April 4, 1975: Microsoft is founded, Seattle.
June 4, 1976: The Hawaiian canoe Hokule‘a completes her maiden voyage.
July 28, 1976: Tangshan, China, earthquake kills three hundred thousand.
FEBRUARY 17, 1977: THE SUBMERSIBLE ALVIN SPOTS AN ABYSSAL HEAT SOURCE.
April 21, 1979: Alvin spots the first black smokers, off California.
May 18, 1980: Mount St. Helens erupts, Washington State.
October 17, 1989: The Loma Prieta earthquake occurs, San Francisco.
Below the thunders of the upper deep
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height.
—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, THE KRAKEN, 1830
In 1977 the Human-Occupied Vehicle for deep-sea exploration known as HOV Alvin was already thirteen years old, salt-stained outside, and well worn inside. And though a snapped cable had once caused her to sink and spend half a year lying unrescued on the floor of the Atlantic, she had by now performed enough deep-sea research around the world to be thought of as quite venerable, an oceanic workhorse, up for anything and down for everything. She was (and indeed remains, still working today, after half a century) as adored as she is revered. Water Baby is how she is known to some—red and white and cheery-looking, a toylike craft, built for the U.S. Navy and operated on the sailors’ behalf by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts.
On a Thursday morning in mid-February 1977, this doughty miniature research submarine, so precisely engineered and so heavily armored as to allow three explorers to be brought down into the ocean deeps and then driven safely back to the surface, was lowered into the warm blue waters of the eastern Pacific for the 713th logged dive of her career. What she would find later that day, in the abyssal gloom almost two miles down, would laser-etch her name into oceanography’s history books as having made perhaps the greatest maritime discovery of all scientific time.
For she discovered down in the dark a whole new undersea universe, a previously unimagined dystopia of crushing pressures and scalding temperatures, of curious topography and even more curious life-forms, all gathered around a family of hitherto unknown phenomena that were immediately named for the gaseous torrents that they spewed ceaselessly out into the sea. Alvin, on that midwinter’s day in 1977, first discovered the existence of what were to be called deep-ocean hydrothermal vents, gushings of gas and superheated water in places where all was believed to be cold and dark and dead.
For science alone, a find like this, with all its implications and possibilities for research, might perhaps have been enough. But thanks to Alvin, there was much more to come: further finds, also in the Pacific Ocean, that excited not just the scientific community, but the commercial brotherhood as well. For, not long after that first find, there came news of another, in which the undersea gushings were not fluid at all, but were solid and enormous and studded with minerals, and came to be known as smokers.
The little craft had already proved herself a boon. In 1966, when just two years old, she found a missing American hydrogen bomb, one of four that broke free from a crashing B-52 bomber over eastern Spain. Three of the weapons had been found, more or less intact, on a tomato farm. But one had parachuted into the Mediterranean, causing the Pentagon to panic that the Soviets might find it first. Twenty warships and 150 divers searched the sea for three months, but in vain. In the end, little Alvin was brought in, and with her Woods Hole crew of scientists sworn to secrecy, she eventually found the weapon, lying half a mile down, snagged on the edge of an undersea canyon. Crews from other navy ships, clumsily trying to haul the menacing-looking ten-foot-long silver cylinder up from the depths, managed to drop it, twice, but eventually wrestled it up, wrapped it in tarps, and flew it posthaste back to America. A Spanish fisherman who had seen it fall from the sky, and who had first shown Alvin where to look, was given a hefty salvor’s fee.
Alvin, the doughty three-person submersible, has allowed scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to find many of the most significant deep-sea structures, including the hydrothermal vent fields and black-and-white smokers.
Woods Hole Oceanic Institute.
Alvin would go on to make even better-known discoveries later on in her long, long career.* Her most famous find was in 1986, when she carried Robert Ballard on a dozen dives to investigate the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic. The wreck had been found a year earlier, by the Argo, an unmanned Woods Hole underwater sled; but Alvin allowed divers to see her close up and in person, and this mission brought the tiny craft enduring fame.
Even though finding a lost hydrogen bomb in 1966 and finding a lost passenger liner twenty years later were significant accomplishments, it was the uncovering of a long-hidden natural creation in the eastern Pacific on February 17, 1977, that proved the kind of truly significant contributions the Alvin could make.
The finding of the first smokers was a discovery that had fourfold implications. It had a formidable impact on humankind’s understanding of the workings of the planet. It introduced wholly new thinking to the understanding of the origins of life itself. It hinted at untold wealth yet to be found on the bed of the sea. And it unleashed, as a corollary, the possibilities of major environmental mayhem, even as the Pacific Ocean—this being the mid-1970s, a time of building ecological anxiety—was taking pole position in the planet’s current concern over its fast-spoiling oceans.
Both discoveries (which history now logs as having been made on Alvin dives numbers 713 and 914) occurred on or close to the six-thousand-mile-long chain of underwater mountains known as the East Pacific Rise, a place where the seafloor spreads outward, just as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge does on the far side of the world, and which can be thought of as the true birthplace of the modern Pacific Ocean. The Rise is an underwater chain of mountains that run in a more or less north–south direction from close to the Salton Sea at the hot upper end of the Gulf of California, down to a landless point in the empty wastes of the cold South Pacific, a subantarctic place of albatrosses and wandering icebergs, with the huge waves and endless storms of the Roaring Forties.
It is the relatively modest eastern Pacific section of the so-called global Mid-Oceanic Ridge system—one of the planet’s biggest physical features and certainly, at forty thousand miles long, the most extensive of all the world’s mountain chains, even if it is invisible, entirely covered by water. The system has numberless branches and offshoots, and were its waters to be drained from the ocean and the planet dried out, its ridges would look like a web of fibers somehow helping to hold the earth together, like the stitches on a baseball or the sutures on a skull.
Its existence was confirmed only recently, although there were suggestions as early as Victorian times that lines of unexpected shallows were to be found out in the mid-ocean deeps. HMS Challenger, surveying the Atlantic in 1872 to find the optimal route for an undersea cable, found that depths in the middle of the ocean were many thousands of feet less than expected, and a century later, German oceanographers noticed that this same upwelling continued around the African coast right up past Madagascar.
Yet Albert Bumstead’s classic 1936 National Geographic map of the Pacific (the same one used, as mentioned, by Colonel Charles Bonesteel III to divide postwar Korea) still gives no clue that anything similarly significant had yet been noticed on the Pacific side of the world. Most of that ocean, so very large, so little explored, was depicted as blue and almost entirely blank, with just a few curving lines hinting, and probably fancifully, at the unsurveyed depths below.
If it was one thing to determine the existence of mid-ocean ridges, then it was quite another to figure out their significance. Initially, and as the ranges were found, they were thought to be undersea mountain chains, pure and simple, and that was that. The first inklings that they actually offered clues to the origins of the planet came only in 1947, when geophysicists based in New York, dredging from a Woods Hole surface ship, found that the undersea rise in the middle of the Atlantic was made of basalt, and not the granite of which most continents are composed. The scientific community was greatly puzzled, and set about trying to determine why this might be so.
A decade later a pair of Americans, Marie Tharp from Michigan and Bruce Heezen from Iowa, both working at Columbia University in New York, decided to create a comprehensive map of the entire ridge system, surveying every ridge in every ocean. Working with the U.S. Navy, and with much of their initial research quite secret, Heezen took a survey ship, a three-masted iron-hulled schooner named Vema, and employing all the new sonar technology at the navy’s disposal, first mapped the entirety of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, arctic end to subantarctic other end. Miss Tharp was initially not allowed aboard the survey ship: in those unenlightened times, her sex forbade it. She had to be content to crunch the numbers back in her cartography laboratory in New York. She made her first voyage as Heezen’s shipmate only in 1965, after which the mapping work accelerated near-exponentially.
They soon discovered that the ridge was not only long and sinuous, and reflective of the shapes of the continents on its two sides—curving out where Africa bulged out, and sashaying back in where South America curved in—but also that it was very much more complex an entity than the mere heaped-up pile of seafloor the early surveyors had supposed it to be. Not only was it made of basalt, but also it had a curious and quite unexpected topography. It had a deep groove, a rift valley, that ran along the summit of its entire length, and within this groove, according to the seismometers that the pair took on their expeditions, lay the epicenters of a bewildering number of earthquakes.
Tharp had an immediate epiphany. She thought the ridge-and-valley-and-ridge feature somewhat resembled the Rift Valley in Kenya, and that its existence might help explain how the continents that ran parallel to it on either side had been formed. The submarine ridge had perhaps disgorged new volcanic material, basaltic material, which had then forced the seafloors on either side of the ridge to spread themselves outward, pushing the continents away from one another as they did so. That might be a reasonable supposition today, but even as recently as the middle of the twentieth century, it was, in some circles, still somewhat premature to imagine that the all-too-solid, all-too-fixed continents could possibly have moved. Proponents of the theory—continental drift, as it is called—had long been derided as apostates. Some of the more elderly geologists denounced such thinking as impertinently and irreligiously challenging the sacred order of the universe.
Except that, as it happened, and at almost the same time as Marie Tharp came up with her ideas about the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, other research going on in the Pacific Ocean was beginning to show that continental drift was not a sacrilegious fantasy, but in fact one of the central driving forces behind the making of the present-day world.
In a series of secret U.S. Navy experiments that were begun in the early 1960s, a flotilla of antique warships was used to drag sensitive magnetometers back and forth across those Pacific ridge summits that had been found off the Oregon coast. Scientists then analyzed the recordings, and carefully noted the traces of the magnetism that had been detected in the rocks below. What they found quite astonished them, as the submarine rocks displayed, with an elegant and instantly understandable symmetry, the record of the already known phenomenon of the earth’s magnetic field reversal.
Every fifty thousand years or so, and for no certain reason, the direction of magnetism of the planet abruptly changes: compasses that point to the north suddenly point to the south, to put it simply. It had already been known for many years before this Pacific experiment began that the direction of the earth’s magnetic field is always faithfully recorded in those kinds of rock that contain iron, as the millions of tiny iron crystals align themselves like miniature compasses, all pointing to wherever the pole happened to be when the rocks became solid. And if the magnetic field’s direction changed, the tiny rock magnets would record that change, as it happened.
What was to be found off the Oregon coast showed that the field reversals were recorded not just in one set of submarine rocks, but in the rocks on both sides of the ridge over which the magnetometers were being dragged. Moreover, they were to be seen not just on both sides, but each at exactly the same distance out from the ridge itself.
It was blindingly obvious what had happened. Molten rock had emerged from the ridge’s central rift and had then flowed over the two sides, dividing itself equally as it did so. The two streams had then spread outward away from each other, slowly unrolling like a pair of conveyor belts proceeding in opposite directions. As they continued to roll outward, every fifty thousand years or so, each belt of rocks recorded within itself the effects of magnetic field reversal. One field reversal was recorded in the rocks on one side of the ridge, and the very same reversal, occurring at exactly the same time, was recorded on the rocks now scores of miles away on the other side, giving the mirror image that appeared, at first so mysteriously, on all the recording traces.
The corollary was clear and, to geophysicists, intensely exciting. As the ocean floor spread outward from its ridges, and as new ocean floor was being created, the continents on either side of the ridge were being pushed away from each other—they were drifting, as only a short while ago the apostates and heretics had been fancifully supposing. A geological revolution was in the making.
The results from the Pacific exactly coincided with what Tharp and Heezen in the Atlantic would soon so boldly imagine: that in all the oceans, new seafloor was being created by the endless volcanic gurgitations along the mid-ocean ridges and then, as still newer material followed it, was spreading itself away from the central rift valleys.
The world’s newest material was being born in such places: the ridges were the locus of the origins of today’s continental geography. Western Africa stands where it does, and is shaped as it is, because of all the eruptions and movements in an invisible underwater suture line lying a thousand miles off its coastal horizon. The same is true for almost every other coastline in the world. The ridges made them all.
The ridges were also central to the construction, also in the mid-1960s, of the ideas that gave rise to the now familiar theory of plate tectonics. The theory had been built directly onto this now confirmed and fully believed idea of continental drift. It is a theory of such logic, elegance, and beauty that we sometimes imagine it has been with us for eons past; it is in fact not much more than half a century old.
The unique tectonic architecture of the Pacific Ocean, with its major and minor plates jostling and shifting around its edges, has created an immense coastal zone displaying the most intense volcanic and seismic activity, the so-called Ring of Fire.
U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
Current thinking holds that the world’s outer solid crust is composed not of one continuous surface, as on an orange or a baseball, but of a number of enormous plates, each of which floats on top of the hot and relatively mobile upper mantle of the planet. There are seven major plates, eight lesser plates, and a host of other, new ones being discovered all the time. No fewer than sixty-three had been named at the time of writing.
The Pacific Plate is by far the biggest. It occupies 103 million square kilometers, thirty times the area of the continental United States. It is roughly the same shape as the island of Ireland. It has a long and quite smooth, convexly curved eastern boundary that runs southward across from the Gulf of Alaska down to the Southern Ocean.
The western side of the plate has a different appearance: a serrated and indented boundary that runs down from the Kamchatka Peninsula, past Japan and then New Guinea, turning back toward the center of the ocean, and then shifting sharply down southward, to where it casually bisects New Zealand—with the country’s North Island on the outside of the plate, half of the South Island within it, and the long chain of the Southern Alps marking the dividing line between the Pacific Plate and its western neighbor, the Indo-Australian Plate. The Pacific Plate underlies much of the ocean, but not all of it.
Crucially, all the plates move. They move when magma below them swirl, and they move in concert with the swirling going on beneath them. So if the magma is moving in a northwesterly direction, the plate that lies atop it moves in that direction, too. Most plates move relatively slowly—the North American Plate, for example, is shifting westward at about twenty millimeters a year, somewhat less than the rate at which human fingernails grow. The Pacific Plate is, by contrast, something of a speed demon: it moves ten times as rapidly, and in a habitual northwesterly direction, covering something like two centimeters each year.
The evidence for this is plain to see. A glance at any physical map of the Pacific Ocean shows that almost all the myriad island groups on its western side are strung out in roughly elongated lines, all stretched in a generally southeast–northwest direction. This is because the plate on which they sit is moving beneath them from the southeast to the northwest, persuading them to align themselves just as boulders and debris are aligned on the surface of an ever-moving glacier. By contrast, the islands that lie beyond the plate’s known borders are arranged higgledy-piggledy, with no evident pattern to their location on the planetary surface.
All that is seismically spectacular about the Pacific Ocean—and there is plenty, with earthquakes and volcanoes and tsunamis happening with what, to humans, is dismaying frequency—happens along the edges of its underlying plate, where it abuts its neighboring plates. Most famously, there is the so-called Ring of Fire, which runs for twenty-five thousand miles around the ocean’s northern, eastern, and western edges. This ring—or, more suitably (since it is discontinuous, and isn’t truly a ring), this belt—plays host to more than four hundred volcanoes. Mount St. Helens, Mount Pinatubo, Krakatoa, Taupo, Popocatepetl, Unzen—the majority of the planet’s earthquakes occur on these same three edges of the Pacific, including the three biggest ever recorded in history, which occurred in Chile in 1960, in Alaska in 1964, and in Japan in 2011.
Yet, for all their savage spectacle, these earthquakes are not necessarily important in strictly scientific terms. It turns out that the most geophysically significant discovery of recent times was not made among the giant volcanoes or violent earth shakings of the Ring of Fire. Rather, it was made above the East Pacific Rise, which appears relatively peaceful, unspectacular, and quite lacking in the power and dangerous majesty so visible elsewhere.
For the Rise is actually where the very makings of the modern Pacific Ocean occur, the one place in the Pacific where ocean floor spreading is provably and visibly happening. This is where the present-day Pacific Ocean is being manufactured, and has been manufactured since the plate made its first appearance about one hundred eighty million years ago. Elsewhere, at all those places around the plate edges where there are volcanoes or earthquakes, the plate is either subducting beneath a neighboring plate (in Japan, the Kuril Islands, the Aleutians, and the Cascade Range in the Pacific Northwest), or else sideswiping its neighbor (most infamously along the San Andreas Fault, where it sideswipes the North America Plate, and triggers historically important earthquakes).
The East Pacific Rise is a classic mid-ocean ridge, a range of undersea mountains marking the boundary between the Pacific Plate and its three southeastern neighboring plates: the tiny Cocos Plate, the enormous Antarctic Plate, and between them, most critically, the Nazca Plate, which lies off South America’s west coast and runs from Colombia to halfway down Patagonian Chile. This is the most energetic of the ridge’s spreading zones. The Pacific Plate and the Nazca Plate are moving apart very fast: the crust above them moves about 7.5 centimeters a year on each side, or 15 centimeters of total spreading annually, much faster than around any other mid-oceanic ridge.
Bruce Heezen died in 1973, after which Marie Tharp took her ship alone and onward into the vastness of the Indian Ocean and then farther on east, to the Pacific. With the research from that trip, she completed in 1977 the first-ever map* of the world’s entire undersea mid-ocean ridge system. And once the ridges were fully mapped, and had been accepted as the places where new material was gushing out of the earth’s mantle to form the greatest features of our planet, armies of geophysicists descended on them, to determine exactly what was happening there.
The Alvin would give them the ability to do precisely this. So, in early 1977, the heroic and salt-stained little craft, shackled onto the deck of her mother ship, the Lulu, journeyed for the first time in her career through the Panama Canal, bound for her assignation with oceanographic history.
Another Woods Hole vessel, the Knorr, had preceded her, heading down to a spot in the ocean where curious temperature anomalies had been detected, hints of something odd, something worth divining. It was suspected that something, quite possibly hot water, was pouring out the top of the ridge, much as geyser water would gush out of solid earth at volcanically manic places such as Yellowstone and Rotorua. The site in the ocean was some four hundred miles west of the Ecuadorian coast, two hundred fifty miles northeast of the Galápagos chain, on a ridge that spun out from the eastern flank of the East Pacific Rise.
It was here that the discoveries would be made by Alvin on Thursday, February 17, that would startle and amaze the world.
The Knorr went exploring first, placing herself neatly into position above the site where a previous expedition, in 1972, had detected decisive hints of strange goings-on below. Instruments aboard a submersible device owned by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Woods Hole’s congenially competitive opposite number on the Pacific coast, which had been towed along that year through the 8,500-foot-deep, pitch-dark, and near-ice-cold waters over the ridge, had detected two strange spikes. One was of temperature, which had inexplicably risen—no more than a fifth of a degree Celsius or so, but it had risen nonetheless. Moreover, the spike was detected a hundred feet and more above the seabed, suggesting the presence of an upward gush of something hot, most likely water. The other spike was a sudden increase in dissolved iron and sulfur, and in just the place where the temperature made its own sudden rise.
The Knorr, using new and highly accurate maps made as part of the secret U.S. Navy magnetism researches, first sent down three sound beacons, transponders the pilots named Sleepy, Dopey, and Bashful. They would lie doggo on the seabed and emit signals to help keep on target any vehicles that the Woods Hole scientists sent down into the blackness of the deep sea.
The first vehicle was an unmanned two-ton, hundred-thousand-dollar steel-caged contraption named ANGUS (for Acoustically Navigated Geophysical Underwater System), which had powerful strobe lights, a collection of thermometers, and, most critically, high-definition cameras. Late on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 15, as computer-controlled propellers kept the Knorr above from drifting off target, a giant crane lowered the ANGUS downward, directly above the ridgeline. It took two hours to pay out 8,250 feet of twinned wire cables.
While the ANGUS was then electronically ordered to keep her position by communicating with the three transponders, the boom operator up on the mother ship was commanded to raise and lower the cables so as to keep the costly vehicle from hitting the seafloor. Then, fifteen feet above the seabed, the ANGUS switched on her powerful strobe lights, and then her array of cameras, and began to move, snapping one photograph of the bottom every ten seconds.
After six hours into the first watch, by which time the ANGUS had covered five miles, the needles on the many dials in the Knorr’s control room suddenly quivered upward for nearly three minutes, as the seawater became briefly hotter and hotter. It was a temperature anomaly, perhaps a rise of a fifth of a degree Celsius. Then the dials quivered back downward, as the temperature cooled just as rapidly. The ANGUS hovered above the Rise for another six hours, until a signal came that the film had run out. The ANGUS was winched carefully to the surface, her crew now agog to see what the three thousand photographs showed.
The developers worked through the morning, the pictures snatched from their hands as the sheets emerged from the fixing baths. Hundreds upon hundreds showed nothing other than rocks and darkness. But the photos from the spot where the ANGUS had recorded the temperature anomaly showed something very different, something quite unexpected. For down there, strobe-lit in the abyssal night, was a sudden abundance of wholly unanticipated life. Creatures were to be seen, living creatures, growing in the dark; oblivious to the cold, to the dark, and to the skull-crushing, hull-crushing, life-denying pressure tonnages of the two miles of seawater above.
There were just thirteen pictures of interest, but they showed something quite amazing, images that left the biologists aboard openmouthed with astonished delight: hundreds, maybe thousands of completely unexpected clams and mussels, living where no creature had the right or duty or supposed ability to be alive. The water here was blue and misty. The bivalves were apparently in good health, brightly colored, fronded, and evidently alive. How could this be? There were no nutrients. No light. No sun. And yet these creatures existed, here, on the floor of the sea—enigmatic and evidently eternal, the fact of their presence profoundly puzzling, and aching for an answer.
Just as the final pictures were being examined—and after the thirteen-image orgy of fascination, the next fifteen hundred images showed coils of glassy lavas changing to pillow piles of dull basalts, and nothing else at all—the other Woods Hole vessel, the Lulu, broke the horizon.
Frantic radio messages were sent out: Could the Alvin dive the next morning? Did she have the ability to dive that deep? Were there crewmen able and available to descend eight thousand feet, in a vessel that only recently had been upgraded with a new titanium sphere to hold the crew, to dive that deep?
To each inquiry, the answer was an unqualified yes. So the Lulu moved close in, and then positioned herself directly over the spot where the thirteen relevant pictures had been taken. Crane operators lifted the little Alvin up and over the gunwales and down onto the surface of the warm blue sea. It was Thursday, February 17. Three crewmen clambered in and strapped themselves onto the well-worn seats inside the cramped and damp little craft. Jack Donnelly was the craft’s pilot; two marine scientists, Jack Corliss and Tjeerd van Andel, were the observers.
Donnelly closed the hatch and flooded the air tanks, and the water closed over their heads. The cables were released, and the craft began to head downward at a stately hundred feet a minute. Within no more than three minutes, darkness had quite enveloped them; through the porthole there was just the faintest glimmer of the pale blue of the surface; and then, with the dark loom of the mother ship’s hull barely distinct, it faded away, too. The pilot switched on the powerful strobes.
He had seven thrusters with which to adjust his position, his heading, his attitude. It took an hour and a half of weaving and bobbing to reach bottom—where, to Donnelly’s delight, he found they were a mere five hundred feet from the target. He gunned his motors, adjusted his thrusters, and according to an official account of the expedition, “they entered another world.”
The lava fields below them were crisscrossed by cracks, and billowing up from the cracks in shimmering clouds were endless gushings of what the sensor probes showed to be very hot water. The shimmering itself was mesmerizing—but just a few feet away, the hot water mixed with the bitterly cold seawater, precipitating certain chemicals that turned the color to a powdery blue as they settled heavily on the seafloor, staining the surrounding rocks with crystals of deep umber.
This was spectacular in itself, and Jack Corliss, a geologist, was seeing before his very eyes confirmation of his theory that hydrothermal vents clearly did exist, which further supported the presence of spreading ridges beneath the sea, and which would lead to the creation of new ocean floor.
Then he cried out in astonishment, and asked a young woman named Debra Stakes, in the Lulu’s control room two miles above, “Wait—isn’t the deep ocean supposed to be like a desert?” Stakes patiently replied that, yes, this was what was believed. To ask her so basic a question strained credulity—it was as if an astronaut had asked if it was true there was no oxygen in space. “But,” spluttered an evidently flabbergasted Corliss, “there’s all these animals down here!”
They had stumbled onto a huge and densely populated biological community, in a part of the planet where life was previously thought to be entirely impossible. This turned out to be only one of four such fields they found that session, each different, each pullulating with robust displays of living existence. There were enormous clams and crabs, and creatures on long stalks, like dandelions. There was an octopus of a kind never seen before, and scores of eyeless shrimp. There were forests of waving tube worms, some of them seven feet tall, licking hungrily at the waters, seeming to suck nutrients from it.
The three crewmen were quite stunned, and noted that these creatures, illuminated for the first time by the strobes, did not run for cover or dive for shelter. They just sat there, pulsating with life.
Back in the 1970s the Alvin, though not as technologically sophisticated as today, had grappling arms and sample bottles, so while the crew’s air supply remained intact, and the pilot kept his craft on station, the two scientists delicately plucked clutches of living specimens from this newfound world, and sucked water into bottles for analysis up above. They had to get answers to a series of hitherto unimagined questions: What were these creatures? What were they doing here? How were they living? What were they eating? The Pacific Ocean swiftly became the nexus for a set of quite fundamental inquiries that had never been either imagined or supposed before.
When the trio broke the surface hours later, they had animals with them, among them a huge white clam bigger than Corliss’s two hands. They had scores of new photographs. And they had water samples. When they opened the bottles, they were hit by the unmistakable odor of rotten eggs. The water was clearly heavy with dissolved solids, its odor suggesting the presence of the element normally seen as a yellow powder around volcanic vents: sulfur.
John Edmond, the young Scots geochemist who had come out from MIT to be aboard the Lulu for this expedition, remembered the ecstatic moment of realization that was born of this particular chemical find. For he realized that whatever the importance of the vents in the story of the formation of the ocean floor (whatever the geological significance, in other words), the presence of animals and plants and, crucially, of sulfur, was more significant still: for this told him and his colleagues vastly important things about the origins of life itself.
The biology team immediately knew that the relatively complex creatures they had found below must be feeding on something. Logic told them that whatever that something was, something lower down the food chain, was likely to be more primitive than the creatures that were doing the feeding. Most probably the foodstuff consisted of bacteria, of some kind. So, somewhere in these hot streams of water, logic said, there had to exist some very primitive living creatures that could somehow reproduce themselves and so serve as the very base, and an endlessly replenished base, of the planetary food chain. Whatever these creatures were, they had no apparent need for sunlight, or for oxygen, or for any of the other chemical or physical components commonly connected with the endowment of the vital force. Such bacteria, if that is what they were, probably originated in places and circumstances like these newfound hydrothermal vents of the Pacific.
“A whole lot of things sort of fell into place,” Edmond said. “We realized that regular seawater was mixing with something. It was a unique solution I had never seen before. We all started jumping up and down. We were dancing off the walls. It was chaos. It was so completely new and unexpected that everyone was fighting to dive in Alvin. There was so much to learn. It was a discovery cruise. It was like Columbus.”
The finds made that day confirmed one aspect of tectonic plate theory. But they also entirely upended the hitherto comfortable assumptions concerning the origins of life. For no longer were sunlight, chlorophyll, oxygen, and warmth considered necessarily essential for life’s beginnings. Another, and quite new, option had now revealed itself here in the Pacific Ocean. For whatever it was that lay at the base of this East Pacific Rise food chain (still undiscovered at this point, but surely to be found someday soon) had somehow come into being in this most inhospitable of environments. It had been born in what was, essentially, another version of the already much-vaunted primeval soup: liquid that in this case would soon be shown to be ferociously hot, was already known to be eternally dark and chemically rich, and was of the kind of sulfur-rich composition that was suspected to have existed at the volcanic dawn of the earth’s story.
The notion that life itself, that living cells prodded into life from simple amalgams of chemistry into some primitive beginnings of sentience, did begin in the hydrothermal vent ecosystems would swiftly set the biological world afire. The curious were about to have a field day.
A young woman named Colleen Cavanaugh was one of them. She was a biology student from Michigan, and she happened to be at Woods Hole just before the institution’s little submarine was discovering the vents. She had arrived there, innocently enough, to take a summer course on the mating habits of horseshoe crabs. But at the course end, her car broke down, and she never made it home to Michigan. Instead, she decided to complete her undergraduate degree in Boston, and was then invited back to Woods Hole (an hour away, and on the sea) in the summer of 1977. That was the so-called discovery year—except that Ms. Cavanaugh’s work was unrelated, and was concerned as it had been before with the love lives of horseshoe crabs.
But everyone in the sprawling campus of the Woods Hole laboratories seemed now to be talking about events five thousand miles away in the Pacific, and about the sensational finds that the Alvin had made the previous winter. People were talking about the geology, true. They were talking about the ocean ridges’ mineral potential, true. But they were talking most energetically about just how it was that clams, tube worms, subsea dandelions, and, yes, crabs (relatives of Cavanaugh’s crabs) managed to flourish as they did in the high-pressure darkness right beside scalding-hot vents.
Colleen Cavanaugh became a passionate believer that bacteria of some kind must provide the key to the story. It was she who would then go on to discover both the actual nature of the bacteria in these hydrothermal vents and, perhaps most crucially, the chemical process that they undertake to provide nourishment for the creatures that cluster beside them. She most famously enjoyed her epiphany by interrupting a classroom discussion on the biology of vent-living tube worms: the moment she heard the lecturer casually remark that the worms had crystals of sulfur inside them, she stood up and loudly asserted that it was “perfectly clear” that the creatures had to have sulfur-oxidizing bacteria inside them. Somehow these bacteria were manufacturing organic material (sustenance for the tube worms) out of inorganic building blocks. Making life, in other words, out of purely elemental whole cloth.
It is a process known as chemosynthesis. Not a new process—a remarkably prescient Russian musician turned chemist named Sergei Winogradsky, working in Saint Petersburg in the 1890s, had proposed the theory that some specialist bacteria could produce energy from purely inorganic materials, could then employ that energy to obtain carbon, and with that could produce sugars: organic material, in other words, the basis of life.
Cavanaugh, who would in time become a tenured professor at Harvard with her own eponymous laboratory, was eventually able to demonstrate that chemosynthesis was exactly what was happening in deep-sea hydrothermal vents. The tiny globules of sulfur found in the gut* of a giant tube worm (one of the dauntingly large, six-foot-long, red-tipped creatures brought up from the deep) indicated to her that bacteria living inside the worm were able to create energy from the hydrogen sulfide that was dissolved in the vent’s hot-water gushes. They then would use that energy, just as Winogradsky so presciently suggested, to capture carbon from the methane and carbon dioxide also found in the water, and manufacture food on which the tube worms could feed.
It was a truly edge-of-your-seat scientific advance. Before this, the scientific community believed that all life ultimately demanded energy radiated from the sun, that the process of photosynthesis, in which light is an absolutely essential component, lay at the basis of all living existence. Winogradsky’s theorizing, and Cavanaugh’s impertinent epiphany and her work on the deep Pacific tube worm (Riftia pachyptila), showed beyond doubt that energy could be derived from within the earth itself, with no need whatsoever for any contribution from a distant star.
Colleen Cavanaugh announced the find in 1981, with a paper in Science, “Prokaryotic Cells in the Hydrothermal Vent Tube Worm Riftia pachyptila Jones: Possible Chemoautotrophic Symbionts.” It remains one of the milestones of modern science. And that it was derived from discoveries made by the Alvin in the Pacific Ocean underlines the formidable importance of the planet’s mightiest of seas.
All the other oceans have since been discovered to house hydrothermal vents. More than three hundred fifty clusters of vents have been found and seen since that first Alvin dive. It was swiftly realized that the water gushing up from them was seawater that had seeped down through cracks in the ridges, had been heated, and like a geyser out on the dry surface of the world, had erupted back outward again. This is not newly created water—rather, it is existing seawater recirculated through the ridges so the total volume of water in the seas remains constant. The recirculation is a massive planetary engine: all the world’s oceanic water is thought to circulate through these chains and clusters of vents about every ten years, and to leach out immense amounts of crustal chemistry into the deep sea as it does so.
Most of (but not all) the vents have been found along the rifts at the top of their various spreading ridges. Most have been given rather prosaic names, like those given to obscure stars or small asteroids. But some vents are so large and powerful that they have been given appropriately memorable titles: White City, Loki’s Castle, Bubbylon, Magic Mountain, Mounds and Microbes, Neptune’s Beard, Nibelungen, Salty Dawg. Not surprisingly, numerous international bodies have been established to coordinate and regulate ridge research—one of them born in 1992, when two ships arrived at the same mid-ocean site at the same time with plans to send submarines down to the very same ridge to look for the very same vent fields.
Though the role these vents play in the search for life’s origins is fascinating, another motivation for today’s activity over the deep-sea ridge lines is more economic—and that commercial interest was spawned by a second discovery that was made two years later, also by the Alvin, also in the Pacific, on the craft’s dive number 914. This was the dive that found, at the tops of the most active ridges, almighty “submarine towers,” the massive solid and semimetallic consequences of all the fluid gushings beneath. If dive 713 has become part of scientific legend, then dive 914 is best remembered for revealing the commercial possibilities behind that legend—and for offering the alluring hint of treasure, there for the picking, down in the world’s deep waters.
The Alvin had been kept busy in the months following her first vent discoveries. She performed twenty more dives north of the Galápagos, and then headed back through the Panama Canal to spend the rest of the year in the Caribbean, before heading home to Woods Hole. In 1978 she had more nip-and-tuck work done (much steel was replaced by titanium), to prolong her working life and enable her to probe ever deeper and for longer periods of time. A second grabber arm was added so the scientists could seize more samples of the marvels waiting at the vents. And there were new cameras, new lights, and a basket at the bow to hold ever more samples.
Thus kitted out, she then performed a scattering of more workmanlike tasks (investigating nuclear waste dump sites off the New Jersey coast, for example) before heading back south to warmer waters, and then through the Panama Canal once again to the Pacific’s exceptionally active rift zones. She made two dozen further dives northeast of the Galápagos in the winter of 1979—during which time her crew discovered that the dandelion-like creatures below were actually specially adapted colonies of thousands of even tinier creatures known (when clumped together) as siphonophores, related to the jellyfish lookalike called a Portuguese man-o’-war. These beasts did not handle the pressure at the surface well, and exploded on deck or otherwise vanished, another indication of the vast amount of entirely new science that was being uncovered in this new hydrothermal universe.
It was in April that the Alvin headed north. Her mother ship, the Lulu, voyaged for eighteen hundred miles, carrying the Alvin up and onto the crest of the northern sector of the East Pacific Rise. She was assigned to a spot in the tropical seas at twenty-one degrees north latitude, within sight of the cliffs at the very tip of Baja California. Surfers were riding the waves here, oblivious to the work that was about to begin far offshore.
The Lulu’s cranes hoisted the fifteen tons of Alvin over the side. Dudley Foster, a thirty-three-year-old former navy pilot (who once said that the Alvin’s arm was an extension of his own, and that he wore the sub as part of his body), was in command. An American geologist and a French volcanologist were the observers. It was Saturday, April 21, 1979.
The Frenchman, Thierry Juteau, was aboard because of a curious discovery made nearby the year before by the French mini-submarine Cyana. Her crew had not encountered a vent, but they had dredged up a great number of tantalizing rock samples, including one more bizarre than most, which seemed to have assumed the form of a long, hollow metal tube glistening with crystals. These turned out to be precipitates of a zinc ore called sphalerite;* there were traces of iron, copper, lead, and silver on the sides of the tube as well, suggesting both a vast trove of deep-ocean chemistry below and also the presence of the exceptionally hot water needed to dissolve it.
The Alvin descended quickly into the darkness, switching on her powerful new lights as the sunlight vanished. By mid-morning she was close to the bottom, and almost immediately spotted the white clams that are the most visible signature of a Pacific vent field. Dudley Foster turned the craft to follow the ever-thickening concentration of shells until, suddenly, quite without warning, he had to slam on his brakes.
Before him, staggering to see, was something that no human had ever witnessed before. Rising directly in front was a tall spire of dark rock, with what looked like a jagged crystal-fringed mouth at its top, from which gushed, without cease, a torrent of thick, black, coiling fluid, looking just like dark and oily smoke, belching upward as if from a ship charging full ahead or from a railway train racing down the line.
Foster nudged his craft closer—and found its considerable tonnage bucking and rearing under the immense water turbulence beside the edge of the fountain. For a moment he lost control, and the sub was knocked into the pillar, breaking it and widening the hole even more, and filling his viewing screen with pitch-black fluids that briefly blinded him. He steered frantically back into clear water and then turned to view what they had found. The three sat entirely mesmerized by the show. It was like watching a leak from a rogue oil well, with tens of thousands of gallons of pitch-black fuel coursing upward without end into the pristine sea.
After a few moments, the crewmen’s courage regained, their breathing rates stabilized, they advanced the sub slowly back toward the tower, this time with an electronic thermometer gripped tightly in the manipulator arm. Using the thrusters to keep the platform horizontal and moving in a straight line, they pushed a sensor gingerly into the liquid uprush—whereupon it promptly shot off scale, showing a temperature of more than 90 degrees Fahrenheit. No such figure had ever been experienced in such deeps. It had to be wrong. They tried again—the needle banged hard up against the end of the range again, and this time the instrument went dead.
Only when they got to the surface did they look at the thermometer and realize why. Its sensor tip had melted. The temperature of the smoker fluid—which they then determined on their next dive, with a thermometer capable of working in a blast furnace—was some 662 degrees. It was an incredible figure. If this was water, then it was hot enough to melt lead. Magnesium would soften, too, and so would tin. Sulfur would be almost at its boiling point.
This column of fluid clearly was not composed of water, at least not principally. The fluids were so intensely hot, the pressure so insanely high, that metals or their compounds had first been dissolved and extracted wholesale from within the material of the earth’s crust deep below. The upward-gushing fluids were most probably made up of considerable concentrations of dissolved compounds of gold, silver, iron, magnesium, lead, zinc, and tin. They could almost be thought of as a molten alloy of all these base metals, mixed with sulfur and seawater. And when this chemical-laden torrent suddenly confronted the ice-cold deep-sea waters, the base metals and the sulfur compounds almost instantaneously precipitated out of solution and created a bewildering smorgasbord of solids—either compounds of metals or else, in rare cases, clanging, shining shards of the wholly pure metals themselves.
These gathering masses of solids would then fold themselves out of the uprush and, as they fell to one side, still half-molten, would pile ever upward around the circumference of the gushing liquid column, like metallic stalagmites. As the gush continued, so the towers became ever taller and taller, until they could not stand under their own weight—or else until careless passing research submarines knocked into them. Towers like these could be built in a matter of hours, climbing skyward in the dark, and yet never (like the trials of Tantalus) quite making it upward beyond the limits imposed by physics and gravity, but instead slumping back onto the seafloor, for the ever-hopeful gusher to try again.
These towers on the East Pacific Rise were called black smokers, for obvious reasons—although this smoke is a precipitate of particulate metal rather than, as is traditional, combusted ash. Other huge underwater chimneys—soon to be discovered in the Atlantic Ocean and exhaling, by contrast, torrents of paler-colored fluids, and emerging at lower temperatures—turned out to be laden with calcium and barium. These quite reasonably came to be known as white smokers.
When heavy metal sulfides are caught up in the geysers of superheated water gushing from a submarine vent, huge but fragile towers of metallic minerals—black smokers—form and rise dozens of feet from the seabed, until they eventually collapse under their own weight.
P. Rona/NOAA.
Hundreds of smoker towers have been found in the years since. They have been found in all the expected places: along the summit traces of the ridges in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans and, most profligate of all, along the immense tracery of ridges and beside the ocean trenches and island arcs that mark the boundaries of the great Pacific tectonic plate.
Not surprisingly, it took no time at all for those in the mining business to realize the value of these gleaming pipes of crystalline metal compounds. And some of the towers are truly immense. One black smoker, named Godzilla, lying deep off the Pacific coast of Canada, could be watched as it grew fully one hundred fifty feet up from the seafloor, before it finally collapsed under its own mighty weight. And that mighty weight was made up not of coral or clams or crabs or tube worms, but of metallic compounds: sulfides, most commonly, of exploitable, minable, potentially salable metal.
Surveys have recently identified an alluring number of collapsed smoker pipes and vent crystals deposits, making what are now called seafloor massive sulfide (SMS) deposit fields or sites. Eye-watering tonnages of copper, lead, and zinc sulfides, and ores of gold and silver, have been assayed in the glittering, meteorite-heavy, and metal-like SMS fragments that have already been dredged up or brought to the surface by Alvin-type submarines.
For years following the first finds, the world’s mining industry became intrigued with trying to work out how best to win these SMS deposits from the sea. But the companies’ enthusiasm was tempered by caution, and understandably so. The industry was already somewhat gun-shy, since it had been badly burned back in the 1960s by the commercial failure of the much-vaunted manganese nodule boom, in which billions of tons of mineral-rich pellets lying on the ultra-deep seafloor turned out to be far too costly to bring to the surface. SMS fields, by contrast, were richer in minerals and, as they lay on or beside mid-ocean ridges, were in much shallower waters. If only the technological challenges of getting at them could be met, and if the world price of these various metals remained high enough, then there was an absolute fortune waiting down there in the deep.
A Canadian firm called Nautilus Minerals has become the first in line to try to make a business out of the metal-laden ruins of old black smokers. It has identified two sites, both in the Pacific, both on the Ring of Fire. One is in the Bismarck Sea, just north of Papua New Guinea, halfway between the islands of New Ireland and New Britain, and thirty miles north of the infamous and unfortunate city of Rabaul.* The other is on a ridge to the west of the Kingdom of Tonga. The means Nautilus has contrived to extract from these sites the hundreds of thousands of tons of metal ores suspected to lie two miles below are clever, cunning, and, in the view of some environmental groups, deserving of wide condemnation.
The United Nations has set up a regulatory body, the International Seabed Authority, based in Jamaica, which lays down rules for deep-sea mid-ocean mining. The first two undersea sites chosen by Nautilus fall within the territorial jurisdiction of their neighboring states, Papua New Guinea and Tonga, and so are not subject to UN rules. However, another Pacific Ocean site that Nautilus believes could be exploitable lies in what is known as the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone, a two-million-square-mile expanse of sea that stretches from a point some five hundred miles southeast of Hawaii right across to the coast of Mexico. The ISA does wield authority here, though the United States refuses to accept it, not being a signatory to the Law of the Sea convention that set up the ISA in the first place. In any case, the ISA’s control over seabed mining in the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone is at present more academic than actual, since no one has yet come up with an affordable technology that will allow mining under the frigid and crushing environments that exist five miles down. That is for the future.
But technology is now being created to exploit the shallower parts of the seas, such as those unregulated inshore waters off Papua and Tonga. Nautilus is planning to deploy a small armada of three massive, powerful (and highly waterproofed) new machines known collectively as seafloor production tools, remotely controlled robotic crawler miners that will be lowered gingerly down five thousand feet directly onto the site where the sulfides are known to be. The machines are made, uniquely, by a firm in Newcastle upon Tyne, in northern England, known as Soil Machine Dynamics, a company that specializes in building “remote intervention equipment, operating in hazardous environments worldwide.”
Sitting on the factory floor, each of the white-painted engines towers over the gaggle of Geordie workers laboring to assemble it. They are working in a factory where for years steam turbines were assembled, back when this part of Newcastle was a shipbuilding city and made destroyers for the Royal Navy and oil tankers for the merchant fleets of the world. Nowadays the shipyards are mostly silent, but the new machines being manufactured in their old assembly buildings seem just as huge, just as heavy—and instead of floating on the sea, they are being designed to work far beneath it, carving cargoes out of the seabed rather than transporting them on the ocean surface.
The three machines initially delivered are truly monstrous, both in size and in appearance. They have long iron arms and huge spinning blades; gouging devices and giant claws and buckets that could hold whole cars, and lay down tracks, as if they were tanks or bulldozers, and that allow the vehicles to crawl and lumber at will over any of the steep hillsides and through any of the canyons they might encounter deep below.
The auxiliary cutter moves in first, thrashing its mighty knives and dozer blades, cutting wide benches into the rockfaces and scarifying and otherwise preparing the ground for the arrival of the suboceanic big boy, the unromantically named bulk cutter. This fearsome creature, two hundred tons of raw blade power, then grinds its way along the benches and cuts and slices and hauls and finally crushes the sulfides out of the cliffs, leaving them in many-tonned piles scattered in rows along the seafloor, waiting to be collected by the last member of this ironbound trinity: the collecting machine.
This is much like a robotic dump truck, only much larger than any ever seen in the world’s biggest opencast mines. Down below, it is obliged to run on tracks, rather than on the mansion-size tires seen up on the surface. It scoops up the sulfide litter piles and, responding always to commands from its remote driver sitting like a drone pilot in the mother ship two miles above, takes them across to the slurry pump and riser. This is a heat-hardened vertical rubber tube fully two miles long that, like an elephantine vacuum trunk, then sucks the material up to the surface and onto the deck of an enormous mining control vessel.
This ship, of a kind never before made, is being manufactured in China for a Dubai-based chandlery, and it will by rented by Nautilus for the first five years of the project. It will cost the not inconsiderable sum of $199,910 a day. The vessel will act as a controlling guardian angel for the three machines growling away below. It is also being built to receive through its two miles of hard-rubber umbilicus the thousands of tons of sulfide-and-water mixture that the three monsters manage to claw out of the seafloor. Once enough has been piled up into wells on deck, this ore will be strained through an immense net and, to use the miners’ term, dewatered, before the surplus and de-ored wastewater is then sent back down to the ocean bottom.
The solid sulfide ore will finally be swished by conveyer belt across to a flotilla of waiting barges, and after each barge is filled to its brim, it will leave for a metals processing plant on the Yangtze River, three thousand miles across the open Pacific and the East China Sea.
Out of every thousand tons of ore, Nautilus expects to get seventy tons of solid copper, and sizable poundages of gold and silver. The mine will pay for itself, the firm’s Canadian shareholders are assured. The Pacific will begin to yield up its bounty from about 2018 onward, and the bounty, for a copper-starved world in particular, will prove an immense boon to all.
This is the plan, and the company prints attractive brochures and makes slickly produced films to underline the point that it is doing all this with unalloyed concern for the Pacific’s fragile environment. Of course, the firm has released an environmental impact statement, and it has acknowledged that two types of deep-water snail might have their habitats briefly disturbed. Nautilus says the regional environment, however, will escape unscathed. Others are far from sure.
As one might expect, the usual protective agencies (the World Wildlife Fund, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace among them) are concerned that the seabed is going to be ruined in the name of profit and greed. But in this case an indigenous foe has arisen, too: Papua New Guinea Mine Watch. At the time of writing, it is producing an energetic, intelligent, and highly coherent argument against seabed mining generally and in the coastal waters off Papua New Guinea in particular. The arguments are both principled and technical. In summary, though, the question that dominates is simple: why place at risk the sanctity of our oceans briefly to sate our endless appetite for planetary growth?
The affair is of deep significance to the Pacific story. How this single debate plays out over the coming years will offer some indication of just how the Pacific Ocean is going to be regarded in the future—by outsiders who see it mainly as a major resource to be exploited, and by those who live there and have long drawn their sustenance from it and wish to see it treated with proper reverence and care.
The arguments are complex on many levels. To limit the professed worldwide need for copper, say (the kind of copper that Nautilus plans to claw up from one of its chosen undersea fields), the most acceptable solution seems always to be: to lean on the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and all other such developing countries to limit their use of the metal, to lower their populations’ expectations, and to wind back such standards of living as depend on the use of copper—and in today’s high-technology consumer world, that is a huge number of uses.
Not unsurprisingly, the citizens of these countries cry foul. They want to know why they should not enjoy the standards that Westerners have long taken for granted. Why should they have to bear the consequences of the environmental damage that our past wanton overconsumption has caused? Why should they not have copper, for example, and acquire it from wherever it may be lying?
If such an argument wins the day—and it most probably will—the first submarine mines in the South Pacific will almost certainly be developed. The bulk cutter and the auxiliary cutter and the collecting machine will, in due course, be lowered into the ocean and will start to crunch, grind, and tear their unheard and invisible ways through the undersea ranges of the Bismarck Sea, and will turn the seafloor into a moonscape of unutterable ugliness—or, it would be ugly, were anyone able to see it. But since the sea is so deep, and the seabed so dark, and once scoured of its riches, it need never be seen again, probably few will care. Nautilus and its shareholders will do well, will sleep happy, and the firm will move on to other projects in the same great ocean.
Meanwhile the Alvin, now well into her fifties, will no doubt continue to dive ever deeper, and will make still more spectacular breakthroughs in submarine science. Whether mankind then makes responsible use of the ever-widening knowledge that the busy little craft brings back to the surface is, however, another matter altogether.