Moby-Duck

by Donovan Hohn

  By the 1950s, oceanographers, many of them at Woods Hole, seemed finally on the verge of solving the mystery of ocean currents and had even begun to illuminate what the “scientifics” of the Challenger expedition had called “the dismal abyss.” What the space race would later do for astronomy, the submarine warfare of World War II did for ocean science. Deep-sea explorers were the astronauts of the postwar years, the abyss the final frontier. No longer a howling waste, or a great blankness, the ocean had become the latest locus of an old, elusive dream: the dream of a new world. “In this Kingdom most of the plants are animals, the fish are friends, colors are unearthly in their shift and delicacy,” the deep-sea explorer William Beebe had written in the 1930s. “Here miracles become marvels, and marvels recurring wonders.” Now, in the 1950s, with the advent of underwater cinematography, we could all be armchair deep-sea explorers of this magical kingdom. Jacques Cousteau was a celebrity and Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us a bestseller. A former director of WHOI appeared on the cover of Time. In his first State of the Union address, Kennedy declared, in a passage that would now seem anachronistic, “We have neglected oceanography, saline water conversion, and the basic research that lies at the root of progress.” With instruments developed for the U.S. Navy, aboard research vessels the Pentagon had subsidized, marine geographers mapped the seafloor in exquisite detail, supporting the then controversial theory of plate tectonics. Currents flowed through the earth’s mantle, their soundings revealed, as well as through water and air. Everything was adrift, even continents. The only difference was the rate of flow.

  In the last chapter of The Sea Around Us, published in 1950, Rachel Carson informed her readers that the benighted cartographers of the Middle Ages had thought of the ocean as the “dread Sea of Darkness.” Over the centuries, little by little, explorers and then scientists had pulled the veil of darkness back. “Here and there, in a few out-of-the-way places, the darkness of antiquity still lingers over the surface of the waters,” Carson wrote. “But it is rapidly being dispelled, and most of the length and breadth of the ocean is known; it is only in thinking of its third dimension that we can still apply the concept of the Sea of Darkness. It took centuries to chart the surface of the sea; our progress in delineating the unseen world beneath it seems by comparison phenomenally rapid.”

  If Carson had stopped there, if she’d made of oceanography yet another chapter in the triumphant march of progress, implying that soon there would be no watery mysteries left, the ocean would have made of her a fool, as it had of Aristotle. But Carson didn’t end her story on a triumphant note. Prophetically, she added this: “Even with all our modern instruments for probing and sampling the deep ocean, no one now can say that we shall ever resolve the last, the ultimate mysteries of the sea.” Which brings us to mesoscale eddies.

  In 1960, aboard a one-hundred-foot ketch called the Aries, a British oceanographer named John Swallow sailed northeast out of Bermuda into the Sargasso Sea in search of a vast, deep, and altogether hypothetical northerly current that he was confident he would find. He was confident because a scientist at Woods Hole, Henry Stommel, the Isaac Newton of physical oceanographers, had deduced its existence. Most oceanographers sailed out, collected data, and then interpreted it. Stommel made his most important discoveries on land, with pencil and paper. In 1947, scribbling on a place mat at a roadside diner, he’d mathematically explained the physics of the Gulf Stream. And in the midfifties, once again with pencil and paper, for sound mathematical reasons, he’d hypothesized that beneath the northerly Gulf Stream there must be another fast-moving western boundary current—the Gulf Stream’s shadowy twin, its abyssal, invisible doppelgänger—flowing in the opposite direction, south, toward the equator.

  How to prove this hypothesis? On the far side of the Atlantic, John Swallow had found a way. To follow a deep current, Swallow realized, what you needed was a neutrally buoyant float, ballasted to sink toward but not quite to the ocean floor. If you equipped such a float with a battery-powered transducer that could send forth pings, oceanographers aboard a research vessel could track it—not with terrestrial eyes, but with aquified ears. In March 1957, west of Bermuda, aboard the British research vessel Discovery II, Swallow had launched three of his experimental floats—Swallow floats, they’re now called—into rough seas. One collided, ruinously, with the Discovery II. One wandered aimlessly about. The third Swallow failed to track. Launching eight more floats, Swallow’s experiment met with success: one was lost, but seven were carried south, below the Gulf Stream, by the unseen current whose existence Henry Stommel had divined.

  Now, three years later, in 1960, aboard the Aries, Swallow expected to vindicate Stommel once again. Again he cast his floats overboard. Then, from the deck of the ketch, he lowered his hydrophone into the water and listened for pings. This time his floats sauntered extravagantly, first one way, then another. They spun. They described arcs. They meandered. They doubled back. Not one of them drifted steadily north, as Stommel had predicted. Even more than those of the castaway toys, their drift routes seemed hand-drawn by a cartographer with palsy, a drunken cartographer with palsy. Examining his chaotic data, Swallow began to discern a vortical method to this oceanic madness. His floats hadn’t charted rivers in the sea. Instead they’d revealed watery breezes, watery winds, watery storms, and this revelation fundamentally changed the way scientists think of the sea.

  There are still oceanographers preoccupied by the ocean’s third dimension, but a growing number—perhaps even most—are thinking about its fourth and darkest dimension: time. Just as geographers and cartographers mapped the earth, so the physical oceanographers of the nineteenth century set out to map the sea—to chart its currents, to fathom its depths. As Swallow’s discovery made clear, the geographic analogy turned out to be a poor one. The ocean was not so much a place as a kind of weather. What we think of as the surface of the sea oceanographers now think of as the “ocean-atmosphere interface,” a membrane more permeable than it looks. The “hydrosphere,” one of Swallow’s contemporaries proposed we rename the ocean. The climate of the planet stretches twenty-five miles, from the depths of the Mariana Trench to the ozone layer, oceanographers tell us.

  No wonder so much of my Atlas of the World is blue and blank. Map the ocean! You might as well map the clouds. Chase a castaway duck! You might as well chase the wind. Caught in a mesoscale eddy like a seagull in a hurricane, who knew where a castaway duck might go? Not Curtis Ebbesmeyer. Certainly not Charlie Moore or Chris Pallister. Not OSCURS. Not I.

  ARROGANCE IS A BAD THING

  The skies had cleared. The sun was nearing its meridian. Three gulls were gliding in our draft, occasionally climbing up or dropping down, but mostly just hovering in place, resting in the air, their wings locked. We were due east of Gooch’s Beach, south of Nova Scotia, in the temperate climate of the Gulf Stream, no land in sight. The seas were, as the deck boss, Will Ostrom, put it, “flat-ass calm.”

  It was the second day of our voyage, and out on the Knorr’s fantail Ostrom was conducting a crash course in mooring deployment. A fantail is just what its name suggests. Instead of tapering aerodynamically, the Knorr’s tail fanned wide, wide but also low, so that the deck was just a yard or two above the water, so low that even in calm seas the wave crests poked above the bulwarks. A white A-frame crane straddled the stern. An A-frame crane is also what its name suggests—a crane shaped like the letter A, only, in this case, without the crossbar. Gazing between its steel legs, you could see the Knorr’s wake fading away toward a vanishing point on the horizon. Bolted to the deck of the fantail were wire cages full of “hard hats.” In the language of oceanography—which pleasurably mixes the arcane, Latinate, acronym-laden jargon of science with the salty, poetic argot of sailors—“hard hats” are glass floats encased in yellow plastic shells, and from the outside they look very much like what their name suggests, two hard hats sealed together. Also bolted to the deck was an enormous diesel-electric winch, onto the drum o
f which Ostrom had already spooled approximately two miles of steel cable sheathed in black plastic.

  Working with a skilled, trained team of specialists from the Woods Hole Mooring Operations Engineering and Field Support Group, Ostrom can deploy ten moorings in a single day, one after another, even in rough seas. But Bower couldn’t afford to pay the usual mooring ops team to spend nine days in transit and one day at work, deploying a single mooring. She could barely afford Ostrom, who was therefore obliged to press-gang the available able-bodied members of our unusually small scientific crew. There were only three of us: me, a thirty-five-year-old writer with a bad back; Kate Fraser, a matronly science teacher from the Perkins School for the Blind, in Watertown, Massachusetts, who was helping Bower develop oceanographic curricula for visually disabled teenagers; and Dave Sutherland, a tall, blond, twenty-eight-year-old doctoral candidate from North Carolina who’d volunteered to assist Bower, sans compensation. Sutherland had high cheekbones and close-set eyes that gave him a look of puzzlement, and he was kind and polite in a slightly sheepish, slightly innocent way. When I noted that he would soon be able to call himself Dr. Sutherland, he smiled, embarrassed, and said, “Yeah, I know. Pretty wild.”

  “I’ve been doing this for thirty-four years,” Ostrom said to the three of us out on the fantail. “When I started, I was twenty-one years old, twenty years younger than most guys. I was this little guy.” At fifty-five, he was still a little guy, littler even than Chris Pallister, with windblown white hair and a two-tone beard, white on his cheeks, black around his mouth. His wardrobe seemed mostly to consist of old blue jeans and old flannel shirts, the sleeves of which he wore rolled up. Deep crow’s-feet had formed at the corners of his eyes, and black crescents of grease had collected—permanently, it seemed—under his fingernails. “The guys who taught me,” he continued, “most of them were military. They’d been in World War II, Korea. Now I’ve got to train guys like you”—he shot a sardonic glance first at Sutherland and then at me—“so that (a) you won’t kill me and (b) you won’t lose the mooring.”

  Over dinner in the mess our first night at sea, at a Formica table, beneath a wall-mounted rack of condiments, Sutherland had revealed that he was engaged to a marine biologist. I’d offered my congratulations. Ostrom had offered his condolences, and advised the young scientist to start saving for alimony now—a lesson he’d learned the hard way, Ostrom said. He referred to his children as “brats.” He warned the rest of us never to take solitary nocturnal walks on the fantail, then added, “I will, because I don’t care.” He liked to act grumpy, even when he wasn’t—mock grumpy. With Ishmael, he seemed to concur that going to sea was the best psychotherapy, the only substitute for pistol and ball. He went to sea every chance he got, and because his skills were both valuable and rare, he was offered many chances. Aboard research vessels, he’d traveled the world. He’d walked the frozen seas of the Arctic, gone marlin fishing in the Caribbean. More than once, he’d played golf at the old military base on Midway back before the base was closed and the island designated an albatross sanctuary. Golfing on Midway back then, you had to watch out for the albatross nests as well as the sand traps, Ostrom said. When condemned to spend time at home, he occupied himself by doing a side business, repairing the moorings of yachts.

  The mooring of a yacht resembles the high-tech underwater weather vane that we were soon to deploy about as much as a yacht resembles the R/V Knorr. Bower’s mooring wasn’t only high-tech. Like John Swallow’s neutrally buoyant floats, it was experimental. In the half century since Swallow set sail on the Aries, oceanographers had used one of two methods to study underwater storms. Some, following Swallow’s lead, had sailed out, searched for a mesoscale eddy, and, if they were lucky enough to find one, tossed a float overboard. This is known as the Lagrangian method. Others had anchored data-collecting moorings in waters where eddies are known to propagate and waited for one to swirl past. This is known as the Eulerian method. Two years ago, over lunch in the WHOI cafeteria, Amy Bower had struck on a novel way to combine the two methods. “Suppose we were to launch a float from a mooring?” she’d wondered aloud.

  As it so happened, one of Bower’s colleagues at Woods Hole, a physical oceanographer named David Fratantoni, had recently invented a device that could do just that—a submerged autonomous launch platform, or SALP, Fratantoni called it. He’d tested his invention off the coast of Bermuda, but it was still a novelty. “That was the selling point of the proposal,” Bower told me aboard the Knorr, “that we were trying to do something new. People don’t seem to recognize the risk. I hope they continue not to recognize the risk.”

  At Woods Hole, I’d attended a lecture during which Bower had played a digital animation of the risky experiment she’d spent two years orchestrating. On the lecture hall screen, the mooring appeared, anchored to the floor of a transparent sea by a five-ton cylinder of solid iron, tugged toward but not quite to the surface by a yellow sphere, a subsurface buoy (avatar of the actual yellow sphere now lashed to the deck of the Knorr). Strung onto a half-inch-thick steel cable between anchor and sphere, like big, data-collecting beads, were assorted gadgets and instruments with magical names—eight Aanderaa current meters, nine Seabird SBE 37-SM MicroCATs (high-tech thermometers that also measure salinity), a pair of SALPs custom-built at Woods Hole by engineer Jim Valdes in a machine shop the size of an airplane hangar.

  The actual SALPs, now lashed to the Knorr’s fantail, were the size of elevators. Each one resembled the chamber of a colossal six-shooter, a six-shooter of the sort Jupiter might whip from his cosmic holster in a duel with Neptune. Into the twelve chambers of the two SALPs we were to load twelve profiling floats, nifty gizmos that show well just how far Lagrangian technology has come since John Swallow cobbled together his neutrally buoyant novelties out of scrap metal and navysurplus electronics. Profiling floats resemble torpedoes but behave like hot-air balloons. Drifting upright, noses pointed to the sky, they can, by filling or emptying a hydraulic bladder, recalibrate their own buoyancy, sinking to the ocean floor or ascending to the surface, analyzing—or “profiling”—the water column as they go. When they surface they can beam data to shore via satellite and download into their circuitry any new directives their oceanographic masters choose to beam back.

  Onto the lecture hall screen there appeared a lethargic tornado of blue water, a cartoon Irminger Ring. It caught the yellow sphere and, towing it along, made the mooring acutely lean, like a palm tree in a hurricane—or like, Bower suggested in pantomime, a red-and-white cane tilted by a blind oceanographer on the stage of a lecture hall. Pressure gauges on the SALPs registered this disturbance. Another sensor registered temperature anomalies indicative of Irminger Rings, which are one to two degrees warmer than the frigid water through which they swirl. At the behest of a “decision algorithm” programmed into its computerized brain, the uppermost SALP tripped a burn wire and, a moment later, spat out a profiling float painted the bright, innocent yellow of a rubber duck.

  Down the yellow float swooped into the eddy’s watery coils. There, for the next several months, it would stay, like a weather balloon launched into a hurricane’s eye, traveling wherever the storm carried it, surfacing once every several days to beam its findings home. Bower’s mooring would allow her to study Irminger Rings remotely for two years, even during the brutal Labrador winter, when sea spray will freeze on contact to a ship’s bulwarks, shellacking them in ice. With the data her profiling floats collected, she’d be able to do for an Irminger Ring what I, so many months ago, had dreamed of doing for a castaway duck—tell its story, from birth to death.

  Assuming, that is, that the experiment worked. To her office door in Woods Hole, alongside a Monet print (woman with parasol, in a field speckled with red poppies) and snapshots of her Guatemalan daughter, Bower had taped a slip of paper bearing a typewritten motto: “Theory is when you know everything but nothing works. Experiment is when everything works but you know nothing. Most of the time nothing work
s and no one knows why.” Deck boss Will Ostrom, whose job was to make sure that everything worked and if it didn’t that someone knew why, also had a motto: “Arrogance is a bad thing.”

  Our first morning at sea, in the main lab, using a diagram as a visual aid, Ostrom had explained how the mooring deployment should, in theory, go. As soon as the Knorr was “on station,” we’d “do a little bathymetry.” The mooring had been cut, precisely, for waters 3,200 meters deep. “Obviously we don’t want to make this”—he’d jabbed a greasy fingertip at the yellow sphere on the diagram—“a hundred meters higher. It would be on the surface, right?” At the surface it could get fouled in the screw of a passing boat. “So we want it right here,” he’d said, “ninety-five meters down.” The anchor would go over last, the sphere first. Once the sphere was in the water someone with good penmanship would have to keep a meticulous log—“a diary of the balloon” Ostrom called it—because we would be measuring out the mooring in increments of time. “Okay, like a 480-meter shot of wire should take about twenty minutes,” Ostrom said. “So what if instead it takes ten? That means it’s too short.” When we shackled an instrument onto the cable, someone would have to check the cotter pins. “The smallest detail, and this thing will fail, will come apart. I don’t know what the bottom-line cost of this mooring is but—”