Pacific

by Simon Winchester

  On the one hand, pitilessness; on the other, compassion. The difference is stark, and serves as a vivid reminder of the two very separate Australias that still exist. On the one hand is the delightfully nuanced and multicultural urban Australia, with Sydney and Melbourne now among the most gorgeously admixed cities to be found anywhere in the world, representative of an Australia as a pitch-perfect member of the western Pacific community. On the other, however, stubbornly displayed by a residue of politicians and would-be politicians (Pauline Hanson a type specimen), is an Australia remarkably and woefully out of touch with and unsympathetic to the ways of the Asian world. The two sides of the argument, an argument long settled in almost all other former British colonial possessions, encapsulate a nagging and potentially serious problem.

  For is this enormous, wealthy, talented, and truly fortunate country part of the Pacific, a real working component of the great engine work of Asia? Or is it still an outpost of Olde England, a place of beer, bellies, and bogans, set dustily down on the western edge of this mighty sea? It seems in part to want to be Asia, to play its role, to be a powerful component and a moral counterweight to China, to be a place of well-mixed values and of tolerance and understanding, and of a people who present, in and of themselves, a microcosm of the very ocean that washes the continent’s shores.

  But there is an awful undertow at work still as well, a concatenation of white-dominated, blinkered, complacent, and reactionary forces that may yet keep this once lucky place pinioned and fettered firmly in its past, and thereby not allow it to become a true member of the community in which geography has settled it, now or maybe for some long while to come.

  A great place to live, as a friend in Sydney said to me one evening. A great place to live. But not a great country. Not yet.

  1 Few of his predecessor premiers are today well remembered outside Australia, save perhaps for Robert Menzies, who held office twice, for a total of eighteen years. His successor in 1966, Harold Holt, is recalled for a curious reason: he vanished while swimming in the sea near Melbourne, his body never found. His governance of Australia ended once he was declared dead, a tragic end to a long political career—and to his reign, as it happens, as one of Australia’s best-dressed men.

  2 The GCMG, the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, is a British order of chivalry traditionally given to British and Commonwealth diplomats. There are three orders, in ascending seniority, CMG, KCMG, and GCMG; they are popularly, if a little unkindly, said to signify “Call Me God,” “Kindly Call Me God,” and, as in the case of Sir John Kerr, “God Calls Me God.”

  3 Even though, near-uniquely, it does not have an international airport. Even Ottawa has one; though Monaco, Lichtenstein, Andorra, and the Vatican do not, and the Pacific archipelago of Tokelau, which is entirely without an airfield, has no capital, either, but rotates its administrative headquarters annually among its three main islands.

  4 A template might well have been Hon. Russ Hinze, Queensland’s minister for racing, minister for main roads, minister for police, and supposed “minister for everything” in the 1970s. Fat, uncouth, and incorrigibly corrupt, Hinze is best known for having a state freeway diverted several miles to bring customers to a pub he owned. His genes almost outlived his reputation: his granddaughter Kristy Hinze went on to model for Victoria’s Secret.

  5 Australia, still at the time clinging to the mother country’s apron strings, used British-style pounds, shillings, and pence until 1966.

  6 By now the country had left the pound and was using the dollar, which was initially to be called the royal, but which ended up as the Australian dollar.

  7 It was Goossens who, in 1942, with the aim of finding stirring music to help with the war effort, wrote to Aaron Copland asking for a composition. The result was Copland’s famous Fanfare for the Common Man.

  8 H. L. Mencken liked the word, though it was an Australian who invented it, as a mild insult for a moral scold. Or, as the ribald twenties poet C. J. Dennis put it, “Wowser: an ineffably pious person who mistakes this world for a penitentiary and himself for a warder.”

  9 Donald Horne’s famous book of this title was in fact a harsh critique, and his title suitably sardonic. So far as today’s boat-borne migrants are concerned, it is most apt. Few who come up against the harsh realities of today’s Australian immigration law experience good luck of any kind.

  [Marzolino/Shutterstock, Inc.]

  Chapter 8

  THE FIRES IN THE DEEP

  Below the thunders of the upper deep

  Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,

  His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep

  The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee

  About his shadowy sides: above him swell

  Huge sponges of millennial growth and height.

  —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, THE KRAKEN, 1830

  In 1977 the Human-Occupied Vehicle for deep-sea exploration known as HOV Alvin was already thirteen years old, salt-stained outside, and well worn inside. And though a snapped cable had once caused her to sink and spend half a year lying unrescued on the floor of the Atlantic, she had by now performed enough deep-sea research around the world to be thought of as quite venerable, an oceanic workhorse, up for anything and down for everything. She was (and indeed remains, still working today, after half a century) as adored as she is revered. Water Baby is how she is known to some—red and white and cheery-looking, a toylike craft, built for the U.S. Navy and operated on the sailors’ behalf by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts.

  On a Thursday morning in mid-February 1977, this doughty miniature research submarine, so precisely engineered and so heavily armored as to allow three explorers to be brought down into the ocean deeps and then driven safely back to the surface, was lowered into the warm blue waters of the eastern Pacific for the 713th logged dive of her career. What she would find later that day, in the abyssal gloom almost two miles down, would laser-etch her name into oceanography’s history books as having made perhaps the greatest maritime discovery of all scientific time.

  For she discovered down in the dark a whole new undersea universe, a previously unimagined dystopia of crushing pressures and scalding temperatures, of curious topography and even more curious life-forms, all gathered around a family of hitherto unknown phenomena that were immediately named for the gaseous torrents that they spewed ceaselessly out into the sea. Alvin, on that midwinter’s day in 1977, first discovered the existence of what were to be called deep-ocean hydrothermal vents, gushings of gas and superheated water in places where all was believed to be cold and dark and dead.

  For science alone, a find like this, with all its implications and possibilities for research, might perhaps have been enough. But thanks to Alvin, there was much more to come: further finds, also in the Pacific Ocean, that excited not just the scientific community, but the commercial brotherhood as well. For, not long after that first find, there came news of another, in which the undersea gushings were not fluid at all, but were solid and enormous and studded with minerals, and came to be known as smokers.

  The little craft had already proved herself a boon. In 1966, when just two years old, she found a missing American hydrogen bomb, one of four that broke free from a crashing B-52 bomber over eastern Spain. Three of the weapons had been found, more or less intact, on a tomato farm. But one had parachuted into the Mediterranean, causing the Pentagon to panic that the Soviets might find it first. Twenty warships and 150 divers searched the sea for three months, but in vain. In the end, little Alvin was brought in, and with her Woods Hole crew of scientists sworn to secrecy, she eventually found the weapon, lying half a mile down, snagged on the edge of an undersea canyon. Crews from other navy ships, clumsily trying to haul the menacing-looking ten-foot-long silver cylinder up from the depths, managed to drop it, twice, but eventually wrestled it up, wrapped it in tarps, and flew it posthaste back to America. A Spanish fisherman who had seen it fall from the sky, and who
had first shown Alvin where to look, was given a hefty salvor’s fee.

  Alvin, the doughty three-person submersible, has allowed scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to find many of the most significant deep-sea structures, including the hydrothermal vent fields and black-and-white smokers.* [Woods Hole Oceanic Institute.]

  Alvin would go on to make even better-known discoveries later on in her long, long career.1 Her most famous find was in 1986, when she carried Robert Ballard on a dozen dives to investigate the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic. The wreck had been found a year earlier, by the Argo, an unmanned Woods Hole underwater sled; but Alvin allowed divers to see her close up and in person, and this mission brought the tiny craft enduring fame.

  Even though finding a lost hydrogen bomb in 1966 and finding a lost passenger liner twenty years later were significant accomplishments, it was the uncovering of a long-hidden natural creation in the eastern Pacific on February 17, 1977, that proved the kind of truly significant contributions the Alvin could make.

  The finding of the first smokers was a discovery that had fourfold implications. It had a formidable impact on humankind’s understanding of the workings of the planet. It introduced wholly new thinking to the understanding of the origins of life itself. It hinted at untold wealth yet to be found on the bed of the sea. And it unleashed, as a corollary, the possibilities of major environmental mayhem, even as the Pacific Ocean—this being the mid-1970s, a time of building ecological anxiety—was taking pole position in the planet’s current concern over its fast-spoiling oceans.

  Both discoveries (which history now logs as having been made on Alvin dives numbers 713 and 914) occurred on or close to the six-thousand-mile-long chain of underwater mountains known as the East Pacific Rise, a place where the seafloor spreads outward, just as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge does on the far side of the world, and which can be thought of as the true birthplace of the modern Pacific Ocean. The Rise is an underwater chain of mountains that run in a more or less north–south direction from close to the Salton Sea at the hot upper end of the Gulf of California, down to a landless point in the empty wastes of the cold South Pacific, a subantarctic place of albatrosses and wandering icebergs, with the huge waves and endless storms of the Roaring Forties.

  It is the relatively modest eastern Pacific section of the so-called global Mid-Oceanic Ridge system—one of the planet’s biggest physical features and certainly, at forty thousand miles long, the most extensive of all the world’s mountain chains, even if it is invisible, entirely covered by water. The system has numberless branches and offshoots, and were its waters to be drained from the ocean and the planet dried out, its ridges would look like a web of fibers somehow helping to hold the earth together, like the stitches on a baseball or the sutures on a skull.

  Its existence was confirmed only recently, although there were suggestions as early as Victorian times that lines of unexpected shallows were to be found out in the mid-ocean deeps. HMS Challenger, surveying the Atlantic in 1872 to find the optimal route for an undersea cable, found that depths in the middle of the ocean were many thousands of feet less than expected, and a century later, German oceanographers noticed that this same upwelling continued around the African coast right up past Madagascar.

  Yet Albert Bumstead’s classic 1936 National Geographic map of the Pacific (the same one used, as mentioned, by Colonel Charles Bonesteel III to divide postwar Korea) still gives no clue that anything similarly significant had yet been noticed on the Pacific side of the world. Most of that ocean, so very large, so little explored, was depicted as blue and almost entirely blank, with just a few curving lines hinting, and probably fancifully, at the unsurveyed depths below.

  If it was one thing to determine the existence of mid-ocean ridges, then it was quite another to figure out their significance. Initially, and as the ranges were found, they were thought to be undersea mountain chains, pure and simple, and that was that. The first inklings that they actually offered clues to the origins of the planet came only in 1947, when geophysicists based in New York, dredging from a Woods Hole surface ship, found that the undersea rise in the middle of the Atlantic was made of basalt, and not the granite of which most continents are composed. The scientific community was greatly puzzled, and set about trying to determine why this might be so.

  A decade later a pair of Americans, Marie Tharp from Michigan and Bruce Heezen from Iowa, both working at Columbia University in New York, decided to create a comprehensive map of the entire ridge system, surveying every ridge in every ocean. Working with the U.S. Navy, and with much of their initial research quite secret, Heezen took a survey ship, a three-masted iron-hulled schooner named Vema, and employing all the new sonar technology at the navy’s disposal, first mapped the entirety of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, arctic end to subantarctic other end. Miss Tharp was initially not allowed aboard the survey ship: in those unenlightened times, her sex forbade it. She had to be content to crunch the numbers back in her cartography laboratory in New York. She made her first voyage as Heezen’s shipmate only in 1965, after which the mapping work accelerated near-exponentially.

  They soon discovered that the ridge was not only long and sinuous, and reflective of the shapes of the continents on its two sides—curving out where Africa bulged out, and sashaying back in where South America curved in—but also that it was very much more complex an entity than the mere heaped-up pile of seafloor the early surveyors had supposed it to be. Not only was it made of basalt, but also it had a curious and quite unexpected topography. It had a deep groove, a rift valley, that ran along the summit of its entire length, and within this groove, according to the seismometers that the pair took on their expeditions, lay the epicenters of a bewildering number of earthquakes.

  Tharp had an immediate epiphany. She thought the ridge-and-valley-and-ridge feature somewhat resembled the Rift Valley in Kenya, and that its existence might help explain how the continents that ran parallel to it on either side had been formed. The submarine ridge had perhaps disgorged new volcanic material, basaltic material, which had then forced the seafloors on either side of the ridge to spread themselves outward, pushing the continents away from one another as they did so. That might be a reasonable supposition today, but even as recently as the middle of the twentieth century, it was, in some circles, still somewhat premature to imagine that the all-too-solid, all-too-fixed continents could possibly have moved. Proponents of the theory—continental drift, as it is called—had long been derided as apostates. Some of the more elderly geologists denounced such thinking as impertinently and irreligiously challenging the sacred order of the universe.

  Except that, as it happened, and at almost the same time as Marie Tharp came up with her ideas about the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, other research going on in the Pacific Ocean was beginning to show that continental drift was not a sacrilegious fantasy, but in fact one of the central driving forces behind the making of the present-day world.

  In a series of secret U.S. Navy experiments that were begun in the early 1960s, a flotilla of antique warships was used to drag sensitive magnetometers back and forth across those Pacific ridge summits that had been found off the Oregon coast. Scientists then analyzed the recordings, and carefully noted the traces of the magnetism that had been detected in the rocks below. What they found quite astonished them, as the submarine rocks displayed, with an elegant and instantly understandable symmetry, the record of the already known phenomenon of the earth’s magnetic field reversal.

  Every fifty thousand years or so, and for no certain reason, the direction of magnetism of the planet abruptly changes: compasses that point to the north suddenly point to the south, to put it simply. It had already been known for many years before this Pacific experiment began that the direction of the earth’s magnetic field is always faithfully recorded in those kinds of rock that contain iron, as the millions of tiny iron crystals align themselves like miniature compasses, all pointing to wherever the pole happened to be when th
e rocks became solid. And if the magnetic field’s direction changed, the tiny rock magnets would record that change, as it happened.

  What was to be found off the Oregon coast showed that the field reversals were recorded not just in one set of submarine rocks, but in the rocks on both sides of the ridge over which the magnetometers were being dragged. Moreover, they were to be seen not just on both sides, but each at exactly the same distance out from the ridge itself.

  It was blindingly obvious what had happened. Molten rock had emerged from the ridge’s central rift and had then flowed over the two sides, dividing itself equally as it did so. The two streams had then spread outward away from each other, slowly unrolling like a pair of conveyor belts proceeding in opposite directions. As they continued to roll outward, every fifty thousand years or so, each belt of rocks recorded within itself the effects of magnetic field reversal. One field reversal was recorded in the rocks on one side of the ridge, and the very same reversal, occurring at exactly the same time, was recorded on the rocks now scores of miles away on the other side, giving the mirror image that appeared, at first so mysteriously, on all the recording traces.

  The corollary was clear and, to geophysicists, intensely exciting. As the ocean floor spread outward from its ridges, and as new ocean floor was being created, the continents on either side of the ridge were being pushed away from each other—they were drifting, as only a short while ago the apostates and heretics had been fancifully supposing. A geological revolution was in the making.