by James Nestor
The research and stories that follow cover only a sliver of the current research on the ocean and pertain specifically to the human connection within this realm. The scientists, adventurers, and athletes profiled here are only a handful of thousands of people now plumbing the sea’s mysteries.
It’s no coincidence that many of the researchers are freedivers. I learned early on that freediving was more than just a sport; it was also a quick and efficient way to access and research some of the ocean’s most mysterious animals. Shark, dolphins, and whales, for instance, can dive a thousand feet or more, but there’s no way of studying them at such depths. A handful of scientists have recently discovered that by waiting for these animals to come to the surface, where they feed and breathe, and then approaching them on their own terms—by freediving—they can study them far more closely than any scuba diver, robot, or sailor.
“Scuba diving is like driving a four-by-four through the woods with your windows up, air conditioning on, music blasting,” one freediving researcher told me. “You’re not only removed from the environment, you’re disrupting it. Animals are scared of you. You’re a menace!”
The more I immersed myself in this group, the more I wanted to share the close encounters they were having with their subjects. I began freediving on my own. I became a student of the form. I went deep.
And so, my freediving training is also a part of this book’s downward spiral—a personal quest to overcome dry-land instincts (aka breathing), flip the Master Switch, and hone my body into a diving machine. Only by freediving could I get as close as physically possible to the animals who were teaching us so much about ourselves.
But freediving, I knew, had its limits. Even experienced divers usually can’t go below 150 feet comfortably, and even when they do, they can’t stay long. The average beginning freediver—me, for instance—isn’t able to get past a few dozen feet for several frustrating months. To get to these deeper depths and see deep-sea animals that never come near the surface, I followed a different kind of freediver—a subculture of do-it-yourself oceanographers who are revolutionizing and democratizing access to the ocean. While other scientists working in government and academic institutions were filling out grant requests and reeling from funding cuts, these DIY researchers were building their own submarines out of plumbing parts, tracking man-eating sharks with iPhones, and cracking the secret language of cetaceans with contraptions made of pasta strainers, broomsticks, and a few off-the-shelf GoPro cameras.
To be fair, many institutions don’t carry out this kind of research because they can’t. What this group of DIY researchers was doing was dangerous—and often totally illegal. No university would ever permit its graduate students to motor miles out to sea in a beat-up boat and swim with sharks and sperm whales (which have eight-inch-long teeth and are the largest predators on Earth) or ride thousands of miles deep in an unlicensed and uninsured hand-built submarine. But these renegade researchers did it all the time, often on their own dimes. And with their slapped-together gear and shoestring budgets, they clocked more hours with the inhabitants of the ocean’s depths than anyone before them.
“Jane Goodall didn’t study apes from a plane,” said one freelance cetacean-communication researcher working out of a lab he’d set up on the top floor of his wife’s restaurant. “And so you can’t expect to study the ocean and its animals from a classroom. You’ve got to get in there. You’ve got to get wet.”
And so I did.
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WHAT HOUSTON IS TO SPACE stations, a turquoise two-story tract home in Key Largo is to Aquarius, the world’s only underwater habitat. In front of the house, a mailbox is propped up on a cinder block and zip-tied to a pile of weathered wood. White gravel covers a driveway filled with grimy, decades-old cars. Go past a menacing chainlink fence and up a wooden staircase, and you’ll find a sliding glass door that opens onto a room paneled in 1970s veneer. Mission Control is on the right.
Aquarius is run out of what’s essentially a dorm room. There are oak cabinets in the hallway, threadbare sofas placed at odd angles in the living room, and sunburned guys in shorts and backward ball caps eating microwaved noodles in the kitchen.
Saul Rosser, operations director, invites me into the observation deck. Rosser, who is thirty-two and has worked at Aquarius for two years, is wearing a black polo shirt, baggy brown pants, white socks, and black shoes—the unofficial uniform of an engineer at leisure. In front of him on a sectional desk are three computer monitors, a red telephone, and a logbook. Rosser shakes my hand and then excuses himself. He needs to take a call.
“Ointment,” a female voice crackles through the speaker.
“Copy on ointment,” says Rosser.
“Applying ointment,” says the voice.
“Copy on applying ointment,” says Rosser.
A closed-circuit video feed in front of Rosser—one of ten displays on the computer monitors—shows a grainy image of a hand applying ointment to a knee.
“Ointment applied,” says the voice.
“Copy on ointment applied,” says Rosser.
Rosser documents every word by hand in the logbook. The speaker goes silent. He stares at the video screen and watches as the woman caps off the tube of ointment. A moment later, another video feed from a different angle shows the back of a woman as she walks across a tiny room and puts the ointment in a small white drawer. The video is pixelated, and it looks as though the transmission is coming from outer space. Except for the fact that the woman is young, blond, and wearing a bikini bottom and a T-shirt, which, in a way, makes Mission Control seem even more like a dorm room.
“Over,” the woman’s voice crackles through the speaker.
“Over,” says Rosser.
The woman, Lindsey Deignan, is a sponge researcher from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She has been living inside Aquarius for eight days and won’t surface for another two. She’s got a scratch on her knee that needs medical attention and some healing time in the sun, but it won’t get either anytime soon. There’s no sun in Aquarius, and no doctor. Opening the back hatch and swimming straight to the surface would probably kill Deignan; her blood would boil and most likely shoot out of her eyes, ears, and other orifices.
In the name of science, Deignan and five other researchers, called aquanauts, have volunteered to have their bodies supercompressed to the same pressure that’s found sixty feet deep on the ocean floor—about thirty-six pounds per square inch—so they can dive for as long as they want without ever having to worry about decompression sickness. The only requirement is that once the aquanauts head down to Aquarius, which is located seven miles off the coast from where we’re sitting, they’ll have to stay there for a week and a half, until the mission is over. Then they’ll be decompressed, a seventeen-hour process that brings their bodies back to surface pressure and allows the nitrogen gas to safely diffuse.
In the name of research, I’ve come here to see what these scientists get out of spending ten days living in the equivalent of a submerged Winnebago. Plus, I can’t freedive yet, so this is the best way for me to sample the immersive approach to underwater research.
A doctor visiting Aquarius a few years back demonstrated what would happen to Deignan and the other aquanauts should they suddenly get claustrophobic and go AWOL without decompressing. He dove down and drew blood from an aquanaut who was just finishing a long mission, placed the blood in a vial, and then headed back to the surface. By the time the doctor reached the top, the blood was bubbling so violently it blew the rubber stopper off the vial.
“Imagine what would happen to your head,” says Rosser, kicking his black comfort shoes from beneath the desk. Sissy Spacek in Carrie comes to mind.*
The prospect of bubbling blood is only one of the inconveniences of living underwater in a steel box. Even with air conditioners running on high, nothing ever really dries down there. This is why Aquarius aquanauts are usually half naked and why Deignan applied ointment to a tiny scra
tch on her knee. In the pervasive humidity, which ranges between 70 and 100 percent, infections are rampant. So is mold, and so are earaches. Some divers experience constant, hacking coughs.
In 2007, Lloyd Godson, a twenty-nine-year-old from Australia, attempted to spend a month living just twelve feet underwater in a self-sustaining pod called Biosub. It wasn’t the loneliness that eventually got to him—it was the wetness. Within a few days, the humidity inside Biosub was at 100 percent, water was dripping from the ceiling, and Godson’s clothes were soaking wet and molding. He became dizzy, faint, panicky, and paranoid. He lasted less than two weeks. Crews in Aquarius have lived in similar conditions for up to seventeen days. Fabien Cousteau, the grandson of the famous French ocean explorer, is planning a thirty-one-day mission in Aquarius in 2014.
If the moisture in Aquarius doesn’t get you, the pressure might. One hundred and twelve tons of water presses down on Aquarius at all times. To keep the water out, the habitat must be pressurized at a high level, which, at around sixty feet below the surface, works out to about two and a half times the pressure at sea level. Being inside Aquarius feels the opposite of what it would feel like to be thirteen thousand feet up. Bags of chips become pancake flat. Bread becomes dense and hard. Cooking facilities are limited to hot water and a microwave, and most food is vacuum-packed camping stuff. Years back, a surface-support-crew diver delivered a lemon meringue pie in an airtight container to the aquanauts. The pressure had flattened it into a thin sheet of white-and-yellow goo by the time it was opened.
ROSSER IS NOW WATCHING A video feed of aquanauts as they prepare for sleep. (He writes in the logbook that the aquanauts are preparing for sleep.) One checks the oxygen level on a back wall. (Rosser writes in the logbook that an aquanaut checked the oxygen level on a back wall.) This goes on for the next twenty minutes.
Aquarius is under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Microphones record conversations in every room. Each movement, motion, and action is logged. Air pressure, temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide and oxygen levels are checked by a computer every few seconds. Valves are checked every hour. The smallest break in the system could have a domino effect that would lead to flooding in the living chamber, which would instantly drown the aquanauts. Rosser and the other managers are there to make sure it doesn’t happen. So far, they’ve done a good job.
Over the past two decades, Aquarius has run more than 115 missions, and there’s been only one death, and that was caused by a malfunction on a rebreather device and had nothing to do with the laboratory itself.
But the Aquarius team members have had their share of close calls. A generator caught fire during a hurricane in 1994, requiring aquanauts to evacuate immediately after decompressing into fifteen-foot-high waves. Four years later, in another storm with seventy-mile-an-hour winds, Aquarius was ripped from its foundation and almost destroyed. In 2005, the seas got so rough that Aquarius—which weighs 600,000 pounds—was dragged a dozen feet across the seafloor.
To the aquanauts, though, danger, close quarters, sleeping on wafer-thin bunk beds, eating flattened potato chips, and sitting around wet and semi-nude are a small price to pay to have unfettered access to the first six stories of ocean, a depth researchers call the photic zone.
LIFE IN THE FIRST FEW hundred feet of the sea is much like life on land, only there’s a lot more of it. The ocean occupies 71 percent of the Earth’s surface and is home to about 50 percent of its known creatures—the largest inhabited area found anywhere in the universe so far.
The depth of shallow waters, called the photic (“sunlight”) zone, varies depending on conditions. In murky waters of bays near the mouths of rivers, it might extend down to only about forty feet or so; in clear, tropical waters, it can reach down to around six hundred feet.
Where there’s light, there’s life. The photic zone is the only place in the ocean where there’s enough light to support photosynthesis. Although it makes up only 2 percent of the entire ocean, it houses around 90 percent of its known life. Fish, seals, crustaceans, and more all call the photic zone their home. Sea algae, which makes up 98 percent of the biomass in the ocean and can grow nowhere else but in the photic zone, is essential to all life on land and in the ocean. Seventy percent of the oxygen on Earth comes from ocean algae. Without it, we couldn’t breathe.
How algae can generate so much oxygen and how that might be affected by climate change, nobody knows. That’s part of what the aquanauts on Aquarius are trying to find out. They’re also trying to crack more mystical marine riddles, like the secret behind coral’s “telepathic” communication.
Every year on the same day, at the same hour, usually within the same minute, corals of the same species, although separated by thousands of miles, will suddenly spawn in perfect synchronicity. The dates and times vary from year to year for reasons that only the coral knows. Stranger still, while one species of coral spawns during one hour, another species right next to it waits for a different hour, or a different day, or a different week before spawning in synchronicity with its own species. Distance seems to have no effect; if you broke off a chunk of coral and placed it in a bucket beneath a sink in London, that chunk would, in most cases, spawn at the same time as other coral of the same species around the world.
The synchronous spawn is essential for corals’ survival. Coral colonies must continuously expand outward to thrive. To remain healthy and strong, they must breed outside of their gene pool with neighboring colonies. Once released to the surface, the coral sperm and eggs have only about thirty minutes to fuse. Any longer, and the coral eggs and sperm will either dissipate or die off. Researchers have found that if the spawning is just fifteen minutes out of sync, coral colonies’ chances of survival are greatly reduced.
Coral is the largest biological structure on the planet and covers some 175,000 square miles of the seafloor, and it can communicate in a way far more sophisticated than anyone ever thought. And yet, coral is one of the most primitive animals on Earth. Coral has no eyes, no ears, and no brain.
There soon won’t be much of it left. All over the world, coral colonies have been dying off at record rates. Fifty percent of the corals along Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have died. In some areas of the Caribbean, such as Jamaica, coral populations have shrunk by over 95 percent. Colonies off the coast of Florida died off by 90 percent over the past decade. The causes are unclear but scientists believe pollution and global warming are to blame. In fifty years, coral may be completely gone, and disappearing with it will be one of the stranger unsolved mysteries in the natural world.
For the Aquarius aquanauts who were researching coral, their work is a race against time—one of many such races I’ll encounter in the months ahead.
EVER SINCE ARISTOTLE PROPOSED turning a giant jar upside down, putting a man inside it, and sinking it, humans have devised all sorts of grand schemes to explore the shallow waters of the photic zone. Most of these either killed or maimed their occupants. The history of underwater exploration is paved with the bones of those who tried to go deep.
In the 1500s, Leonardo da Vinci drew up a sketch for a diving suit: it was made of pig leather, had a pouch at the chest to hold air, and a bottle at the waist to catch urine. (It was never built.) Years later, another Italian suggested putting a bucket with glass cutouts over his head and diving down twenty feet. (It failed in trials.) In the 1690s, an English astronomer named Edmond Halley, who would later have a comet named after him, proposed dropping a man inside an enormous wooden bucket and delivering air to him through wine barrels. (He never tried it.)
The first diving contraption capable of making it down to Aquarius’s depth was invented around 1715 by John Lethbridge, a wool merchant who lived in Devon, England, with his seventeen children. The craft was constructed using a six-foot-long oak cylinder that had a glass porthole at its head and an armhole with a leather sleeve at each side. Air was fed through a hose at top. The whole thing looked extremely primitive and fragile but Lethbridge managed
to take it down to around seventy feet for a half hour at a time—although, Lethbridge wrote, it was done “with great difficulty.”
A half a century later, a Brooklyn machinist named Charles Condert debuted a more agile and “safe” means to explore the seafloor—the world’s first self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, or scuba. The device consisted of four feet of copper tube, which was mounted onto Condert’s back, and a pump made from a shotgun barrel, which pulled air into a rubber mask that covered Condert’s face. Anytime Condert wanted to breathe, he’d just pump the gun-barrel contraption and receive a blast of fresh air. In 1832, Condert debuted the device in New York City’s East River and became the world’s first successful scuba diver. Later that day, when the copper tube broke off at twenty feet down, Condert became the world’s first scuba fatality.
Other inventions soon followed. In England, John Deane attached a fireman’s helmet to a rubber suit to create the first production dive suit. A pump on deck delivered air through a hose that was connected to the back of the helmet, allowing a diver, for the first time, to stay at depths of around eighty feet for about an hour. The Deane helmet was a great success, but it was dangerous. The compressed air pumped into the suit made it susceptible to sudden and extreme shifts of pressure during dives. If the helmet or air tube ruptured, the reversed pressure created a vacuum in the suit that “squeezed” the diver’s body from inside out, forcing blood out of the nose, eyes, and ears. Squeezes became semiregular events. Some were so powerful that a diver’s flesh would be ripped from his body. In one case, so much of a diver’s body was torn away that there was nothing to bury but the helmet clogged with his bloody remains.
The deeper humans plunged into the ocean, the more grotesque and violent the consequences. In the 1840s, construction workers were using watertight structures called caissons to build underwater foundations for bridges and piers. To keep water out, the structures were filled with pressurized air from the surface. After being in them for just a few days, caisson workers usually reported maladies like rashes, mottled skin, difficulty breathing, seizures, and extreme joint pain. Then they began dying.