The Eternal Darkness by Robert Ballard with Will Hively, Princeton University Press, 拢18.95/$29.95, ISBN 0691027404 (March)
EVERYONE-well, almost everyone- knows that water covers 70 per cent or so of the Earth鈥檚 surface. What most people don鈥檛 know is that half the surface lies between 3000 and 6000 metres beneath the waves. An extraterrestrial visitor charged with collecting samples of Earth life would not visit dry land, but dive into the abyssal ocean. It is the typical environment of the planet, and it is home to life at least as diverse as that of the rainforest.
Biologically rich it may be, but the deep ocean is a hostile place for land dwellers. As you descend, the pressure increases by 1 atmosphere every 10 metres. In even the shallowest of the ocean deeps, a craft has to withstand a crushing pressure of about 300 atmospheres. This has made deep-sea exploration a challenge as difficult in its own way as outer space. In The Eternal Darkness, Bob Ballard charts our efforts to penetrate the 鈥渋nner space鈥� of the ocean, a task that has inspired the development of remarkable technology.
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Curiously, the technology to explore both outer and inner space has kept in step. Around the time Robert Goddard鈥檚 friends funded his rocketry in New Mexico, attempts were made to reach the ocean floor. In the 1930s, Otis Barton and William Beebe took a dive 鈥渁 half mile down鈥� in the bathysphere. Then the race began to develop a craft to penetrate the deepest ocean. It was won by the bathyscape Trieste in the early afternoon of 23 January 1960, when Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh plunged to 10 912 metres in the Challenger Deep of the Mariana Trench.
The real race was not yet won. A desire to travel in an apparatus free from a surface tether drove the engineers. Not surprisingly, French marine explorer Jaques Cousteau led the way by developing the Soucoupe, a submersible in which the pilot and observer lay on their bellies on a mattress, and peered out of the portholes. (I found that this delightful French tradition continues when I dived in the Nautile in 1997.) The US was not far behind, and in the early 1960s there was a rush to build submersibles, as they were now called.
One proved a star-the Alvin came to dominate deep-sea diving.
Alvin鈥檚 first mission was to find an H-bomb lost when two US Air Force planes collided off the Spanish coast in the early 1960s. Its first scientific dive was on 17 July 1966, just three years before Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon.
Yet for years afterwards we knew more about the surface of the Moon than we did about the ocean depths. Like spacecraft, submersibles are hugely expensive, and NASA鈥檚 missions seemed more glamorous than deep-sea exploration. Ballard is well equipped to tell us about this: as a young researcher, his first task was to act as cheerleader for Alvin, selling deep submergence to the scientific community.
Along with a dedicated band of similarly minded oceanographers, Ballard had realised the benefits that 鈥済etting down there鈥� brought us. But traditionally, oceanographers carried out their research by lowering apparatus from surface vessels. But they did change, and The Eternal Darkness is a testament to Ballard鈥檚 success. Alvin altered forever our concepts of the deep sea, and is still going after more than 3500 dives.
There was a lighter side to the work. Ballard recalls the famous 鈥淎lvin lunch鈥�. The submersible had slipped from its mooring when a support wire broke, and it sank into deep water together with the crew鈥檚 lunch (the crew scrambled clear). When recovered about 18 months later, the lunch was amazingly preserved: an intrepid biologist even ate one of the sandwiches. This led to an enormous effort to examine microbial physiology and ecology in the deep sea. (Sceptics have suggested, by the way, that the lack of decomposition was only thanks to the cling film.)
Responsible for many developments in oceanography, Alvin鈥檚 best-known coup remains the first observations of hydrothermal vents along the Galapagos Rift in 1977 (Ballard was there). These not only changed our concept of deep-sea ecosystems, but gave us the first substantial ecosystem where primary production operates independently of the Sun.
Ballard has now moved on from the crewed submersible technology he championed. In the late 1980s and 1990s he began to work with remote operated vehicles (ROVs). Tethered by fibre-optic cables to the mother ship, these can be deployed almost indefinitely. They operate without a crew. Rapid advances in optics and electronics allow a rich 鈥渢elepresence鈥� impossible 10 years ago.
Ballard has become a different kind of explorer. He is chasing wrecks, fascinated by marine archaeology. And he has succeeded magnificently: he found the Titanic on the ocean floor. You might think there was no better wreck than this, but it is clear that Ballard was as excited by the others he found-for example, a Roman ship sunk in 761 metres of water in the Mediterranean. I had not realised that most marine archaeology is done in waters of scuba depth. In the Mediterranean, the continental shelves are narrow and the water deepens quickly offshore. There must be thousands of wrecks just waiting discovery with the new ROV technology.
The Eternal Darkness is a highly readable book, not only for general readers. As an academic, I am always on the lookout for books that will motivate and enthuse potential and present students. The Eternal Darkness will become a firm favourite on that list, as Ballard shows what can be achieved by hard work, determination and unbounded enthusiasm. If I have a gripe, it is the constant use of imperial units; even Alvin dives in metres now. But it is a minor flaw in an entertaining book.