The advent of the almanac provided fishermen with a secret weapon, because the currents, and consequently all life in the ocean, is affected to a significant degree by the phases of the moon. When the moon and the seas grow, there is more water, more currents in the fjord. And that impacts the patterns in which the fish move. For example, many fishermen knew they had to be at specific places when the moon was full in order to catch herring. If they arrived a few hours late, the herring would be gone until the next full moon.
In the old days, before fishermen had tools like GPS, sonar, echo sounders, cell phones, and reliable weather forecasts, the most skilled captains and fishermen were as respected as prominent scientists are today—at least in their local environs.
Unfortunately, the vocabulary, which was previously so rich in describing the nuances of nature, has severely diminished over the past decades. As the words disappear, so does the knowledge of complex ecological connections. Our view of the various landscapes is reduced, we attach less meaning to them, and they become less valuable to us. And that also makes them easier to destroy, in our pursuit of short-term gains.
—
Before long, Hugo and I will have to pull up the line and head for Skrova. But neither of us wants to discuss it. We’re enjoying the silence. Our thoughts have slipped their moorings and are drifting with the current. The stars up there, the sea down here. The stars rippling, the sea gleaming and glinting.
From outer space the Gulf Stream looks like the Milky Way. From earth the Milky Way looks like the Gulf Stream. Both contain spiraling maelstroms of movement. In science fiction stories, spaceships don’t look like planes; they look like boats. And they’re constantly running into nebulae, ion storms, hurricanes, or icebergs. The captain stands on the bridge and looks across the deck, his face furrowed with concern. Will they make it? If the spaceship is too severely damaged, the crew will have to launch the rescue capsules, just like seamen leaving their mother ship for their lifeboats. Even the monsters in outer space often resemble creatures that are found in the sea.
Today, scientists are busy planning new types of space probes. The problem with the old ones is that they run out of power. The new ones will have tall masts with big sun sails; they will most closely resemble the old schooners or full riggers on their way through space.
—
I have a flat stone in my pocket. I stand up to skip it across the water. In Norwegian, it’s called a flounder stone. As kids, we used to compete to see whose stone would skip the most times. If the stone is too light or flat, it spins in the air and then sinks straight to the bottom. If it’s too heavy or round, it won’t skip properly. I suppose your throwing technique is also a factor. I toss my stone, and it skips five times. Pretty lousy. A flounder stone probably works best on a calm body of freshwater, where you can get it to skip twenty times or more.
The rings in the water, one after another, are absorbed by the eye, which is also circular and bathed in a thin layer of salt water. Our eyes are advanced optical instruments, but the “technology” they comprise was developed over millions of years, by species that used their eyes to see underwater. Human beings can see only a very limited spectrum of light. We’re not able to see many types of light waves or rays, such as gamma rays, X-rays, and ultraviolet rays. If we could, the world would look very different to us. We see with the eyes we have, and they’ve served us well. With the naked eye we can make out tiny plankton at close range, but we can also see stars that are thousands of light-years away, which may have burned out thousands of years ago. Lots of people have multicolored irises. If you look closely, the iris resembles a nebula. Sometimes they are composed of many colors like a galaxy, or an ocean current seen from space, scaled down and miniaturized. There is also an infinite depth to them, which can be magnified and in turn magnified again, just as the increasingly more advanced telescopes have made it possible for us to see farther into outer space.
The Greeks believed that the earth was encircled by the world-stream, called Oceanus, which was also the source of all freshwater. The god Oceanus, depicted with the head of an ox and a fish tail, ruled the movement of the heavenly bodies, which rose and fell on the horizon. And in most of Greece, that meant on the sea. After the battle of the Titans, the losers were thrown into Oceanus, condemned to drift for all eternity.
In early Greek mythology, Oceanus was a god of the heavens. A few hundred years later, after the Greeks discovered new parts of the world while they were exploring the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the North Sea, Oceanus was transformed into a god of the sea. He personified the earth’s oceans and was depicted with horns made of crab claws. He was frequently shown with an oar, a fishing net, and a large serpent.
—
“Water and meditation are wedded for ever,” Herman Melville once wrote. The steady small waves lapping against the RIB’s rubber sides rock us into a floating, almost trancelike state.
Where did all the water actually come from? A lot of it came from the comets that collided with our planet in its infancy in the form of ice from the cold, far reaches of the solar system, before the sun and the other planets were fully formed.
“Dirty snowballs” of rock, dust, and ice still race around in space. They’re the remnants of the matter that built our solar system, back when it was mostly just flying around, colliding, collapsing, melting, and evaporating, in a continuous nuclear Ragnarok that lasted billions of years, until the cosmic subatomic outrage eased up a bit. Gradually the solar system became more or less stable, with planets big and small falling into orbits. A few built an atmosphere from vapor and gases that were expelled from the planet’s interior.
More than four billion years ago, before the oceans were formed and while the earth was covered with seas of flowing magma, the planet was bombarded by objects from outer space. One collision was so violent that big pieces of earth were blasted loose and hurled into space. Some of the pieces began orbiting around the planet. One piece that stayed is what we know as the moon. About five hundred million years ago, the earth spun considerably faster on its axis than it does today, and the moon was closer. A day lasted 21 hours, and there were 417 days in a year. At just about the same time, enough oxygen had been produced on earth to keep a flame burning. Five hundred million years—before Christ, that is.
—
Over billions of years a complex web of life has evolved on earth, though sometimes the actions of humans can seem quite primitive. Hugo and I, for instance, have bought eleven hundred feet of sturdy line and chain and multiple shark hooks, which we bait with a big piece of whale blubber and toss into the sea to catch a big fish for which we have no real use. At the same time, we, as a species, are capable of sending a probe far into outer space.
It took ten years for the space probe Rosetta to make it 350,000,000 miles away from earth. There it encountered the comet 67P, which is shaped like a rubber ducky and races through space at a speed of six thousand miles per hour. Rosetta sent out the small lander module Philae, which attached itself to the comet. The goal was to send analyses of the comet’s water back to earth, since many of the world’s leading natural scientists have been wondering how much of the water on earth actually originates from space. One theory is that not long after the earth was formed, it lost its atmosphere. The gases separating us and space disappeared. But comets filled with water and other particles bombarded the earth and thus created a new atmosphere.4
Unfortunately, Philae landed at an angle so that the solar cells could no longer charge, but some data were sent to earth before the batteries ran out. And many months later, in June 2015, the probe rewoke and briefly sent messages to earth.
—
Hugo is wearing his headset to listen to the radio. As far as I can tell he too is enjoying the situation and is in no hurry to pack up and go back to Skrova. I wave at him, and when he takes off the headset, I ask him if he knows why water exists in the universe. He smiles, shakes his head, and puts the headset back on
. He probably thinks I’m joking.
It’s actually not all that difficult to come up with a concrete answer to the question. The only reason that water exists in the universe is because hydrogen binds with oxygen. Swirling around the nucleus of the oxygen atom is an outer orbit of six negatively charged electrons. But the orbit has room for two more electrons. And there is one perfect partner to provide them: the hydrogen atom. Hydrogen and oxygen form covalent bonds and create H2O. The water molecule.
Hydrogen bonds hold multiple water molecules together in a loose arrangement in which each molecule is constantly joining with the others, in a sort of dance, with the partners changing several billion times a second.
The molecules combine at a dizzying speed in ever-new variations, like letters joining together to form new words, which then become sentences and maybe even whole books. If you think of water molecules as letters, you could say that the sea contains all the books ever written in both known and unknown languages. In the oceans other languages and alphabets also arose, such as RNA and DNA, molecules in which genes connect and disconnect in the waves that wash through the helical structures and determine whether the result will be a flower, fish, starfish, firefly, or human being.
A gentle wind blows in from the rich library of the sea. The light overhead filters through the clouds, and when the rays shoot down into the water, they are conjugated like irregular verbs.
—
There is an enormous amount of water in outer space. But in our own solar system, water—in liquid form—presumably exists only on our planet.5 The earth is the perfect distance from the sun. If we had been farther out in the solar system, all our water would have been in the form of ice or vapor, as in the spermlike tails of comets racing away from the sun.
The earth is big enough for gravity to hold the atmosphere in place, even though that’s not a given. And we’re not close enough to any giant planet with so much gravitational pull that every flow tide would make a wave several hundred feet high wash over the whole planet, like in the movie Interstellar. On Neptune, harsh conditions prevail. Icy winds blowing at more than twelve hundred miles per hour are constantly sweeping across the planet’s polished white surface. The average temperature is about minus 350 degrees Fahrenheit. The distance from our earth to the sun is such that most of our water is liquid. Without these conditions, the water would be ice or gas, if it was present at all. And life as we know it wouldn’t be able to exist.
—
From the boat, we see more and more stars appear on the dark blue horizon above the mountains in the east. Galaxies and planets race frictionless through space, heading farther and farther out, in an explosion that never ends. Their speed never slows. No, they’re actually accelerating, though the astrophysicists don’t know why. The cause lies in what they call “dark energy,” which is merely a code for something they can’t explain, even if most energy in the universe is of the dark kind. For whatever reason, the stars farthest away from us are picking up speed. This means that somewhere, millions of light-years away, a cosmic blind is being pulled down. Everything beyond that point is sunk in the darkness, at the bottom of a sea of stars that will forever remain unknown to everyone here on earth.
—
It’s getting late. The moon is now in full view, and we wouldn’t be able to see the floats if we didn’t know where to look. I can just barely make them out. They’re bobbing in the same place as we drift away, moving at a speed of several knots. Hugo seems deeply immersed in the radio program he’s listening to, or maybe he’s just lost in thought. I’m not about to suggest that we head back.
Moonlight takes more than a second to reach earth. Sunlight takes eight minutes. It occurs to me that astronomers are archaeologists or geologists, searching for fossils of light. Nothing happens in real time; everything we see is from the past. We’re always lagging slightly behind. Even in our interactions, even inside our own heads, we’re a millionth of a second behind.
Our own Milky Way, which is one among billions of galaxies, is a hundred thousand light-years in diameter. The most distant galaxy discovered by the Hubble telescope is a deep red patch with the prosaic name UDFj-39546284. The light from that galaxy has taken many billions of years to reach earth. The whole galaxy may have gone cold and dead billions of years ago.
We can’t really fathom time and distance on such a vast scale. We were made to live on this earth, in relation to such objects as trees, cars, desks, mountains, rocks, boats; in relation to prey, predators, and other people. Things we can see and recognize, whether their surface is smooth, rough, soft, hard—or perhaps most importantly, friendly or aggressive. In general, we were made to interact with things close at hand. Not with the universe, not even with the ocean. We imagine the ocean as practically endless, but it is barely a drop in the universe.
Yet we do think a lot about the ocean. Maybe, like the universe, our consciousness is expanding.
—
If you start thinking about the stars in this way, a certain question will usually come floating past: Is there life somewhere out there?
Since there are billions upon billions of planets, and since the universe may well be endless, shouldn’t there be a high likelihood that we’ll find life? Even if we drop 99.99 percent of the planets because they presumably lack the properties required for sustaining advanced life-forms, there would still be hundreds of billions left.6 Scientists seem to agree on one thing: Life is most likely dependent on water, no matter where it might be. It’s a matter of chemistry. If we assume that the building blocks are the same in the whole universe, then water has to be the essential instigator everywhere, along with carbon. Water doesn’t necessarily contain life, but without water, there can be no life. That’s why the astrophysicists are not initially looking for life when they study Mars and the other planets. They’re looking for water. But mostly they’re finding ice and steam, sometimes in amazing amounts. In 2011, two NASA teams discovered a reservoir of steam surrounding a quasar that is twelve billion light-years away from earth. The mass of water was estimated to be 140 trillion times bigger than all the water present on earth.
Over the past few years, scientists at Penn State University (at the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds) have been searching for advanced life in hundreds of thousands of galaxies. They look for unusual quantities of midfrequency infrared rays, based on the theory that highly evolved cultures must use energy that produces heat. So far they haven’t discovered anything remarkable.
In the summer of 2015, NASA scientists announced that they had identified a planet outside our solar system that was as similar to earth as any they had ever found.7 It might be habitable. But its sun emits more energy than ours, so the planet might be simply a desert of rock with an atmosphere, just like our planet will one day become. Today the earth is blessed not only with an atmosphere and enormous amounts of liquid water, but also with nutrient-rich arable soil, which alone can feed many billions of people and animals.
The bar scene in the movie Star Wars, in which colorful drinkers from various galaxies meet to fraternize or fight, may be very entertaining. But even if there are many billions of galaxies, the human being may be the only creature in the whole universe to hit a bar. Though I like to doubt that.
Along the deep-sea mountain chains that circle the earth there are many volcanic vents, or “chimneys.” In 1977, scientists discovered that they are swarming with life. Gushing out is a sulfurous, boiling fluid, which, because of the pressure, is 750 degrees Fahrenheit. No one thought life could survive under such circumstances. Small creatures do thrive, and some larger species nearby spend their lives in water that is 175 degrees Fahrenheit.
At the greatest depths there is no light, and hence no plants. Energy is created by means of chemical reactions. Toxic substances are broken down by bacteria, to become nutrition for other species. Down there, life is sustained not via photosynthesis but via chemosynthesis. Some scientists suspect that life on earth began aro
und these types of deep-sea vents. Others think life originated way out there in the starry depths.
—
Hugo takes off his headset, looks around, and brings us out of our trance. I’ve brought along a bottle of whisky, for special occasions. There’s no particular cause for celebration at the moment, but that makes it even more special, so I open the bottle. Hugo doesn’t care for hard liquor, but we happen to have our box wine. I take a big swig of whisky. The heat spreads from my stomach like a little Gulf Stream, all the way out to the northernmost and southernmost parts of my body. Our boat isn’t drunk, but it reaches a slightly tipsy state before Hugo takes another look around, this time as if he has suddenly realized how late it is. The sea is wine dark, but the stars are shining as if through a perforated lampshade.
Hugo decides to tell me a story. This one is about the time he and his uncle Arne crossed Vestfjorden in the Helnessund. Arne was known as a man with a powerful voice. He was good at scolding and ranting, and his bellowings always dominated noisy gatherings, such as celebrating Constitution Day on May 17 or at parties for teenagers in the local village hall. Hugo, who was fourteen at the time, went into the small room behind the boat’s wheelhouse where the echo sounder and radio were kept. On the table lay an open notebook along with the sea charts. Uncle Arne had written a poem, and one of the verses has stayed with Hugo ever since: “Beneath the swarm of heavenly stars / I stand here tonight and feel / at my wheel.”
—
Just as the beam of the Skrova lighthouse switches on, Hugo says, “We need to pull up the line and head in. It’s almost pitch-dark.”
Light shoots through the darkness, capturing us in a blitz-like moment. Then it sweeps onward, sending its rays far out to sea.
Of all the meaningless schemes we could have come up with, this feels meaningless in exactly the right way.
16
A fishing float doesn’t get interesting until it moves. And the longer it takes for that to happen, the less compelling it becomes. We go out every day, staying from morning till night. And for every day that passes, the likelihood that something will happen diminishes. Occasionally we pull up the hook to make sure the blubber is still there. No bite marks, only a few little parasitic creatures from the seafloor. Don’t Greenland sharks like farmed salmon? Has some other scavenger, like maybe a lamprey, gotten to the bait first? A lamprey can strip clean a huge halibut in a few hours. If it’s left too long on the line, the fisherman will pull up nothing but its hollowed-out skin. Or could it be that the whale blubber is so odorless and clean that the shark hasn’t noticed it?
Shark Drunk Page 10