4

Night of the Lightning Dolphins

SEPTEMBER 2001
EXPEDITION TITANIC XIII, MIR-2, DIVE 10
DEPTH: 2.5 MILES

Lamp trimmer Samuel Hemming's hatch was still wide open, almost ninety years later and barely fifteen feet away from us. The anchor chains, although their features have been softened by a light dusting of deep ocean snow, seemed somehow brand-new. Beyond the range of our floodlights was the deck space where Dan Buckley watched people happily playing with pieces of the iceberg. All of the wood planking in that direction had since been reduced to a spongy pulp by bacteria and by scavenging invertebrates representing at least three different phyla.

No one really knows for sure how many species took part in the devouring of the deck. In its life after people and sunlight, command of the Titanic's bow has been ceded to sea creatures like “gorgons” and eyeless crabs—along with the previously unknown “flashing Milk Duds,” so named because of their size, shape, and color. The one that drifted past my viewport has defied classification. No sooner had it appeared than it flashed out in dazzling green light, and by the time my eyes recovered, it was drifting out of view.

Nice defensive mechanism, I guessed—but some of the large red shrimp and many of the prey-seeking fish we see down here lack eyes and are already blind. The flashing Milk Duds must be using blinding light against any number of large-eyed creatures, most of which we haven't seen yet, because they probably fled our own lights long before we crested the nearest hill.

No one would have believed, in April 1912, that so strange and wondrous a world existed in the “ever-black,” or that the Titanic would come crashing down into it.

AUGUST 19, 2001
RUSSIAN RESEARCH VESSEL KELDYSH
EXPEDITION TITANIC XIII
APPROXIMATELY TEN MILES WEST OF THE TITANIC'S LAST POSITION

We approached the site during the Chinese calendar's Week of the Dead. Half of my family is Chinese. Some are Buddhists, some are Christian—and one branch of our clan is Russian Jews. I myself am agnostic (“to lack knowledge”). Doubting Thomas—that's me. Still, in accordance with Buddhist philosophy, and with the instructions of Ma Leung, my mother-in-law, I agreed prior to this expedition to perform, on this date, a small ceremony in my stateroom in respectful acknowledgment of our approach to hallowed ground.

Only Big Lew Abernathy (who played a role essentially as himself—Big Lew—in the film Titanic) and microbiologist Lori Johnston knew about the ceremony. I had explained that according to Chinese tradition, ancestors' spirits were believed to walk among the living, sometimes inhabiting people's dreams or visiting places they would like to see.

Abernathy thought about this for a while: the thirteenth expedition to the Titanic, arriving during the Week of the Dead. “Oh, great,” he said at last, laughing. “Now I know we're not getting back from this alive.”

In accordance with Ma Leung's instructions, nothing of the ceremony was to be photographed. In accordance with the Keldysh fire regulations, I prepared the requisite ashes in advance in the chemistry lab. The “meal” for the offering included Skittles candy, grapes, and a Mars candy bar; the “libation” was coffee and Newfoundland Screech rum. The final offering included squares of brightly colored tissue provided by Ma Leung—sent out of my porthole and meant to land on the sea as the ship slowed to a stop.

The one-man ceremony turned out not to be quite so private as I had hoped. Shortly after we arrived on site, filmmaker James Cameron took one of the new 3-D cameras out aboard a Zodiac inflatable boat to film the Keldysh. In Newfoundland, he had paid to have the ship repainted for his documentary. Abernathy was with him on the camera boat, when Cameron let out a startled cry of “What the hell is that?”

Along the Keldysh's port side, sea spray and humidity had pasted scores and scores of the colored squares to the ship's white-painted hull. Fortunately, they had been made with watercolors, which would wash away and dissolve through the night; but presently they were dripping pigment, ruining Cameron's shot. Abernathy conducted a quick mental assessment to see if the mosaic of tissue-paper squares pointed in a pattern toward cabin number 5513, my cabin, but the wind had apparently scattered them in random directions before they became stuck against the hull.

Charlie got lucky this time, Abernathy thought, and kept the secret behind the colored squares to himself.

• • •

Dolphins had attended our arrival. At night they stayed with us, racing around the ship. Deep-ocean explorer Ralph White told us to keep our eyes open for one of nature's rarities. He called them the “lightning dolphins.”

The greatest migration on Earth occurs during every diurnal cycle of the seas. Each night, bioluminescent predators and prey ascend from a zone so thick with life that it scatters sonar signals and is therefore called the deep scattering layer. Normally, ships do not stand stationary in the middle of the Atlantic, allowing people to look down from the fantail into clouds of sparkling creatures drifting and feeding—among them, a tiny squid species that leaves behind a cigar-shaped cloud of glowing ink whenever it jets away from a predator. Every time a squid or a fish touched a comb jelly or other bioluminescent animal, the creature gave off a greenish-yellow flash of distress.

On some nights—such as our first night above the Titanic—the “biolumes” were like giant swarms of underwater lightning bugs that usually kept their lights off. Collectively, they were millions of tiny pixels spread near the sea surface—waiting (no one really knew why) to flash their presence at the slightest disturbance. Thousands upon thousands of them were flashing all at once as the dolphins swam through them. The pixel flashes gave the thoroughly beautiful illusion of being racing streamers of lightning, shaped like pods of dolphins.

White delighted in pointing out that for all we thought we knew about the deep frontier, there was so much more we did not know. He told us that down there where the Titanic had fallen, “there are all sorts of large animals that no one has ever seen.” He had been up close to some of them, but never as personal as he alternately wished for and dreaded (any thoughts about an encounter of the “here-be-monsters” kind only added spice to the danger of White's dreams and ours).

“I've seen giant puffs of dust,” he explained, “larger than the submersible—much larger. Something big just left Dodge City as we were moving along the bottom and our lights approached. So, there are some really big animals down there. We've seen them. Fortunately, they haven't seen us yet.”

It's strange to be thinking about what might have evolved in a world that knows no sun, while planning to explore the planet's ultimate haunted mansion, the Titanic, and to be thinking too about the rapid evolution of the machines we use to explore the deep range. In 1985, the first robot to perform a reconnaissance of the Titanic, named Argo, could scarcely be called more than a sled for equipment that, by the standard of the time, had been “miniaturized.”

Exploring the wreck site then was like trying to navigate a New York City street with a camera attached to a wrecking ball, dangled on two and a half miles of cable from a helicopter in the wind—and Argo was over ten feet long. Weeks later, during Expedition Argo-Rise, we flew Argo over the hydrothermal spreading centers of the Galapagos Rift (along the East Pacific Rise). Although the Argo control van looked and felt like the bridge of a spacecraft—with racks of multiview picture tubes and VHS videotape recorders—we knew that this was but the first seedling of future-tech, and that if our civilization survived, we would look back upon Argo as a primitive relic. Thus did we live to see the future become history. By 2001, we had robots much smaller than Argo—just small enough to fit through Titanic passenger Molly Brown's stateroom window and explore the interior of the wreck freely. Robots still on the drawing board would be even smaller, no wider than toasters, and small enough to now commonly be called “bots.”

Cameron and his brothers were able to shrink and evolve these machines year by year before our eyes, with plenty of hard-lesson glitches along the way. The equipment took on biological overtones, rendering the whole mission profile like evolution itself: chaos with feedback.

On day one of the expedition, Jim Cameron announced that submersible assignments would depend on mastering the bots. Every spare moment, we began running virtual bots through virtual rooms (in which we could select the states of ceiling, wall panel, and pipe deterioration). After a while, one really did get a sense of becoming a pair of telepresent eyes trying to seek out passenger Edith Russell's stateroom and the passageway to the Turkish baths.

We were told to expect the camera eyes in the Titanic's interior to become next of kin to an out-of-body experience, with occasional jolts of reality whenever we looked out the viewport of the Mir submersible and saw the lights of the bots moving busily to and fro behind the Titanic's portholes, like little spirits. Look away from the portholes and back again to the screens, we were told, and you will have become, again, the spirit on the other side of the hull, roaming along corridors and into staterooms.

Cameron had given a curious name to this kind of real-time telepresence, the sense that one inhabits a machine that is deep within the wreck and not part of oneself, yet at the same time it is somehow part of the self. He dubbed this the “avatar effect.”

Fifteen years earlier, all of this technology was the substance of pure science fiction. Even being here in 2001, aboard a Russian ship, was like something out of an Arthur C. Clarke novel. The Keldysh and the two Mirs were built during the Cold War—a spasm in history that probably qualified as the greatest waste of human brain power since advertising and chess. Ocean explorer Robert Ballard's deep submergence machines were, like the Mirs, funded to serve Cold War purposes.

Within that same time frame, at Brookhaven National Laboratory, physicist James Powell had formed brainstorming sessions devoted to the design of Valkyrie rockets (antihydrogen propulsion feasibility studies), and nuclear melt-through probes to explore seas hidden under the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Titan. These sessions became, for Powell, welcome breaks from the Strategic Defense Initiative (then popularly known as Ronald Reagan's “Star Wars” program). Along the way, Senator Spark Matsunaga had invited our brainstorming team to join his Space Cooperation Initiative.

Microbiologist Johnston and I had agreed to name some of the equipment we would be planting on and around the Titanic after the late Senator Matsunaga and his Russian counterpart, Roald Sagdeev. Together they had proposed that their two adversarial nations should work together toward a joint space rescue capability, perhaps even an international space station, and a joint exploration of the deep ocean (a prelude, perhaps, to Europa). They believed that by working together and learning to survive together, all alone in the cold and the dark, adversaries might discover their common humanity and in at least some small way diminish what Matsunaga and Sagdeev feared most: the possibility of annihilation by nuclear weapons, humanity's Pandora.

It was all turning out a little different from what Matsunaga and Sagdeev had anticipated, and much of it had occurred a lot faster than any of us dreamed possible. Yet, here we were, with the old “duck and cover” nightmares and fears of global nuclear winter a thing of the past. Civilization had earned its complacency the hard way. For nearly a decade, now, the world had been breathing a collective sigh of relief—and yet, although Johnston and I were working together with Russian scientists and engineers aboard the Keldysh, there still existed a thin, residual membrane of the Cold War standing between us.

The membrane would eventually break—it would be gone in an instant and gone seemingly forever—but not for another three weeks.

• • •

Cameron had shown Johnston and Abernathy the bronze plaque he made, questioning whether he should place it on the bottom, somewhere near the Titanic's stern. It was not the calling-card type of plaque left on the bridge by so many prior expeditions, naming an institution, a society, or some dot-com millionaire on an expensive submersible camping trip, memorializing the date of each dive. It was only a simple, nameless, and timeless plaque, and on it these words appeared: “The 1500 souls lost here still speak, reminding us always that the unthinkable can happen, but for our vigilance, humility, and compassion.”