by James Nestor
Acknowledgments
TWO YEARS AGO, I WAS dangling my feet off the prow of a sailboat, manically scribbling in a notebook, attempting to describe the tension, elation, horror, and profundity of competitive freediving. At the end of the first day of competition, all I had were a few names, times, and quotes. Just the facts. Freediving left me utterly speechless, and subsequently noteless.
That night, Alex Heard, my editor at Outside magazine, called to check in. I remember mumbling something to the effect of “freediving is like being in space, but it’s in water; like flying but you’re diving. It’s the most . . . the worst . . . the best . . . the bloodiest.” Alex must have hung up more confused than he was before he called. But over the next several weeks he helped me get the words out. The resulting article, published in the March 2012 Adventure Issue, sparked this book. I’m very grateful for Alex and the crew at Outside for sending me overseas for ten days to cover a sporting event I knew nothing about.
Field research is hard. Field research at sea is harder. Field research miles off the coast of a developing country in a rickety boat with a bunch of do-it-yourself researchers on shoestring budgets using slapped-together equipment to study the ocean’s largest predators often verges on suicidal. That nobody was seriously injured during the writing of this book is a testament to the ace improvisational skills of the crews with whom I was lucky enough to share the past year and a half. Or maybe it was just dumb luck.
Thank you, Fabrice Schnöller, Hanli Prinsloo, and Fred Buyle, for letting me into your watery world. Thank you for saying things like “Dolphins are usually friendly, but sometimes they might try to rape you” and then yelling at me to get in the water . . . with dolphins. Thank you for lying when you said there weren’t any sharks at the beach we had just dived at. Thank you for taking my arm and pulling me down to have my bones rattled by toothed whales. Thank you for not mocking my French more than three times a day. Without your persistent prodding, I doubt I’d ever have gotten wet.
Although I’d lived around the ocean my whole life, I was pretty clueless about what happened below the surface. Dozens of kind, patient, and brilliant marine scientists helped light the way to the darker depths. They responded to my e-mails, called me back, spent hours explaining stuff that took me months to fully understand. And they did it for nothing more than a lame verbal remuneration that usually included phrases like “Seriously helpful”; “Whoa! Excellent”; “This is really great.” I’m talking about Stan Kuczaj at the University of Southern Mississippi, Saul Rosser at Advanced Diving Systems, Alan Jamieson at the University of Aberdeen, Fabienne Delfour at the University of Paris, Robert Vrijenhoek at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Bart Shepherd at the California Academy of Sciences, John Bevan at Submex, and Douglas Bartlett and Paul Ponganis at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. And lest I forget the brainy and badass Kim McCoy at Ocean Sensors, who shared his fat Rolodex and decades of oceanic expertise more than a few dozen times. (Kim is a cheap date: Just buy him an espresso at a café in downtown La Jolla and he’ll tell you anything you want to know, all in double-time.)
It’s a fine line between editing and rewriting. Luckily for me, Danielle Svetcov at Levine Greenberg Literary Agency crossed that line many times when I needed it most. A literary agent who picks up the phone is a gift. One who knows how to edit is a treasure. But what to call one who stays up until three a.m. rereading dozens of pages of draft chapters that are due to an editor the next morning, and does this not once, not twice, but a zillion times? And does this with an unshakably blithe spirit? And then still returns your phone calls the next day? I call this person ridiculous. Thank you, Danielle Svetcov. Now please get some sleep.
If you took all the ink in all the acknowledgments of all the books published in the past two decades that praised the lethal wit, editorial prowess, and philosophical erudition of Eamon Dolan and then spread that ink out on a single piece of paper and laid that piece of paper over land, you’d cover the surface of Guyana. (Look at a map and you’ll discover that Guyana is quite large, some eighty-five thousand square miles.) The rumors are true: Eamon Dolan is the real deal. His persistent and patient support and expert advice was unwavering from the get-go, even through the dark hours of what became an arduous sprint to the finish line. So there it is, more ink. So predictable, I know, but then again, so well deserved. (Thank you, Eamon: I promise never to use the words incredible and tremendous to describe anything ever again.)
Will blood squirt from unprotected human eyes at −5,000 feet? How long does it take for a duck to drown? What happens if you pee in an atmospheric diving suit? This is the kind of unpleasantness that awaited Julie Coombes’s in-box day after day for the better part of a year. Julie assisted in the historical and scientific research of this book and did so with unblinking assiduity (a phrase she would rightfully have edited to really well had she gotten her mitts on this page). She saved me from factual missteps more than too many times. Thank you, Julie Coombes, for your good humor and better hourly rates.
There’re dozens of other people who assisted in less direct ways in the research and writing of Deep. Some of them became minor characters; others provided invaluable information; a few just bought me an occasional beer and listened to me complain about the sucky movie selection on United’s international routes. They are Markus “Dream Killer” Fix, Max Landes, Stig Severinsen at Breatheology, Bertrand Denis, Captain Jose, Steven Keating at MIT Media Lab, David Lang at OpenROV, Marc Deppe at Triton Submarines, Tad Panther, and Adam Fisher. Daniel Crewe at Profile Books (UK) provided unabashed encouragement early on and ace edits at the end. Thank you, Daniel.
I’m also very appreciative of the support and Swiss-neutral professionalism of Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee and the crew at Go Project films. These guys got the short end of the Sri Lankan sperm whale stick, but they never squealed. Add to this list Jean-Marie Ghislain, whose underwater photographs are some of the best I’ve ever seen and whose keen skills in the Belgian art of diplomacy kept our sinking trip afloat.
The stunning and otherworldly photographs that appear in the middle pages of this book come courtesy of Fred Buyle (nektos.net), Jean-Marie Ghislain (ghislainjm.com), Yann Oulia, Olivier Borde (olivierborde.tumblr.com), and Annelie Pompe (anneliepompe.com). Merci les gens merveilleux qui sont français, belge, et ceux qui ne sont pas français!
While you’re looking all that up online, please gambol over to Hanli Prinsloo’s I Am Water (iamwater.co.za) and DareWin (darewin.org). Both of these organizations are using a hands-on, direct-action approach to ocean exploration and conservation, and, so far, it’s working. And they’re doing it on the shortest of shoestring budgets. Contact them to get involved.
Will Cockrell at Men’s Journal somehow convinced his boss to send a writer he’d never worked with to an island neither of us had heard of to cover a project that had a very good chance of failing. That project, SharkFriendly, was the focus of the feature “The Shark Whisperer,” published in the June 2012 issue of Men’s Journal. If it weren’t for Will, I would never have made it to Réunion and never have met Schnöller; the past two years of deep-water delving would very likely never have happened. Thank you, Will and the MJ staff, for rolling the dice. (And to the rest of you: Don’t let the shiny gear and buff bros that sometimes plaster the covers fool you; Men’s Journal is one of the best magazines going.)
If you haven’t figured it out already, freediving can be a dangerous hobby and a lethal sport. Many freedivers delude themselves into thinking otherwise. As a result, many die every year in accidents that are easily preventable. The crackerjack, no-bullshit approach offered by Eric Pinon at Performance Freediving International and Ted Harty at Immersion Freediving has been a lifesaver for me and thousands of other beginning divers. If you want to go deep, start at the top. See these guys. And remember: Know your limits. Never dive alone. Always stay in control.
William Trubridge will certainly not approve of this book, and I certainly do not appr
ove of William Trubridge’s approach to freediving, but I’d still like to thank him for the five hours he spent talking with me in Greece and giving me the inspiration to take the plunge.
That creep you’ve seen splayed out beneath a row of chairs with a T-shirt over his face, sleeping through a seventeen-hour layover in the Dubai airport? I was that guy for a year and a half. Needless to say, I wasn’t home much. Brent Johnson and Maile Sievert watched my dog, Face, during the months away. Amanda at Amanda Bilecki Moler Acupuncture fixed my broken body when I returned. Circle Community Acupuncture kept things running (thank you, Jenn, David, and Melissa). And thank you, Ilana Rainbow Diamond.
My mother warned me seven years ago to never quit my day job. She was wrong about that, but she has been right about so much else. Thanks, Mom. I promise to keep forwarding my Kayak itinerary confirmations for any upcoming trips.
Deep was written between stints at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, various rental cabins in Inverness, California, and the second-floor desk between the stacks of decorative arts books at the Mechanics’ Institute Library in San Francisco.
Ĉi tiu libro estas dediĉita al tiuj,
kiuj klaki la Majstro Switch.
This book is dedicated to those who flip the Master Switch.
Notes
−60
[>] Coral has no eyes, no ears, and no brain: Since corals’ annual mass spawning was first discovered, in 1981, it has stumped scientists. Coral is a primitive animal with no sense of sight or hearing, and yet it manages to communicate with other corals in ways more sophisticated than our own.
In 2007, a group of Australian and Israeli researchers tried to find out how. They discovered that coral had a gene called CRY2 that allowed it to distinguish between subtle changes in light. Many plants and animals, including humans, share the CRY2 gene, which is associated with monitoring levels of light as well as sensing subtle shifts in magnetic fields. In humans, CRY2 proteins help set circadian rhythms of sleep and may also be related to depression and mood disorders. Corals were using the gene as the tiniest and most primitive of eyes.
“This particular gene allows the coral to sense blue light and to actually work out what phase the moon is in,” explained Bill Leggat, a coauthor of the study, in the October 22, 2007, issue of Science. And using these CRY2 genes, Leggat and the scientists believed, corals might be able to sense the passing of seasons and so time their mass spawning to a particular light on a particular day. The corals weren’t telepathic at all; they were just taking cues from the sky and counting the days.
While it came as an epiphany to some, Leggat’s theory pushed against many reports from the field.
For instance, the Leggat report didn’t consider that corals spawned in synchronicity even when there was no light. In other words, a chunk of coral species totally hidden from natural light would still spawn at the same time as other corals a hundred feet deep and hundreds of miles away. Aquarium owners around the world often witness this phenomenon.
Theories aside, in 2007, the mere fact that corals had the CRY2 gene was newsworthy. For Leggat and other scientists, it was an example of how closely humans were tied to the ocean and to even the most primitive animals within it.
“CRY2 were preserved for hundreds of millions of years before being inherited by corals when they developed about 240 million years ago, and are still found today in modern animals and humans,” said Leggat. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of marine science at the University of Queensland, said of the CRY2 discovery, “They are an indicator that corals and humans are in fact distant relatives, sharing a common ancestor way back.”
The human connection to the ocean, it appears, extends even to the crusty clumps of white rock on the seafloor.
−300
[>] the same effect on humans: The first experiments into animals’ amphibious reflexes were conducted twenty years earlier by French physiologist Paul Bert. In the 1870s, Bert started drowning ducks and chickens and timing how long it took each to die. The ducks consistently lasted from seven to sixteen minutes underwater, while the chickens survived for only three and a half. From a scientific standpoint, this made little sense. The animals were biologically very similar—with the same lung volumes, weight, and circulatory systems—and yet the water seemed to extend the life of ducks and drown the chickens more quickly.
Bert continued looking for answers in a series of bizarre experiments he called “death in closed vessels,” a horrible if illuminating exercise. He bled ducks to the point where they had the same blood volume as the chickens and then drowned both to see which would die faster. (The chickens still died two to three times faster than the ducks.) He crammed newborn kittens in bell jars, sealed the jars, then timed how long it took them to die. (They died in about the same amount of time as strangled grown cats.) He drew blood from a dog, killed it, ran an electrical wire through its mouth and out its anus, electrified the corpse, and checked to see if the oxygen levels changed. (They didn’t.) He urinated in various bottles and exposed the bottles to different air pressures for up to several days. The results were, in Bert’s words, “completely turbid, very alkaline, horribly foul.”
Six hundred and fifty experiments later, Bert had killed off dozens of dogs, sparrows, rats, cats, rabbits, kittens, owls, chickens, and ducks and had saved himself a few trips to the latrine, but he was no closer to understanding why ducks were able to survive underwater longer than chickens or other animals. What he did discover, however, was that breathing high concentrations of oxygen could lead to oxygen poisoning (later called the Paul Bert effect). Bert’s 1,050-page book Barometric Pressure: Researches in Experimental Physiology became an instant classic when it was published in 1878 and paved the way for scuba diving and high-altitude flying in the next century. Today, Bert is considered the father of aviation medicine.
[>] He’d seen the same thing happen in deep-diving seals decades earlier: By the late 1960s, research in the physiology of diving animals became increasingly bizarre—and grotesque. None topped those by Robert Elsner, a marine animal physiologist. Elsner’s battery of experiments, published in 1969 by the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, included cutting open the bellies of pregnant sheep to check for maternal and fetal responses to asphyxia. Elsner, along with colleagues D. D. Hammond and H. R. Parker, also traveled to Antarctica and performed similar experiments on Weddell seals. What they found was that sheep and seal fetuses both responded to asphyxia in similar ways: the heart rates dropped and blood was shunted to the vital organs.
[>] nitrogen narcosis: Nitrogen gas can build up in the blood to dangerous levels during very deep freedives assisted by heavy weights or machines or when a diver descends below a hundred feet several times in quick succession over a period of hours. Ancient South Pacific pearl divers who dove forty to sixty dives a day, sometimes to as deep as 140 feet, suffered a severe illness they called taravana, the symptoms of which—dizziness, numbness, visual confusion—closely resembled what later became known as decompression sickness. In the 1970s, Dr. Edward Lanphier showed that decompression sickness could easily be avoided by either diving to shallower depths or spending twice the amount of time at the surface as it took to make the dive—long enough for the body to eliminate the nitrogen bubbles from the blood. (See http://www.skin-diver.com/departments/scubamed/FreedivingCauseDCS.asp.)
−650
[>] most acute sense yet discovered on the planet: So far, electroreception has been measured in sharks only when they are in very close range, about three feet from their targets. Researchers believe that sharks use it to orient their jaws for an accurate final attack. For instance, in the last few feet of an attack, great white sharks have been documented rolling their eyes back into their heads for protection and letting their electroreceptive sense guide them. See http://science.howstuffworks.com/zoology/marine-life/electroreception1.htm.
[>] speaker of Tzeltal: Deutscher, Through the Language Glass.
[>] significantly more accurately tha
n those with magnets: Of the control-group students (the ones without the magnets), 77 percent pointed toward the home direction with 75 percent accuracy, but only 50 percent of the magnet-wearing students pointed accurately. Additional tests yielded similar results. See Baker, Human Navigation, 52.
[>] about one in two hundred: About ten years ago, researchers at the University of Western Ontario began a battery of tests on the effects of very low magnetic fields in the brain. The data from the majority of these tests showed that very low magnetic fields had a consistent and sometimes profound effect on the areas of the brain that processed unconscious thoughts and senses. In one test, conducted in 2009, researchers looked at the effects of very low magnetic fields on thirty-one volunteers. This experiment was designed to find the exact areas and mechanisms in the brain that were affected by the low magnetic fields. To do that, researchers put each volunteer in an fMRI scanner and prodded him or her with a heated stick. Next, the researchers broke the volunteers into two groups. In the control group, they repeated the exact same experiment with no changes; in the other group, they exposed each volunteer to a magnetic field of no more than two hundred microteslas (a measurement of magnetic flux).
Neither the control group nor the exposed group reported feeling a difference between the two tests in the level of pain inflicted by the heated rod. However, the scans of the exposed group showed significant changes in the areas of the brain associated with processing pain (anterior cingulate, insula, hippocampus). The brains of the group exposed to the low magnetic field processed fewer pain signals, although the members of this group hadn’t consciously known it.
The results of the study suggest that the effects of low magnetic fields aren’t patent—that is, consciously sensed—but latent. In other words, they could affect and influence brain function without us realizing it.