On a much younger Planet Earth, with perhaps a single rudimentary continent, archaeans and other primitive life-forms may well have arisen on the margins of the superheated water surrounding a deep-sea vent. The deep ocean may well have been the earliest laboratory, the first proving ground for life.
And so we journey to the bottom of the sea in search of ourselves as well.
I am reclining on the back of a fishing boat northeast of the Dominican Republic. I am on a whale trip, but the whales are nowhere to be found, and my thoughts, like this rattling boat, are drifting. The fierce tropical sun fights to penetrate the low haze off the coast. A few miles out, the morning sea turns lively, but not yet uncomfortable. The captain shouts out our coordinates: 19°55' N, 65°27' W. We are almost there. I have been waiting for this moment, the moment when I can say I am directly above the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean: the Puerto Rico Trench, more than five miles (8 km) deep. It is not as deep as Challenger Deep, in the Pacific, but it is less visited and even less known.
At the prescribed moment, the captain shuts down the engines, and we slide to a slow rocking stop. The sound of the waves lapping against the sides of the boat would be enough to send me to a peaceful siesta on most days in the tropics. But on this occasion, I can’t chase the idea from my mind of being so close to one of the deepest pits of the ocean.
And then it hits me. It would be so easy to be the first person to touch the bottom here. Unlike a trip to the moon, which costs millions of dollars and requires years of training, or summiting Mount Everest, which demands both financing and mountain-climbing skills, a visit to the Puerto Rico Trench at this moment would be simply a matter of tying on a few weight belts and gently rolling off the deck of the boat. It might take a few hours, but I could be on the bottom by suppertime—the first human to reach the hadal depths unassisted.
The sea cucumbers would greet me as I arrived, and we would soon be joined by the odd starfish and maybe a crab or two new to science. Then I would stroll along the subduction zone with my little entourage and perhaps stumble upon the remnants of a hot vent. Prodding the embers with King Neptune’s staff, I could uncover new species of mussels, eyeless shrimp and hardy archaeans. This wonderful fantasy would be “rapture of the deep,” not at all the condition of narcosis to which Cousteau referred—a consequence of diving too deep—but true rapture.
My fantasy is soon shattered by the reality of how close and yet how far the hadal trenches remain. Reaching the bottom of the trenches is easy. The trick is getting there and back to the surface alive.
Even with submarines, the technological challenge of getting to the bottom of the sea has proved at times more elusive than space shuttle flights, space station visits and moon landings. It took a great deal of determination for James Cameron to achieve his dreamed-of descent to Challenger Deep. But someday, we will develop the technology necessary for humans to explore the middle and deep layers of the sea, just as we do now on the surface of the sea with cruise ships. It could develop like the planned space flights for which Richard Branson and others are already selling tickets. The deep is still the last frontier, yet one day, I believe we will take holidays there, perhaps to escape the heat and humidity of the city, to get back to our evolutionary roots in the sea or to get away from the pressure, as it were, of life at sea level.
For the foreseeable future, however, it is but a journey of the imagination, informed by science at the frontiers. In our imagination, we can swim or speed inexorably to the bottom and explore every layer. With our imagination, we can renew the bond with our oceanic Earth and its deep-sea creatures, the sea from which our species came. We can consider our relationship to the archaeans. We can listen to the scientists who tell us these great stories, and in the decades to come, the deep ocean can help us rediscover the mysteries and unlock the secrets of our own water planet. This is the ride of our lifetime for now, as we wait for technology to give us the actual ride to the bottom.
Then, disrupting my reveries, a single jellyfish, idly riding the current, drifts into view. At first, it is just one. It rides the waves boldly, displaying its colors. But behind it, I see a whole flotilla of jellyfish. And minutes later, down below, jellyfish are illuminated in the water column. They are all the same, like an advancing army—mindless, relentless and, finally, menacing. Are these the true monsters of the sea? One thing for sure, if the jellyfish do take over the ocean, the traditional “monsters” that we all know and love, from sharks and squid to whales, will be consigned to the margins, if not the scrap heap, at the bottom of the sea, to become part of the ooze. The great era of creatures of the deep will be mostly over.
Within 10 minutes, the jellies are all gone, carried away by the current to do their business elsewhere. At the same time, the strains of an ancient melody, an orchestra of cellos testing the vibrato on the lowest string, filter up through the water and the underside of this resonant wooden boat, like the strains of a familiar song: the sweetest song of the deep blue sea.
A massive female humpback whale adorned with a heavy crop of barnacles charges up from the deep black and into streaky blue view, smashing the rippled surface. Rearing her head, she shoots her blow skyward, drenching all of us and sucking in a bite of atmosphere before dipping below. There’s scarcely time to catch a human breath. Half a minute later, she emerges, all of her, all at once, a stone’s throw from the boat—a full body breach of instant joy. Now, that’s my ocean.
♦