by James Nestor
The boat hand explains in stilted English that this was how Sri Lankan fishermen used to listen for whales hundreds of years ago. Sperm whale echolocation, even from miles beneath the ocean’s surface, is strong enough to vibrate five feet of wood and make an audible clicking sound. I give it a try and hear a faint tick-tick-tick. It sounds like a signal from another world, which, in a way, is precisely what it is. I get chills listening to it.
Schnöller puts the headphones on and spins the strainer dexterously. He tells us the whales will switch from making echolocation clicks to codas as they ascend. By listening to these subtle shifts in click patterns, and the volume and clarity of the clicks, he has taught himself to predict the location and moment that the whales will surface, with startling accuracy. I ask him: How accurate? Then he demonstrates.
“They are two kilometers that way,” he says, pointing west. “They are coming up. They will be here in two minutes.” We sit, staring westward. “Thirty seconds . . .” he says. “They are moving to the east, and . . . right . . .”
Exactly on cue, a pod of five whales surfaces about fifteen hundred feet from our boat, each exhaling a magnificent blow. He grins, obviously proud of himself, takes off the headphones, and throws the strainer and broomstick in the bow. I give him a high-five. The boat captain looks dumbfounded.
“Okay, now,” says Schnöller. “Who wants to go in?”
AFTER DINNER, SCHNÖLLER, Gazzo, and Ghislain are sitting around the patio table going over the day’s footage. The clips are hypnotizing. Each of us had short encounters with half a dozen different whales. Schnöller and Gazzo recorded the interactions in 3-D high-definition video. He says this is the first time some of these behaviors have been documented at such close range. The most impressive footage, he says, comes from the dive that Guy Gazzo and I took at the beginning of the day.
A pod of about five whales turned and approached our boat. Schnöller told me to grab my mask and follow Gazzo, who was carrying the 3-D camera, into the water. At first the whales were moving away from the boat, but as we swam out farther they changed direction to meet us face to face. Some two hundred feet in front of us, a shadow expanded, then separated into two forms—two enormous whales, perhaps thirty-five-feet long. One whale, a bull, came directly at us but then unexpectedly spun around so that its belly was facing us. We couldn’t see its eyes or the top of its head. As it approached, it dove just beneath our fins and let out a rapid burst of coda clicks so powerful that I could feel them in my chest and skull. The bull, still upside down, released a plume of black feces, like a smoke screen, and disappeared. The entire encounter lasted less than thirty seconds.
Schnöller boots up the video on his laptop and plays it back for me. This time, he turns up the volume on his speakers.
“You hear that?” he says, then reverses the video again, and again. I listen closely. The clicks sound harsh and violent, like machine-gun fire. “That’s not a coda.” Schnöller laughs. He plays the clicks back again. “And he’s not talking to you.”
What Gazzo and I heard and felt was a creak—the echolocation click train that sperm whales use when they’re homing in on prey. The whale flipped on its back so it could process the echolocation clicks more easily in its upper jaw, much as a human might cock his head to focus on a sound. Schnöller plays the video again and again, laughing.
“He was looking at you to see if he could eat you!” he says. “Lucky for you, I guess you didn’t look too delicious.”
But this brings up a question I’ve had ever since we first boarded the boats. Why didn’t they eat us? We’re certainly easy prey.
Schnöller believes that, when the whales echolocate our bodies, they perceive that we have hair, big lungs, a large brain—a combination of characteristics they don’t see in the ocean. Perhaps they recognize that we’re fellow mammals, that we have the potential for intelligence. If this theory is correct, then sperm whales are smarter than us in one crucial way: they see the similarities between our two species more readily than we do.
He then brings up another file on his computer, a ten-second audio loop he recorded with the hydrophones earlier in the day. He clicks Play.
“Well?” He looks at me. I tell him the only thing I hear is distant echolocation clicks, which sound like random emanations from a drum machine. He orders me to put on his headphones, turns up the volume, and blasts me with what sounds like an enormous bomb exploding from miles away.
“I think this is something big,” he says. I ask him if the hydrophone just bumped into the side of the boat. “No, impossible,” he says. “This is something important. I promise you, this is big.”
IN ORDER TO EASE THE constant bickering between Prinsloo and Schnöller, we decide to rent another motorboat for the next several days. Schnöller’s team will take one boat while Prinsloo takes the other. I’ll alternate between the two, starting with Prinsloo.
During the off-hours when there are no dolphins or whales to dive with, we cut the motor, jump overboard, and freedive. Prinsloo brings her training float and rope and suggests we do some freediving depth training.
“How deep do you want to go?” she asks me, sitting cross-legged at the prow. “Fifty feet?” Without waiting for my reply, she grabs her mask and fins, jumps overboard, and swims the float out a dozen feet. I put on my gear and follow. The water conditions today are perfectly clear, with visibility extending perhaps two hundred feet. Even farther below, the depths aren’t black and brooding like they had been at the 40 Fathom Grotto, but a violet-blue. I watch through my mask as Prinsloo ties a weight belt to the end of the rope and releases it down into the water. From where I’m floating, it looks like a root from a tree growing in time-lapse images.
Marshall suits up and swims near Prinsloo; the two breathe up together, then dive down in unison along the rope. I begin the pre-dive breathing exhalations—“Inhale one, hold two, exhale ten, hold two”—and close my eyes, trying to calm my thoughts and relax my body. I focus on the static breath-holds I’d been doing for the past few months, and I try to remember how easy it was to hold my breath for three minutes, and how easy it will be to hold my breath for just one minute as I dive down fifty feet to the end of the rope and return.
It’s a lot of self-talk, but all my coaches have told me this internal cheerleading is essential: I must convince myself this dive will be easy and enjoyable. Freediving, as William Trubridge said, is a mental game.
When I open my eyes a few minutes later, I’m a little lightheaded from all the heavy breathing, and I feel a strong sense of vertigo. Prinsloo and Marshall, whose tiny figures swim in circles at the end of the rope, appear to be floating high in a cloudless sky. The scene seems in every way a mirror image of the surface world; there are no other markers—underwater animals, seafloor, boat bottoms—to convince me otherwise. Luckily, after months of training, I’m getting used to this kind of disorientation. I relax and roll with it.
Inhale one, hold two, exhale ten, hold two . . .
I begin my final ten exhalations. My mind returns to the training with Prinsloo in Cape Town. We were at a freshwater quarry with four other students, practicing deep dives. I was, again, having difficulty making it below twenty feet. I resurfaced from a painful attempt to thirty feet when Prinsloo approached me from the other side of the float and suggested I try the next dive, the deepest of the day, with my eyes closed. This was an exercise in trust, she said; I needed to trust her, and I needed to trust myself. I thought it was a horrible idea, but I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything. I inhaled, squinted, dove down, and resurfaced one minute later having completed the deepest, longest, and most comfortable dive I’d ever made. I dove to a depth of forty feet without feeling the slightest discomfort.
NOW, STARING DOWN INTO THE void of blue water, watching Prinsloo and Marshall hovering six stories below me, I try to remember how that blind dive felt. Then I take one last inhale and descend.
As I pull with my left hand, I reach down and pinch
my nose with the right, lift a puff of air from my stomach into my head, then cough a T sound into my closed mouth and seal my throat with my epiglottis. I jackhammer that trapped air from the back of my throat up into my sinuses. It’s the first time I’ve used the Frenzel method at depth. It works seamlessly. After half a dozen pulls, I’ve passed twenty feet and am falling quickly.
The pulling gets easier the deeper I go. I’m able to loosen my grip so that I’m pulling the rope with just the thumb and forefinger of each hand. Moments later, I let go entirely. I’m neither kicking nor pulling, but I continue to lunge downward. I’ve hit zero gravity. The door is open. I bring my arms down to my sides in skydiver pose and prepare to fall into deeper water.
First, the wetsuit vest tightens. My chest feels like it’s been shrink-wrapped. My lungs push up toward my throat, and my stomach caves in slightly. This is the pressure of the deep ocean pressing on my exterior; it’s inside me too, sucking my body into itself like a black hole.
The huge breath I took at the surface has disappeared. I didn’t exhale it; I’ve been holding it the whole time. But it’s now compressed to half its volume, enough so that it tugs at the soft tissues of my lungs and throat. This sounds uncomfortable, but it isn’t. The feeling is unexpectedly warming, as if someone just threw a blanket around me. It’s the feeling of peripheral vasoconstriction, of oxygenated blood flooding in from my arms, legs, hands, and feet into my core.
I’ve just flipped the Master Switch.
Months back, when I was in Greece, I asked a competitive diver what it was like to dive deep, to have a hundred pounds of pressure per square inch pressing against her body. Her answer then struck me as woo-woo: she said it felt like the ocean was hugging her. But that’s exactly how it feels, a generous squeeze from the largest mass on the planet.
I drift farther down. I feel a buildup of pressure in my ears, and it’s more painful than any I’ve experienced before. I pinch my nose and try to equalize but can’t; the air that I had trapped in my sinus cavities, like the rest of my body, has been halved in volume. My lungs feel completely empty too, but I know from my training with Ted Harty that this is an illusion. There’s still plenty of air to draw from.
Though I’ve let go of the rope, I’ve never strayed from it, and now I grab it again with my left hand to stop my descent, then back myself up a few feet to let the air re-expand in my sinuses and ease the ear pain. I pinch my nose again and draw another puff of air from my lungs into my head, then shuffle it between my nose and ears. My ears open with an audible squeak, then a pop. I let go of the rope with my left hand, kick a fin to restart the descent, and drop deeper.
The weight belt at the end of the rope passes by the length of my body—my chest, legs, feet, then fins. I’m descending at about the same rate that a feather drops in the air. In front of me, there’s no longer any rope. All directions glow in the same neon-blue light and it goes on forever.
Part of me wants to keep going, to continue exploring this alien space. I feel no onset of convulsions, no nagging need to breathe, no coldness, not even a strong sense of being underwater. But I know this is competitive freediving’s temptation speaking to me—Go deeper, it says. And that’s not the kind of freediving I’ve come here to master.
I grab my knees, curl into a ball, and flick my right fin to turn my body around in a slow-motion somersault. The world flips upside down, and the vertigo I experienced at the surface restarts.
Now it appears as if I’m no longer floating at the end of the rope but hovering from above, preparing to fall to earth. I kick a few feet up, grab the weight belt with my right hand, and dangle there for a moment.
The first few pulls require some effort; there’s 200,000 pounds of water pushing against me, trying to tug me farther down. A few big pulls, a few strong kicks, and I’m back in zero gravity. The pulling here is significantly easier. The air that vanished from my lungs and head at depth now miraculously returns. It feels like my chest is being inflated with a pump. There’s no need to equalize my ears on the ascent; the expanding air inside my head does that automatically. And I can ascend as quickly as I want. My body, like all human and most mammalian bodies, is specially adapted to process the exchange of oxygen and nitrogen gases that occur during a deep dive—a trigger of the Master Switch.
I pull on the rope now with both hands and kick my fins with more force. The same invisible hand that drew me to the depths is now lifting me back up to the surface. I’m ascending at twice the speed I descended. I’ve reached the positive-gravity zone.
Nearing the top of the rope, I look skyward and see the reflective sheen of surface water; the float and boat bottom are now less than twenty feet away. The air within my lungs expands by another third. It feels like a living thing trying to get out. I open my mouth, relax the epiglottis in my throat, and a cloud of bubbles and vapor streams from my mouth. Seconds later, my head breaks through to the surface atmosphere and I’m spitting out flecks of water, breathing in fresh air, and blinking my eyes in the flashbulb-bright morning light.
There’s no sense of flushing in my face; no quivering in my stomach; no need to gasp for air; no aching ears, throbbing headache, or dizzying highs. There is no pain at all.
Marshall and Prinsloo are floating a few feet beside me. Prinsloo’s been watching the whole dive. She doesn’t say anything; she doesn’t congratulate me or ask how deep I’ve dived. She doesn’t even acknowledge that she’s been monitoring me. There’s no boasting here or judges to impress. This is no competition.
Without saying a word, all three of us breathe up, upturn our bodies, then, all together, fall back down past the doorway to the deep.
−28,700
IT TAKES A LONG TIME to become ooze. First you need to die and be eaten, then excreted, then have another organism eat that excrement, then have yet another animal eat that organism that just ate that excrement, and so on. This cycle will repeat until all that’s left of you are a few million molecules spread out like a constellation of stars across the world’s oceans. And you’ve still got a few thousand years to go before you become ooze.
At some point along the way, one of those tiny bits of you will leave the food cycle and be pulled down to deeper water. During this descent, you’ll be surrounded by phytoplankton that will degrade you into even smaller bits. When these phytoplankton die off after a few days, the last little bit of whatever is left of you—some cluster of molecules—will drift off inside the microscopic skeletons. These will join trillions of other tiny skeletons in a never-ending snowstorm of detritus that floats down to deeper water.
Most of these particles will be recycled by the time they reach ten thousand feet. Only a fraction of 1 percent will make it to the seafloor below twenty thousand feet, a depth so dark and foreboding that scientists have named it the hadal zone, from the Greek word Hades, or hell.
Now comes the hard part. To become ooze, these last tiny bits of you must sit on the bottom of the deep sea, undisturbed, and solidify for hundreds, thousands, even millions of years.
This ooze of microscopic skeletons blankets more than half the ocean floor. Billions of years ago, when the ocean covered the planet, ooze coated what is now land. Look around and you’ll see its remnants everywhere.
The pyramids of Giza were built using limestone, a sedimentary rock made up of ooze. London’s House of Parliament and the Empire State Building are also built from limestone. The concrete sidewalk in front of your house is filled with ooze. You probably brushed your teeth with ooze this morning. (That white stuff in toothpaste is made from calcium carbonate, a chalky compound composed partly of ancient phytoplankton skeletons.) The silicon in computer chips that power the e-readers on which some of you are now reading these words come from the same siliceous microscopic shells that oozed on the seafloor millions of years ago. Our world is built on microscopic bones.
DOUG BARTLETT, A LANKY MAN with round glasses and kind eyes, knows all about ooze, and just now he’s pointing some out to m
e, in a seawater sample that he keeps inside a pressurized stainless-steel tube. Bartlett, a marine microbial genetics researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, has studied ooze for the past twenty-five years, and he’s spent a decade collecting it.
We’re standing in a refrigerated room just down the hall from his office, a storage locker containing dozens of tubes that hold water samples from the world’s deepest oceans. Inside these tubes are phytoplankton and microbes that will one day become ooze. Each tube is kept at the pressure of the depth from which it was taken, in some cases fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. This allows Bartlett and his team to study the microbes in their original form, in their natural environment, and, in some cases, to grow microbe cultures, a substance akin to deep-sea yogurt.
“We’re like astronomers looking up at the heavens at millions of stars,” says Bartlett. “Instead of telescopes, we use microscopes and see billions of microbial life forms.” He tells me that there is more diversity among microbes than any other life form, and that the deep ocean harbors the greatest diversity of microbes of any environment on the planet. By studying these microbes, Bartlett and his team hope to figure out how the Earth might have formed billions of years ago, where life on the planet first began, and, possibly, where all life might be heading one day.
These are hard questions, made harder by the location of the answers: 20,000 to 35,814 feet down. That’s the depth of the hadal zone, the world’s deepest ocean region and where Bartlett gathers his most valuable samples. To get there, Bartlett and his team have built two unmanned robots, called landers, that they send down to the seafloor to suck water into pressurized vaults, gather samples, and, perhaps, capture some never-before-seen animals. Sinking a lander in the deep water is relatively easy. You just drop it, and gravity does the rest. Retrieving it is another story. Unlike ROVs, bathyspheres, and other deep-sea research vessels, landers aren’t tethered to support ships, and they don’t have motors. Instead, they use an almost-quaint system of weights and air packets.