Robert Kunzig - Mapping the Deep: The Extraordinary Story of Ocean Science

This recounting of recent advances in the ocean sciences presents a lot of fundamental Earth science in easily understood terms.... Most writing about the sea, even in the scientific literatur, addresses only coastal or continental shelf phenomena, and I value this book for its almost exclusive attention to the neglected deep oceans.

Alan Longhurst, Nature

Fascinating.... On every page, another aspect of the oceans strangeness emerges.... Anyone who peers over the edge of a boat this summer, down into the green and fuzzy murk below, and feels that frisson of awe that the sea can suddenly evoke, will find plenty of interest in this book.

Philip Marsden, Sunday Times (London)

Spirited and engaging.... A nimble, thorough introduction to the ocean in all its vast, untamable, and fearsome attraction. Kunzigs flair should stir readers awe and allow them to share in his protective urge.

Kirkus Reviews

With grace and humor and net cast widely for facts, [Kunzig] presents a compendium of what is known about the ocean and how the men and women we now call oceanographers have assembled that knowledge over the centuries.... A rich portrait.

Scientific American

To my mother and father

THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY
OF OCEAN SCIENCE

ROBERT KUNZIG

Copyright 2000 by Robert Kunzig

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.

Published in 2000 by Sort of Books
First published as a Norton paperback 2000

An earlier edition of this text was previously published in 1999 by W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10110 USA under the title The Restless Sea: Exploring the World Beneath the Waves

1999 Robert Kunzig.

Typeset in Minion and Meta
Book Design by Henry Iles Design
Printed at Courier Companies, Inc.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

eISBN-13: 978-0-393-34535-3

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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IMAGINE you looked out your window one morning and saw jellyfish. Not just the occasional songbird fluttering or hawk circling, soon to alight again, but a sky full of floating gelatinous animals, jellyfish and ctenophores and salps sucking in microscopic plankton. Every now and then a shark or a tuna glides through noiselessly; every now and then one of the jellies starts glowing like a giant firefly. A sky like that would be worth exploring, would it not?

Imagine that when you picked up your newspaper, the lead story concerned a mountain range newly discovered in Switzerland. Its peaks, according to the paper, were higher than 10,000 feet; geographers were amazed. You would be amazed too, would you not?

Imagine, finally, that when you stepped out into your backyard, you discovered a new species of plant. And reporting this to the proper authorities, you learned that this plant of yours, which no one had seen before, because no one had looked, was so fabulously abundant in everyones backyard that it seemed to be exerting a significant influence on the climate of the whole planet. Perhaps you can imagine that; perhaps not.

The ocean is a sky like that, a landscape like that, a backyard like that. It is 320 million cubic miles of water covering 140 million square miles of seafloor covering seven-tenths of Earth. Great discoveries remain to be made there, discoveries as big as mountains or as Architeuthis, the giant squid. Giant squid are the worlds largest invertebrate animals, as much as 60 feet long; we know that because from time to time their corpses wash ashore somewhere. But they have never been observed scientifically in their native habitat. In 1999 the Smithsonian Institution in Washington organized an expedition whose chief purpose was to find a giant squid in the waters off New Zealand, where fishermen have hauled up the odd Architeuthis in their nets. The researchers stayed out for a month with their television crew, diving daily in a submersible, reporting their observations of whales and other creatures on the expedition Web site but they never saw Architeuthis. Maybe by the time you read this someone will have. But maybe not. The ocean is a place where giant squid, and much else, can still hide.

The ocean remains largely unexplored and yet oceanographic exploration in the past half century has completely transformed our view of it: both statements are true, and they are the intertwined threads of this book. In 1950, when the famous naturalist Rachel Carson summed up the state of marine science in her book The Sea Around Us, only two men, William Beebe and Otis Barton, had ever penetrated deeper into the ocean than sunlight does; they had descended half a mile beneath the waves off Bermuda in a primitive steel sphere dangling from a ship. No one had ever been to the deep ocean floor. No one guessed the tremendous diversity of animals that lived there, or for that matter in the water above. No one knew that a range of seafloor volcanoes, the mid-ocean ridge, ran right around the planet, or that it was dotted with hot springs that teemed with an entirely new form of life a form no one, in 1951, could possibly imagine. No one had mapped the global web of currents, surface and deep ones, that, along with the microscopic floating plants, the phytoplankton, exert a profound influence on our climate. The deep had not really been mapped at all.

The change since then is hard to sum up in a few sentences. It is like the change of view you get in going from an overcast night sky to a clear one, or from a city night to a country one: what once was dull black is now full of stars. The ocean has become a lot more interesting in the last half century. When Carson wrote her book, the seafloor was considered an ancient, unchanging place, a passive receptacle for detritus washed off the continents; its mountains were far older than the ones on land and destined to outlive them. We now know the opposite is true. The seafloor is the youngest part of Earth, because it is constantly being made anew by the volcanic outpouring of the mid-ocean ridge. Something similar could be said of the ocean in general: it has in all ways come to seem more full of motion and energy, life and change, than it used to.

We ourselves, it is now clear, can change the ocean. It may be too large for us to grasp easily, but it is quite small enough for us to muck up. We have always caught as many fish as we could, always treated the ocean as a garbage can, but now there are more than twice as many of us as there were half a century ago, and our technology is more efficient and our garbage more durable. Day after day the newspapers confirm the trend. In the summer of 1999, the dead zone on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico a fishless region of oxygen-depleted water that has recurred every summer since the mid-1990s, and that is caused by pollutants washing down the Mississippi River reached a record extent of more than 7,700 square miles, which is almost as big as Wales. In November 1997, when a 70-ton finback whale washed ashore on a beach in northern Spain, an autopsy revealed that its digestive tract had been clogged by 40 pounds of plastic shopping bags, trash bags, boat lines, yogurt containers. Plastic, French researchers reported in 1999, accounted for more than 80 percent of the trash they found when they systematically surveyed the continental shelf around France and northern Europe. They found half a billion bits of trash in all, one every few yards in some parts of the Mediterranean.