Moby-Duck

by Donovan Hohn

  “A lot,” Bower interjected. The bottom-line cost of the mooring (labor, equipment, ship time, R & D), I knew by then, was $1.2 million.

  “Beaucoup, okay?” Ostrom said, pronouncing beaucoup bookoo. “I want to be right up front. If there is anything that you don’t understand and you don’t feel comfortable doing, just say so. But it is a problem if you are a person that says, ‘I can do everything,’ and does a really lousy job. Arrogance is a bad thing.”

  Now, out on the fantail, Ostrom played variations on this theme. “You can see scars on my eyes when I close them, right there,” he said, exhibiting his eyelids. “I’ve been hit in the face with chains. Twice.” That big yellow sphere sitting over there by the starboard rail weighed 2,600 pounds. If a line fouled on a rail as we sent the sphere overboard, it would rip the rail right out. “And that’s bad,” Ostrom said, “because now you’ve got to steer a 2,600-pound sphere that’s loose and coming back at you.” Once, on the University of Rhode Island’s research vessel, an eye bolt in the deck had sheared off and gone flying into the bosun’s leg, breaking it “like that,” Ostrom said and snapped his fingers. Just the other day at Woods Hole, the counterweight on a core-sampling apparatus had come crashing onto the docks. “It was an act of God that it didn’t kill someone,” Ostrom said. “And it happened just like that.” He snapped his fingers. Another time, on another voyage, on this very ship, right here, on the fantail, right after a pretty yellow sphere had gone overboard, the cable had caught a deckhand in the face, and flipped him. “Tore his mouth, all the skin on his lip,” Ostrom said. “He was a real talker too, and couldn’t talk anymore for the rest of the trip.” Arrogance is a bad thing. Another time Ostrom was trying to free a fouled line with a six-foot crowbar when a “big, perky” seaman came running to his aid. Right then Ostrom had “popped” the line, which twanged like a giant bowstring into the big, perky seaman’s arm—“fractured it in four places, just like that,” Ostrom said and snapped his fingers. “It really screwed him up. I mean, we carted him off and shot him full of morphine, put him on another ship that night. The point here is, no freelancing, okay?” The injury had screwed up the perky seaman so badly that he quit seafaring and became an English teacher. This was Ostrom’s cardinal rule: No freelancing. Do as you’ve been told but nothing else. He had other rules: Don’t get underneath a crane load. Keep out of the bight. Wear a hard hat. If you’re not working, stay back.

  For the next hour, like a director rehearsing a troupe of talentless actors, as we rocked about at the center of the circle described by the horizon, Ostrom put us through our paces, teaching us how to cleat and “clear” a tag line—a rope that keeps hoisted objects from swinging wildly about; how to tie a bowline and a clove hitch; how to coil a rope properly, letting it drip from your fingers to the deck in a clockwise ellipse; how to operate the diesel-electric winch, and to follow commands flashed in the semaphoric language of crane signals. “If you’re at the winch, I will point to you and then I’ll point down. What does down mean? Pay it out. Up is in. Down is out. And this means what?” He held up a fist.

  “Stop,” Sutherland and I said, almost in unison.

  Out here in the sunlit, seasickening arena of his life’s work, Ostrom’s world-weary air seemed to fall away. You could tell that despite or probably because of the risks, he loved his work. Adored it. Although there was no glory or fame in doing what he did (deck bosses never appear on the cover of Time or even on the cover of Oceanus, WHOI’s in-house organ), Ostrom knew he was good at what he did, as good at it or better than anyone alive. He knew moorings. Moorings were just about all he knew well. A computer could autopilot a ship. A computerized glider or float could explore the deep. But no computer knew what Ostrom knew. He could cleat and clear a slip line single-handedly with the legerdemain of a rodeo cowboy lassoing a post. In the small world of ocean science, he’d gained a certain notoriety. The bosun on a NOAA research vessel once drew a caricature of Ostrom, depicting him as a little devil in a red jumpsuit, pricking deckhands in the ass with a pitchfork. Ostrom loved this drawing. During the course of our voyage, David Sutherland would name a photo of Ostrom that he uploaded onto the Knorr’s computer server “will_overseer.”

  NIGHT VISION

  For the next three days, the seas are flat-ass calm. Ostrom and the engineer, Jim Valdes, unpack instruments from crates and begin hitching them together. Dave Sutherland sits at his laptop beneath the portholes in the main lab, working on his dissertation, a study of the East Greenland Coastal Current. Amy Bower and Kate Fraser post daily “audio postcards” on a website for the blind and take questions from Fraser’s students by satellite phone:

  How deep is the water?

  The depth varies, but in the Labrador Sea, where we will deploy the mooring, the water is about two miles deep.

  How cold is the air?

  Fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit here in the moderating influence of the Gulf Stream, but soon, in the Labrador Sea, it will fall to just a few degrees above freezing.

  How do you make the batteries in the profiling floats last two years?

  Lithium.

  Can you bring a seeing-eye dog onto a research vessel?

  No, but Bower planned to adopt one shortly after returning to Woods Hole. From Fraser’s students this news elicits raucous cheers.32

  At sea, Bower has no need for a seeing-eye dog. She finds life on a ship easier than life at home, where her daughter strews toys in her path and her husband misplaces the remote control. On a ship, everything is where it’s supposed to be. She navigates the corridors with her cane, detecting the thresholds of the watertight doors. She memorizes the number of stairs between the main deck and her cabin on the upper decks and counts them carefully off as she ascends and descends. We’ve all been assigned a labeled coffee mug—mine is labeled SCI 6, since I’m the sixth and lowliest member of Bower’s team—that we are responsible for washing; around hers, labeled SCI 1, Bower has snapped a knotted rubber band so that on the wooden rack in the mess where the mugs are kept she can find it by touch.

  When Bower first learned that she was losing her sight she felt foredoomed to darkness and to failure, to a life of dependence and disability checks, and in another century, she would have been. Even in another discipline she would have been. Marine biologists, for instance, have to see the specimens they dissect. Paradoxically, since physical oceanographers study invisible phenomena, since all physical oceanographers are in effect partially blind, Bower’s blindness proved less disabling than she’d feared. When it comes to looking at the ocean, her vision is far superior to mine. The papers she’s published are filled with colorful maps and charts that make watery winds and storms as visible as atmospheric ones. She has, with the help of her expensive instruments, acquired aqueous powers of perception, a sense of oxygen, a sense of isotopes, a sense of current, a sense of salt.

  As we pass through the Strait of Belle Isle and emerge from the shelter of Newfoundland’s lee, we’re struck, and rocked, by northwesterly winds. The first mate pipes instructions from the Knorr’s bridge: we are to lash down or stow all belongings. Rough weather ahead. Rough weather and icebergs, forty-one of them, according to Canadian ice charts. Seated before an array of glowing screens in the main lab, on which various data appear, spectacles perched on the tip of his nose, the chief technician, Robbie Laird, says of the officers on the bridge, “They can see icebergs fine. The only thing we have to worry about are bergy bits.” Silly as it sounds, “bergy bit” is the technical name for a little iceberg, a molehill rather than a mountain of ice. “A bergy bit probably wouldn’t sink this ship,” Laird says, “but it could do some damage and end this cruise.”

  On the bridge two ABs begin standing watch instead of one, scanning the seas with night-vision goggles. Night-vision goggles work best in total darkness. Second officer Mark Maloof passes through the main lab, extinguishing the portholes. The other night, in the mess, while I was trying my best to explain my weird quest to a table of
mariners, Maloof said, “Kind of like Moby-Dick!” He, too, had fallen under Melville’s spell. Now whenever we pass each other in the corridors or in the mess, he greets me with Ahab’s famous question: “Hast seen the white whale?” To which I reply, “Hast seen the yellow duck?” He hasn’t, but some of the other mariners on the Knorr have heard the tale. In fact, one afternoon on the bridge a balding piratical seaman named Kevin, who sports a hoop earring and a handlebar mustache, decided to share with me an incredible tale. He commenced to recount the legend of the rubber ducks lost at sea. Interrupting him, I brandished my yellow duck and explained why I was here. When Maloof has finished clamping shut the metal lids of the portholes in the main lab, he moves on to the mess. The lit windows of the Knorr wink out, one by one, and the ship moves stealthily through the dark.

  Overnight, autumn turns to winter. The temperature drops from 55 degrees Fahrenheit to 41 degrees. In an icy rain we wallow through gray swells marbled with foam. Fearful that her experimental mooring might fail, Bower has made a change of plans. She’s decided to keep one profiling float in reserve. Before or after we deploy the mooring, depending on the weather, we’ll investigate Irminger Rings the old-fashioned way, the Swallow way—by hunting one down and hurling a float into it. Hunting for Irminger Rings, I’m pleased to hear, requires a good deal of fancy detective work. “If you just go out and poke around looking for an eddy, you’re not going to find one,” Bower says.

  Beneath the shuttered portholes, she downloads onto her computer’s magnifying nineteen-inch monitor images of red and orange blobs in a field of yellow. Nose almost touching the screen, pecking at her mouse, robotic software chattering away, she studies the images for clues. Generated from data beamed down twenty-four hours ago by Jason-1, the NASA satellite speeding overhead, the images on Bower’s computer are altimetric maps of the Labrador Sea—maps that measure subtle variations in the ocean’s topography, variations as small as three centimeters. The red blobs represent Irminger Rings, the circling currents of which raise a bump on the ocean’s surface, a bump just fifteen centimeters taller than the surrounding water. Spread out across a ring’s thirty-mile diameter, that fifteen-centimeter elevation is invisible to the naked eye, but not to the satellite-corrected eyes of Amy Bower.

  Unfortunately, Bower’s maps are already out of date, blurred by the passage of time. They show us where rings were yesterday, and suggest where we should look for them now, but not where we’ll be sure to find them. The easiest way to confirm the presence of an underwater storm is to measure the speed of its watery winds with something called an acoustic Doppler current profiler, or ADCP. The Knorr has an ADCP, but it’s on the fritz. We have no choice but to resort to more time-consuming methods, taking the water’s temperature not with a thermometer but with yet another acronymic piece of electronic equipment, an expendable bathythermograph, or XBT. An XBT looks, deceptively, like a black poster tube.

  At 59.5°N, 52.4°W, off Greenland’s tip, Bower phones the bridge. The helmsman powers down the engines. Chief Technician Laird pulls on his parka, loads an XTB into an orange metal launcher shaped like a spackle gun, and teeters out onto the fantail, trailing a cord behind him. David Sutherland and I follow. At the stern, as the Knorr idles, Laird leans over the rail and aims the XBT at the gray water. I lean over too. Looking at the ocean from the deck of a ship, I’ve found, it’s hard not to think of drowning. Not just think of it, imagine it—the shock of the cold you’d feel hitting the surface, the weight of your sodden clothes pulling you down, the salty water rushing into your nostrils and lungs, the darkness below, the diminishing light above. Laird pulls the trigger. I expect some sort of charge to fire, the XBT to go whizzing harpoonlike through the air. Instead it plops into the Knorr’s loud wake, a copper wire thinner than fishing line paying out behind it.

  Along that wire travel data, into the orange launcher, through the cord, back to a computer in the main lab, where we gather around a monitor to watch. As the little expendable instrument sinks—fifty meters, one hundred, three hundred, a thousand—it draws two lines down a graph, one for temperature, one for depth. Where it crosses the boundary between the cold, fresh surface waters to the warmer, saltier deep water below, the temperature line abruptly jogs then resumes its linear descent. By warmer I mean 3.5 degrees centigrade, just a degree or two warmer than the surface waters above, into which thousands of icebergs and floes have dissolved.

  No eddy here. In the core of an eddy, the water temperature should rise to a balmy 5 degrees centigrade. But the absence of an eddy is good news: Bower didn’t expect to find one here. She is collecting control data, profiling the water’s background temperature and depth. Meanwhile, the XBT keeps sinking—1,300 feet, 1,500, 1,800. Then the filament connecting it to the surface runs out and snaps. This explains the X in XBT. Expendable bathythermographs can’t be retrieved. Obliviously now, it continues to sink to the seafloor, connected to us only by filaments of the imagination. An hour later we launch another XBT. This time I get to pull the trigger. Out drops the black tube. In comes the data. Still no eddy.

  When oceanographers talk about climatological models, they themselves draw the visual analogy, comparing their computerized simulations to cameras, their satellites to eyes. The better the model, the higher “the resolution,” they say. Although they are still the best crystal balls oceanographers have, the resolution of current computer models, Bower told me, is still “very low.” She emphasized the word very. The only way to increase the resolution is to gather more data—data finer in scale, not megascale data but mesoscale or even microscale data, and if you were deciding where to begin collecting such data, the Labrador Sea would be a good place to start.

  Along the Labrador Sea’s western edge, the cold water of the Arctic flows south into the North Atlantic. Along its eastern edge the comparatively warm remnants of the Gulf Stream flow north toward the Arctic. At the heart of the Labrador Sea, chilled by Canadian winds, as temperatures drop and ice forms, making the water saltier, the converging remnants of the Gulf Stream grow dense enough to sink. Hundreds of meters down, they begin the long, slow journey back toward the equator. There are only two spots in the entire Northern Hemisphere where this sort of sinking occurs, here in the Labrador Sea, and just east of Greenland. “Circulation pumps,” such spots have been called. The pumping isn’t constant. It happens only in winter, and some years the pumps are more active than others. But for at least ten thousand years, since the end of the last ice age, the intermittent pumps have kept the North Atlantic surface currents flowing to subarctic latitudes, delivering a trillion kilowatts of heat or more (scientists have yet to calculate the precise figure) to the Northern Hemisphere, heat that munificent breezes and winds carry east around the globe.

  That, at least, is how the low-res megascale climatological model of the Labrador Sea works, and oceanographers have understood the low-res megascale model ever since Henry Stommel puzzled it out on a notepad a half century ago. The mesoscale model of the Labrador Sea, however, is still blurry. Oceanographers like Bower are now trying to bring it into focus, trying to do what Emerson required of the poet—“magnify the small,” “micrify the great.”

  DIARY OF THE BALLOON

  Amy Bower has received some very exciting news. The latest altimetric map shows an Irminger Ring right near the mooring site. The news from the bridge is also exciting, but in a bad way: rapidly, sickeningly, sea conditions have continued to deteriorate. Low clouds of drizzling rain have shut down around us. The waters above and the waters below seem one. The ocean-atmosphere interface has vanished in the mist. It’s doubtful that any fishing boats are still out. We haven’t seen one in days. To be safe, every two minutes, the Knorr’s foghorn booms out its twotoned song. Big waves come rolling in from the east, hitting us broadside. The portholes in the main lab seem to fill and empty with every roll: nothing but water, then nothing but fog. Seasick, Kate Fraser retreats to her cabin belowdecks. Bower remains at her computer. A whiteboard keeps
leaning away from the wall, then smacking back into place. A yellow hard hat—an actual hard hat, not a float—zigs and zags across a workbench. Tools clank around inside Willy Ostrom’s tool chest. Walking from starboard to port feels like walking on a seesaw. You’re leaning into a hill one moment, then running down it the next.

  By 2100 hours—nine o’clock—we will reach our destination, just west of Greenland’s continental shelf, and therefore have a decision to make: deploy the mooring tonight, in rough seas and darkness, or wait for daylight. “The weather is the driving force,” Ostrom says. “If the weather’s going to blow up before tomorrow morning then it makes sense to do it now.”

  For the first time since we left Woods Hole six days ago, the Knorr’s captain, Kent Sheasley, appears in the main lab, along with first mate Mark Maloof. Sheasley, age thirty-six, is young for a captain. A man of few words and few displays of emotion, he dresses casually, in tattered khakis and an old rugby shirt. Maloof spreads out the latest weather maps on a workbench and we gather around. There’s a low-pressure system in the area. The winds right now are blowing 31.5 knots out of the north—out of, that is, the Arctic. Through the portholes we can hear them scream. By tomorrow morning, according to the forecasts, the winds will be forty knots—gale force. “At least we know there’ll be no terrorists trying to come aboard,” Ostrom cracks.

  Since the Knorr has to make Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, in just three days, there’s no time for us to heave to and wait out the storm. This is Sheasley’s recommendation: we deploy tonight, as soon as we reach the mooring site.