvi–xvii, 59, 61–62, 64, 72, 81–82 Weir, Gary 118 West Coast National Undersea Research Center 168 Westinghouse Award 137 “Westward Intensification of Wind–Driven Currents, The” (Stommel) 92–93 White, Sheri N. 169 Wild, Jean Jacques 5 Wildlife Conservation Society 18 Willemöes-Suhm, Rudolf von 5, 9 William and Mary, College of 168 Wilson, J. Tuzo 77, 79–80, 83 winds, effect on ocean surface currents xvi, 91–92, 96–97 Woese, Carl 147 women on oceanographic cruises 166 Women Pioneers in Oceanography Award 65

204 Modern Marine Science

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) xv, xviii, 47, 65, 83, 155, 169 and Alvin xvi, 107–110, 113, 115, 118, 159 Ballard, Robert, at 124, 131, 133, 136 Ewing, Maurice, at 55–56, 105 Stommel, Henry, at 89, 92, 95, 99, 154 Van Dover, Cindy, at 159, 161, 168 Vine, Allyn, at 105–106, 115, 118 women at 166

World Beneath the Sea, The (Barton) 22, 28 World Ocean Floor, The (Heezen, Tharp, Berann) 64, 66 Worzel, Lamar 106 Wunsch, Carl 93, 95, 97, 99, 154, 155 Wyville Thomson, Charles xiv, 1–3, 2, 5, 10–13 chronology 13–14 compiles Challenger data 10–13 death 12 early research 3 further reading 14–16

on Challenger expedition 5, 10, 11 youth and education 1–2

Y Yale University 70, 89 Yorktown, USS 134