Mountains in the Sea
A daily log of explorations of an underground range off Cape Cod.
Mountains in the Sea
05.10.2004
By early Monday morning, after steaming through the night, the NOAA ship Ron Brown reached the waters above Bear Seamount. We're almost 200 miles offshore. From the decks of our ship, the world revolves around us now. Nothing lies between us and the horizon except the wide, flat, empty, dark-blue sea.
The weather is being kind to us so far. A thin overcast, no wind, calm seas. All the scientists are ready to start the dives they came here for. But breakfast comes, it goes, the hours roll past, and still the technicians and engineers are strolling the aft deck, tweaking and testing and peering intently at their machinery. They are talking through headsets and working through checklists.
Meanwhile, the science team keeps busy in the lab, planning more details of their tasks, reviewing data from past explorations, and training some of the newer crew and graduate students on data-logging duties. Every few minutes someone asks, "Won't the ROV get launched today? Does anybody know when?" But everyone knows that for this first deployment, the best thing is to leave the technicians alone and let them take their time. When will the ROV launch? When it's ready, is the only answer that's forthcoming, and the only answer that makes sense.
Finally, at about 2 p.m., the Argus tow sled was let down gently into the sea off the stern. Argus is tethered to the ship with a thick steel line, 4,000 meters of it, rolled on a massive winch on the deck. Hercules, connected to Argus with a long blue-and-yellow cable, follows next. Right from the start, a three-foot-wide plasma screen in the main Science Lab lights up with the video feed. The scientists gather and gaze.
Oohs and ahhs are heard for every glimpse of a darting fish, a luminescent copepod. "Oh! Did you see that? It looked like an eel." "Whoa! That might have been a squid." "That was a sea butterfly... a Gonionena jellyfish..." "Look at all that bioluminesence - it sparkles." Tiny bright particles flurry by as Hercules sinks in the darkness. "They look like little cephalopods, drawn to the light, like moths." Bright-red and glowing-white creatures dart past. It's kind of like watching fireworks in slow motion. Everyone is waiting for that first look at the seamount structure.
But the ROV never made it there. Suddenly, in the Science Lab, the screen grew dark. A scout to the aft deck came back to say the winch had stopped turning. A few minutes later, it was reported to be turning again - but in reverse. It took almost an hour to pull Argus and Hercules back to the surface, and secure them in their places on deck. Early reports said the control cable between the two machines suffered some kind of internal breakage. The good news is, there's a spare cable on board. The plan is to make the fix and try for another dive sometime before midnight.
We encountered several creatures out here today, besides us on our lonely ship: a huge whale breached just by the aft stern deck, rolled on his back and smashed out a wave. We saw a tiny yellow-and-brown wood warbler, not more than four inches from beak to tail, wandering exhausted on the weather deck, nearly 200 miles from shore, in the early afternoon. And in the evening, two storm petrels turned up on deck, attracted by our lights, and seemed dazed. A crewman picked them up gently, one in each hand, and brought them into the lab in search of biological advice. Throw them off the rail on the dark side of the ship and they'll fly away, was the consensus. Beyond these few, there is only our ship alone out here, beneath the stars.
Cruise Log, Day Three: Learning by doing
05.11.2004
Out at sea, there is no Home Depot. No corner hardware store or Walmart. So when technician Dave Wright figured out what had gone wrong with the ROV Hercules, and what it would take to fix it, he sent a helper round the ship in search of the proper tool. He needed something small, kind of bristly, with a long skinny handle, to clear the carbon from some critical wires.
Hercules and Argus are complex and unique machines. Every structure and wire and cable has been figured out by engineers and craftsmen and fitted together piece by piece. Every system -- for propulsion, for video, for manuevering, for manipulation, for lights, for communication -- has been meticulously fabricated and interfaced and trial-and-errored.
Originally designed for underwater archeology, this is the ROVs' first time on a biology expedition. It's also their first mission since they were modified to reach greater depths, so a few glitches and tweaks were expected.
Tuesday morning, Hercules reached a slope on the north side of Bear Seamount, and began to explore. The science crew and the ROV crew were working together for the first time, so it was a learning experience on both sides. "We had to learn what the ROV can do, and they had to learn what we need," said Scott France, one of the science watch leaders. "It all went kind of slowly, but that's to be expected at first."
The work was cut short about 9:30 Tuesday morning, when a burned-out circuit tripped a safety feature that shut down both machines. In the control van, screens went dark and all telemetry was lost. There was no choice but to start the two machines on their long upward haul to the surface. Only a few samples had been collected before the blackout.
About noontime, while many us were gathered on deck to watch a pod of pilot whales romp nearby, Hercules was winched back on to the deck, and the science team pounced to extract their samples from the bio-box.
Out came a branching bamboo coral, a bright orange sea star, a beautiful two-foot-long strand of frilly orange stuff called Chrysogorgia that looked like a delicate bonsai creation. A tiny creature called a brittle star wrapped its long skinny arms around a stalk of coral and wouldn't let go, so they came to the surface together. Each one was dunked immediately into a bucket of cold seawater and taken to a cold room near the science lab. And each one was treated by the scientists like a precious artifact exiled from the sea.
In the lab, the samples were divided up, bits snipped off and preserved for DNA analysis, while other bits were examined under microscopes. Some of the scopes were hooked to video displays so everyone could watch. Each specimen was poked and prodded, in search of eggs, parasites, clues. The orange sea star, under the scope, was found to have a mouthful of coral skeletons.
Les Watling, the lead scientist on this cruise, called everyone over to share his find. Apparently the sea star had been captured mid-meal, before it had time to expel the waste. "It's got a mouthful of pooey," Watling said. "It's as if you put a whole chicken leg into your mouth, and then spit out the bones. This shows that the sea star was feeding on the deep-water corals. It's the first known predator."
Meanwhile, Wright, with his tiny paintbrush, some alcohol, and electrical tape, patiently cleaned and wrapped each troublesome wire on Argus. By sunset, the two vehicles were ready to go for dive number three. With the pilot whales cruising off the starboard side, the round red sun slowly sinking, and an osprey circling overhead, Hercules was lifted overboard. It trailed behind the ship and surfed with its top level with the waves, its bright lights reflecting in the dark water.
Next, Argus was lowered off the stern, and the two sank into the darkness.
Cruise Log, Day Four: Seeking to shed light on black coral mysteries
05.12.2004
Six thousand feet may not seem like a long way, if you're strolling a pleasant path on a sunny afternoon. It's easily done in twenty minutes or less. You can climb or fly 6,000 feet straight up, and still feel comfortable. The air up there is a little thinner, maybe a little chillier, but it will do you no harm.
But travel six thousand feet straight down from the surface of the sea, and you've entered a foreign and hostile land with pressures and problems beyond what our bodies can tolerate.
So when Hercules spends all night on the seamount slope, 6,000 feet down, and brings up a watertight box packed full with biological specimens, they are subjected for the first time to an alien world that many of them can't bear. Some of the creatures drip with mucous when exposed to our warm, thin atmosphere, or they turn to mush, or they die and deteriorate almost immediately.
But most of what was collected today seems to have made it intact to the surface. Whether they made it dead or alive is often hard to tell. The specimens are still, quiet, and inert, but that's their normal state.
These animals are born into a black, silent world, far beyond where the sunlight ever reaches. They live and die in darkness. This raises some questions among the scientists on board.
"The colors of the brittle stars seem to match the colors of their hosts [the coral stalks]," scientist Lauren Mullineaux observed, looking into a plastic bucket holding some of today's collection. "Why should that be, when there's no light down there?"
Les Watling, principle investigator, has no answer beyond, "I wish I knew."
The bright colors of many of the corals and urchins shown on the video feed is a nagging mystery to biologists. What is the point of all that color, when nobody can see it?
All afternoon, the scientists labor to process their samples. Tiny branches from fragile corals are snipped, dunked into tubes filled with ethanol, sealed and labeled. They will be used for genetic tests. Another sample prompts detailed discussion about the "weirdness" of its polyps.
Scott France calls us into the freezer room for a quick show: A long bamboo coral, nearly an inch thick, lies tangled in a five-gallon bucket. France turns off the lights, gently taps the coral a few times with a plastic ruler, and it sends off rays of pure white light. Why it does that is yet another mystery. Does it frighten off predators? What kind of predator would it be?
Science knows very little about these deep-sea animals. Trying to learn about them, now that we have the technology to reach them, is a race against time. Once we have the means to get to a place and explore it, it's never long before we also have the urge to exploit it.
"We need to understand how these corals reproduce, and if they migrate, how far they can go," says France. "Are the corals on Bear Seamount the same species as those on Manning? Or have they been isolated and evolved into separate species, like Darwin's finches on the Galapagos? How critical are the coral colonies to the fish populations? If we understand these things, we can try to predict how these communities could recover -- or not -- once they're disturbed."
Sidebar: More about black corals
The black corals that Scott France is collecting are so unstudied that he can't even assign a genus and species to his samples. The coral is actually a colony of small polyps, each with its own mouth, stomach, and six tentacles. They perch upon the coral branches like birds on a wire, and they're connected by a continous layer of tissue. "So are these polyps actually individuals? That's a good question," France says. "Each one is separate, yet they share nutrients in that common pipeline, and they share the same skeleton. So we refer to each specimen as a colony."
The skeleton is a black, shiny substance, hard and brittle, covered by a thin veneer of delicate tissue that easily rubs off. France's sample is less than a half-inch in diameter, and he guesses it took about 100 years to grow. Black corals that live on the seamounts near Hawaii and in the ocean near Ecuador have been harvested almost to extinction, their skeletons sold for jewelry. The coral colonies are now protected by international agreements that prohibit their export.
Cruise Log, Day Five: Hercules and Argus -- a team effort
05.13.2004
Every minute or so, the foghorn blasts. The ship, on an overnight haul toward Manning Seamount, climbs a swell, then slides down the other side, swaying. The waves crash against the hull with a sound like a car wreck.
Every ten seconds, the multibeam mapping sonar chirps, like a very loud sparrow trapped in an echo chamber. Motors, generators, bow thrusters add to the cacophony.
Sleeping in my narrow bunk, I'm frequently jarred awake. Here below waterline, there's no way to tell midnight from dawn, so I check my indiglo watch. It's 1:30, then 3, then 5 something, then the alarm goes off at 7:30 to start another day.
We woke today to a new sea.
Late last night, as we plowed through the fog, Peter Auster had clued us in that this was coming. "We'll be crossing the Gulf Stream tonight," he said. "Then the fog will lift, and it'll get warm, and we'll be basking on the bow in shorts and t-shirts!"
He flung his arms wide to simulate the anticipated sprawl. Sure enough, today the sky is clear. The ocean has lost its gray-black sheen, and glows a deep irridescent blue. The air feels warm and mild, and the ship's bow wave sparkles a brilliant white.
Out on deck, the ROV crew spent the day of travel time meticulously checking and tweaking their machines. About 8 p.m., Jim Newman, chief engineer for the Hercules team at University of Rhode Island's Bay Campus, came into the science lab to tell lead scientist Les Watling to expect a delay -- the pre-dive checks found a hose that needs replacing, and it will take an extra hour or so. Everyone takes in stride such last-minute changes, it's the rule of life on the ocean, where waves and weather, equipment problems, can't be predicted, and nothing is ever certain.
It's the unknown possibilities that Newman finds troublesome. "It's those things that I'm not worried about, that worry me the most," he said. The problems he can foresee, he can forestall. "But the other day, with the carbon buildup on the wires, who could have predicted that?"
So they do what they can, and hope for the best.
This is only the second cruise for Hercules. (Its first deployment, in the Black Sea last summer, is written about in this month's National Geographic magazine.) At about 8 feet tall, and weighing as much as a large car, it's an impressive device. Its yellow top consists of a high-density foam to provide buoyancy. On the front, two robot arms are installed, one for precise and delicate manipulation -- called the Predator -- and one for brute strength -- called Mongo. Bolted between the two arms is the insulated biobox, with a drawer that opens and closes hydraulically. The box fills with cold water at the sea bottom so the creatures collected there can travel comfortably to the surface.
Around the frame are stowed thrusters to drive it and hold it in position. "We can control any direction except pitch and roll," Newman said.
Hercules is designed to always stay upright and steady. The frame also holds an array of lights and sensors: a bubblecam that can swivel in any direction, high-powered 400-watt lights, high-definition video cameras, an acoustic scanning sonar. "The sonar paints a picture for the pilot of the surroundings, beyond the 30-foot reach of the lights," Newman said.
Hercules -- aka "Big Herc" -- is tethered to Argus, the tow sled, with a hundred-foot neutrally buoyant cable. Argus dangles beneath the ship on a strong steel cable that winds onto a huge winch bolted to the aft deck. The cable encases the wires that deliver power to both units and the wires that carry data back to the ship. Argus has thrusters on board so the pilots can control its orientation, and keep it pointed toward Hercules, but it doesn't provide any propulsion. It acts as a kind of shock absorber, protecting Hercules from the jerks and heaves of the ship.
With Argus as a mediator, Hercules can work in peace, as long as the line that connects the two remains slack.
Argus also carries two 1,200-watt lights and a tiltable high-definition video camera. Both vehicles carry navigation beacons that send a pulse of sound back to the ship, to relay their precise position. Later in this cruise, the two ROVs are scheduled to dive to 4,000 meters, the deepest they've ever been.
What's next for the pair after this trip, and their Titanic visit in June?
Newman said that's all that's planned for this year. "Bob [Ballard] has me working on an autonomous vehicle next," he said. "That way the ROV can go off on its own, while the ship is doing other things. It will make better use of the ship's time."
At about 10 p.m. Thursday, we are getting close to Manning Seamount, the farthest point out of our trip, and the ROV team is almost ready to deploy. It will take about an hour or two for the vehicles to sink to the seafloor. All night, the science team will stand watch as the ROVs sink to the bottom and explore.
Early Friday morning I'll join them in the control center to take a shift observing the live video, and my log next Monday will describe that experience.
Cruise Log, Day Eight: The view from the control van
05.17.2004
All night long, as the ROVs explore the ocean deeps, life in the control van runs on a rhythm of its own.
The space in the van, which is built from two tractor-trailer-type steel containers jammed side by side on the aft deck, is packed full with video screens, computer terminals, and control panels. A video operator crams into a tiny space between a steel wall and a bank of tape decks. The engineer, pilot, and navigator of the ROVs huddle together beneath a bank of plasma screens - the main cameras on Hercules and Argus each are shown on wide screens, and a half-dozen smaller screens show ancillary cameras and the winch on the aft deck.
The walls and ceilings are painted black, and the ambient light is kept low to better view the video screens. Talk not related to the dive is kept to a minimum.
At the ROV controls Friday morning, pilot Dave Wright sat in the engineer's seat, watching over the shoulder of trainee pilot Tom Orvosh, guiding him through each maneuver.
"The software is constantly being updated and tweaked, so it's a challenge to keep up with it," Wright told me later. "And this is our first trip with Hercules since last summer, so we all are just getting back up to speed." The complicated control panel is crowded with buttons and switches, and a multi-jointed joystick that controls the robot arm on Hercules.
Orvosh, an electrical engineer at University of Rhode Island's Bay Campus since 1981, has been working with the ROV project since it came to URI almost two years ago. He was a member of last summer's expedition to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean to explore ancient shipwrecks, and after this trip he'll stay on board the NOAA ship Ron Brown to travel with Bob Ballard to the Titanic.
When not at sea, he works with the Coastal Institute and the Jason Project at the Bay Campus, and also looks after Endeavor, URI's research vessel.
"I'm still learning to pilot the vehicle," he said of his training this week . "It's pretty intense."
The hardest part, he said, is the long descent, when there are few visual cues and Argus and Hercules have to be closely monitored and controlled. "Once we're on the bottom, you can see the terrain, and you can just drive around," he said. "That's easier."
Learning to move the robot arm is also challenging. "We have a bubble-cam that looks directly down on the sample, while the hi-def camera is looking straight-on, so that gives us the two references we need to move in three dimensions," he said.
It's tricky, though, and takes practice. "You have to be careful not to move the wrong way and hit yourself in the eye, and break the camera, " he said, laughing.
The arm and its scissor-like hand are used to pluck coral specimens from the seabottom and stow them in an insulated box.
Having internationally-known ocean explorer Ballard and his ROVs based at the Bay Campus has been great for the school, Orvosh said. He enjoys working with the school kids who take part in the Jason Project. "The ROVs are also great for our grad students, " he said. "Webb [Pinner] is with us on this trip, and he's doing a great job, and we have another student coming to the Titanic."
It takes an hour or more for Hercules to reach the seafloor. Once there, the vehicle can be driven along, poking at a speed of one knot or less. It flies above the bottom, sending up nonstop video of the seafloor.
During the dive, three scientists sit behind the ROV team in the dark, cold control van, at a similar bank of computers and screens. Speaking through headsets, both teams work together to make decisions about what to sample, where to go next, and how to get the work done. Space is tight in the confines of the van, but usually a few observers from the science team crowd in as well, unwilling to miss any of the show. The high-definition video, with brilliant lighting and sharp detail, is incredible to watch.
The sandy plains tend to be barren, so the scientists search for basalt rock surfaces where corals are likely to be found. The corals glow with bright orange, red, pink colors, the seabed is dotted with orange and red sea stars, occasional urchins in shades of purple and blue, deep- sea fish swim by, a hermit crab or shrimp scampers past.
Some of the corals are ancient, thick and gnarled at the base, bearing tall branches, probably hundreds of years old. Others spiral wildly up into the water column, thin and whiplike. Bamboo corals have round, pale trunks marked by dark nodes. Translucent creatures shaped like ancient urns, thick green fans of sponge, long-legged orange sea stars, create an extra-terrestrial landscape. At one site, the Argus camera looks down on Hercules, perched on the seafloor in front of three fan- shaped red corals, each one over four feet tall, still and illuminated by a small circle of light, surrounded by darkness. They are likely being seen for the very first time.
Once a specimen is chosen, it's carefully observed, measured and photographed. High-definition cameras zoom in to record minute details for later study. Hercules is nudged into position and sits tight on the seafloor, held in place by the downward force of its propulsion system, just like holding it down with a foot. The ROV manipulator arm reaches out and painstakingly works its way into the proper position to collect the sample, which is then placed in the biobox. The entire procedure can easily take the better part of an hour, yet the entire process absorbs the total attention of everyone in the control van.
Most of the dives so far have run for 10 or 12 hours, and the scientists and ROV crew rotate on four-hour watches. On Saturday, we finished our exploration of Manning Seamount and headed back toward Cape Cod. Sunday night we reached Kelvin Seamount, where Hercules will attempt its deepest dive yet, down to 4,000 meters.
Next, we'll visit Retriever, a pristine site that has never been dived on before.
Cruise Log, Day Nine: Seamounts explained
05.18.2004
Far to the east of us, in the deepest part of the ocean known as the abyss, an underwater mountain chain runs like a ragged seam down the center of the ocean basin. This is the mid-Atlantic Ridge, and it marks the place where new rock is being created of molten lava from the planet's interior. The hot lava pushes to the surface, forcing the seafloor to spread, and piles up on either side of the fissure in ranges of solid rock that stretch from the Arctic, past Iceland, between South America and Africa, and down to the Antarctic.
The force of that spread drives the seafloor away from the ridge toward the East Coast, at a rate of a couple of inches a year. Our New England Seamounts are oriented along that direction of movement, which helps to explain where they came from. The theory goes that now and then, beneath the moving rock seafloor, a hot spot forms. This convection cell brings hot lava near the surface, and as the rock plate slowly moves above it, a chain of volcanoes is formed as magma bursts through the crust. The volcano closest to the ridge is the newest one, and the mounts grow older as they creep toward Cape Cod.
Like mountains on land, the seamounts create a vertical gradient that supports a wider range of creatures than would be found on the flat. The mounts stir the currents, they offer canyons and crevices, they create various seabeds at various depths. The altitudnal zones are reversed from those on land -- the coldest regions are at the bottom, and warmer waters bathe the peaks. Rocky ridges provide prime habitat for deep-sea corals -- the creatures need hard rock to hold fast to, and currents stirred up by the topography carry the particles of food they need.
Underwater mountain chains also create stepping-stones for shallow-water species that otherwise would be found only on the continental margins. The abyssal plain, much of it covered with soft sediments that provide nothing to hold onto, is a barrier to their dispersal.
Sidebar: The Zone of Trees
For years, the conventional wisdom regarding corals has been thus: they are purely tropical creatures, found only in warm waters, at depths shallow enough for light to penetrate. That's what I was taught in college, and students were still being taught that just a few years ago... some are likely still taught that today.
Prof. Les Watling, the chief scientist on this mission, told me that the deep-sea corals were well-known by fishermen and naturalists in the 1800s, but then were forgotten by science. He pulled out an antique text, one of many he had dragged on board the ship in milk crates, and showed me the dog-eared monographs with detailed illustrations of deep-sea coral anatomy.
"They were caught in fishing nets and that's how the naturalists got their specimens," Watling said. "Fishermen even knew the region where they were likely to find them. It was called The Zone of Trees."
The corals, with their trunk-and-branch formations and their hard skeletons, seemed more like plants than animals to the fishermen.
Science forgot the corals of the deep sea, while the shallow coral reefs of the tropics got all the attention. Then about five or six years ago, Watling said, a deep-sea coral reef off the coast of Norway made the news when it was being destroyed by trawlers. Nobody even realized it was there, and its destruction focused international attention.
That was the beginning of this new and ongoing effort to learn about the lives of corals in the deep cold seas.
Cruise Log, Day Ten: Stabilizing the system
05.19.2004
Late Sunday night, Hercules passed its previous depth record, on its way down to Kelvin Seamount. But around midnight, when it reached the seafloor 4,000 meters deep, it was immediately clear that all was not going well.
"The manipulator arm was evidently not working," University of Connecticut scientist Peter Auster said the next morning. "And some of the foam flotation had cracked, so the vehicle lost its neutral buoyancy. Now it was negatively buoyant, and the only way to keep it off the seafloor was to run the thrusters. That just kicks up dust and we can't get good video, so there was no point in even trying to stay down there."
It took about an hour for the ROV operators to stabilize the equipment and begin the ascent, so the science team got a brief look around from the landing site. "We saw a few spiky little corals, a couple of fish, some sponges," chief scientist Les Watling said. "But we didn't really get to see much."
It had taken about four hours to reach the 4,000-meter depth, and it took another four to bring Argus and Hercules back on deck. The engineers immediately set to work on the problems. ROV pilot Todd Gregory drained and checked the hydraulic system, and discussions began about how to address the problems with the foam flotation blocks, one of which had ruptured. Part of the answer was to remove some of the ballast from Hercules, so it could maintain neutral buoyancy with less foam.
The ROVs stayed on deck all day Monday getting checked and repaired, while the seas were building and the sky was filling with clouds. By evening, we had encountered a low pressure system and the ship was rocking and heaving. The decision was made to let everyone get a good night's sleep.
Tuesday morning, Argus and Hercules went back into the water, when the front had passed and the weather was even more calm than we've seen yet, with clear blue skies and the ocean like a lake.
Sidebar: Where are the babies?
Last year, when the manned submersible Alvin visited Manning Seamount, two sets of 10 basalt blocks, each one about six inches square, were left behind on the seafloor. One set was dropped in what was dubbed "the coral forest," and the other set on the "plains" nearby. The plan was to come back at some future date and see if any new corals were growing on them.
"This is all about answering the question, 'Where are the babies?', " said Lauren Mullineaux, a researcher with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute who designed the experiment. "Because it seems when we go looking, we see only adult corals. So that raises the question, how are they reproducing? If they are slow to reproduce, then that means that if anything happens to the adults, the corals may not be able to recover."
Last week, Hercules retreived half of those blocks, five from each set, and WHOI research assistant Susan Mills went right to work examining each one under the microscope.
Yesterday, Mills took out a notebook of data sheets to show me what she found. "Lots of gastropods, two varieties of anemones, some kind of slimy, dirty, empty pouch that had been left behind by something, a couple of polychaetes - maybe scale worms, but I'm not certain - a couple of isopods, that looked the same on blocks from both sites. A thin worm tube, but no worm. A tube with tentacles! I'm not sure what that was, but that's what I wrote down. Some snails, maybe predatory. Most of these were things that could have just crawled onto the blocks. But we did find a caprellid, a juvenile stalked crinoid - I can show you a picture, it's adorable - and some polynoids, that had settled there."
To translate: Gastropods are a kind of mollusk, a polychaete is a segmented worm, an isopod is a flat crustacean, crinoids are related to sea stars, a caprellid is a skeleton shrimp, and polynoids are worms with scales on their backs.
But did they find any baby corals? "No, but that's no surprise. It's a long, slow process."
Sidebar: Running on deep time
On the surface of the Earth, all life depends on the sun. Plants create their food in chemical reactions driven by the rays of heat and light. Everything else eats the plants, or eats other creatures that eat the plants. But in the oceans, ninety-nine percent of the sunlight that falls on the surface is gone at 300 feet deep. The wavelengths of light, starting with red, then orange, yellow, green, and last of all blue, are scattered and refracted and absorbed till there's nothing left. The sun's heat is dispersed and diluted in more complex processes that depend on latitude and currents, but by about a half-mile deep it too is lost. So how do animals survive at one, two, three miles deep, in the eternal cold where the sun never shines?
In some places, heat escapes through vents from the Earth's interior, to form the base of an alternative food chain. But in most parts of the ocean, it's the marine "snow," drifting down from the surface, that transports captured bits of solar energy to the depths. The snow, formed of tiny surface creatures, their dead bodies, scraps, flotsam, fish waste and debris, flurries slowly down through the water column till it eventually lands on the seafloor. The bright forward lights on Hercules reflect off the particles like headlight beams on a snowy night.
"In this part of the ocean, the snow really comes only once a year, after the spring plankton bloom," says Les Watling, the chief scientist on our expedition. "So imagine if you are a deep-sea coral, for most of the year you are living in the quiet and the dark and the cold, nothing varies, there is nothing to mark the passage of time except that once-a-year plankton bloom. That's when you get fed, and you grow, and then it's all quiet again for another year.
"So while the corals that are hundreds of years old seem ancient to us, a hundred years to a deep-sea coral, probably seems like nothing at all."
Cruise Log, Day Eleven: Nighttime brings ship fever
05.20.2004
From the aft deck of this big ship, an island in the endless sea, last night I saw a bright red star glittering low on the horizon.
It was probably Mars, but it never glows red like that at home. Back in Providence, we can see Orion, the Big Dipper, Venus, and a few others, just a handful of pale stars in our small patch of sky. Here, the black sky fills half the world, and stars scatter across it in shimmering translucent clouds. That we've lost all this, the brilliance and the colors, is a sad price we pay for living in our warm civilized world.
Twelve days into our trip, keeping strange hours, confined to the ship's decks and cabins and labs and companionways, sleeping in narrow rocking bunks, everyone is getting a little homesick. We know that at home, the flowers are blooming, the grass is growing, the dogs need walking, and who will keep the deer out of the garden?
In the main lab this afternoon, five of the science crew chatted on and on about the pets they miss at home. The ship downloads our e-mail twice a day, and it's a welcome connection with life on shore.
Yet every time the video screens fill with images from the seafloor, and every time the ROVs return with boxes full of creatures from the deep, the enthusiasm carries on, undiminished.
Most places that Hercules traveled over today had never been seen before, by anyone. The rocky terrain was dramatic, the colorful corals, sea stars, urchins, and shrimp are mesmerizing to watch. Hercules, after hours of tinkering by engineers, proved its hardiness, working hard all day without any mechanical problems.
Tonight, the ROVs are on deck, and most of the crew is getting some rest, playing pingpong, reading, or dozing in the movie lounge. Tomorrow, the exploration proceeds.
Cruise Log, Day Fourteen: Deeper understanding of ocean exploration
05.24.2004
We are used to thinking that our human communities form the hub of the universe. We imagine that the world revolves around us, our cities, our farmlands, our freeways and shopping malls. Most maps of the world enhance this illusion. They focus on the mid-latitude land masses and leave out large chunks of the planet's surface. Our maps show the U.S. and Europe at the center of all things, and marginalize the Pacific Ocean, the Southern Hemisphere and the poles.
But the truth is that most of Earth is uninhabited. The Pacific alone covers nearly half the planet. The polar regions are empty. The Gobi and Sahara deserts, the rugged mountains of Asia and the Americas, the wide Amazon forests, are only sparsely and intermittently occupied. The truth is that if all six billion of us humans stood shoulder to shoulder for a head count, we wouldn't even fill the state of Rhode Island.
So here along the New England Seamount chain, less than a day's journey from the crowded East Coast, we are seeing places on Earth that have never been seen before. It's wilderness out here on the seafloor, a place where fishes, crabs and corals live unseen and undisturbed for hundreds of years.
"This is really a cruise of exploration," says Peter Auster, of the University of Connecticut, one of the principle scientists on board, who studies the ecology of fishes. "We don't know enough yet about these seamounts to formulate specific research questions. So on this cruise we are making systematic observations of nature and looking for patterns, in order to generate hypotheses that we can test and either prove or disprove."
One thing he found on this cruise is that most of the fish were not among the corals, but in the open sandy plains. "If you don't need protection from predators, and you're looking for things to eat, then it makes more sense to be where the current isn't slowed down by the coral structures," says Auster. He spent every dive leading the twelve-to-four watch, around the clock, to keep an eye on the fishes caught in Hercules' camera. "No fish here," was his usual comment, as the ROV flew through the coral forests. "No fish, no fish, no fish." This is actually good news for those who hope to preserve the seamounts. The promise of a rich fishery could have attracted trawlers, which would destroy the fragile, ancient corals.
These deep-sea corals, although they don't build reefs like their tropical relatives, do provide structure that attracts other species. Many seabed creatures depend on the current to deliver the food they need. Flat against the surface is not a good place to intercept that current, so vertical space is at a premium. Every coral we look at has among its branches an assortment of squatters. The brittle star, a type of sea star with long snakelike arms, is often intertwined with the coral branches. Sponges, barnacles, and feather stars -- their arms fringed with delicate tassels -- climb aloft into the current. Other types of sea stars feed on the soft coral polyps, and yellow anemones colonize their stiff branches. Even dead coral skeletons, like dead trees, provide a vertical spot where other creatures can find an advantage.
By the final weekend of this cruise, after 15 days at sea, it's clear that scientists who investigate the natural world have an infinite store of patience, dedication, and curiosity. The process of exploring has its moments of discovery and excitement, but these are embedded in long hours of tedium, repitition, and weariness. The ROVs go overboard, the winch winds out its thousands of feet of steel cable, the dive goes on for hours and hours, the machines are winched back home. The scientists stand their four-hour watches in the dark, cold control van, sleep intermittently in their small, noisy cabins, swarm out to the deck with their heavy plastic buckets, haul their samples into the smelly crowded lab, and do it all over and over and over, with unending Zen patience.
Late Sunday morning, under an overcast sky, Hercules is retreived for the last time after yet another all-night dive. The ship turns toward shore and steams through the fog for Boston Harbor, as everyone on board packs their gear and dreams of home. It's been a spectacular cruise. The weather gods were kind to us, we explored miles and miles of seafloor that had never been seen before, we watched hours of real-time high-definition video direct from the seamounts, we saw seabirds and whales and sunfish and stars.
The scientists are heading home with dozens of specimens, thousands of digital images, and hours of videotape. "We got terabytes of data," chief scientist Les Watling said at the wrap-up science meeting Sunday night. "We exceeded all our expectations. I was skeptical of what these ROVs could really do, but they were just fantastic. The crew was so responsive and ready to solve every problem. We've seen what's possible with this technology now, and it's very impressive."
At the dock in Boston, the science team will head for home, in Maine, Connecticut, Florida. The ROV crew will have a few days off, then head back out across the Atlantic on the Ron Brown to visit the Titanic with Bob Ballard and National Geographic. Lance Arnold and I, NOAA's two teachers-at-sea, will take back to our students a deeper understanding of natural science and ocean exploration. And each of us, in myriad ways, will tell the tale of the unseen life that fills the cold dark slopes of these mountains in the sea.
Thanks for visiting. Updated March 2005.
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