by James Nestor
“Isn’t the deep ocean supposed to be like a desert?” one pilot said into a hydrophone connected to the support vessel above.
“Yes,” a crew member replied.
“Well,” said the pilot, “there’s all these animals down here.”
In front of Alvin were shrimplike creatures, albino crabs, mussels, lobsters, fish, anemones, and clams. Foot-long candy-cane-striped worms, an unknown species, swayed in the currents like wheat in a field. Corliss called the place the Garden of Eden.
Back onshore, scientists listened to the reports with extreme skepticism. And who could blame them?
Until 1977, it was thought that all life required sunlight. Trees and plants need the sun’s energy to convert carbon dioxide and water into fuel. Animals eat trees and plants. Even organisms that live deep underground or thousands of feet under the water and never see sunlight rely on the nutrients created by solar energy above. But not these animals. Corliss and his crew had stumbled upon not only a new species, but an entirely new biological system fueled by chemicals. Scientists called it chemosynthetic life.
The Garden of Eden would be recognized as one of the most significant scientific discoveries in human history.
THE REVELATIONS ABOUT CHEMOSYNTHETIC LIFE led to another mind-boggling discovery. It turned out that hydrothermal vents were only temporary homes. Vents die off and new vents suddenly erupt. Chemosynthetic life forms need chemicals and hot water to survive. While some animals, like shrimp, could alternate between photosynthetic and chemosynthetic environments, other hydrothermal animals, like mussels, could not. (Mussels hardly move, and they certainly couldn’t travel a few hundred or a few thousand miles to the next deep-water trench to find another vent. They’d die en route.)
And yet, somehow, these mussels, crabs, tube worms, and other hydrothermal life forms kept showing up at each newly discovered vent community. Researchers estimate that hundreds of hydrothermal vents exist along the seafloor of the world’s oceans, and most of them have never been seen. But even with the limited amount of exploration that has occurred to date, scientists have discovered six hundred new species of chemosynthetic life.
It isn’t just the hadal zones that harbor their own unique animals and organisms; the vents do as well. The sea appears to be home to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small, secluded biospheres containing new life.
The researchers found that the more inhospitable the environment, the more life seemed to flourish. The areas around vents, for instance, hosted up to a hundred thousand times more life than surrounding waters that weren’t heated by vents. It was discovered much later that the deep pelagic realm, those waters from about 13,000 to 35,000 feet, housed the largest animal communities, the greatest number of individuals, and the broadest animal biodiversity of not only the ocean but any place on Earth.
Where did all this come from?
Nobody knows for sure, but there’s increasing evidence suggesting it came from inside the vents. Life on Earth may have started not on the sunlit surface but down in the boiling toxic water of the world’s deep oceans.
THE DAY BEFORE I’M TO rendezvous with the Nautilus at the Mona Rift, disaster strikes. Again. The second charter boat cancels. The captain says there’s a problem with the boat’s motor. Or the GPS is broken. Or something. His English is no better than my Spanish, and the cell phone reception is scratchy; I can’t really make out what he’s saying other than that the trip is off. Without a boat, I have no choice but to report on Bartlett’s lander deployment and retrieval from land—specifically, from a stuffy hotel room in San Juan, where I’ll be watching the live feed from the NautilusLive.org website on my laptop. Nothing about this excites me. But it doesn’t surprise me either.
This is why I came to Puerto Rico with a plan B.
When I started this project more than a year ago, my goal was to participate in as much deep-sea research as I could. I was writing about the human connection to the ocean, after all; to not see and feel that connection myself seemed dishonest and wrong. This wasn’t possible with research at all the depths. For instance, I couldn’t exactly see or feel the deep water at ten thousand feet, but I could at least see those mysterious animals that dwelled down there when they came to the more accessible waters of the surface. And I did see them, and I was lucky enough to dive with them and feel them see me with their bone-rattling echolocation.
The hadal zone was an exception. No hadal animals make it to the surface; many don’t even make it up to ten thousand feet. Two submarines—Alvin and James Cameron’s DeepSea Challenger—were capable of making it below twenty thousand feet, but I had no chance of riding in either.* And yet, I was still determined to personally experience the hadal zone in some way. Staring down at the waters of the Puerto Rico Trench—which at its deepest went to nearly 28,700 feet—would be equivalent to standing at the foot of Mount Everest (itself 29,000 feet high). I wanted to feel the presence of such deep waters and see what they looked like. I also had to make a special delivery.
Weeks before coming to San Juan, I called around and found a captain of a large fishing boat who could make the shorter, twenty-mile round trip out to the edge of the trench. His name was Captain Jose, he was eighty-one, and he had spent most of his life at sea. Captain Jose called my plan “unique.” He agreed to take me out in exchange for my helping him get started writing his memoir. I’d also need to pay for gas, tip two deck hands, and let him fish for dorado along the way.
Ours was a nonbinding contract: If Captain Jose got a better offer to fish with someone else, he’d take it. If my charter to the Mona Rift actually came through, I’d do that. But neither happened.
When I got word that the Mona Rift expedition was officially a no-go, I immediately called Captain Jose. He told me to meet him and his crew at six thirty the next morning beneath the Sizzler restaurant at the San Juan Bay marina. And he told me to bring some Dramamine.
IN THE 1980S, WHEN GÜNTER Wächtershäuser first put forth the idea in academic journals that life had originated in the deep ocean, nobody paid attention. After all, Wächtershäuser wasn’t an academic, he wasn’t a professional scientist. He was a lawyer practicing international patent law in Munich, Germany. And there was no getting around the fact that his argument sounded nuts. Wächtershäuser thought that all life on Earth started from a chemical reaction between two minerals, iron and sulfur. This reaction touched off a metabolic process that created a single molecule. Once that process was under way, it fueled the creation of more complex molecular compounds, which would evolve into life forms, and, eventually, us.
According to Wächtershäuser, you, me, the birds and the bees, the bushes and the trees—we all came from rocks. And these rocks came from the black and boiling water of hydrothermal vents. Wächtershäuser called it the iron-sulfur world theory.
To understand just how controversial Wächtershäuser’s theory is, keep in mind the generally accepted view of the origin of life at the time. In the 1980s, most scientists subscribed to some form of the soup theory. This theory—explained here in the most basic terms—argued that around four billion years ago, chemicals in the primordial sea, the “soup,” with input from energy sources like lightning, reacted to form the first organic compounds. These compounds eventually formed more complicated structures, which eventually grew into early kinds of life.
Wächtershäuser, who received a doctorate in organic chemistry, believed in the soup theory in his academic career. Then he got fed up with academia and pursued chemistry as a hobby while practicing law. During that time, he took the soup theory apart and discovered numerous holes.
For instance, the soup theory posited that chemicals mixed freely in the water and air to make more complex molecules. The problem was, as Wächtershäuser thought, chemicals don’t stay together for long in a free-floating, three-dimensional environment: On the surface of rocks, however, chemicals were stable and could combine and grow into more complex forms.
In most soup-theory models (an
d there are many), cell membranes are believed to be the first element of life. But if that was the case, how did food get through the cell membrane and into the cell? Without fuel, the cell had no way of staying alive. Strike two against the soup.
None of these issues affected iron sulfide. In the hot, pressurized waters of hydrothermal vents, chemicals could combine and recombine on the two-dimensional surfaces of these minerals relatively quickly and easily.
Wächtershäuser argued his case in obscurity for years. In 1997, he and a researcher at the Munich Technical University decided to test the hypothesis by combining the gases found in deep-sea vents with iron and nickel sulfides. The result surprised everyone. From this simple mixture, an active form of acetic acid, an organic compound made of two bound carbon atoms, was produced. This form of acetic acid can react with other chemicals, meaning that the reaction may have been the first step in the origin of life. The results of this experiment were published in the April 1997 issue of Science.
In April 2000, researchers at the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Geophysical Laboratory took the iron-sulfur theory one step further. They not only combined the hydrothermal gases and iron minerals that Wächtershäuser used in 1997 but put everything in a steel pressure chamber that mimicked the pressures of water in the deep ocean.
“We came across an unanticipated result,” George Cody, the lead researcher on the study, told the New York Times. The pressurized mixture produced pyruvate, a molecule made up of three linked carbon atoms. Pyruvate is a key component of living cells and a building block for multiple organic compounds.
Wächtershäuser claimed victory, writing that the experiments “greatly strengthen the hope that it may one day be possible to understand and reconstruct the beginnings of life on earth.”
Years later, further tests of the iron-sulfur theory produced more startling revelations. In an article published in the January 2003 issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, researchers Michael Russell and William Martin argued that certain structures of hydrothermal vents made perfect incubators for organic molecules. Russell demonstrated his point as early as 1997 by dissolving hydrothermal gases in the lab and then adding an iron-rich solution to the mix. Within a minute, an inch-high honeycomb of compartments emerged. Even more amazing is that the membranes of the newly formed rocks separated two solutions with different ion concentrations, creating a voltage across the membrane of about six hundred millivolts. This voltage, which lasted for several hours, was about the same as the voltage across cell membranes and could be enough to support the formation of compounds.
“It’s a little bit of rock that reminds us where we came from,” said Russell.
If it is true, the iron-sulfur world theory suggests that life not only could have started in hydrothermal vents but that it had to have started there. No other environment had the pressure and chemical components needed to produce organic compounds that led to early life. The process in the vents was so reliable and consistent that life most likely emerged from hundreds or thousands of vents at around the same time—trillions of different cells replicating in the boiling water of the Earth’s core across the seafloor.
A people born from the entirety of the world’s oceans.
“HELLO, SAN FRANCISCO!”
It’s Saturday at 6:30 a.m. and I’m standing on the dock of the Puerto Rico Bay marina beside Captain Jose’s fishing boat, a twenty-seven-foot Sea-Pro. Captain Jose is beside me, vigorously shaking my hand and welcoming me, for the third time in ten minutes, to Puerto Rico. He is short and muscular and wearing a tan baseball cap with an oversize bill, gray shorts, and black shoes with white tennis socks. When he’s not talking to me, or at me, he’s whistling and yelling at the deck hands, two young locals.
“You got to be hard on these guys, you know,” Captain Jose says. “I need to teach them right!” I throw my dive equipment into the back of the boat and hop in. Captain Jose follows, stands behind the steering wheel, starts the motors, turns the boat around, and we head north toward the open water.
The thunderstorms that pummeled San Juan last night have passed, leaving a clear and windless sky and a gray, glassy ocean—perfect conditions. Captain Jose predicts we’ll be out to the edge of the Puerto Rico Trench in about three or four hours. “I know these seas better than anyone,” he says. “Captain Jose knows just where to go!”
Three hours later, he is still talking and yelling. Behind us, the buildings and mountains around San Juan have shrunk to a pencil-thin blur on the horizon; in front, there is nothing but open, endless ocean. He estimates that we’re more than twenty miles out to sea. We’ve finally passed over the cliff into the Puerto Rico Trench.
“San Francisco,” he says. “You ready to do your thing?”
Captain Jose cuts the motor, grabs a sandwich, and sits on the gunwale with the deck hands. They watch as I pull a mask, weight belt, fins, and a ziplock bag containing a fist-size white plastic container of Daggett & Ramsdell knee and elbow skin-lightening cream, extra-strength formula. Inside this container is a memento I’ll be dropping down to the hadal zone.
I’ve never used elbow whitener and didn’t even know such a thing existed until I started building the deep-sea container two days ago. I’d spent hours scouring hardware stores looking for something suitably small and airtight. No luck. Then I went to a drugstore and checked the cosmetics aisle. It turns out that the round 1.5-ounce jar that holds elbow whitener is ideal for the outside of a double-hulled vessel capable of surviving the crushing pressures of deep-ocean waters. And the tiny glass container that holds Maybelline Color Tattoo eye shadow is an excellent pressure chamber.
I bought both products, emptied their contents, placed my memento inside the eye-shadow container, dropped this into the larger elbow-whitener jar, filled both with silicone oil, and sealed them shut. A perfect fit. Even the smallest air bubble could implode this vessel on its downward journey; the silicone oil removed any air and also protected the whole apparatus from the crushing pressure of 28,700 feet, should it drift down that deep. Any liquid works; I used silicone oil because it wouldn’t harm the delicate electronics I’ve placed inside.
Now, on deck, I take the makeshift vessel, stuff it inside my wetsuit vest, throw my legs over the side of the boat, and jump off. The ocean water is a shimmering bright blue that rivals the color of the noontime sky overhead. The visibility is two hundred feet, maybe farther—the best I’ve ever seen.
The extra five pounds of weight on my belt helps carry me deeper, faster, with little effort. Within about ten seconds I’m soaring on the other side of gravity, falling effortlessly past the doorway to the deep.
I reach my right hand in front of me and push back at the water with a waving motion to slow my body from falling. Everything stops; there is no sound, no movement, nothing to feel. The breath in my lungs has vanished, and I’m hovering motionless, upside down, craning my neck into the nothingness below. With my left hand, I reach into my wetsuit vest and take out the container. I reach out above my head so that my fist is facing the seafloor, then loosen my grip until the vessel falls away.
It spins in slow motion, drifting off inch by inch, foot by foot, until there’s nothing left but a speck of white against a blue and empty space. But now, unlike a year and a half ago, I know there is nothing empty about this space that surrounds me.
THERE ARE MORE LIVING THINGS here and more different kinds of life in the ocean than anywhere else in the known universe. And as I hover, like a satellite miles high in the sky, above the deep ocean floor, it strikes me, and not for the first time, that the farther we descend into the lightless depths of the sea, the closer we get to understanding our origins—our amphibious reflexes, our forgotten senses, where we came from.
Inside the white plastic container I just dropped is a digital draft copy of the book you’ve just read. These words you’re reading are on their way into the Atlantic Ocean’s deepest waters, sinking thousands of feet, perhaps miles away
from the sunlit surface. But they’re not lost to a distant, alien world. The sea is where all life began billions of years ago, and where all living things will eventually return.
Hours later, as Captain Jose pulls back into the harbor, I imagine the container touching down, silently, on the seafloor of sunless valleys and hills, where it will stay for the next few thousand years, getting softly dusted by the never-ending snowstorm of microscopic skeletons that will one day cover some future Earth.
As quickly as it began, the journey has ended. We’ve finally made it home.
Ascents
−28,700
Doug Bartlett’s lander never made it down to the hadal zone. Or, rather, it never made it back. “It was a disaster,” he wrote in an e-mail the day I got back from Puerto Rico. “It’s just as well that you weren’t there—all you would have been able to record was a very, very disheartened marine technician.”
Either the glass-buoyancy spheres had imploded and dragged the lander back down to the seafloor or the radio beacon had broken off, or a strong current had pulled the lander to some faraway ocean. Perhaps all of those things. Bartlett said he didn’t know what happened and would probably never know. Meanwhile, the hadal zone claimed another victim, this one with a price tag of tens of thousands of dollars.