Discovery Channel Magazine: What’s Down There? The Bottom of the Sea

Discovery Channel Magazine, April 2015

We have a tendency to look up before we look down. Most people tend to know a lot more about the stars above us than the oceans beneath us: we’re captivated by the idea of space travel much more than we are about the sea floor, despite the fact that the sea is all around us on our very own planet.

Did you know that four times as many people have walked on the moon as have been to the very bottom of the sea? Little surprise, then, that when Don Walsh – one of the first two men to go to Challenger Deep at the bottom of the Mariana Trench off Guam, the deepest point in the Earth’s surface – comes to write his autobiography, he’s thinking of calling it: The Right Stuff. The Wrong Direction.

Our indifference towards the sea, and in particular the sea floor, is illogical. “We’re talking about 70% of the planet’s surface,” says Rob McCallum, a long-standing ocean explorer with a rich CV from the wrecks of the Titanic and Bismarck to the ocean vents of the mid-Atlantic ridge and the successful search for the Air France jet that crashed in the Atlantic. “Look what we found on the first 30%: some pretty cool stuff. There’s no reason to think it’s going to be any different down there.”

And yet, comparatively speaking, we know very little about it. “You could spin a globe and throw a dart at it, and anywhere you decided to search the ocean would be new and exciting. Because we know virtually nothing. We’ve explored so little of the sea floor.”

Partly, this is about cost; partly, about convincing anyone there’s any point. “Many years ago, one of our members of Congress was asked questions about investing in ocean research, and he replied: fish don’t vote,” says Walsh, a true pioneer of the (bottom of the) sea. “It’s a profoundly stupid statement but it encapsulates, almost in a Confucian proverb, the basic problem. Well, shame on us: knowing the world’s oceans, and what’s going on there, affects every living thing on the planet.”

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Clearly, ocean exploration does happen, but it’s not necessarily in the name of science but resources. “In our society, science is not always a key motivator, unless people can see there’s going to be some benefit from it,” says McCallum. For a while, the idea of exciting new compounds was seen as a motivation: “perhaps some creature, some plant, some biological resource in the deep that might yield the cure for cancer or reverse alzheimers or some other medical use.” Now, the prompt, if anything, is likely to be the search for mineral resources – an extension of the mining industry on land. “We do a lot of deep water engineering for people who want to exploit minerals, perhaps rare earth elements or valuable industrial compounds,” says McCallum. “If all the exploitation of minerals so far has been on 30% of the world, it’s logical to go to the next 70% and find just as much or more than what you found in the first 30. It’s the same planet. It’s just covered in sea water.”

McCallum today runs a business called Williamson & Associates, a deep water search facility. Part of its role is industrial – looking at cable routes for undersea telecommunications and power, for example – and another part is finding things that have gone missing. Williamson has sonar capable of acoustic measurement up to seven thousand metres deep.

Is there much call for that? “Well, there are over a million shipwrecks out there,” says McCallum. “The most high profile things are aircraft: when an aircraft goes missing at sea – which they often do because 70% of our planet is covered in water – and if they are below five hundred metres, finding them is a real challenge.” McCallum built a ship called the Alucia for deepwater research, and its debut mission was to find Air France 447, which it succeeded in doing.

How does one find a missing object at the bottom of the sea? “It’s like searching for anything: you need to know roughly where to start,” says McCallum. “If you lose your car keys, did you leave them outside? In the pub? You have to know where to start looking.” This is the central problem with the search for MH370, he says: “No-one really knows where to look as there hasn’t been a single scrap of physical evidence.”

Once that’s done, he says, it’s about three things: having sonar that can work at the necessary depth, a high quality of coverage so that no area is missed out, and having skilled people who can interpret the data, “because acoustic data is just a physical representation of sound waves. You’ve got to have someone who can read the signals and tell what they’re looking at.” Increasingly, a new technology is being used which involves charging the sea water with electricity and looking at how the sea bed reacts to that change; that enables people to understand more clearly what’s down there. “The romantic notion is that you drive around in a yellow submarine and look out of the window. In reality, it’s mostly done through other means.”

Exploration for its own sake is rather rarer. Both Walsh and McCallum were instrumental in helping with Jim Cameron’s own dive to Challenger Deep in 2012; do they think this heralded a new period of interest in exploring the depths? “You know, I’ve got to be honest and say I am skeptical,” says McCallum. “I was on the Cameron team on Deepsea Challenger, a fantastic project: Jim did so well to develop that technology, and to have the gumption to drive it through. But when I went to see the movie of Jim’s project, I saw it in a picture theatre with two other people. I went again and there was one person, and that was me. It was tremendously sad. I wondered how big the audience would have been if it had been ‘Burt’s voyage to the moon’.”

When Walsh did his own dive with Jacques Piccard on a craft called the Trieste in 1960, there was a period of celebrity and ticker-tape – one which Walsh didn’t personally enjoy, but he did use the opportunity to try to lobby for further exploration and budget. It didn’t work out that way. “After we surfaced on the Trieste, Jacques and I were topside, idling, and we said: how long will it be before someone comes back and does another dive here for science? We agreed on two years. It was 52 years. We were out by half a century, and Jacques never lived to see it.” Walsh says he was “extremely proud” to be involved in Cameron’s dive, because after 40 years he had begun to believe that nobody would ever bother going back.

Today, it would be exceptionally difficult to conduct a manned dive to those depths anyway. “We really do not have any capability of exploring the deep ocean beyond 6,000 metres,” says Walsh. “There are a handful of vehicles, less than six in the world, that could go down there and come back.” But even those that can have suffered ill fortune in recent years. The Japanese ROV Kaiko, an unmanned vessel which became the second craft to go to Challenger Deep in 1995 (and the first to take photographs, since Walsh’s dive had stirred up too much sediment), was lost at sea in a typhoon in 2003 when a cable snapped. Then there was the Nereus, another unmanned vehicle, built by the famed Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the next to go to Challenger Deep in 2009. That, too, was lost at sea, exploring the Kermadec Trench in the South Pacific, after apparently imploding. Walsh says Cameron’s craft, Deepsea Challenger, will likely never dive again: Cameron has bequeathed it (at least temporarily) to Woods Hole, but as a single-person sub it is unlikely ever to be used for meaningful scientific exploration, as no biologist would be allowed to take off to that depth by themselves. There is a Chinese manned sub, Jiaolong, that can reach 7,000 metres, and a Japanese, Shinkai 6500, but both of those would implode if they tried to go as deep as Walsh and Cameron did. “And that,” says Walsh, “is it.”

Perhaps it should be no surprise to learn that the next pioneers are likely to be Chinese. Walsh says China is working on a project to build a new submersible that can reach 11,000 metres. But, given that existing subs can cover 98% of the sea floor, what’s so important about the trenches?

“These trenches are only 2% of the sea floor, but that 2% is about the same areas as the US, Alaska, and half of Mexico,” Walsh says. “So it’s worth doing. It’s like telling a mountain climber they can’t climb above 5,000 metres. We have to explore every nook and cranny of the world ocean.”

Besides, these are the deepest accessible parts of the Earth’s crust, and there is a lot to learn there. Walsh talks about plate tectonics, the method through which continental plates move and collide. Some of the most interesting aspects of this are happening in the sea, where new crust is formed, moved and subducted; in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge or the East Pacific Rise off Mexico, remarkable things are happening. “How are we going to understand that process of plate tectonics if we don’t know about the trenches?” says Walsh. “I’ve been on the mid-Atlantic ridge at the Azores. I’ve watched the smokers [the hydrothermal vents deep in the sea which emit geothermally heated material]. But without knowing the whole system, the conveyor belt of the sea floor from its creation to its destruction by subduction, we don’t know a lot. It’s very important.”

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In truth, from our armchair or desktop, we can now see more of the sea than ever before, not because of submersibles scouring the depths but because of satellites in space.

In October, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego used two satellites – one from NASA, the other the European Space Agency – to obtain gravity measurements and, using them, create the most detailed map of the world’s sea floor ever attempted. As an ordinary viewer, it’s fun to play around with it, but for scientists, it may be useful for exactly the sort of information Walsh is looking for. “One of the most important uses of this new marine gravity field will be to improve the estimates of seafloor depth in the 80 per cent of the ocean that remains unchartered, or is buried beneath thick sediment,” says the report. The work has identified many previously unseen undersea mountains, continental connections across South America and Africa, and evidence for seafloor spreading ridges at the Gulf of Mexico. The study says it offers “a new window into the tectonics of the deep oceans.” It’s also pitched as improving safe navigation for the US Navy.

There is a video explaining the map which begins with a voiceover: “Today, we know the topography of Mars 100 times better than the topography of our own oceans.” That’s because it’s been harder to see what’s beneath our sea than it is to see what’s on another planet with a satellite. Surveying the seafloor has historically been the work of shipboard surveys, which provide high spatial resolution but are very slow; the Scripps video suggests 125 to 200 ship years of survey time, costing billions of dollars, would be needed to do the job properly.

But to an impressive degree of accuracy, it can be done from satellite. Incidentally, neither of the two satellites involved was designed to do this job; it’s a fortunate side effect of their actual missions (such as monitoring Arctic sea ice).

The video offers a fly-by simulation of a world with no water, which demonstrates, among other things, how extraordinarily difficult it will be to find MH 370.

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If science won’t necessarily take us to the depths, there are still plenty of ideas for adventures that can be had if people will back them. “We are becoming a highly stimulated species and we expect instant gratification,” says McCallum, who yearns for the patient science and nature documentaries he recalls from growing up. “I can only watch people wrestling alligators for so long.” But there are ways of stimulating an audience with the sea, if only a story can be attached, and McCallum finds himself the end provider for a lot of production houses, including Discovery Channel.

The clearest example is the shipwreck. “We’re fascinated by the stories that they tell,” says McCallum, who was an expedition leader on dives to the Titanic and Bismarck, and was on the last dive on the Titanic in 2005, taking high-end tourists down. “About 200 people have dived on the Titanic and only about 22 or 23 have dived on the Bismarck. And what that tells you is that people want to dive on the Titanic because of the story that surrounds it: the classic Greek tragedy, the chivalry and bravery.” It’s not the scale of the loss: if it was, everyone would want to dive the Wilhelm Gustloff, the deadliest single-ship sinking in history, sunk in the Baltic Sea in 1945 (although, as a war grave, diving on the site is now prohibited).  “The Titanic is the poster girl of shipwrecks,” McCallum says.

Following that logic, what’s still out there to inspire us? McCallum names a few possibilities.

One is the plane of Amelia Earhart, the pioneering aviator, who vanished in the Pacific Ocean near Howland Island in 1937. People have been looking for the wreckage of her plane since the day she disappeared, but McCallum – who says over $24 million has been spent on looking for her – says he still gets queries from people wanting to do a search, and would like to have a go himself. “I think we’ve got a great shot at it,” he says. “I’ve been keeping track of where they have and haven’t searched, and I think there is one good search to do in the area where it’s most likely to be. If you imagine a whole square search area, everything’s been done except the last little bit, which is in the middle and to one side, and that’s the bit we think the aircraft is in.” McCallum’s happy to lead such an expedition, but needs someone else to pay for it.

The other, which is underway, is a search for the ship of Earnest Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer. Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, was trapped and crushed in the sea ice a hundred years ago this year, and must rest on the bottom near Antarctica. Walsh, too, has followed this one closely. “We know pretty well where it is, at 14,500 feet; Shackleton’s captain, Frank Worsley, was considered a consummate navigator,” says Walsh. “He sat next to that ship for eight months and every day took a celestial sighting. Next to GPS, I don’t think any ship sank in a more well known position.” Unlike the Titanic and Bismarck, which moved some distance underwater as they sank because of the shape of their hulls, the Endurance was crushed in ice and presumably went straight down to the sea floor beneath it.  Walsh believes a lot of useful science would come out of such a mission, sitting in the Wedell Sea and watching the biological ebb and flow of what happens there for an extended period of time.

Would he want to go on such an expedition, now he’s 83? “Does Pinocchio have wooden nuts?”

McCallum expresses an interest on diving on the USS Indianapolis, which also hits an anniversary this year, 70 years in July. The Indianapolis, whose story is immortalized in Robert Shaw’s monologue in Jaws, delivered parts for the first atomic bomb to the US air base at Tinian, then was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine shortly afterwards between Guam and the Philippines, causing the single greatest loss of life at sea in the history of the US navy. Its wreckage has never been found despite at least two attempts. “It would be good to put that story to rest.”

Beyond that, and of course the continuing search for MH 370, “in terms of geographical accomplishment, there are other deep water trenches that people have not explored,” McCallum says. “It would be interesting to get someone to the bottom of the Kermedec trench,” the one where Nereus was lost. He would also love to dive to a hydrothermal vent in Antarctic waters: it is thought that species at each vent may be unique, different to those at the next one. “There are so many questions. I say we barely known enough to ask the right questions, let alone understand the answers.”

And then there’s the understanding of sea life itself. McCallum says he used to think the sea was like a consommé soup, “with some stuff on the top you can fish out, like fish and octopus and whale, and then a whole lot of clear-water nothingness all the way to the gunge on the bottom. But when I dived, I realized the sea was like a minestrone instead. There is life from the very top to the very bottom. A huge part of our human future is in the ocean, be it in the water column or some kind of chemical compound at the bottom or under the surface.”

Long-time readers of Discovery Channel Magazine will recall meeting Walsh once before, in our detailed interview with him after the 50^th anniversary of the Trieste’s voyage. They might remember we met him in his ranch in rural, remote Oregon, in a room filled with bookshelves whose combined length was equal to that of the Bismarck – and not by coincidence. History will remember Walsh as an explorer, but he is also an avid, learned, highly qualified scholar, and on one subject with particular passion: the sea. To him, a failure to learn more about it is a lamentable disappointment.

He talks about acidification of the ocean, the ability of the seas to absorb carbon dioxide, the impact of sea on atmosphere and atmosphere on sea. He talks about ocean temperatures, what we can learn from reefs, the melting of Arctic ice and the northward advance of Arctic treelines, the thawing of methane-filled permafrost, the vital interactions of our whole ecosystem. “We are getting awfully close to one of those tipping points where global warming could become very fast. The sea helps us to understand how and why.”

“Collectively,” he says, “the world is wealthy enough to pay to learn the fundamentals of how our planet works. And that comes down mostly to the research and exploration of the oceans.”