Moby-Duck

by Donovan Hohn

  On the Knorr’s fantail, beside the starboard rail, looming above Bower’s shoulder as she posed for photographs, appeared another, smaller sphere, painted the yellow of a rubber duck. The size of a wrecking ball, made of syntactic foam interlarded with hollow glass orbs, it sat atop a big steel trellis. Across its northern latitudes, in black block letters, the following message ran.

  IF FOUND ADRIFT CONTACT

  MOORING OPERATIONS GROUP

  WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC

  INSTITUTION

  WOODS HOLE, MA 02543

  The photo shoot over, Bower extracted from her black leather pouch a collapsible cane. With an expert flourish of her wrist, like a magic trick, she made the cane spring forth and went tap, tap, tapping up the gangway.

  The week before, I’d driven to Cape Cod in a rented Chevy and checked myself in to the Sands of Time motel. After a fitful night beneath a floral print bedspread in the motel’s basement suite, my mind sluggish with caffeine withdrawal but abrim with boyish curiosity, I’d made my way on foot to what had once been a church of the classic New England sort—white siding, white bell tower adorning a peaked roof. From outside it resembled a Puritan chapel whose cross and steeple had been dismasted by an atheistic wind. The interior of the building conjured forth altogether different associations.

  Up front, where perhaps a preacher in a black cassock had once detailed the dangers awaiting sinners in the hands of an angry god, there now protruded the flukes of a whale. The beast seemed to have been snared in Sheetrock while attempting to escape. From a nearby computer mounted on a pedestal emanated the otherworldly ululations of humpbacks, and in a glass case beneath a window could be seen replicas of the tube worms that thirty years ago scientists on the Knorr had discovered growing along the sea vents of the Galápagos Rift.

  The former church now serves as the gift shop and exhibit center of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, whose initials, WHOI, its employees charmingly pronounce HOO-ee. Woods Hole, I learned during the week I spent there, is a marvelous place, a veritable distillery of marvels. Passing through it on your way to catch the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, you’d never suspect that this sleepy seaside village—also home to the Marine Biological Laboratory, a Coast Guard station, and branch offices of both NOAA and the U.S. Geological Survey—had once been the Houston of deep-sea exploration and the Los Alamos of submarine warfare.

  With remote-controlled vehicles resembling torpedoes, Woods Hole oceanographers have looked for cracks and leaks in the forty-five-mile-long network of aqueducts that deliver drinking water to New York City. Some can read the history of the planet in tubes of sediment, thousands of which are kept, carefully archived, in a climate-controlled warehouse, a sort of library of dirt, whose contents date back decades and may well contain auguries of decades to come. With a mass spectrometer, they can analyze the isotopes in a baleen frond and tell you that the whale to whom it formerly belonged wintered in the tropics and summered in the Arctic. Others are experts on sand, which is more interesting than you’d think.31

  I hadn’t come to Woods Hole seeking wonders, however. I’d come seeking a guide, some wayfinding oceanographer willing to help me follow the trail of the toys into and out of the Arctic’s icy maze. I didn’t find one, but I did find Amy Bower, who was willing—so long as I packed quickly and could afford a last-minute plane ticket home from Greenland—to take me to the Arctic’s brink. There, at 60.6°N, 52.4°W, just south of the Davis Strait, in the northeastern waters of the Labrador Sea, gateway to the Northwest Passage, birthplace of icebergs, we would deploy a “densely instrumented mooring,” a sort of underwater weather vane almost two miles long in waters two miles deep. The purpose of the mooring was to gather intelligence on Irminger Rings, a variety of “mesoscale eddy” spawned by the Irminger Current, a remnant of the Gulf Stream.

  The Labrador Sea, I’d learned by then, is the source of the Labrador Current, which transports cold Arctic water south along the coasts of Newfoundland and Maine. If those beachcombers in Kennebunkport and Curtis Ebbesmeyer were right, if one of the castaway ducks had made it to Gooch’s Beach by the summer of 2003, if the duck I’d spent years chasing was in fact a data point rather than a will-o’-the-wisp, it would have ridden the Labrador Current to get there. For me voyage 192 was a free ride, a voyage of opportunity. When I accepted Bower’s last-minute invitation, I had no particular interest in Irminger Rings and mesoscale eddies. I had no interest in them because I’d never heard of them. In the dank, dim, florally themed basement suite of the Sands of Time motel, I consulted the oceanographic textbooks I’d stuffed into my suitcase. “Mesoscale eddies are the oceanic analogues of weather systems in the atmosphere,” one textbook said. They are also, it said, “an exciting and relatively new discovery.”

  At nine thirty sharp, the provisions all stowed, the equipment all lashed, the stevedores slipped the lines, and with a blast of its horn, the Knorr drifted from the dock. At the starboard rail Bower and I and the four other members of her scientific team waved at the crowd that had come to send us off. In the aimless manner of a councilman on a parade float, I waved at figures I could see but did not know. Bower waved, aimlessly, at figures she knew and loved but could not see.

  A seasoned seafarer, on previous research cruises she’d braved winter storms on the North Atlantic and Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden—pirates, armed with grenade launchers, whom the research vessel’s crew had managed to repel with a high-powered hose. From her colleagues her fearlessness had earned her the nickname “Hurricane Amy.” She’d published dozens of scientific papers in academic journals, papers with abstruse titles like “Structure of the Mediterranean Undercurrent and Mediterranean Water Spreading Around the Southwestern Iberian Peninsula.” She also happened to have, while performing these feats of seamanship and scholarship, gone almost totally blind.

  She first learned she was losing her sight in her early twenties, when, driving to the University of Rhode Island from her mother’s house in Maine, aware that her night vision was poor, she’d turned down the dash lights. With the dash lights off, it was easier to see the road ahead, but with the dash lights off, she couldn’t read the speedometer. Going seventy on a two-lane highway, she’d come up too fast on a truck and skidded into it. She’d escaped the wreck unscathed, but not her next visit to the ophthalmologist. He informed her that she’d developed a blind spot. It was eventually determined that she was suffering from not one but two congenital diseases, macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa.

  The macula, near the center of the retina, “is what you use for fine vision,” Bower told me. When it degenerates, “everything you look at,” everything you try to focus on, “disappears.” Retinitis pigmentosa, meanwhile, attacks your peripheral vision. Bower’s loss of sight resembled the meticulous restoration of a painting, only in reverse—a meticulous defacement. Slowly, little by little, from the center and from the edges, her vision was being rubbed away as if by a rag dipped in turpentine. When she looks at you with what remains of her vision, she doesn’t appear to be looking at you. She appears to be looking at something to one side of you.

  She could sense this morning that the sky was overcast. That over there, to aft, were the gray waters of Vineyard Sound, and over there, to fore, the village of Woods Hole, a blur of Cape Cod clapboard and academic brick. But when she looked straight ahead, at the crowd gathered on the dock, whatever she tried to focus on disappeared. In the crowd were Bower’s husband, David Fisichella, and, in his arms, dressed in pink leggings and a fleece sweatshirt, their adopted Guatemalan daughter, five-year-old, black-haired Sara. It was to Sara that Bower blindly waved. That morning Sara had been “acting out” in protest of her mother’s desertion, or so Bower believed. “She wanted to wear a bunny costume to bed last night, and when she woke up one of the socks was missing, and she had a total meltdown,” Bower said.

  Sending forth from its stack a yellowy stocking of diesel fumes, the Knorr circled about and steamed
north, past the wooded coast of Martha’s Vineyard. From the Knorr’s mast an American flag snapped in the headwind. Atop the bridge the white bar of the LORAN lazily spun. At the starboard rail, Bower reported the day’s forecast: “Four- to five-foot waves out of the northeast. Sounds good to me.”

  Meanwhile, 828 miles above the lowering clouds, hurtling through space at 17.4 times the speed of sound, a NASA satellite named Jason-1 was beaming microwaves silently and invisibly down, and eight hundred miles north of Woods Hole a mesoscale eddy was invisibly gathering in the depths of the Labrador Sea.

  “Mesoscale eddies are like watery storms, kind of like tornadoes, only much slower,” Bower tells me that first morning in the Knorr’s main lab, as we’re steaming past Nantucket, making twelve knots. The main lab is a long room lit by portholes and fluorescent lights and furnished with galvanized metal workbenches surfaced in plywood and bolted to the floor. We’re seated at one of these workbenches, in front of our computers, beneath a pair of portholes through which can be seen—though not by Bower—the leaping shapes of the waves. As the ship rolls to port, the portholes seem to fill, just a little, with water. As it rolls to starboard, they seem to drain. Plugged into power strips bracketed to the ceiling, the cords of our computers sway, and from belowdecks come the rumble and throb of the Knorr’s four engines.

  Not only are mesoscale eddies like watery storms, Bower explains; from the viewpoint of a physicist, they are watery storms—not storms of wind and waves, rain and lightning, all the usual atmospheric jazz, but storms of spinning water. To a physicist, water and air are both turbulent fluids. “Mesoscale” means that, relative to other climatological phenomena, these eddies we’re hunting are pretty big—dozens of miles wide—but relative to others, not that big, not megascale big, not thousands of miles wide; not as big as the great oceanic gyres Curtis Ebbesmeyer had taught me about.

  At the other extreme from the megascale gyres are “microscale eddies,” eddies the size of dance floors or dimes, and if you would like to see one, drag your hand through a bathtub and watch. There they go, swirling away, as ephemeral as they are small. Throw a rubber duck in and you can watch it swirl away too. If you were a god dragging your divine hand through the ocean basins, that’s what mesoscale eddies would be like. Underwater storms are slower than atmospheric ones. The watery winds of an Irminger Ring attain a “swirl speed,” Bower said, of around one mile per hour—the speed, in other words, not of a hurricane or a gale but of a breeze.

  Their slowness belies their strength. In their watery coils they can transport up to 1.95 trillion cubic meters of water, along with flora and fauna and flotsam, seaweed and krill, driftwood and rubber ducks. They can also, if warmer than the water through which they swirl, as Irminger Rings are, transport heat, how much no one precisely knows. A few years ago, a Seaglider—a kind of motorized remote-controlled underwater drone—strayed into a gathering Irminger Ring while exploring the Irminger Current, which winds westward around Greenland’s continental shelf. Caught in an underwater storm, it took the motorized glider fourteen days to break free and resume its preprogrammed route.

  Underwater storms are also smaller than atmospheric ones—Irminger Rings measure, on average, thirty miles across. They’re also denser, of course, which explains their sluggishness, and their sluggishness in turn explains this: much as mammals with slow metabolisms tend to have long life spans, so the longevity of underwater storms tends to exceed that of their atmospheric counterparts. Hurricanes decay and vanish just days after meteorologists name them. A mesoscale eddy of water by contrast can last—or “live,” as Bower likes to say—for many months.

  Perhaps the most meaningful difference between atmospheric storms and underwater ones from a terrestrial point of view is this: you can’t see mesoscale eddies, or feel them. You could be sailing on calm seas, at Beaufort force o (“sea like a mirror”), and the underwater storm of the century could be swirling slowly beneath you. Nobody gives them names, or watches them on the Weather Channel. Nevertheless they are as much a cause and effect of the climate as rogue waves and hurricanes. What made the “relatively new discovery” of mesoscale eddies so exciting? Until recently, no one, not sailors or scientists, knew that the world below the waves was such a stormy place.

  By sunset we are somewhere east of Boston, no land in sight. The skies have begun to clear. A crescent moon rises to starboard. Through a porthole in the main lab I watch the black shape of a cargo ship—a post-Panamax container ship, by the look of it—cross the sunset in silhouette. After a dinner of buttery fish and rice in the mess, the Knorr’s off-duty oilers and deckhands gather in a lounge to watch a movie about an assassination plot. Long after the portholes have all gone black, through the lounge’s closed door, the muffled sound of gunfire can be heard. On the bridge one officer and one able-bodied seaman stand watch in darkness, their faces, lit by screens, like those of sleepy revenants. In the main lab, Bower stays up late working at her computer, which blows documents up to a scale she can decipher. Special software speed-reads text aloud in a robotic voice as nonsensical to my ears as the chattering of a telegraph. Taking a break from her work, she clicks through the library of music she’s brought along. “I always loved this song,” she announces, and a moment later, somewhere out on the Gulf of Maine, inside the Knorr’s main lab, UB40’s “Red Red Wine” begins to play.

  In my windowless cabin belowdecks, I stay up late reading about the history of oceanography. When I turn out my bunkside light, the darkness is absolute, as black a darkness as I’ve experienced, and I wonder if this is what it’s like to be totally blind. I have been, since the age of four or five, acutely myopic. I spent my childhood wearing—and losing, and replacing, and lashing to my head with unflattering elastic accoutrements—spectacles with Coke-bottle lenses and breakproof plastic frames made, unconvincingly, to resemble tortoiseshell. From such eyewear I was liberated, as a teenager, by the contact lens, to the inventors of which I will remain eternally grateful, whatever my misgivings about disposable plastics. Without glasses or contact lenses I too would be prohibited from driving. Without glasses or contacts, I should probably be prohibited from walking. I tried it once on the sidewalks of New York, circumambulating by night while visually impaired. Traffic lights turned into colorful chandeliers, pedestrians into shadows that caught me by surprise. To read a book without contact lenses or glasses, I have to bury my face between the pages so that I appear to be snorting meanings through my nostrils.

  Aboard the Knorr, in the darkness of my submarine cabin, I lie awake awhile, eyes open, contacts out, glasses off, wondering what Beth and Bruno are doing, listening to the pulsing RPMs of the engines below and to the amniotic hiss and whoosh of the waves above. Then I close my eyes and fall asleep thinking how strange it is that I am below the surface of the high Atlantic. Inches from my pillow, for all I know, fish swim.

  THE MYSTERY OF OCEAN CURRENTS

  In 323 B.C., the last year of his life, charged with philosophical heresies by the pagan inquisitors of Athens, Aristotle—generally regarded by scientific historians as the forefather of oceanography—fled to his family’s country house in Chalcis on the Greek island of Euboea. Chalcis happens to be one of the best spots in the Mediterranean to observe the tides, a phenomenon of which the Greeks of Aristotle’s time were largely unaware, for good reason. Tides in the shallow, enclosed waters of the Mediterranean are weak, so weak that on some shores near Athens, the difference between flood and ebb measures less than a centimeter. If you were an ancient Athenian, you too would be unaware of the tides. Unless, that is, you’d visited a place like Chalcis.

  There the Euripus Strait, separating the island of Euboea from the Greek mainland, narrows into a channel only 130 feet wide. There even the weak tides of the Mediterranean make the funneled water diurnally rush, frothing and churning, first in one direction, then the other. This twice-daily riot was something undreamt of in Aristotle’s philosophy. In fact, Aristotle believed that since water
seeks its level and in the ocean finds it, below its windy surface the ocean must be still, as if an ocean basin were a kind of giant cistern. A few months after retiring to Chalcis, the forefather of oceanography died. The cause of death?

  According to a legend that persisted into the seventeenth century: drowning. Suicidal drowning. Suicidal drowning brought on by despair. Despair brought on by confusion. Confusion induced by the sea. Confronted with the tumultuous, inexplicable waters of the Euripus Strait, Aristotle supposedly hurled himself into them. “The great Master of Philosophy drowned himself,” the seventeenth-century British scientist Richard Bolland wrote, “because he could not apprehend the Cause of Tydes.” So begins the history of physical oceanography. Except that it’s mostly fictional. Aristotle did indeed flee to Chalcis, but the actual cause of his death was an undiagnosed gastrointestinal ailment, brought on, probably, by a funky oyster. In Aristotle’s suicidal confusion, it seems, Bolland and his seventeenth-century oceanographic colleagues saw their own.

  Just twelve years after Bolland repeated the apocryphal story of Aristotle’s suicide, Isaac Newton finally determined the lunar and solar “Cause of Tydes.” The currents, however, would prove to be an even more maddeningly intractable riddle. “The secrets of the currents in the seas,” Melville observes in Moby-Dick, which unlike most novels includes citations to actual scientific papers, “have never yet been divulged, even to the most erudite research.” By the time Melville died, in 1891, most of the major surface currents had been charted, or at least sketched, but they had yet to be explained. “We are now becoming acquainted with only the roughest features of the oceanic circulations,” the oceanographer Harald Sverdrup observed in a 1929 article called “The Mystery of Ocean Currents.” Three years later the British mathematician Horace Lamb famously remarked, “I am an old man now, and when I die and go to Heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics, and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. And about the former I am really rather optimistic.”