COLUMN ONE : Sea Studies Struggle in Space Age : Frustrated by our preoccupation with the stars, oceanographers urge us to look down, not up. They cite natural wonders and lament the scientific ventures that they say are being shortchanged.
Tired of sitting on the sidelines as space scientists reap the glory--and fat budgets--ocean explorers are trying to probe new depths and tantalize the public with discoveries of bizarre life forms never before imagined under the sea.
“The space shuttle’s toilet cost $23 million,” lamented ocean explorer Sylvia Earle, who is part of a fund-raising effort to build deeper-diving submersibles. “The (entire) National Undersea Research Program budget is $16 million.”
Frustrated that our preoccupation with the skies may have come at the expense of the oceans, scientists such as Earle cite recent and major ocean discoveries as evidence of how little mankind has explored the seas and how much more may be out there to find.
In their quest, scientists squeeze into tiny submersibles with cabins the size of a closet. They plunge deep into dark, frigid waters, where the pressure is so intense it could squash a plastic foam cup to the size of a thimble.
Long-held beliefs can be quickly shattered.
In the last 15 years alone, scientists have stumbled upon communities of unusual creatures living in total darkness on the bottom of the ocean, dependent on noxious chemicals emitted from the Earth’s fiery insides where the sea floor has split. Until their discovery, it was commonly assumed that all life depended upon sunlight.
One of the largest sharks in the world, the megamouth, a whale-like animal with huge eyes and an apparently docile nature, was not discovered until 1976. Some scientists even suspect that sea monsters may exist in the guise of giant squids.
“We know extremely little about the sea,” said Elliott A. Norse, chief scientist for the Center for Marine Conservation in Washington. “Hundreds of years of exploration have only really just given us bits and pieces of a puzzle, and it is still very incomplete.”
Some marine scientists complain that mankind knows more about the dark side of the moon than the oceans, even though the seas are generally believed to be where life on Earth began. They cover more than 70% of the planet, absorb much of its pollution, feed nations and provide at least 40% of its oxygen. But only 10% or less of the sea floor has been explored.
Although the seas yield important information about pollution’s effects and provide new sources of medicines and industrial products, ocean research has traditionally taken a back seat to space exploration.
Scientists attribute the disparity to human nature. People prefer looking up, rather than down. Stargazing has fascinated mankind for ages. The skies even have religious connotations--the location of heaven.
“There is a mystique about the stars,” said University of Virginia research professor G. Carleton Ray. In contrast, “the ocean historically has been considered extremely hazardous, a place of devils and monsters, death and destruction.”
Eager to change such attitudes, some researchers are participating in an exploration effort that will be documented in a 10-part TV series for worldwide distribution. The programs will feature scientists exploring leagues under the sea.
Oceanography may also get a boost from “seaQuest DSV,” Steven Spielberg’s futuristic undersea adventure series scheduled to air on NBC this fall. The series consultant is scientist Robert D. Ballard, who was the first to discover that life could thrive on the sea floor completely independent of sunlight.
“People assume that because we can go to the moon, we can go anywhere on Earth,” said Earle, a former chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “It’s not true.”
A vehicle capable of taking people to the deepest part of the oceans no longer exists. Only once, in 1960, did explorers go to the floor of the Mariana Trench--37,800 feet under the Pacific east of Guam. A Navy submersible, which later was retired because of age and expensive maintenance, made the dive.
Its two-man crew saw a foot-long, white, flat fish browsing the sea floor, confirming for the first time that fairly high orders of marine life survive in the deepest abyss.
Even knowledge of the landscape of the ocean floor is relatively new. Only decades have passed since mankind learned that huge mountain ranges, taller and more extensive than any on land, rise from the ocean floor. This year, scientists discovered the greatest concentration of active volcanoes on Earth in the South Pacific.
A nearly six-foot-long, scaly, sharp-toothed fish, which scientists believed had become extinct 70 million or 80 million years ago, was found to be living in 1938 and was not photographed alive under water until the last decade. Called coelacanths, the creatures have arm-like fins and are “related to the fishes that gave rise to us,” Norse said.
Scientists only now are learning that gelatinous creatures--transparent, oddly shaped animals of various hues and sizes--are far more plentiful than once imagined. These animals snare food by setting traps and play a key role in the ocean’s food chain.
One of the biggest discoveries in oceanography was made in 1977 when scientists found an oasis of bizarre animals living near cracks in the deep sea floor called hydrothermal vents.
The animals, found about 250 miles northeast of the Galapagos Islands, survived by feeding on bacteria that depend on chemicals produced inside the crevices.
Until then, said Oregon State University Prof. Louis Gordon, who was among the first to see the animals, scientists had believed that the deep ocean was a barren desert, with too little food sinking down from the surface to sustain much life.
In one of the first manned expeditions to the vents, Gordon and two others climbed aboard a submersible for the 2 1/2-hour descent, too elated about what they would see to be nervous.
Light gave way to darkness as the vehicle descended, until the blackness outside the small window only occasionally was brightened by the glow of a passing luminescent sea creature. The taped singing of humpback whales filled the cramped cabin.
Finally, at the ocean’s bottom, the three witnessed what other scientists had stumbled upon just days earlier: an array of exotic creatures thriving without sunlight--an ecosystem not believed to exist on Earth.
“You really felt like a Columbus-type, seeing things that no other human had seen before,” said Gordon, an associate professor of oceanography.
Gigantic red-tipped tube worms without eyes, mouths or guts were tangled amid footlong clams. Such communities have since been found elsewhere, and so far about 295 new species have been discovered in them.
“The vent animals are just so unusual,” said J. Frederick Grassle, director of the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University. “It’s . . . like wandering into a valley of dinosaurs.”
Some scientists suspect that life may have originated in such ocean floor vents because of the abundance of elements that are vital to making organic compounds and the presence of energy needed to assemble the compounds.
“It’s almost like an alien planet because instead of energy coming from the sun, it comes from the center of the Earth,” said Laurence Madin, associate scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. “People have suggested it is the kind of thing you could imagine finding on some distant planet--an ecosystem divorced from the sun.”
Although much of the zeal for discovering what lies in the ocean’s interior is fueled by an explorer’s determination to travel to the unknown, practical reasons for investigating the seas are plentiful.
Understanding their chemistry is important to understanding how much the oceans can mitigate global warming caused by pollution.
The oceans also are threatened by excessive fishing. New technology makes it possible to wreak havoc on fish populations. Many scientists say some populations may never fully recover, and when one population crashes, it generally has a spiraling effect on others.
As with species on land, marine organisms are also important to medicine and industry. Several can be used against cancer and tumors, and derivatives from marine plants and animals have been tapped for drugs.
Antiviral substances from seaweeds have been useful in treating cold sores and venereal diseases, and researchers have discovered a chemical in sea sponges that has been effective against viral encephalitis. Bacteria found in deep ocean vents may also have industrial applications because of their ability to withstand extreme heat.
Despite the possible applications, deep sea research is limited by the capabilities of submersibles and the funds to use them. Although mankind has traveled more than 250,000 miles into space, the world has only five manned submersibles capable of diving as deep as 20,000 feet--less than four miles.
The Japanese have the manned submersible that can dive deepest, 21,320 feet. But no manned submersible exists that can bring researchers to the deepest 2% of the ocean--as deep as 36,000 feet.
“It’s like telling a mountain climber you can only climb so high,” said Don Walsh, a former Navy officer who with another man made the record 1960 dive to the deepest part of the ocean.
Eager to set records and uncover new worlds, U.S. scientists and engineers have started the Ocean Everest project to raise $10 million to build a vehicle capable of taking scientists to the deepest abyss.
“It’s an area the size of the United States that we don’t have access to at the moment,” Earle said. “It’s a unique part of the planet that is sure to be populated by some interesting creatures and to have some geological processes that are fundamental to understanding how the planet works.”
But some experts contend that new vehicles are not needed in light of the limited amount of money available for operating them and the current fleet’s capabilities of reaching 98% of the ocean floor.
The problem for scientists, said Barrie Walden of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, is obtaining grants to pay for the use of submersibles, which can cost $25,000 to $30,000 a day to operate.
“The gantlets scientists have to go through . . . are erected because of competition for the funds, not for the time slots,” said Walden, manager of submersible engineering and operations.
Diving can also be risky, although only five people have been killed in submersibles in the last 25 years, Walsh said.
To save money and protect human life, more scientists are using remote vehicles, robots manipulated by pilots aboard a mother ship. The unmanned vehicles, attached by a cable to a boat and hoisted by a crane, contain video cameras, sensors and movable arms that can collect samples. The Japanese soon are expected to launch such a vehicle that will be capable of diving to the deepest parts of the ocean.
Monterey biological oceanographer Jim Barry uses a robot to explore cold seeps, underwater springs that are rich in either hydrogen sulfide or methane.
Scientists discovered in 1984 that creatures in these seeps survive without sunlight, in much the way animals do in the warm springs or hydrothermal vents.
During a recent expedition, the remote vehicle owned by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute dived about 12 miles off Monterey. Inside a darkened room aboard the mother ship, scientists watched the video being sent back as the robot made its journey downward.
It fell through what looked like a snowstorm, fast-moving dots of white that in fact were fecal matter from marine life, tiny bits of algae and the remains of dead sea creatures. Gelatinous creatures, one shaped like an octopus, glowed purple and white as the craft floated by. Another looked as though its body were filled with marquee lights.
The robot reached the bottom about 3,000 feet below, where the sea floor was covered with white clams. The pilot, seated in the dim control room, painstakingly maneuvered the robot’s arm as it scooped up samples from the sediment and slid them into containers attached to the machine.
Before the advent of such technology, people mostly explored the ocean by dragging nets and buckets under the water and examining what turned up. But much of the sea life fell out of the nets before reaching the surface.
More recently, military interests largely propelled ocean exploration. Research aimed at protecting and detecting submarines has yielded important information about water temperatures, saline contents and currents.
Annually, about 8%, or $177 million, of the National Science Foundation’s research money is devoted to ocean issues. Donald Heinrichs, head of the oceanographic centers and facilities for the foundation, estimates that ocean research in this country receives no more than 20% to 25% of the amount devoted to space research, most of that spent for satellites, space shuttles and other hardware.
Despite their envy, few marine researchers dispute the importance of the space program in understanding the oceans.
Satellites have helped oceanographers produce detailed maps of the sea floor. Space-based instruments also provide images of the contents of the upper layers of the oceans.
Indeed, aquanauts are not unlike astronauts in their zeal for adventure and passion for science. Walsh, who has spent months living in a submarine, listening to the whistling of dolphins and the snapping, cracking and sizzling of other sea life around him, has long wanted to travel into space.
The former Navy officer once worked with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, running a spacecraft oceanography project, and aspired to be an astronaut.
“What I wouldn’t give to be able to look out the window and see the whole planet out there,” said Walsh, whose record ocean descent made the cover of Life magazine in 1960. “I don’t care so much about the land, but to see the oceans from space.”
A World of Water
Some facts and figures about the Earth’s oceans:
* Area: Oceans cover 71% of the planet.
* Volume: By volume, oceans make up 99% of the planet’s living space.
* Depth: The planet’s deepest spot is the Mariana Trench in the Pacific floor, six miles below the surface. By comparison, Mt. Everest is five miles above sea level. The average depth of the oceans is about two miles.
* Surface: The top 10 feet of the oceans hold as much thermal energy as in the entire atmosphere.
* Uses: Substances from marine plants and animals are used in such products as medicine, ice cream, toothpaste, gasoline, cosmetics and livestock feed.
SOURCE: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
