by James Nestor
Food at 2,500 feet down is extremely scarce. With no sunlight, there is no photosynthesis, and without photosynthesis, no plants, plankton, or any other kind of vegetation can grow. This is a carnivorous world, where animals can survive only by hunting and eating other animals. Muscles and flesh require more fuel and energy than many deep-sea creatures can find. As a result, most have developed gelatinous skin and skeletal frames that are the most efficient design for this deep-water environment.
Movement takes energy too, and so most bathypelagic animals rarely bother. They get their food by sitting in one spot and waiting for unsuspecting prey to come close enough to be eaten. They breed in the same way, simply waiting to bump into a prospective mate. Some animals have increased their chances by becoming hermaphrodites, which allows them to breed with whatever sex might come along. Other animals survive by developing a single heightened sense.
Perhaps the most impressive deep-water adapter is the electric ray, a resident of these parts. This creature should be easy prey: it has poor eyesight and worse hearing. Some electric rays can hardly swim, and others have no teeth. And yet electric rays are some of the most feared predators of the ocean.
In the past few hundred million years, these odd, disk-shaped fish (there are roughly sixty species) have evolved organs that can emit a shock of more than 220 volts—about twice that of a light socket in an American house. This isn’t some supernatural power; all organisms function through a series of electrical discharges, what is known as bioelectricity. The electric ray simply developed organs that maximized its lethal potential.
Humans share this electricity. Every cell in your body contains an electrical charge. Any time you look at something, hear a sound, feel, taste, or think, a storm of electrical discharges explodes inside your cells, going back and forth from your brain to different areas in your body at four hundred feet per second.
This electricity travels by way of a series of circuits called ion channels, tiny proteins in the membranes of cells. These channels can permit or block the flow of electrically charged ions through them.
Think of your nerves as rivers, and your brain as a lake into which all those rivers empty. Ion channels work like little dams to control the flow and direction of signals to and from the brain. You have somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-five trillion cells in your body, each with its own ion channel, opening and closing in synchronicity to give you a sense of the world around you. A few billion just went off while you were reading this sentence.*
When a nerve fires an impulse, a significant amount of electricity is produced. According to Oxford University geneticist and author Frances Ashcroft, the electric field through the ion channel is the equivalent of about 100,000 volts per centimeter.
A human body generates around 100,000 millivolts (a measure of potential energy), about four times the energy it takes to get an image to appear on an old-fashioned cathode ray tube television. If all the electricity in a person’s body could be harnessed and converted to light, the human body would be sixty thousand times brighter than a comparable mass of the sun. Pound for pound, you could be brighter than the brightest star in the solar system.*
Some pharmaceuticals work by closing or opening ion channels, which can allow certain cell functions to return to normal. Ashcroft has written extensively on ion channels and helped pioneer the use of medications like sulfonylurea for ailments like neonatal diabetes. Sulfonylurea treats this disease by closing the defective ion channels in cells that, when open, inhibit the production of insulin.
In Chinese medicine, the body’s electric energy is referred to as chi; the Japanese call it ki, and Indians know it as prana. The medical traditions of these eastern cultures are, in large part, based on adjusting the amount of energy in certain areas of the body to promote or restore health.
One of the most striking examples, and perhaps the closest human analog Western science has seen to electric rays, are the Tibetan Buddhist monks who practice the Bön tradition of Tum-mo meditation. These monks can raise the temperature in their extremities by as much as 17 degrees, and they can dry wet sheets on their backs in ambient temperatures of 40 degrees. Their power is nowhere near as great as the electric rays’, but it is a clear indication of a capacity we share with these creatures.
STANLEY REVS IDABEL’S MOTOR and we drift a few feet off the sloping seafloor to even greater depths. If we were to keep heading down, we’d eventually reach 28,700 feet. The depth gauge now reads −2,550 feet.
In the distance, a group of glittering disco balls hangs a few feet above the seafloor. It’s a school of squids, Stanley tells us. Each is wrapped in a Technicolor coat more sparkly and garish than the next. Beside the squids are other animals—jellyfish, I think—that emit bright pink and purple light. It’s like we’ve stumbled into some underwater Studio 54.
“Hey, take a look at this,” Stanley says as he cranks Idabel to the left. Kuczaj and I crane our necks to get a bit closer to the front window. The steel walls of the observation deck are freezing now, and droplets of frigid water fall onto our heads and down our necks.
Stanley stops the sub. A two-foot glob of flashing color approaches, then hovers a few inches from the window. Along the top of this glob is a blanket of lights, all blinking, one after the other, in perfect synchronicity. First, only blue lights flash, then only red; then purple; then yellow, until every color in the spectrum has appeared. Then all the colors flash at the same time and the spectacle repeats. The hundreds of rows of little lights are evenly spaced around the glob. It looks like a cityscape at night: when the lights are red, they look like the taillights of cars on a freeway; when they’re white, they look like a grid of streetlights as viewed from an airplane thousands of feet above. Between these lights, there is nothing—no visible flesh, no nerves, no bones or body.
“What the hell is . . .” Kuczaj says, his eyes and mouth open wide.
Stanley says it’s a comb jellyfish, the biggest he’s ever seen. Comb jellyfish, members of the Ctenophora phylum, are common in deep waters. They propel themselves with an outer layer of fine hairs called cilia and can grow up to five feet in length. Like all jellyfish, the comb jellyfish has no eyes, no ears, no digestive system, no muscles. The orb we’re looking at is composed of 98 percent water and a scant network of invisible nerves and collagen, all held together by two layers of transparent cells. It has no brain, and yet this animal hunts prey its own size, mates, and can move nimbly through the water.
And there it is, this thing, two feet from our faces, at a depth equivalent to twice the height of the Chrysler Building, watching us with its non-eyes, communicating with its non-brain, and dazzling us with its Las Vegas lights.
THE CTENOPHORA, THE WALKING FISH, the shoal of glittering squids, the vertical feeders—all seem to me like outlandish rarities, but in fact they represent the norm here. The bathypelagic and the sunless depths below house 85 percent of the ocean’s life, the largest living space on the planet. There are an estimated 30 million undiscovered species in the ocean but only 1.4 million known species on land. The largest animal communities on the planet and greatest number of individuals live below three thousand feet.
As I’m sitting in this cramped metal sphere peering through the window at a seldom-seen habitat, I feel an emptiness in my chest that breath can’t fill. This is the real Earth, the 71 percent silent majority. And this is how it looks—gelatinous, cross-eyed, clumsy, glowing, flickering, cloaked in perpetual darkness and compressed by more than a thousand pounds per square inch.
The azure sphere we see from the space is only a veneer. Our planet isn’t really blue, it’s not filled with leaves of grass, clouds, color, and light.
It’s black.
−10,000
THE RIDE IN STANLEY’S YELLOW submarine, however wondrous, only delays the inevitable: the misery of training to freedive. I have eight weeks before Schnöller’s sperm whale mission in Sri Lanka. I can’t go if I can’t freedive with the team. And so I pra
ctice. A lot.
Training for deep dives isn’t an option in San Francisco’s open waters—the visibility is poor, the water frigid, the tides deadly, and there’s the ever-present menace of great white sharks. Instead, I focus my efforts on pool and surface training. A few times a week, I throw my wetsuit and mask into a backpack and bike down to a local public pool to swim underwater laps beneath the dangling feet of elderly women. The lifeguard, who I later learn is a freediver himself, keeps a watchful eye on me. After a few weeks, he takes it upon himself to start coaching me, Mr. Miyagi–style.
His torture device of choice is an orange safety cone that he moves along the edge of the pool, forcing me to hold my breath a few seconds longer with each progressive dive. Improvement in this drill is measured by horizontal distance instead of time spent underwater. I call it Subaquatic Schadenfreude, because making these longer dives isn’t easy, and the lifeguard knows it. He chuckles when I resurface, flushed in the face, gasping for air, and looking around bleary-eyed while flapping my numb hands in an effort to restore circulation. Aches, pains, numbness—these are asphyxiation’s calling cards. He’d experienced them too. Every freediver in training has.
The drill works. After a month, I double my underwater distance, from about seventy-five to a hundred and fifty feet.
During days off from pool training, I practice static breath-holds while splayed on a yoga mat in my living room. Dry runs are no more tolerable than wet, but they serve a unique purpose: they help me get used to carbon dioxide buildup in my body.
That nagging, need-to-breathe feeling you get holding your breath is triggered not by oxygen deprivation but by buildup of CO2. Comfort with this buildup is what separates good freedivers from great ones, or good ones from guys like me. Freedivers condition their bodies to tolerate high levels of CO2 using timed breath-hold exercises called static tables. Essentially, it’s interval training. Breathe two minutes, take four huge breaths, hold breath for two minutes; breathe one and a half minutes, take four huge breaths, hold for two and a half minutes, and so on.
The aim of static tables is to increase breath-holding time while decreasing the rest interval. Within a few weeks, I hit my goal of three-minute breath-holds with only one-minute rests in between.
THERE WAS ANOTHER, SELDOM-DISCUSSED side effect of static training that went beyond increasing CO2 tolerance: it gives you a bone-deep high. This high falls somewhere between the endorphin rush of intense exercise and the dirty, intoxicated feeling you get from drinking bad alcohol in a hurry. A warm spaciness takes over and you feel the electric pulses of your nerve endings firing through your entire body, or you’re at least high enough to imagine that something like that is happening. Your mind wanders to happy places.
I begin practicing static breath-holds in different locations around the house. Schnöller warned me that if I ever did this (and almost every freediver in training does), I should be sitting or lying down and have nothing sharp nearby. Blackouts can happen on land as easily as in the water, and sometimes it’s hard to know exactly when they’re going to hit. One moment you’re holding your breath, doing the dishes, and feeling great. The next you’re unconscious on the kitchen floor in a pool of your own blood. That’s exactly what happened to one of Schnöller’s friends. You’ll stay unconscious anywhere from a few seconds to around a minute. Your brain will eventually wake itself up, discover that the rest of the body is not really underwater, and then trigger your lungs to inhale. Blackouts on land are harmless as long as you’ve landed in a soft spot.
I have one close call. A few weeks into my static training, I try to spice up some boring office work by attempting consecutive three-minute breath-holds. I don’t realize anything has happened until I find my head hanging low, one arm dangling at my side, and hot tea spilled all over my keyboard. I’d conked out—just for a second, it seems. I never felt like I was about to be unconscious; it was a seamless transition from pre-unconsciousness to post-unconsciousness. I deduce that something had happened only from the changes in my environment. It creeps me out.
Despite that near-miss, I don’t confine breath-hold training to the safety of my home.
One of the best surface-training methods is so-called walking apnea, which involves holding your breath and walking over a soft surface (in case you pass out) for extended distances. The idea is that the oxygen your muscles use when you’re walking slowly is about the same amount of oxygen muscles use during a freedive. You start by holding your breath while standing still for about thirty seconds until you feel your heart rate decrease, then you walk slowly in a straight line, turn around when you feel you’ve reached your halfway point, and walk back to your starting place. The distance you travel is about how far you’d be able to hold your breath during a deep dive.
After a month of constant practice, I can easily walk more than two hundred feet (a hundred feet each way) without breathing.
But freediving is more than just walking and holding your breath. My greatest challenge, as is true for many beginners, is learning how to equalize my sinuses (or pop my ears) thoroughly and in quick succession. No matter how hard I tried to do this during my dive attempts at 40 Fathom Grotto, I couldn’t seem to perform them fast enough to attain any real depth. The simple explanation: I was doing it all wrong.
When the average person tries to equalize his ears, he puffs out his cheeks and blows hard, so that compressed air enters the sinus cavities that lead to the ears. This method, called the Valsalva maneuver, is used by about 99 percent of the population, and it’s usually effective. But it doesn’t work when you’re freediving past around forty feet. As you dive deeper, air becomes more and more compressed in the lungs, until there isn’t enough left to push into the ears. The Valsalva method becomes useless.
Most freedivers and some jet pilots (who need to equalize quickly during ascents and descents) use the Frenzel method, which traps air inside the closed circuit of the sinus cavities and allows for immediate and thorough releases of pressure. This method is complicated and many people do it wrong, which can cause serious problems at depth. I hire Ted Harty, the team captain for the U.S. freediving team, to lead me through a thirty-minute training session on Skype. (When the lesson starts, I quickly recognize Harty as the guy with the gill tattoos on his ribs who, months back, had monitored me during my four-minute breath-hold at the Performance Freediving International course in Tampa.)
“The big difference between Valsalva and Frenzel,” Harty begins, “is that in Valsalva, the throat stays open; in Frenzel, it’s shut.”
Over ten minutes, he guides me through some exercises that include coughing a T sound and groaning with my mouth shut. Both act on the epiglottis, the fleshy flap that covers the windpipe, so that I can open and shut it at will. Next, Harty shows me how to “puke” air up from my stomach and “jackhammer” it with my tongue into the sinus cavities. By trapping air in my head (instead of the Valsalva method of pushing it up from the lungs), I’m able to shuffle air back and forth between the sinus cavities and release pressure in a fraction of a second. Once I get it, it works every time.
The maneuver is as awkward as it sounds and nearly impossible to explain if you don’t have someone showing it to you, which is why Harty offers his private Skype sessions. It also takes a lot of practice. Harty tells me to repeat the Frenzel method at least three hundred times a day for the next week and then use it during my next pool-training sessions. Before he signs off, he offered a final piece of sage advice.
“Remember: never, ever freedive alone,” he says. “I have students who sign up for courses. But they never show up. You know why?” He pauses. “Because they died practicing alone. Don’t ever do it.”
We hang up, and I head out to the park to walk my dog, holding my breath and puking air into my head the whole way.
The one part of me that still needs to be trained for the rigors of freediving is my mind. For assistance in this realm, I turn to Hanli Prinsloo, a former competitor turned spiritua
lly minded freediver. As with many former competitors, she gained wisdom only after skirting death.
“I felt this irritation in my throat,” says Prinsloo. “I coughed and there were flecks of blood.”
I’m sitting at a worn wooden table with her, inside a crowded restaurant in Kalk Bay, a trendy former fishing village about twenty miles west of central Cape Town, South Africa. Prinsloo, who lives just up the street, is wearing a thin black down jacket, jeans, and lamb’s-wool-filled boots. Behind her is a large window, and looking through it, I see the slick backs of southern right whales bend and push beneath an envelope of gray ocean. Anywhere else, this would be a million-dollar view, but here whales are about as common as dogs on the beach, at least in springtime. Prinsloo is framed in the center of my view, sipping wine and laughing as she describes how her larynx ripped apart.
“I wanted to see how far my body could go,” she says. “You know, test my limit.”
The dive Prinsloo is describing happened in August 2011, a month before I met her at the Individual Depth World Championship in Greece. She was training in Dahab, Egypt, with her friend Sara Campbell before an attempt at a women’s world record in the discipline of constant weight (CWT). The women’s CWT record was 203 feet at the time; Prinsloo planned to increase it to 213.
For months, she followed a rigorous training schedule: diving with half-filled lungs to around 120 feet several times a day, doing yoga, practicing static breath-holds. She ate a raw vegan diet—no wheat, sugar, or alcohol—in order to boost the oxygen stores in her blood and cut down on excess mucus, which would make it difficult to equalize quickly at depth.