by James Nestor
The lander that Bartlett’s engineers are preparing outside his office for an upcoming expedition has a fifty-pound platform of dead weights strapped to the bottom, which will pull it down to the seafloor. When the lander hits the ocean bottom, the engineers will send an acoustic signal from a deck box (basically, a sonar device) that will command it to suck water into a pressurized canister. Bartlett won’t know where the lander hit the seafloor or what it might be sampling until he gets it back aboard his boat. These robots drive blind.
Roughly an hour after sampling, the engineers will signal the lander to release the weight platform, causing it to float back to the surface. A radio transmitter mounted on the side will send out coordinates to a retrieval vessel. They’ll motor over in the general location of the coordinates, keeping a lookout on the water below. Flashing beacons will help them locate the lander if it comes up at night.
That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. Lander research is a relatively new science and only a half a dozen researchers do this kind of work in the hadal zone. Things go wrong all the time. In the decade that Bartlett has been collecting samples, he’s had landers break, malfunction, go missing—sometimes all at once.
Hadal research is made even more difficult by the fact that most of the world’s deepest oceans are located hundreds of miles from land, often off the coast of distant countries. Shipping a container filled with thousands of pounds of this stuff across an ocean to a dingy port in Guam or Mexico (something Bartlett has done numerous times) is a logistical nightmare and very expensive. Then there are the days at sea needed to reach deep water, a journey that can cost thousands of dollars in fuel and boat-rental fees.
Putting all this together, you begin to understand why so few scientists—and absolutely no freelancers—do hadal research. No citizen-scientist has that kind of money. Most universities and research institutions don’t either. Bartlett is one of the most established and respected deep-sea microbiologists in the world; he works at one of the most renowned oceanographic institutions. Still, he and his team manage to get out to research in the “laboratory” about once a year, if they’re lucky.
I GOT A TASTE OF just how difficult it is to conduct hadal research six months ago. During a phone interview, Bartlett mentioned that he was interested in returning to Sirena Deep, a depression going down more than thirty-five thousand feet in the Marianas Trench, the deepest trench in the world. He suggested I come along. Then he suggested that I help organize the trip. We blocked out some dates in the summer and I started calling around.
The advantage of going to Sirena Deep, Bartlett said, is that it’s located only ninety miles south of the North Pacific island of Guam, itself “only” a twenty-five-hour flight from our homes in California. The disadvantage, I soon learned, is that Guam is a U.S. territory, which means all vessels harbored there must abide by U.S. maritime rules and regulations. This makes hiring a research ship nearly impossible. Within a week, I had run up a sizable long-distance phone bill. I talked to every harbormaster and yacht club in Guam looking for a vessel that could legally make the trip.
Most fishing boats large enough to handle the landers and our five-person crew didn’t have the fuel capacity or accommodations; the few that did were forbidden by U.S. law to carry civilians more than twenty miles from the coast. Commercial ships, like tugboats, had the capacity and permission but were outrageously expensive. One captain quoted me a price of $80,000 for a two-day rental—about ten times what Bartlett’s budget allowed.
After months of dead ends, I was finally put in contact with a short-tempered man named Norman. Norman lives on Saipan, an island about a hundred miles north of Guam, where he operates a fifty-foot fishing trawler called the Super Emerald. Norman didn’t have to abide by the same regulations as captains in Guam, or so he said. I needed only to wire him a deposit of a few thousand dollars and he’d take us wherever we wanted.
There was one caveat: The Super Emerald was a wreck—its body was weathered and dented, there was no refrigeration, nowhere to cook, no chairs, and no beds. We’d have to sleep on a bare steel floor, under blankets and towels we packed ourselves. Meals, all cold, would be eaten as we sat cross-legged around a beat-up Igloo cooler across from the toilet. “It’s very basic,” Norman said over a scratchy phone line, but he assured me the Super Emerald could make the trip. At a mere $3,500 a day, it was a relative bargain. I booked it on the spot.
Then, three weeks before we were about to depart, Bartlett’s lead engineer at Scripps suddenly quit. I learned that he’d been on the Super Emerald three years earlier, during an expedition to Sirena Deep. (Rumor was that he swore he’d never set foot on it again.) Without an engineer, we couldn’t deploy the landers; without the landers, there was no point in risking our lives aboard the ship.
Bartlett hired a new engineer, and, for a moment, things looked up. I rebooked the expedition for September. Autumn is typhoon season in the North Pacific and a terrible month to be at sea, but winter is even worse. If we were going to make it to Sirena Deep this year, we’d have to accept the risk. But a few weeks before we were to take off, I got an e-mail from Bartlett explaining that funding at Scripps had dried up. The trip was canceled, he said, this time for good.
And so it was quite a coup when, a month later, the crew of the E/V Nautilus, the most advanced deep-sea research vessel in the world, asked Bartlett and his team to join them on a week-long expedition to the Puerto Rico Trench.
The Puerto Rico Trench is the deepest part of the Atlantic, a five-hundred-mile-long chasm that snakes east to west from Haiti to the Lesser Antilles islands and bottoms out at 28,700 feet. Because it wasn’t possible for private citizens to be onboard the Nautilus for more than twenty-four hours, I wouldn’t be able to join Bartlett for the full ten-day expedition along the trench. Instead, the plan was for me to hire a charter boat, motor out three hours into the open ocean, and rendezvous with Bartlett and the rest of the Nautilus crew forty miles off the northwest coast of Puerto Rico, at a spot in the trench called the Mono Rift. I would watch Bartlett and his team deploy and retrieve the landers, hang out for the day, and then head back to land.
This wasn’t a best-case scenario. But after I’d spent the better part of a year trying, it was as close as I could possibly get to seeing hadal research.
IMAGINE YOU’RE LOOKING AT THE world’s tallest mountains on a three-dimensional topographical map (the ones that let you see and feel changes in elevation). You’ll notice mountain ranges covering all the continents: Everest and K2 in the Himalayan range, Kilimanjaro on the east coast of Africa, Mont Blanc in the French Alps, Mount McKinley in the Alaska Range, and so on. Now imagine flipping that map upside down and looking at each of the tallest mountains from underneath. You’ll see that the world’s highest peaks have suddenly become the world’s deepest trenches. This is what the ocean floor looks like, and those deep trenches dotting the seafloor are what scientists refer to as the hadal zone.
Hadal zone trenches, just like the world’s highest mountains, are scattered across the globe, separated by hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles. In other words, the hadal zone is not a contiguous stretch. What these discrete trenches have in common, and what qualifies them as a single zone, is that they are all located between 20,000 and 35,814 feet down.
The pressure here ranges from 600 to 1,050 times greater than it is on the surface. If you could swim down there—which you couldn’t—it would feel roughly the same as balancing the Eiffel Tower on top of your head. Then there’s the temperature, which hovers just above freezing. There is no light, of course, and even oxygen is in short supply.
Although all the standard building blocks of life—sunshine, oxygen, heat—are missing from these waters, life somehow persists.
In 2011, Bartlett and a team of researchers dropped a lander rigged with lights and video cameras into Sirena Deep to a depth of about 35,000 feet. They hoped to see deep-water shrimp, maybe a few rocks, some ooze. What they discovered instead
was a congregation of giant amoebas the size of a large man’s fists rooting themselves in the seafloor, each covered in a coat of frilly appendages that resembled the ruffles of a 1970s-era tuxedo shirt.
These creatures, called xenophyophores, were more than four inches wide, and yet each was a single cell. Xenophyophores have no brains or nervous systems, but they were able to scoot around, feeding among the deposits of million-year-old detritus, seemingly unaffected by the fifteen thousand pounds of pressure per square inch that weighed on their bodies. To make the scene even more bizarre, halfway through the video, a jellyfish swam lazily by, the deepest ever filmed.
Bartlett had discovered the world’s largest species of single-celled organisms living in the world’s deepest ocean.
A year later, in 2012, a group of hadal researchers from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland sent a metal trap down 22,000 feet into the Kermadec Trench, the world’s second-deepest, which is located off the coast of New Zealand. A few hours later, they pulled up an albino shrimp the size of a housecat.
In 2008, this same group had discovered schools of foot-long fish, called snailfish, at depths below 25,000 feet. The snailfish had fins shaped like bird wings, and instead of eyes, they used vibration sensors on their heads to find their way around.
Until very recently, scientists thought the hadal zone was a desert. The few animals that lived down there were supposed to be viscid, scrawny, small, and inactive, like the ones in shallower waters. But snailfish were fat and happy-looking, swimming briskly along the seafloor, interacting with one another as if they were members of the same family.
Nobody had expected such a profusion of life because nobody had looked; the technologies Bartlett and the team at Aberdeen were using were new, and each of these landers was specially designed for the mission.
At this writing, scientists have discovered at least seven hundred unique animal species in the hadal zone. An estimated 56 percent of these animals are endemic to hadal water, meaning they probably live nowhere else in the ocean. Further, only 3 percent of those endemic hadal animals were found in other hadal zones.
What these discoveries suggest is that each of the hadal zones pocking the ocean floor could have its own distinct life forms. And these life forms could have been on their own evolutionary path for millions of years.
It’s as if there were an archipelago of Galápagos Islands buried beneath five miles of black ocean, removed from the rest of the world and developing new life in wondrous ways. And they’ve been there for millions of years, just waiting for us to shine a light on them.
This multiworld theory can be proved or disproved only through more extensive deep-sea research. Sadly, not many people are looking. Beyond Bartlett’s team and the Aberdeen group, only a handful—Bartlett literally counted them on one hand—of other researchers in the world have the resources, and interest, to explore life below twenty thousand feet.
Today, the hadal zone remains one of the most poorly investigated habitats on the planet.
TWO DAYS BEFORE MY PLANNED charter trip to meet Bartlett, I’m at the Old San Juan Marina in Puerto Rico waiting to board the Nautilus for a press tour before the ship heads out to sea. The deck is buzzing with activity: Tanned guys in blue shirts and matching ball caps hustle about. An engineer in greasy overalls adjusts a piece of large, unrecognizable equipment. A deck hand coils a rope as thick as an anaconda into a perfect circle.
Leading the press tour is Dwight Coleman, a stout oceanologist from the University of Rhode Island and the leader of the Puerto Rico Trench expedition. I’ve been in e-mail contact with Coleman the last few weeks, working out specifics for my meet-up with Nautilus at the Mona Rift, which is seventy land and forty nautical miles from the marina.
So far, the trip seems eerily similar to the Sirena debacle. The captain of the charter boat I booked weeks earlier has just pulled out. He said the sea would be too rough, the trip to the Mona Rift too dangerous, his boat too small. I considered giving up altogether, but last night, I found a different boat with a captain who was willing to make the trip for the inflated price of $1,200.
It’s a lot of money, but I’d already flown ten hours to Puerto Rico and knew it would be my last chance to see hadal research in action. I booked the trip.
Now there’s another problem. I haven’t heard from Bartlett in days, and I haven’t seen him aboard the Nautilus for the twenty minutes I’ve been on deck. I finally ask Coleman where he is.
“Bartlett? I’m sorry, there are a lot of people onboard,” he says. Coleman leans his head back and winces in deep thought. “You said his name was Doug? Doug Bartlett?”
There are eleven maintenance-crew members and thirty-one scientists and research assistants aboard the Nautilus. Bartlett is one of the primary researchers on this expedition. Surely Coleman knows him. But he doesn’t.
It turns out he shouldn’t; Bartlett isn’t on the Nautilus. He never showed up. (I learned later he had teaching commitments he couldn’t get out of.) Instead, he sent two researchers. Coleman assures me that he and his crew are still expecting me at the Mona Rift and will accommodate my schedule as best they can. This is some consolation, but not much. The fact is, the scientist I’ve traveled 3,500 miles to interview and observe is a no-show. And this hadal expedition—like my previous attempts in the past year—already feels doomed.
The press tour begins. Coleman leads me and four local journalists up the gangway and onto Nautilus’s back deck. We stop first beside a tangled mass of steel that’s the approximate size and shape of a car crushed for scrap metal, about five feet by five feet. This is Hercules, one of two ROVs onboard. As the Nautilus makes its way along the Puerto Rico Trench, the engineers will send Hercules to the seafloor. A menacing-looking three-foot mechanical arm protruding from its front will grab at stuff and place it in vessels for later analysis. A half a dozen cameras rigged to the thing will record high-definition video and feed it up thousands of feet of tethered cables into Nautilus’s control room, located on the second floor of the observation deck, our next stop.
“This is where a lot of the action happens,” Coleman says. He ushers us into a dark twelve-by-twelve room crammed wall to wall with equipment. Facing us are eleven oversize computer monitors showing footage of spooky life forms that Hercules has captured with its cameras over the years. Below the monitors are four keyboards, three joysticks, three chairs, an oversize LED clock clicking down seconds, and the two pasty engineers who run the place. To the left of the engineers is another work area, this one with nine monitors, several keyboards, joysticks, chairs, and one more pasty guy. During ROV deployments, the engineers, alternating in four-hour shifts, will stay in this little hole, removed from fresh air and sunlight, on expeditions that last upwards of several weeks. “It’s pretty exhausting,” says one of the engineers. He smiles for a moment, then retreats back into a dark corner.
What makes this control room different from other deep-sea research vessels’, Coleman says, is the onboard satellite system, which allows Nautilus to transmit high-definition audio and video from anywhere in the world. During expeditions, Nautilus streams the feed coming in from the ROVs on the seafloor as well as the conversations between control-room engineers, live and uncensored, twenty-four hours a day, on the NautilusLive.org website.
“Everything that we see and hear in the control room, you can see and hear online,” says Coleman. I imagine that might include complaints about lack of sleep and shouts of “Holy crap, did you see that!”
We continue the tour through Nautilus’s sleeping quarters, laboratories, the weight room (which looks like it’s never been used), and kitchen, and then we’re back outside on deck. The tour is over. Before I leave, I shake Coleman’s hand and tell him I hope to see him in two days.
“Hope so!” he says, then turns and leads us down the gangway to make room for the next tour group.
THE DOUG BARTLETT OF THE 1970s, one of the founders of deep-sea scientific research, was an Oregon Sta
te University marine geologist named Jack Corliss.
In 1977, Corliss chartered a research vessel off the coast of Ecuador and steamed out two hundred miles to the Galápagos Trench. He began trawling the ocean floor looking for hydrothermal vents—underwater geysers that spew lava and superheated, chemical-rich water from the Earth’s molten core. Corliss suspected hydrothermal vents existed, but he had never seen one. Nobody had. Corliss wanted to be the first, and he had a hunch the Galápagos Trench was a good place to start looking.
Hydrothermal vents aren’t exactly easy to find. They’re scattered along deep-sea mountain ranges formed by plate shifts. Together, these ranges extend more than forty-six thousand miles and may house numerous vents, sometimes close to one another, sometimes separated by hundreds of miles.
The morning of the first day above the trench, Corliss’s crew lowered an ROV named Angus into the water and prepared for the first dive. As cables spooled out from the deck and the ROV sank deeper, Corliss stepped to the observation deck. He stared at a monitor as Angus plunged a thousand, two thousand, three thousand feet. At around eight thousand feet, the temperature gauge registered a huge spike—a good sign. Hot water that far down in the ocean meant that a hydrothermal vent might be close.
The engineers controlling Angus triggered the ROV’s onboard camera to snap a series of photographs. They pulled Angus back on deck, removed the film from the underwater camera, and developed it in a makeshift darkroom. The grainy black-and-white photographs revealed not only the presence of active hydrothermal vents but crabs, mussels, and lobsters. There was life down there, tons of it, flourishing around a column of seawater hot enough to melt lead (750 degrees). The water didn’t turn to steam like it would at the surface because of the tremendous pressure at these depths. They’d found a pressure cooker of life. Soon after, Alvin, a deep-diving sub from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, arrived on the scene. Two pilots hopped into the tiny submersible, plunged into the water, and followed Angus’s coordinates to the vents. Right on cue, at eight thousand feet, the temperature gauge rose. They looked out the port windows and motored cautiously toward an outcropping of steaming and smoldering white rocks.