Pacific

by Simon Winchester

  The United Nations has set up a regulatory body, the International Seabed Authority, based in Jamaica, which lays down rules for deep-sea mid-ocean mining. The first two undersea sites chosen by Nautilus fall within the territorial jurisdiction of their neighboring states, Papua New Guinea and Tonga, and so are not subject to UN rules. However, another Pacific Ocean site that Nautilus believes could be exploitable lies in what is known as the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone, a two-million-square-mile expanse of sea that stretches from a point some five hundred miles southeast of Hawaii right across to the coast of Mexico. The ISA does wield authority here, though the United States refuses to accept it, not being a signatory to the Law of the Sea convention that set up the ISA in the first place. In any case, the ISA’s control over seabed mining in the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone is at present more academic than actual, since no one has yet come up with an affordable technology that will allow mining under the frigid and crushing environments that exist five miles down. That is for the future.

  But technology is now being created to exploit the shallower parts of the seas, such as those unregulated inshore waters off Papua and Tonga. Nautilus is planning to deploy a small armada of three massive, powerful (and highly waterproofed) new machines known collectively as seafloor production tools, remotely controlled robotic crawler miners that will be lowered gingerly down five thousand feet directly onto the site where the sulfides are known to be. The machines are made, uniquely, by a firm in Newcastle upon Tyne, in northern England, known as Soil Machine Dynamics, a company that specializes in building “remote intervention equipment, operating in hazardous environments worldwide.”

  Sitting on the factory floor, each of the white-painted engines towers over the gaggle of Geordie workers laboring to assemble it. They are working in a factory where for years steam turbines were assembled, back when this part of Newcastle was a shipbuilding city and made destroyers for the Royal Navy and oil tankers for the merchant fleets of the world. Nowadays the shipyards are mostly silent, but the new machines being manufactured in their old assembly buildings seem just as huge, just as heavy—and instead of floating on the sea, they are being designed to work far beneath it, carving cargoes out of the seabed rather than transporting them on the ocean surface.

  The three machines initially delivered are truly monstrous, both in size and in appearance. They have long iron arms and huge spinning blades; gouging devices and giant claws and buckets that could hold whole cars, and lay down tracks, as if they were tanks or bulldozers, and that allow the vehicles to crawl and lumber at will over any of the steep hillsides and through any of the canyons they might encounter deep below.

  The auxiliary cutter moves in first, thrashing its mighty knives and dozer blades, cutting wide benches into the rockfaces and scarifying and otherwise preparing the ground for the arrival of the suboceanic big boy, the unromantically named bulk cutter. This fearsome creature, two hundred tons of raw blade power, then grinds its way along the benches and cuts and slices and hauls and finally crushes the sulfides out of the cliffs, leaving them in many-tonned piles scattered in rows along the seafloor, waiting to be collected by the last member of this ironbound trinity: the collecting machine.

  This is much like a robotic dump truck, only much larger than any ever seen in the world’s biggest opencast mines. Down below, it is obliged to run on tracks, rather than on the mansion-size tires seen up on the surface. It scoops up the sulfide litter piles and, responding always to commands from its remote driver sitting like a drone pilot in the mother ship two miles above, takes them across to the slurry pump and riser. This is a heat-hardened vertical rubber tube fully two miles long that, like an elephantine vacuum trunk, then sucks the material up to the surface and onto the deck of an enormous mining control vessel.

  This ship, of a kind never before made, is being manufactured in China for a Dubai-based chandlery, and it will by rented by Nautilus for the first five years of the project. It will cost the not inconsiderable sum of $199,910 a day. The vessel will act as a controlling guardian angel for the three machines growling away below. It is also being built to receive through its two miles of hard-rubber umbilicus the thousands of tons of sulfide-and-water mixture that the three monsters manage to claw out of the seafloor. Once enough has been piled up into wells on deck, this ore will be strained through an immense net and, to use the miners’ term, dewatered, before the surplus and de-ored wastewater is then sent back down to the ocean bottom.

  The solid sulfide ore will finally be swished by conveyer belt across to a flotilla of waiting barges, and after each barge is filled to its brim, it will leave for a metals processing plant on the Yangtze River, three thousand miles across the open Pacific and the East China Sea.

  Out of every thousand tons of ore, Nautilus expects to get seventy tons of solid copper, and sizable poundages of gold and silver. The mine will pay for itself, the firm’s Canadian shareholders are assured. The Pacific will begin to yield up its bounty from about 2018 onward, and the bounty, for a copper-starved world in particular, will prove an immense boon to all.

  This is the plan, and the company prints attractive brochures and makes slickly produced films to underline the point that it is doing all this with unalloyed concern for the Pacific’s fragile environment. Of course, the firm has released an environmental impact statement, and it has acknowledged that two types of deep-water snail might have their habitats briefly disturbed. Nautilus says the regional environment, however, will escape unscathed. Others are far from sure.

  As one might expect, the usual protective agencies (the World Wildlife Fund, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace among them) are concerned that the seabed is going to be ruined in the name of profit and greed. But in this case an indigenous foe has arisen, too: Papua New Guinea Mine Watch. At the time of writing, it is producing an energetic, intelligent, and highly coherent argument against seabed mining generally and in the coastal waters off Papua New Guinea in particular. The arguments are both principled and technical. In summary, though, the question that dominates is simple: why place at risk the sanctity of our oceans briefly to sate our endless appetite for planetary growth?

  The affair is of deep significance to the Pacific story. How this single debate plays out over the coming years will offer some indication of just how the Pacific Ocean is going to be regarded in the future—by outsiders who see it mainly as a major resource to be exploited, and by those who live there and have long drawn their sustenance from it and wish to see it treated with proper reverence and care.

  The arguments are complex on many levels. To limit the professed worldwide need for copper, say (the kind of copper that Nautilus plans to claw up from one of its chosen undersea fields), the most acceptable solution seems always to be: to lean on the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and all other such developing countries to limit their use of the metal, to lower their populations’ expectations, and to wind back such standards of living as depend on the use of copper—and in today’s high-technology consumer world, that is a huge number of uses.

  Not unsurprisingly, the citizens of these countries cry foul. They want to know why they should not enjoy the standards that Westerners have long taken for granted. Why should they have to bear the consequences of the environmental damage that our past wanton overconsumption has caused? Why should they not have copper, for example, and acquire it from wherever it may be lying?

  If such an argument wins the day—and it most probably will—the first submarine mines in the South Pacific will almost certainly be developed. The bulk cutter and the auxiliary cutter and the collecting machine will, in due course, be lowered into the ocean and will start to crunch, grind, and tear their unheard and invisible ways through the undersea ranges of the Bismarck Sea, and will turn the seafloor into a moonscape of unutterable ugliness—or, it would be ugly, were anyone able to see it. But since the sea is so deep, and the seabed so dark, and once scoured of its riches, it need never be seen again
, probably few will care. Nautilus and its shareholders will do well, will sleep happy, and the firm will move on to other projects in the same great ocean.

  Meanwhile the Alvin, now well into her fifties, will no doubt continue to dive ever deeper, and will make still more spectacular breakthroughs in submarine science. Whether mankind then makes responsible use of the ever-widening knowledge that the busy little craft brings back to the surface is, however, another matter altogether.

  1 Though little of her original 1964 structure remains intact, she is still at work in 2015, much refurbished and retrofitted and more agile after half a century of work than she was in 1964, when she first left her factory in Minnesota.

  2 The beauty of what was formally known as the U.S. Navy World Ocean Floor Map derives largely from its having been first painted in watercolors by a Tyrolean illustrator, Heinrich Berann, who was otherwise famed for creating a series of great mountain panoramas (Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Cascades) for the U.S. National Park Service.

  3 Gut is a misnomer, since tube worms do not have a digestive tract: instead, there is an organ called a trophosome, which is inhabited by the bacteria that provide the tube worm’s energy.

  4 As a teenage would-be geologist, I collected the beautiful yellow or brown sphalerite crystals that I once found littering a secret cleft in the moors in Cumbria, in northern England. I would trade them for other specimens (and occasionally for pocket money) to a rock dealer in London.

  5 Rabaul is not a happy town. It had an exceptionally unhappy war—it was once a huge Japanese naval base, but after being essentially isolated by Allied air raids and almost unable to defend itself from attack, it was regularly pummeled by Australian planes and then totally overrun shortly before the Japanese surrender. Then, in 1994, the two volcanoes close by (Ring of Fire volcanoes) erupted, with lightning strikes killing residents and forcing the entire town to be evacuated and then abandoned after almost every building was destroyed or covered by ash. Though the volcanoes have been quiet in recent years, little economic activity has resurfaced in the ruined city.

  [Marzolino/Shutterstock, Inc.]

  Chapter 9

  A FRAGILE AND UNCERTAIN SEA

  Flowers turned to stone! Not all the botany

  Of Joseph Banks, hung pensive in a porthole,

  Could find the Latin for this loveliness . . .

  —KENNETH SLESSOR, FIVE VISIONS OF CAPTAIN COOK, 1931

  Charlie Veron was diving contentedly in the warm shallows off the central Queensland coast’s Pandora Reef on a perfect sky-blue, early summer Saturday when something highly alarming suddenly caught his eye. He kicked his way down through darting blizzards of tiny fish to inspect the banks of multicolored corals below, in particular a cluster of branching specimens that were somewhat uncommon except on this one small island. In due time, Veron himself would give this unique coral the species name Goniopora pandoraensis.

  These clusters were mainly a rich brown and yellow, colors that contrasted brilliantly with the pinks, ochers, blues, and vivid greens of the other coral species that were later to make Pandora a favorite inshore site for divers and tourists (these days, mainly Japanese). But what alarmed Veron that Saturday was a highly unusual patch of pure white that he saw in the center of one of the Goniopora crowns. It was circular and maybe six inches across.

  He reached down with his bare hand and gently touched one of the white coral clusters. Most of the columns were still firm and alive—and sharp, as anyone who has touched a sliver of coral with a bare hand knows. Had they been dead, fronds of the skeleton would have snapped, the pressure of the merest touch causing fragments to tumble like snowflakes down to the seafloor. Veron was reassured that they were still alive, but at the same time he was highly alarmed, since their sickly appearance suggested they might be starting to die. He reached for his waterproof camera and snapped a single image: the first time he had seen on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, long the pride of Pacific biology, this unhappy harbinger of a potentially lethal phenomenon now known as coral bleaching.

  It was one of the first indications that the sea (and in this case, the Pacific Ocean’s portion of the world’s universal sea) was in serious trouble.

  Veron had been a naturalist, a scientist, a coral expert, and a student of the Barrier Reef’s fantastic coralline loveliness since 1972. In later life, he would discover, describe, and catalogue an immense proportion of the world’s 845 known species of hard, reef-building corals, and would write the definitive encyclopedias of the coral universe. So that day, he was uniquely qualified to realize that what he was seeing was a foretaste of something quite awful: a mass bleaching event that would spread around the entire tropical planet in the months and years to come. “It is horrible to see,” he remarked later. “Corals that are four, five, six hundred years old, they turn white and die. It is a very recent thing.”

  Often called the largest living organism on the planet, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef stretches for nearly fourteen hundred miles along the Queensland coast. But it is under threat from a rise in sea temperature and acidity, and its corals and inhabitants are in peril, their fate a potent symbol of global warming’s impact.* [Acropora.]

  This last was significant because it meant that some recently generated external force, at the time still unknown or uncertain or not wholly admitted, was causing these lovely and highly sensitive animals to wither, whiten, and in many cases pass away.

  Veron’s friend and colleague in Brisbane, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, had already put forward a convincing case that corals, uniquely, foretold with great accuracy the coming of global climate change—they could be considered the mine shaft canaries of approaching climate problems. He had long claimed that corals (being animals that look like plants, and which build castles for themselves of stone, thereby becoming a confusing trinity of biology, botany, and mineralogy) were vastly more important than as mere ocean-side decoration. They are among the most acutely sensitive of nature’s early-warning devices. They react very quickly to the minutest changes in their environments, a facility that allows them to serve as predictors of any number of the earth’s environmental troubles.

  And this is exactly what they appeared to be doing on that midsummer’s day on Pandora Reef: they were sending out an alarm to alert the world. Charlie Veron, acutely sensitized to even the subtlest changes in a coral population, was the first to notice it. So sweeping were the implications of his find that he has since devoted his life to promoting the importance of coral reefs—of their beauty, fragility, and impermanence, and of their abiding capacity to warn us of dangers ahead.

  The Pacific Ocean has a formidable amount of coral within its borders. It has twice as many species of coral as the Atlantic does. It sports thousands of coral atolls, numberless fringing reefs, and above all else, it has at its far southwestern edge, where the Coral Sea deeps meet the upwelling seabed off the beaches of eastern Australia, the three thousand reefs and nine hundred islands that make up the fourteen hundred miles of the Great Barrier Reef.

  And just as the panda and the blue whale have come to symbolize both the beauty and the impermanence of mammalian life; and just as creatures such as the bluefin tuna, the Grand Banks codfish, the dodo and the great auk, and the Japanese flowering cherry blossom have come to stand for the precious fragility of nature, the Barrier Reef has come to stand for the earth’s delicate and finely balanced frailty. Not just the frailty of corals. Not just of ocean life. But of the planet’s life, in total. For as goes the Great Barrier Reef, science is able to claim, so goes the natural world.

  Australia’s reef is certainly massive, the biggest in the world, far larger in length and area than any reef structure in the Bahamas; in the Red Sea; off the coasts of Belize, Yucatán, and Guatemala; off Florida or China; or among the growling dangers of the half-invisible Chagos Bank, in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It is so large that astronauts can see the pale green of its shallowings as it spears its ragged way northwestward off the coas
tline, all the way from the glittering tropic seas near Gladstone1 up to where it fizzles out and dies in the estuarine-muddied waters of the Torres Strait.

  Reefs take up a tiny proportion (just one-fifth of 1 percent) of the world’s surface, yet because they are home to such an astonishing diversity of marine life, they are of far greater significance than their size alone suggests. The Great Barrier Reef has almost four hundred types of hard and soft coral: brain corals, staghorn corals, pillar corals, plate corals. A quarter of all marine life is then supported by the gigantic reefs that corals such as these manufacture. The simple existence of reefs like these protects coastlines, nurtures fish, and contributes untold treasures to those who live by or close to them. The limestone of which the coral skeletons are made draws carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and plays a crucial role in the planet’s carbon cycle.

  A coral reef is the marine equivalent of a rain forest: full to bursting with life in all its glory, yet fragile, vulnerable, and presently in the gravest danger. Anyone with a face mask and a snorkel who slips over the side of a boat and into the warm and limpid shallows above the outer reef will be readily amazed. Just inches away is a polychrome feast of life—there are corals of all kinds and colors: green and yellow, red and pink, pale blue and rich brown; in every crevice waft the perpetually hungry cilia fronds of anemones or else the slow-opening and -closing mouths of clams; on each smooth slope of coral, hand-size crabs scuttle slowly sideways back and forth; and darting between the coral pillars, like yellow-striped moments of iridescence, are brilliant electric-blue pulses of sudden light, each one a tiny fish bent on its mysterious business. Larger fish, silver and sedate, weave their polite ways slowly through the currents; and below, in the coral sands, tiny creatures bury themselves in a whirlwind of particles, or emerge blinking into the green sea light. This immense tableau seems perpetually to rock and sway under the press of the tides, the currents, and the swells, all its imagery refracted down from the silver-sided surface above.