For love of the deep sea

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, oceanography, adventurers, submersibles, memoirs

Spoiler: Susan Casey did indeed get to dive with Victor Vescovo in his ultra-deep-diving submersible Limiting Factor. Here they are about to dive to the base of Loihi, as we Haoles call it. The Hawaiians call the soon-to-be-a-Hawaiian-Island Kamaʻehuakanaloa. More on that anon.

Ms Casey's book is The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean. She has been enthralled by the ocean as far back as she can remember. She recounts her own life briefly, and chronicles the growing knowledge of the deep sea as humans have prepared more and better ways of seeing into it and of going there.

Many may still think of "the abyss" as a near-lifeless volume of water, and of the ocean floor as a vast stretch of "unoccupied" real estate with resources we can harvest with impunity. Their understanding is a few generations out of date. Two striking facts emerge from putting eyes in the deep sea, whether robotic (in remotely-operated vehicles, or ROVs) or in person: Firstly, life is everywhere, right down to the bottom of the deepest trenches; and Secondly, our trash is everywhere, from plastic bags and other litter even in the deepest holes, to fibers and bits of "stuff" in the flesh of fish and other animals captured all up and down the water column.

The book lacks an index, which precludes my going back to find the name of the new species of amphipod (they look vaguely like shrimp without the long carapace) which incorporates plastic fibers into its tissues, because, well, it has to. That's easier than trying to exclude them!

Along the way we learn of fish like bristlemouths (they have lots of sharp, very thin teeth), smaller than a finger, that exist in such numbers that they outweigh the entire mass of all mammals put together. Wouldn't you know it, as soon as they were discovered, fishing businesses began to speculate about how to make a net that trawls deep enough (a few miles), with fine enough mesh, to catch a few trillion of these for, well, whatever use can be found for them. That's ignoring the equivalent trillions of squids and jellyfish and hydrozoans (like chains of jellyfish—some are 150 feet long). This "bycatch", if deemed less valuable than the fishes, will be discarded, dying and dead, by the thousands of tons. I wonder what that will do to the chemical balance of the ocean? Ms Casey writes, "The idea of commercially fishing the twilight zone is off-the-charts stupid. That doesn't mean we won't do it." Lust for money makes people stupid.

We also learn of snailfish, the deepest-dwelling fish so far known. They live as deep as 23,000 feet, or 7,000 m. These snailfish came to bait dropped on the ocean floor.

Pressures of several tons per square inch affect the ways proteins work, and so far, snailfish and a few other fish species have been able to evolve ways to counteract certain pressure effects, but they haven't made it all the way to the bottom of the deepest trenches, which measure about 37,000 ft, or nearly 11,000 m. Other animals have done so, and are seen crawling around in the deepest of deeps.

The author devotes a chapter to the things she learned at a conference about seabed mining, and about efforts to prevent it or delay it. Large areas of the "abyssal plain", the flat-lying areas at depths between three and six kilometers (10,000 to 20,000 feet, or 2-4 miles), are paved with polymetallic nodules. Once called "manganese nodules", they consist of oxides and hydroxides of many metals. The transition metals (Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn) are the most abundant, but many other metals are present, including "rare earth" metals, which aren't really rare, but they are rather hard to separate from their ores. At one time they were thought to grow rather quickly. It has been learned that their diameter increases by one or two millimeters per million years.

Polymetallic nodules grow slowly enough that many animals live on and in them. The beautiful sponge in this picture distracts from the numerous "little white things" seen on the nodules. Consider this: every time scientists get the opportunity to sample the seabed, they find that about half of the organisms they bring up have never been seen before. This is also true of samples taken at deep hydrothermal vents, the "black smokers" and scarcer "white smokers". We don't know enough to know what we'd lose if millions of acres of the ocean floor were to be scraped clean, or if thousands of metallic "chimneys" at hydrothermal vents were "mined". We do know that the mid-to-deep creatures are intimately involved in the carbon cycle, which would be dramatically altered, and not for the better, by all the large-scale extraction businesses just mentioned. 

Hey, climate change activists? How come the Cancel Culture hasn't begun to target deep ocean mining firms? Here's where you can have a much greater impact than all prior efforts so far, combined! Get on it, my favorite fanatics!

So far we have just investigated a percent of a percent of a percent of what the ocean contains. Nearly all land life is found within 20 meters of the surface; in tropical rain forests, a decent proportion extends to four times that high, but those account for just a few percent of the total area. The volume of the terrestrial biosphere is thus about 3,000 trillion, or 3 quadrillion, cubic meters. The volume of the ocean is 1.33 million trillion, or 1.33 quintillion, cubic meters: 444 times as much! While it's unlikely that there is 400x as much biomass in the ocean as on land, it is quite reasonable to expect between 10x and 50x. And we don't know what 99.99% of it is!

In her quest to get to know the ocean deeps, naturally Ms Casey was eventually brought into contact with Victor Vescovo, who spent around $40,000,000 to have a full-ocean-depth submersible built, and to obtain ships and other equipment and crew, so he could dive to the deepest point in all five sections of the ocean. I reviewed his book about those experiences a couple of years ago. He has since made more dives in those locations and many more, sometimes solo, and more often with scientists accompanying. His sub Limiting Factor has been purchased by an organization named Inkfish Ocean Exploration (they don't have a website that I can find; it's owned by Gabe Newell). She accompanied a couple of the cruises, and was then asked if she wanted to take a dive herself (Did she ever!).

In 2021 she went on a dive with Vescovo to the base of the Kamaʻehuakanaloa seamount, to retrieve a costly piece of equipment that had descended and failed to ascent...and they had time for some exploration. While this dive wasn't in a trench, it did reach a depth greater than 17,000 feet, or 5 km. At the time, the number of people who had been on dives that deep numbered a couple of dozen. That number is growing, partly from the efforts of Inkfish and even more from manufacturers such as Triton (who manufactured Limiting Factor) that make 5- and 6 km-rated submersibles. Some of these can hold six or more persons. In addition to the immense scientific value of having eyes in situ, the huge impact just being in the deep ocean has on everyone who experiences it is slowly changing the public perception of the deep ocean.

I had an idea. Take every executive from a seabed mining company to see the nodule fields for themselves. I think of it as a kind of intelligence test. If someone takes such a drive and still has only dollar signs in his eyes, take him back down and leave him there (I suspect very few females could be that rapacious).

Failing that, get this book and read it. Read other books about the deep ocean. It's a problem that it costs 1,000 to 100,000 times as much to go one mile down as it does to go one mile up…in many places you can hike a mile up a mountainside in $30 sneakers and wearing jeans and a warm shirt. A tourist ride in a submersible costs in the $50,000 to $500,000 range. A bit more than the typical ocean cruise, and it lasts only a day (plus getting to and from the dive site). And bookmark this NOAA site, which access to livestreams from ships employing deep-diving ROVs to see what's going on, typically about a kilometer deep, but highly variable. During dive season (typically April to November, at least in the northern hemisphere), I like to have one of these cameras going on my screen. In the off-season they have highlights videos available.

Opening the ocean deeps

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, submersibles, deep ocean, expeditions

Josh Young has an explanation for what drives people like Victor Vescovo to extreme exploration: as many as eleven copies of a gene that affects sensitivity to dopamine, the "feel good" neurotransmitter. Most of us get along fine with two or three copies, and we may get a thrill from the occasional bit of risk-taking (like the pursuit of a friend and myself at age 13, of trying to go from one end of a block to another through back yards and not get caught). Those with genetically enhanced dopamine metabolism need stronger stuff.

Whether that is the explanation or not, Vescovo was driven, first to build a fortune of millions in various ventures, all the while spending substantial chunks of cash to complete the Explorers' Grand Slam, defined at the EGS website thus: "The Explorers Grand Slam or Adventurers Grand Slam is an adventurer's challenge to reach the North Pole, the South Pole and all of the Seven Summits." It takes a little more digging to find that "reaching" the Poles involves skiing at least the last hundred kilometers, even if you were taken there by aircraft, and that the Seven Summits are Everest, Kilimanjaro, Denali, Aconcagua, Vinson Massif (Antarctica), Elbrus, and Kosciuszko (Australia; later replaced by an Indonesian peak, the Carstensz Pyramid).

So there you are, fifty years old, and you've just completed the Grand Slam. Now what? There's plenty of life left in those old bones! Inspired by the challenge of the deep sea, Vescovo began almost immediately to add the Five Deeps to his accomplishments. As Josh Young writes in Expedition Deep Ocean: The First Descent to the Bottom of All Five of the World's Oceans, Victor Vescovo figured he could get a deep-diving submersible built for around $10 million or so, a tenth of his net worth at the time.

The actual cost came to more than twice that. Then the sub needed a tender, a ship and crew to take it from place to place and to launch and retrieve it. The submersible, built by Triton Submarines, was named Limiting Factor (LF), and the tender, a 225-foot craft, became Pressure Drop (PD). The ship needed extensive refitting. It had been a military craft, and upgrading it to commercial standards cost millions more. A state-of-the-art sonar system, so they could verify the depths reached, cost about another million, and three "landers", robotic, autonomous submersibles, cost $300,000 each. LF and PD and the landers were named for craft in the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks, a favorite series with Vescovo. The final cost of the construction, refitting, crewing, and expeditions was about $50 million.

In the picture above a portion of the pressure sphere and its portholes can be seen. The sphere is titanium, 59" in diameter (because of some international regulation), and weighs 8,000 lbs. From the size and weight I calculated that the wall thickness is 5.5". The sphere was certified in a testing chamber in Russia, the only one in the world that could test it to a pressure of 20,000 psi; the pressure at the Challenger Deep (Marianas Trench) is about 16,000 psi.

Much of the book relates the sturm und drang of getting the sub built and the tender refitted, plus the regulations and red tape Vescovo's team had to contend with, plus the friction that always develops when you have at least a dozen alpha males striving to work together. Much of the second half relates the year-long expedition to visit the Five Deeps (see more here). These, with their verified depths, are:

• Puerto Rico Trench, Atlantic Ocean, 8,376 m, 24,390 ft.
• South Sandwich Trench, Southern Ocean, 7,434 m, 24,390 ft.
• Java Trench, Indian Ocean, 7,192 m, 23,596 ft.
• Challenger Deep in Marianas Trench, Pacific Ocean, 10,925 m, 35,843 ft.
• Molloy Deep, Arctic Ocean, 5,551 m, 18,212 ft.

Of these, the Molloy Deep is the only one that is "shallower" than 6,000 m, the defined boundary of the Hadal Zone. Along the way, a few other deeps were plumbed, including the Sirena Deep, also in the Marianas Trench, at 10,714 m or 35,151 ft, which makes it the second-deepest Deep. Vescovo made at least one solo dive at each of the Five Deeps plus Sirena. He also made a solo dive to the wreck of the Titanic, and others made multiple dives at all locations.

A secondary function of the expedition was scientific, and a number of scientists were involved. So also were a couple of "tourists", including astronaut and game developer Richard Garriott, seen here with Vescovo inside LF. Garriott flew with ISS at his own expense ($30 million); I don't know if he self-funded his dive to the Challenger Deep, piloted by Vescovo.

Vescovo was one of a few pilots of LF, but when there was a celebrity to "take deep", such as Kathy Sullivan, the first woman to conduct a spacewalk and the now first woman to descend to the Challenger Deep, Vescovo piloted.

Triton and Vescovo were hoping the Triton Hadal Exploration System (LF plus PD) could be sold to a country, company, or consortium, but that has not yet occurred. Vescovo and his company Caladan Oceanic have conducted further explorations, typically with a more intense scientific component.

Although eating within LF is mentioned a few times, there is nothing about how toileting is handled in a sphere with an inside diameter of about four feet, further encumbered by oxygen tanks and other equipment, particularly with two occupants. If it were me (in my younger days, before my colon was shortened), a day or two of fasting, and abstaining from water for several hours before a twelve hour dive, would be needed. But I care for my creature comforts too much!

That's enough from me. It's a thrilling book, a great story well told.