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A Celebration of the Sea By Robert Ballard
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s a child, I always wanted to be the first to leave footprints in the wet sand following the ebb of each tide. I loved to run down the beach in search of the little treasures the waves deposited. Growing up in Southern California in the early 1950s, my imagination was limitless. We knew so little about the sea then, long before the theory of plate tectonics would explain the ocean floor’s systematic structure. We didn’t know the average depth of the sea, or even that the largest mountain range on the planet lay beneath the waves, waiting to be explored someday by a young boy from San Diego. In those days, people never thought twice when passing ships cleaned their bilges with the pristine waters of the Pacific. The oceans seemed so vast, never to be polluted. When the tuna and sardine fishermen returned to their home ports all along the California coast, they never thought the supply of fish would ever run short. Our knowledge of the ocean’s weather system and, more important, its internal structure, was primitive. It seemed akin to a bathtub full of water, with a silent and motionless abyss at its center. In the 1960s, our nation turned to the heavens, searching for solutions to our growing problems or simply dreaming about what might be. That was when private industry was promising to colonize space. And while we reached for the stars, we also turned to the sea, expecting the formation of a “wet NASA” ocean agency, as our rich nation called upon its industrial might to explore and then exploit the wonders of Davy Jones’ locker.
That was when the bathyscaphe Trieste left San Diego to conquer the ocean depths with its historic 35,800-foot dive to the bottom of Challenger Deep off Guam, and when it seemed like nothing could stop man’s conquest of the sea. Every aerospace company in the country began to build deep diving submersibles for this new high-tech adventure.
That was when the oil industry was just beginning to extend its drilling platforms offshore. And scientists were telling us about the rich mineral resources of the abyssal plains where vast expanses of mineral-rich manganese nodules lay waiting like gold nuggets for a modern-day forty-niner to just come and pick them up. That was when others were telling us about the potential bonanza of drugs from the sea that would help cure our ailments, when engineers were trying to think of ways to harness the energy of the waves and tides. That was when Captain George Bond and Jacques Cousteau were beginning to live beneath the sea and visions of underwater cities danced in the heads of dreamers like me.
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As I sit in my library on Cape Cod thousands of miles away from San Diego and almost a half century later, I find myself revisiting those early childhood dreams. We now know a great deal more about the sea and the land surface beneath it. Finally, after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, we began to unlock the secrets of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. We’ve found it to be the largest feature on the planet, wrapping itself around the globe like a giant seam, covering 23 percent of Earth’s total surface area. We also understand the ridge’s origins and continued rebirth thanks to the concepts of plate tectonics. We have discovered exotic life forms in the sea’s hidden recesses. Life forms that live off the energy of the Earth instead of the sun, through the magic of chemosynthesis. And from these life forms we may better understand the origin of life on this planet and its potential on other planets in our solar system and the universe beyond. We may even bioengineer the offspring of these life forms to help us process the toxins and pollutants of the industrial world above. We have discovered minerals deposited around high-temperature “black smokers” that characterize the hottest of these life-sustaining hydrothermal vents. Some remind us of a vast underwater Yellowstone Park, with inverted reflecting pools bounding back the lights from our new, advanced robotic vehicles. We have discovered oil deposits in ever-increasing water depths as engineers race to come up with bigger and better ways to extract those riches. But we have also discovered that the ocean’s environment is more
ANNUAL EDITIONS fragile than we ever thought, that its living resources are not inexhaustible, and that its weather systems are far more complex than we ever imagined. We now know that the oceans control the globe’s weather systems, moderating its extremes and making life on our planet possible. We have discovered that the deep sea contains a vast warehouse of historical artifacts. We have found through our exploration of the Titanic, the Bismarck, and the ships of Iron Bottom Sound off Guadalcanal, site of the famous World War II battle, that the deep sea is a preserver of human history. I’m intrigued by the fact that there is probably more history preserved in the dark cold depths of the sea than in all the museums of the world combined. This year [1995] I will mount an expedition to find sunken ships along the Rome-Carthage trade route using a nuclear sub, the NR-1, recently made available by the Navy. Yet despite these recent discoveries and the promise of more to come— including the potential for the extraction of thermal energy and medicines from the sea—a mood of pessimism have overtaken us. Perhaps it’s a lingering hangover from the fatigue of fighting the Cold War to an end, or a remnant of the cynicism of the ’60s and ’70s that followed Kennedy’s assassination and the Vietnam War, a cynicism that
seems to dampen our belief in ourselves and in our ability to live in harmony with Earth. Ironically, the oceans are more important to the survival of mankind than ever before. Today there are more people living on the surface of our planet than have inhabited it during the entire history of the human race. A population that has taken us more than 500,000 years to reach will double again in just the next century. Clearly, our generation and the next—and yet more generations to come—will not live on the surface of the moon, let alone Mars and Venus. Perhaps the most important image to return to us from space came when the Apollo astronauts focused their cameras back on Earth as they sped to the moon, revealing a tiny blue-green object lost in the black void of space. Earth is our spaceship and home, yet we live on less than 20 percent of its surface. If our species is to survive and prosper in a world at peace, it must begin moving out onto and beneath the sea. Having spent more time than most in the deep abyss, I realize that most of our planet exists in a world of eternal darkness, a world of mud and gloom where I would not send my worst enemy to live. It is not there that I see the future of our race. It is on and in the shallow depths of the world’s oceans. Unfor-
From Popular Science, May 1995. © 1995 by Popular Science.
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tunately, I know of no major effort on the part of our country to determine the plausibility of such a future, or more important, the technologies needed to make it happen. But even if we learn to live below the shallow waters of the sea, the area of bottom surface reached by the sun’s energy is roughly equal only to the area of the North American continent. Thus the sea may provide an opportunity that the generations of the future may use for some extra living space, but eventually it will not be able to sustain a continually expanding human population. The only way we can solve this problem is to educate the young to the true perils they face if population growth is not carefully controlled. The present and future generations of young minds entering this world are no different from the little boy who grew up in San Diego so many years ago. I have great faith in their ability to meet the challenges of the future if we only teach them how to dream. And if they do, I am confident the oceans, the lands beneath, and the life within will play critical roles in their future.
Robert Ballard, discoverer of the sunken Titanic, is Director of the Center of Marine Exploration of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
