by James Nestor
The great advantage of running submarine tours in Roatan is easy access to the Cayman Trench, a deep-water chasm that runs undersea from near Jamaica to the Cayman Islands. At its deepest, the trench plummets down more than 25,000 feet and contains the world’s deepest volcanic ridge. In 2010, a group of researchers from England’s University of Southampton sent an ROV down there and discovered the world’s deepest and hottest hydrothermal vents. (Hydrothermal vents are underwater volcanoes that spew toxic gas more than a half a mile up from the seafloor.) The temperatures near these vents reached 800 degrees, hot enough to melt lead. A return trip in 2012 revealed that the vents, perhaps the most hostile environment on the planet, were home to a host of bizarre animals and microorganisms—species that have been observed nowhere else on Earth.
We won’t be going near any hydrothermal vents today, but we will be diving through pitch-black waters to a spot on the seafloor that no human has ever seen. “I discover something new on every dive,” Stanley tells us.
IT’S TIME TO BOARD. KUCZAJ volunteers to hop in first. I watch as he squeezes his long torso through a two-foot-wide hole at the top of the sub, like a recoiling Whac-A-Mole. Once inside, he worms feet-first into the observation deck, bending his legs up to his chest as he crams himself into the tiny seat. He gives a thumbs-up through the front window and shakes his head, laughing. “I don’t think you’re going to fit in here!” he yells. “I’m serious. You’re not going to fit in here.”
I prove him wrong, managing to wiggle in next to him. I’m sitting not so much beside Kuczaj as on top of him. Because the curved walls make it impossible to lean back, our spines must hunch forward like parentheses. The head clearance is so low we have to crane our necks downward, turtle-like, to avoid scraping our scalps.
Before we change our minds about taking this journey, Stanley crawls in behind us and shuts the hatch. Idabel’s electric motors rumble to life. The cable suspending the Idabel unwinds and lowers us into the water. We disengage from the cable and start heading north, half submerged, to the Cayman Trench.
In the passenger sphere, Kuczaj and I gaze out the window at two very different worlds: brassy sunshine above and silvery water below. Under direct sunlight, the bubble-shaped front window works like a magnifying glass to superheat the interior. Before we leave the bay, the temperature inside Idabel has reached 98 degrees. Kuczaj is sweating through his T-shirt; he looks angry and anxious. Almost immediately, he develops a nervous tic, repeatedly pressing the shutter button of his camera. We take off our shoes to cool our sweating feet.
Idabel sinks lower; the light and life from the surface begin to fade.
“There is going to be some rocking and tipping here,” Stanley says. With a jolt, he tilts Idabel about 45 degrees and hovers for a moment so that we’re looking directly into the maw of the Cayman Trench.
“Here we go,” Stanley announces. We begin the descent.
At the top of the window, toward the surface, bands of blue stretch out on the horizon and grow darker and darker, like a Rothko painting. The gradients of color aren’t a trick of light, or a mirage—they’re the spectrum of sunlight getting slowly swallowed up by water molecules.
At the ocean’s surface, the sun’s energy penetrates easily through the water. Deeper down, that energy fades until, at depths of around three thousand feet, there is no light. Longer-wavelength colors, like red and orange, are easiest for water molecules to absorb, and so they drop out first. The color red becomes invisible to the human eye at around fifty feet down; yellows disappear at around a hundred and fifty feet; greens at two hundred feet, and so on, ultimately leaving only stronger, shorter-wave colors like blue and purple.
The blue ocean water (and sky) we see from the surface has nothing to do with the color of water or air—both, of course, are colorless. Tropical water appears intensely bluish-purple because the visibility extends for hundreds of feet, allowing you to peer into the depths where only blue and purple light can penetrate.
Blue fish are exceedingly rare in the ocean, because they would be highly visible until they reached the lightless waters of the bathypelagic. Meanwhile, red fish are fairly common because red is the best camouflage in deep water. A fish like a red snapper looks red at the surface, but as it descends, the redness appears to fade away until, at around a hundred feet, it becomes virtually invisible to its prey and predators. This is why snapper spend almost all their time at between fifty and two hundred feet.
STANLEY TILTS THE IDABEL sharply so that we’re pointed almost straight down. We glide gracefully to the ocean floor, like a hot-air balloon in reverse. The depth gauge reads −300 feet. Stanley still hasn’t turned on any of Idabel’s interior lights, and the monochrome palette washes over us. Our clothes, skin, notepads, and the world outside all appear to be the same bluish color.
A few minutes later we pass eight hundred feet. We’ve entered the mesopelagic. At these depths, 99 percent of sunlight has been absorbed by water. No plants can survive, and from here on down, the entire ocean is animal and mineral. Idabel’s frame begins to fizz and creak under the pressure, which has reached more than three hundred and fifty pounds per square inch. Stanley has calibrated the cabin pressure to match the 15 psi of sea level, but I’m not sure it’s working. It feels as if the pressure keeps mounting the deeper we go. Every thirty seconds or so, we have to equalize our sinuses so that we don’t blow our eardrums out. Kuczaj is hunched over on his knees and looks like he’s going to be sick. Then I’m hit by a wave of nausea and paranoia.
“You okay?” I ask Kuczaj.
“Heavy,” he says. “Heavy breaths.”
ASTRONAUTS LEARNED TO DEAL with the psychological and physical trauma of space travel by focusing on specific tasks, reminding themselves to stay rational, and working and communicating with other astronauts as much as possible—the opposite of what Kuczaj and I are doing now. As paying passengers, we have no responsibilities aboard Idabel, and it’s too loud in the front sphere to hold a conversation without yelling. Instead, each of us is stuck in his own thoughts. I wonder what awful thing could happen next and, after thirty minutes of claustrophobic misery, I’m having a hard time staying rational. Kuczaj’s jaw is clenched and he looks dazed.
Russian cosmonaut Vasily Tsibliyev had this same problem. In 1997, after four months aboard the space station Mir, he had grown neurotic and depressed. While guiding an unmanned supply ship to Mir’s bay, he suddenly got confused and nearly demolished the entire craft. Two years later, two other cosmonauts randomly broke into a bloody fistfight and allegedly tried to sexually assault a female crew member. She went to another room and sealed the door.
It wasn’t the workload that got to any of these cosmonauts; it was the claustrophobia of being confined with another human in such a small space. Russian cosmonaut Valery Ryumin once said, “All the necessary conditions to perpetrate a murder are met by locking two men in a cabin of 18 by 20 feet . . . for two months.”
I don’t have any particularly strong desire to murder, punch, or sexually assault Kuczaj, but then again, we’ve been confined in this steel pod for only about thirty minutes. We’ve got three and a half more hours to go before we’ll see sunlight . . . or a bathroom. And it’s getting colder too. The water temperature is 45 degrees, and the sub’s interior hull is chilly to the touch. A sheen of moisture covers the walls and windows.
Stanley announces that we’ve just passed eleven hundred feet. Suddenly, there’s a bright flash on one side of the sub, then another, then two more. Stanley has just snapped on Idabel’s eleven headlights. The water in front of us glows as white as milk, then, as our eyes adjust, softens to green-gray, the color of an old television screen. Outside the window, thousands of white flakes stream past us.
Stanley tells us this is detritus from the sunlit waters above. In the ocean, anything that doesn’t float must sink. As gravity increases at greater depth, it begins sucking everything down: plankton skeletons, fish feces, sloughed-off skin—whatever. It
all eventually ends up dissolving into smaller bits and falling to the seafloor in an endless swirl.
The ocean depths suck up not only all the trash but carbon dioxide as well. Phytoplankton, the microscopic algae that make up at least half of all biomass in the ocean, absorb about one-third to one-half of all CO2 and produce more than 50 percent of all the Earth’s oxygen. As the oceans warm, phytoplankton will die off. Carbon dioxide levels will rise and oxygen levels will fall.
From 1950 to 2010, the number of phytoplankton species dropped 40 percent—an astounding number. As phytoplankton continue to die off, it will become increasingly difficult for animals on Earth to breathe.
As we cut into deeper water, the detritus flies by faster, like an underwater meteor shower.
“This is incredible,” says Kuczaj. He turns on his camera to take some photos. Just as we’re scratching the surface of awe, staring at the Milky Way–like light show outside the observation window, Stanley unexpectedly shuts off the lights.
I ask him if he can flick them back on; we’re not done getting our minds blown.
“Keep looking out the window,” he replies. “Just keep looking.”
Without electric lights, it’s black out there. I glance at the depth gauge and notice that we’ve just pushed down past 1,700 feet, the zone where no sunlight can reach. The bathypelagic.
“You see it?” Stanley says. “There, up to the left.”
Maybe forty feet away, it looks like fireworks are exploding in the night sky. Then another explosion of light pops below us. Then more to the right. The colors are brilliant—white with flashes of pink and purple and green. We’re looking at what ancient mariners referred to as the burning sea: bioluminescence, the chemical production of light by living organisms. About 80 to 90 percent of ocean life, from bacteria to sharks, use some form of it.
As we look through the front window, the flickers and flashes grow brighter, twinkling and mechanical. A burst of green on the right is matched by a burst of blue a dozen feet to the left. A half a dozen dimmer lights flash in the distance. We can see no shapes, no animals swimming, just flashes of light, like fireflies. We’ve drifted into a school of . . . something. “It looks like some type of communication,” says Kuczaj, raising his camera again.
Bioluminescent animals use light to startle, distract, lure, and communicate. The grotesque-looking anglerfish uses a little light on the top of its head to attract prey. Giant squids—which can grow more than sixty feet long and are believed to inhabit depths even farther down than the bathypelagic—use bright flashes to communicate with other squids, perhaps using something similar to Morse code. The huge eyes of squids, anglerfish, and other deep-sea animals evolved not to process sunlight—they will never see the sun—but to pick up the faintest bioluminescent flickers.
Very little is known about how this light can be used for communication, because so little research has been done with deep-sea animals. Only two giant squids have ever been filmed, and only once have researchers captured a giant squid sending bioluminescent signals.
Still, some terrestrial researchers are drawing on bioluminescence and applying it to their fields. Oncologists are now using the bioluminescent genes of the sea pansy, a gelatinous, jellyfish-like animal, to study how cancer cells and pathogens react to treatments. Sea-pansy genes are also used to research everything from gene expression in stem cells to how viruses infect living organisms.
In January 2000, American artist Eduardo Kac hired a French genetics firm to splice a jellyfish gene for a green fluorescent protein into an albino rabbit’s genome to create the first—and very controversial—glowing-mammal art project. In 2013, an American team with plans to genetically alter plants so that they glow in the dark successfully raised $480,000 on a Kickstarter creative-project funding campaign. The team hopes the glowing plants may one day replace streetlights.
Around the same time that Kac debuted his fluorescent rabbit, scientists added a fluorescent gene to ordinary zebra fish to create GloFish, the world’s first genetically modified fluorescent fish. GloFish are now available at pet stores throughout the United States.
STANLEY FLIPS THE LIGHTS BACK ON, and the black water in front of us instantly turns gray with the perpetual snowfall of detritus. The fireworks disappear. The scene becomes somehow stranger. Passing before us is a school of fish, but they aren’t swimming horizontally, like normal fish. They’re swimming vertically, toward the surface. In the reflection of the headlights, they look like a dozen silver exclamation marks.
While most creatures on land are restricted to a single horizontal plane, those between the surface and the bottom, an area called the midwater, can travel in any direction. This world is utterly featureless and unnervingly constant. There are no mountains here, no skies, no landmarks, nothing to distinguish right from left, up from down. Night never becomes day; there are no seasons. The temperature is always the same. There is no specific home for the animals that live here, no place to return to, no destination to reach, just constant drifting. I feel a profound, existential sadness here; it is the blackest, loneliest place I’ve ever seen.
Danger in the midwater can come from any direction. Some animals escape the monotony by migrating up hundreds of feet into the shallower, lighter waters when the sun is out, then sink back down to camouflage themselves in the black waters at night. This commute is the largest animal migration of life on Earth, and it happens every day. Most animals in the bathypelagic, however, never leave.
IDABEL PASSES TWO THOUSAND FEET. The hull’s fizzes and squeaks grow louder and more frequent. The pressure outside is now more than 900 psi. If a pinhole leak suddenly appeared in a wall, the stream would cut through flesh like a scalpel until the stream got bigger and the Idabel’s walls collapsed. Death at this depth wouldn’t happen slowly; we’d be crushed in an instant.
Oddly enough, I feel comfort in this. Before the dive, I expected to feel panicked and stressed at these depths, but now, beneath two thousand feet of seawater, I feel calm, almost serene. Absolutely nothing is in my control—I can’t get off, I can’t stop the walls from caving in. There’s no use complaining or worrying about what will happen next.
It reminds me of a passage from George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, in which Orwell, having just been fired from a job washing dishes at a restaurant in Paris and entirely penniless, describes the joy of suddenly reaching rock bottom. “It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.”
Resting my chin on open palms, listening to Idabel’s steel frame groan and creak, I realize that if we all die down here, nobody will know what happened. Not even us.
I credit part of my relaxation to Stanley. On land, he was quiet and cagey. He ignored my questions and seemed bothered by my presence. This didn’t come as a surprise; he’s infamous around Roatan for his prickly temperament.
But down here, thousands of feet below the surface, he’s a changed man. He’s talking, laughing, and tapping his feet to disco and jazz tunes blasting out of a car stereo he rigged up behind us. We’re cruising around in a submarine he built with his own hands, and on his own dime, in a realm where he’s spent more hours than anyone else. We’re guests in his house, and he seems determined to show us a good time.
We pass 2,200 feet, then 2,300 feet, then 2,400 feet. A pale light appears before us. I look through the convex window, and it seems as if we’re approaching some distant moon. Details of an alien world gradually come into view. Stanley edges closer, slows down, then turns the Idabel so that our window is parallel to the seafloor. We ready ourselves for a landing. Kuczaj and I take a deep breath. Idabel squeaks and burps. We’ve just touched down at 2,500 feet.
The steel walls are now freezing, and the inside temperature has fallen to 65 degrees. Kuczaj and I reach down and pull on our shoes
to keep our feet from going numb against the floor. The view outside is lunar—boulders, shallow craters, and broad, open plains, all glowing as white as if the place has just been dusted with snow. But it’s not snow; that powdery blanket is the leftover calcium and silicon from billions of microscopic skeletons, a fine substance that biologists call ooze. Because there is no sun to melt it, no wind to blow it, no rain to wash it away, the ooze just stays here, building up about an inch every two thousand years.
We’ve just landed on the Earth’s oldest graveyard.
It seems impossible that anything could survive down here. And yet, all around us there is life, of a variety that’s more strange and ugly than I could have imagined.
Moving across the white expanse is a reddish, eel-like fish about two feet long. It waddles by on two stumpy legs. This fish, which neither Kuczaj nor Stanley recognize, looks like an offshoot of the evolutionary tree. To our eyes, it seems to be picking an erratic, drunken path along the ocean floor, and we can’t help but chuckle as it passes.
Farther away, a fish the size of a lap dog squats near a rock. Its skin is covered in brown blotches that look like tree bark. Every few seconds it opens its mouth like an old man yawning on a park bench. To our right, a gray shark with a long, ragged dorsal fin drifts sloppily by. It swims in lazy half circles, then stares blankly at us through the window with crossed eyes.
Everything down here seems half developed, awkward, slow-moving, and crippled in some way—failed experiments from God’s test kitchen. But this assumption couldn’t be more wrong. In a world without light, looks don’t matter. What does matter is efficiency and adaptability, and each of these animals, as awkward and ghastly as it might appear, has evolved to fit into its own tiny niche in a harsh environment that would destroy most other creatures.