water in the atmosphere fell as rain, evenly everywhere, the oceans would deepen by only an inch.
Sea level, incidentally, is an almost entirely notional concept. Seas are not level at all. Tides, winds, the Coriolis force, and other effects alter water levels considerably from one ocean to another and within oceans as well. The Pacific is about a foot and a half higher along its western edge-a consequence of the centrifugal force created by the Earth’s spin. Just as when you pull on a tub of water the water tends to flow toward the other end, as if reluctant to come with you, so the eastward spin of Earth piles water up against the ocean’s western margins.
Considering the age-old importance of the seas to us, it is striking how long it took the world to take a scientific interest in them. Until well into the nineteenth century most of what was known about the oceans was based on what washed ashore or came up in fishing nets, and nearly all that was written was based more on anecdote and supposition than on physical evidence. In the 1830s, the British naturalist Edward Forbes surveyed ocean beds throughout the Atlantic and Mediterranean and declared that there was no life at all in the seas below 2,000 feet. It seemed a reasonable assumption. There was no light at that depth, so no plant life, and the pressures of water at such depths were known to be extreme. So it came as something of a surprise when, in 1860, one of the first transatlantic telegraph cables was hauled up for repairs from more than two miles down, and it was found to be thickly encrusted with corals, clams, and other living detritus.
The first really organized investigation of the seas didn’t come until 1872, when a joint expedition between the British Museum, the Royal Society, and the British government set forth from Portsmouth on a former warship called HMS
Because the institutional world mostly ignored the seas, it fell to devoted-and very occasional-amateurs to tell us what was down there. Modern deep-water exploration begins with Charles William Beebe and Otis Barton in 1930. Although they were equal partners, the more colorful Beebe has always received far more written attention. Born in 1877 into a well-to-do family in New York City, Beebe studied zoology at Columbia University, then took a job as a birdkeeper at the New York Zoological Society. Tiring of that, he decided to adopt the life of an adventurer and for the next quarter century traveled extensively through Asia and South America with a succession of attractive female assistants whose jobs were inventively described as “historian and technicist” or “assistant in fish problems.” He supported these endeavors with a succession of popular books with titles like
In the mid-1920s, on a trip to the Galapagos Islands, he discovered “the delights of dangling,” as he described deep-sea diving. Soon afterward he teamed up with Barton, who came from an even wealthier family, had also attended Columbia, and also longed for adventure. Although Beebe nearly always gets the credit, it was in fact Barton who designed the first bathysphere (from the Greek word for “deep”) and funded the $12,000 cost of its construction. It was a tiny and necessarily robust chamber, made of cast iron 1.5 inches thick and with two small portholes containing quartz blocks three inches thick. It held two men, but only if they were prepared to become extremely well acquainted. Even by the standards of the age, the technology was unsophisticated. The sphere had no maneuverability-it simply hung on the end of a long cable-and only the most primitive breathing system: to neutralize their own carbon dioxide they set out open cans of soda lime, and to absorb moisture they opened a small tub of calcium chloride, over which they sometimes waved palm fronds to encourage chemical reactions.
But the nameless little bathysphere did the job it was intended to do. On the first dive, in June 1930 in the Bahamas, Barton and Beebe set a world record by descending to 600 feet. By 1934, they had pushed the record to 3,028 feet, where it would stay until after the war. Barton was confident the device was safe to a depth of 4,500 feet, though the strain on every bolt and rivet was audibly evident with each fathom they descended. At any depth, it was brave and risky work. At 3,000 feet, their little porthole was subjected to nineteen tons of pressure per square inch. Death at such a depth would have been instantaneous, as Beebe never failed to observe in his many books, articles, and radio broadcasts. Their main concern, however, was that the shipboard winch, straining to hold on to a metal ball and two tons of steel cable, would snap and send the two men plunging to the seafloor. In such an event, nothing could have saved them.
The one thing their descents didn’t produce was a great deal of worthwhile science. Although they encountered many creatures that had not been seen before, the limits of visibility and the fact that neither of the intrepid aquanauts was a trained oceanographer meant they often weren’t able to describe their findings in the kind of detail that real scientists craved. The sphere didn’t carry an external light, merely a 250-watt bulb they could hold up to the window, but the water below five hundred feet was practically impenetrable anyway, and they were peering into it through three inches of quartz, so anything they hoped to view would have to be nearly as interested in them as they were in it. About all they could report, in consequence, was that there were a lot of strange things down there. On one dive in 1934, Beebe was startled to spy a giant serpent “more than twenty feet long and very wide.” It passed too swiftly to be more than a shadow. Whatever it was, nothing like it has been seen by anyone since. Because of such vagueness their reports were generally ignored by academics.
After their record-breaking descent of 1934, Beebe lost interest in diving and moved on to other adventures, but Barton persevered. To his credit, Beebe always told anyone who asked that Barton was the real brains behind the enterprise, but Barton seemed unable to step from the shadows. He, too, wrote thrilling accounts of their underwater adventures and even starred in a Hollywood movie called
At all events, he was about to be comprehensively eclipsed by a father-and-son team from Switzerland, Auguste and Jacques Piccard, who were designing a new type of probe called a bathyscaphe (meaning “deep boat”). Christened
In 1958, they did a deal with the U.S. Navy, which gave the Navy ownership but left them in control. Now flush with funds, the Piccards rebuilt the vessel, giving it walls five inches thick and shrinking the windows to just two inches in diameter-little more than peepholes. But it was now strong enough to withstand truly enormous pressures, and in January 1960 Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don Walsh of the U.S. Navy sank slowly to the bottom of the ocean’s deepest canyon, the Mariana Trench, some 250 miles off Guam in the western Pacific (and discovered, not incidentally, by Harry Hess with his fathometer). It took just under four hours to fall 35,820 feet, or almost seven miles. Although the pressure at that depth was nearly 17,000 pounds per square inch, they noticed with surprise that they disturbed a bottom-dwelling flatfish just as they touched down. They had no facilities for taking photographs, so there is no visual record of the event.
After just twenty minutes at the world’s deepest point, they returned to the surface. It was the only occasion on which human beings have gone so deep.
Forty years later, the question that naturally occurs is: Why has no one gone back since? To begin with, further dives were vigorously opposed by Vice Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, a man who had a lively temperament, forceful views, and, most pertinently, control of the departmental checkbook. He thought underwater exploration a waste of resources and pointed out that the Navy was not a research institute. The nation, moreover, was about to become fully preoccupied with space travel and the quest to send a man to the Moon, which made deep sea investigations seem unimportant and rather old-fashioned. But the decisive consideration was that the
