Deep

by James Nestor

  In the modern world, we’re seldom given that opportunity. The pattern of settlements, roads, and other landmarks that undergird human society makes it easy to know our exact location at any time. As populations centralized, cities grew, and technology developed, the need for humans to have a keen sense of magnetoreception became dormant. Just like the need to hold one’s breath and dive to gather food from the seafloor.

  Baker’s human magnetoreception results were met with fierce opposition. Dozens more experiments in human magnetoreception were attempted in the 1980s; some failed completely; others recorded mixed results. After ten years, however, the data was inarguable. The probability that the results of all experiments in human magnetoreception could occur by chance was less than .005. Statistically speaking, you’d have a much better chance of your house getting hit by lightning: about one in two hundred.

  For human magnetoreception to ever be proved, researchers needed to find out how it worked. They needed a receptor. In 2011, scientists at the University of Massachusetts medical school found one.

  The researchers took fruit flies (which have a proven sense of magnetoreception) and removed a protein in their eyes that allowed them to sense and respond to magnetic fields. They then put the equivalent protein called hCRY2, from a human eye, and tested the flies’ behavior. With the implanted human protein, the flies regained the ability to sense and respond to a magnetic field; the human protein in the eye has the same capacity to sense magnetic fields as the fruit flies.

  Whether this protein is vestigial or actively being used in some sort of human magnetoreception is unclear. But Dr. Steven Reppert, the lead scientist of the study, said he would be very surprised if humans did not have a sense of magnetoreception. “It’s used in a variety of other animals. I think that the issue is to figure out how we use it,” he said.

  For Robin Baker, the CRY2 discovery was a vindication.

  “I think one of the things that put people off accepting the reality of human magnetoreception twenty years ago was the lack of an obvious receptor,” he said. “So these new results might actually be enough to tip the balance of credibility. I shall be fascinated to see.”

  IN THE END, IT ISN’T Buyle but seventy-four-year-old Guy Gazzo who tags Réunion’s man-eating sharks.

  After ten days of failed attempts tagging Réunion’s bull sharks, Buyle heads back home to Brussels to pack up his camera gear for a documentary gig in the South Pacific. At his suggestion, Gazzo retools the spear guns to shoot at double strength and sails back out with Schnöller to Saint-Gilles. In one day, Gazzo tags three sharks, enough for an initial test of the SharkFriendly tracking system.

  Schnöller and Gazzo spend the next month watching tagging data, trying to identify patterns. They notice an obsessive congregation around the Saint-Gilles marina. They decide to freedive into the area again, this time to investigate, not tag. The seafloor outside the Saint-Gilles marina immediately catches their attention. It’s an enormous trash heap of plates, food, and refuse.

  As it turns out, boaters at Saint-Gilles had been using the port entrance as a trash can. The bull sharks, always up for an easy meal, have gathered there to scavenge.

  The humans who were attacked at the adjacent beaches had likely gotten in the way and were caught up in a localized feeding frenzy that was instigated by human activity.

  The tagging discovery didn’t scare people away; instead, it opened a new cottage industry. Tour operators began running shark-sightseeing snorkeling trips near the garbage dump. “We accomplished our goal,” says Schnöller. By which he means, he’s managed to educate people. Réunion’s citizens now have a better understanding of the bull shark, its habits, and their role in violent exceptions to those habits.

  Two months after the SharkFriendly campaign was initiated, the French government began reopening the beaches to the public.

  −800

  A FEW MONTHS AFTER I visit Réunion, I’m back in Greece, sitting with about twenty other journalists on the patio of a restaurant in Amoudi, a bayside village on the southwestern edge of Santorini Island. We’re waiting for a charter boat to take us three miles west, across the Aegean Sea to a bay near the island of Therasia. Out there is Herbert Nitsch, the self-proclaimed “deepest man on earth.” In about an hour, Nitsch will attempt to ride a weighted sled to a depth of eight hundred feet on a single breath, what would be a world record in the no-limits discipline in competitive freediving and the deepest freedive ever attempted.

  So far, however, things are not going well. The seas are rough and ocean currents are strong. Nitsch has never dived around Therasia and his team is worried that the currents might be powerful enough to bow the guide rope and slow his descent and ascent. Each wasted second decreases his chances of resurfacing conscious or alive.

  The dive was supposed to happen at 11:00 a.m. It’s now eleven and there’s still no word on when the charter boat will be arriving. Some members of our group are threatening to leave; a few already have. Nitsch’s main sponsor, the Austrian watchmaker Breitling, pulled out a few days ago. Nobody knows exactly why, and no one on Nitsch’s team is talking, but the rumor is that executives at Breitling decided the dive was too dangerous.

  The delay does nothing to ease my mind, specifically my mixed feelings about being here. My experience with Buyle a few months ago introduced me to freediving for a greater good. Freediving, I discovered, could be used as a tool to help crack the ocean’s mysteries. It had a purpose.

  No-limits diving was a step backward; it was another ego-driven competition, and one that put its athletes in great peril. I know this. And yet the part of me that loves superheroes, evolutionary leaps, and Ripley’s Believe It or Not wants to see Nitsch travel to the outer limits of our amphibious abilities. I want to witness the deepest freedive ever attempted. And I’m not the only one.

  Just three days earlier, a crew from 60 Minutes landed on Santorini, along with lead anchor Bob Simon. He’s sitting with the show’s producer and a few cameramen at a table to my right. Simon plans to interview Nitsch right before the dive and witness the event alongside Nitsch’s father on the team boat—the only journalist given such access.

  That is, if the dive ever happens.

  As the hours pass, Simon grows visibly annoyed. He pecks manically on his mobile phone and sips a Diet Coke. Someone at his table orders a plate of french fries; someone else behind me orders an iced tea. We stare at our mobile phones and wait.

  Then, around noon, an announcement. Nitsch’s public relations manager, Silvie Ritt, instructs everyone to head for the dock at the north end of Amoudi Bay. The charter boat has arrived. We hastily pay restaurant bills, grab our bags, shuffle to the dock, and then hop aboard, filing onto bench seats of the exposed top deck. Outside, the wind still howls; waves crash on the seawall. The captain starts the motors and we head toward Therasia as gray swells chop and thump against the hull.

  Everything seems to be falling apart, but the show, it appears, must go on.

  NO-LIMITS, WHICH ALLOWS divers to use any means to attain depth, is the most extreme form of freediving and is, per capita, one of the deadliest sports in the world. Ten years ago, the no-limits freediving record was 525 feet. Since then, at least three divers attempting no-limits dives have died, and dozens have been injured, sometimes permanently.

  In 2006, Venezuelan diver Carlos Coste returned to the surface paralyzed after a 597-foot no-limit attempt in Greece. Russian champion freediver Natalia Molchanova reported symptoms of brain damage after repeated no-limits training dives. In 2002, Benjamin Franz, a Belgian diver, resurfaced after a 542-foot dive totally paralyzed on his right side and unable to speak. He spent ten months in a wheelchair before he was able to walk, or swim, again. The list goes on.

  The human body on its own cannot reach the depths of no-limits dives, which is part of what makes them so lethal. Most divers choose to strap into a weighted sled for the descent and then inflate an air balloon at depth to float them back up to the surfa
ce. These machines allow divers to plummet twice as deep as freedivers in other disciplines, usually in half the time. It’s too fast for the body to eliminate the nitrogen in the blood that builds up during the deep descent. As a result, decompression sickness is a constant danger.

  The sleds carry their own risks. Each is homemade, usually by the diver. Most freedivers aren’t experienced with engineering watercraft. Case in point: Nitsch’s sled was designed with the help of a twenty-eight-year-old whose day job is making prosthetic legs. It’s the first sled of its kind. To gain depth, the sled will use a series of weights. When it gets to the end of the rope, an automatic trigger will release a blast of compressed air that will shoot it back to the surface. Or that’s the idea.

  The only way for Nitsch and other no-limits divers to test their sled designs is to try them during deep dives. They often malfunction. In October 2002, French world champion freediver Audrey Mestre attempted to break the women’s no-limits record with a 561-foot sled dive in the Dominican Republic. She made it down to her target depth, only to find that the air tank that was supposed to fill the balloon and buoy her back to the surface was empty. Many accused her husband, Francisco Ferreras-Rodriguez, of forgetting to fill the tank. Nobody else on board checked. Eight and a half minutes after Mestre began her dive, Ferreras pulled her body to the surface. Foam poured from Mestre’s nose and mouth. She was blacked out but still registering a pulse. Without a proper doctor or even a stretcher on deck, rescuers propped up Mestre’s body on a beach chair. She died shortly after.

  SKETCHY MACHINERY, BLACKOUTS, and occasional deaths—all these things make no-limits dives almost unbearable to watch. And it’s not like there’s much to see anyway. As with other freediving disciplines, the action in no-limits dives happens below the surface. You see a diver huffing and puffing before the dive, see him take a final breath, and then, about four agonizing minutes later, you see him resurfacing—blue with asphyxia, often bloody. A trip to the emergency room usually follows. The whole thing looks insane.

  Oddly, Nitsch himself seems anything but. When I met him at his hotel two days before the dive, I had trouble picking him out from his photographer, publicist, and other hangers-on. He is fit, taller than average, with a clean-shaven head, but not ripped with muscles or physically extraordinary in any other way. He speaks in the hushed monotone of a museum security guard, and he has lived, outside of freediving, a relatively mundane life in his native Austria, first as an airline pilot, then as an inspirational speaker for financial institutions. He appears completely, dreadfully, normal—and yet, it’s this blandness about him, coupled with knowing the dangers of his profession, that give him a strange, almost-sadistic creepiness. A soft-voiced villain with hidden knives.

  Nitsch started freediving “by accident,” he told me, after an airline lost his scuba equipment on the way to a dive excursion in Egypt in 2000. Since then, he has broken thirty-two freediving world records in every discipline in the sport, and he has become the greatest overall competitive freediver in history.

  His interest in going deep, he told me months ago when I first interviewed him on the phone, isn’t about money or fame (“What money? What fame?” he asked) but about finding the human body’s absolute limit, breaking it, and thus extending human potential. “If you think about what is impossible tomorrow,” he said, “the day after tomorrow, you laugh about it.”

  BY THE TIME OUR CHARTER boat arrives at the Therasia coast, the wind has calmed somewhat and the sun is out, but the surface is still choppy, and the currents, I am told, are still strong. Nitsch’s team is on a catamaran about three hundred feet to our north. On deck, a man is yelling. Crew members pace around, barking orders at nobody in particular. The screech of a mechanical winch cuts through the wind and the rumble of the boat motor. It’s a chaotic scene.

  Latched to the rope in the water beside the boat is Nitsch’s sled, a black-and-yellow carbon-fiber pod that looks vaguely like a cough-suppressant gel cap. During his ascent, Nitsch will leave the sled at thirty feet below the surface and hold his breath for one minute, to allow nitrogen bubbles in his bloodstream to dissipate. The total dive time, Nitsch predicted, will be just over three minutes.

  Neither Nitsch nor the scientists he’s consulted know if he’ll make it. If decompression sickness doesn’t paralyze him, oxygen toxicity might. Most of what scientists know about the effects of oxygen on dives below 800 feet, they learned from physiologist Laurence Irving. For three decades, starting in the 1930s, Irving, who worked with Per Scholander, studied Weddell seals, which can hold their breath for up to eighty minutes and dive to depths below 2,400 feet.

  The seals were also able to avoid decompression sickness by reflexively collapsing their alveoli, the small cavities that exchange gases in the lungs, at great depths. This collapse worked to minimize the uptake of air in the animals’ bloodstream and prevent nitrogen from saturating blood and tissues.

  It may be that alveoli collapse at great depths happens in humans. Nobody knows for sure, because no human has ever attempted to go as deep as Herbert Nitsch. The first step is for him to make the dive and live to tell about it.

  NITSCH HAS EMERGED FROM THE cabin of the catamaran and is walking slowly around the deck. His head is bowed, and he’s mumbling to himself. He steps down the ladder and enters the water. A diver hands him a float; Nitsch grabs it and leans his head back, so that he’s facing the sun. Through his gaping mouth, he gulps air like a goldfish.

  “Herbert Nitsch is about to begin the historic dive,” a female voice announces through a loudspeaker on the charter boat. Nitsch pushes himself into the dive sled so that only his head remains above water. He is inhaling more deeply now.

  “Get ready, everyone,” the announcer squawks. A monitor on the catamaran calls out a two-minute warning. Nitsch’s eyes are closed, his mouth drawing deeper breaths.

  “Countdown,” the monitor yells. Nitsch takes a big breath, then exhales. The monitor counts down from ten. Nitsch takes another huge breath, then exhales again.

  “Eight . . . seven . . . six . . .” says the judge. The winch operator assumes his position behind a rack of levers on the back deck of the catamaran.

  “Four . . . three . . . two.”

  By the time the judge reaches zero, the sled has disappeared below the surface.

  “Twenty meters, thirty meters,” says the judge, announcing Nitsch’s depths from behind a sonar screen.

  Nitsch’s planned rate of descent is ten feet per second. In the first thirty seconds, he should be past three hundred feet, but he has reached only about two hundred. Something is wrong.

  “Seventy meters, eighty meters.”

  “He’s going too slow,” I hear someone say behind me. A sickening tension mounts on the boat. Nobody moves.

  “One hundred meters.”

  Forty-five seconds have passed. Nitsch should be down at around 450 feet, but he’s a hundred feet short.

  “One hundred twenty meters.”

  Ninety seconds pass and Nitsch is still sinking. At his current rate, he will be submerged for well over four minutes and will run out of air before he reaches the surface. He won’t be able to pause below the surface to decompress, which will put him at greater risk of decompression sickness, oxygen toxicity, paralysis, and death. Meanwhile, the official at the sonar screen has stopped announcing depths. I ask the man next to me what’s happening. “I don’t like this,” he says. “I don’t like this at all.”

  Some two minutes later Nitsch’s sled shoots to the surface. Nitsch himself is nowhere to be seen. Safety divers kick down. Nobody on deck moves or speaks. Thirty seconds later they return to the surface with Nitsch’s unconscious body. His face and neck are bloated and bright red. A diver grabs an oxygen tank and mask from the catamaran and swims over toward Nitsch’s limp form. Nitsch suddenly comes to.

  “Give me the mask!” he yells, slurring his words. The safety divers don’t know what to do; they stare blankly at each other. Nobody has traine
d for this kind of accident.

  “Give me the mask!” Nitsch yells again. He is now barely breathing. He reaches a stiff arm over to the safety diver, grabs the oxygen tank and swim mask from his hands, then upends his body and tries to dive back down. He needs to give his body time to decompress. But he can’t dive. Without weights, Nitsch’s thick neoprene wetsuit buoys his body to the surface. He kicks his stiff limbs but doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Each second wasted increases the chances of nitrogen bubbles entering his joints, lungs, and brain. Crew members on the catamaran stare at each other with wide, confused eyes, then watch helplessly as Nitsch flounders beneath them. The safety divers look at each other, look at Nitsch, and shake their heads.

  “Let’s have a round of applause for Herbert Nitsch!” the female voice announces through the loudspeaker. “The world’s deepest man!” Someone claps. The rest of us silently gaze at Nitsch as he tries to kick his way down. Finally, he disappears. Minutes pass. Nobody knows where he’s gone. We grimace and wait.

  Five minutes later or so, the safety divers resurface, carrying Nitsch’s body. He’s blacked out again.

  “Oxygen now!” a safety diver yells. They swim Nitsch to a waiting motorboat. He suddenly wakes up and tries to crawl onto the deck, but his arms buckle beneath him. The captain of the boat pulls him aboard and lays him face-up on the deck. Nitsch’s eyes are puffy and swollen; veins bulge from his neck and forehead. He lifts his right arm and, with a shaking hand, points in the direction of Santorini. The captain guns the engine and the motorboat cuts a straight line to the hospital.