Neither the Japanese nor the American vessel will be the first to make the descent to the Ocean Everest. The U.S. bathyscaphe Trieste, a crude undersea blimp, floated down to the Challenger Deep in 1960. But the Trieste just sat there for 20 minutes, unable to explore. The new robots will be able to conduct the first mobile search of the hadal zone-the virtually unexplored ocean depths below 6,000 meters-where, some scientists believe, there may be hidden pockets of life. The hadal depths-including the Challenger Deep are found mainly in the winding ribbon of precipitous canyons that encircles the Pacific Rim, and winds into the Caribbean and Indian Ocean. Whatever else they find, the robots will bring back the first moving pictures of these previously unreachable holes in “inner space.”
_B_The race is on:b The Japanese undersea vessel, the Kaiko, is the pride of the Japan Marine Science and Technology Center (Jamstec). It will attempt the descent in late summer. Following on Kaiko’s heels is the Jules Verne Explorer, the brainchild of California engineer Graham Hawkes, a British expatriate who, unknown to Jamstec, launched a crash program in May to beat Japan back to the Challenger Deep. He plans to launch the Explorer early next year. But Hawkes’s main ambition is far grander: the Explorer will test hull materials for Deep Flight II, a single-passenger “underwater airplane” that Hawkes hopes to pilot to the Ocean Everest by early 1996.
Many of the backers of Hawkes’s Project Deep Flight are old enough to remember John F. Kennedy’s call on mankind to “tap the ocean depths,” and are still trying to make it happen. The project’s prospectus evokes Sir Edmund Hillary along with Captain Nemo: while Mount Everest is now virtually a tourist stop, no one has returned to the Ocean Everest. To Don Walsh, pilot of the Trieste and now a consultant to Project Deep Flight, the United States has ceded its lead to Ja “If I may mix my metaphors,” says Walsh, “Japan’s polestar is the sea, and the deep-vehicles program is the ultimate expression of that.”
Jamstec, a quasi governmental agency, has spent six years and organized five heavyweight corporations, led by Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Kawa saki, to build Kaiko. The $50 million robot has five TV cameras and a pair of six-foot robotic arms, and will dive off the Yokosuka, considered the Queen Elizabeth 2 of deep-sea research vessels. For his part, Hawkes is getting started on the Explorer with a few employees and contractors at his undersea-vehicle workshop in Port Richmond, Calif. The $300,000 Explorer, a camera probe with no arms, will dive off what Hawkes describes as the cheapest ship he can rent in Guam. “That’s part of the mischief,” says Hawkes, who has nearly completed Deep Flight I, a prototype he started in his ex-wife’s garage. “It’s not technologically difficult. It’s symbolic, like the man on the moon. And I think America should get there first.”
Since the retirement of the Trieste, in 1961, the United States has been content to leave the ocean below 6,000 meters to the few strange creatures known to swim there. It’s a cost-benefit calculation: a vehicle that can dive to 6,000 meters can reach 97 percent of the ocean floor, and it’s expensive to dive deeper. So little is known down to even 1,000 meters, why go farther? And how? American oceanographers debate the costs and merits of manned versus unmanned vehicles. Meanwhile, starting in the early 1980s, Jamstec built robots and submersibles, each diving deeper than the last, culminating in 1989 with the three-passenger Shinkai 6500, the world’s deepest-diving submersible (maximum depth: 6,500 meters). With Kaiko, Jamstec will reach the sea’s deepest limit.
Today there are only five submersibles (one American) that can reach 6,000 meters. (Military submarines descend no deeper than 900 meters.) These 1 0-ton submersibles float up and down using ballast, and crawl about the deep-sea floor at 1.5 knots. In contrast, Hawkes says, the 1.5-ton Deep Flight II would not use ballast, remaining buoyant as it “powers down” to the Challenger Deep at top speeds of 15 to 20 knots. Hawkes envisions a fleet of these “fully hydrobatic” vessels swooping over the vast ocean plains and into the trenches, which cover a total area the size of Western Europe: “The reason for doing this is simple: I want to fly around down there. I’m sure we’re missing something big.”
The officials at Jamstec are not given to romantic metaphors. Kaiko means “trench.” After the symbolic trip to the Challenger Deep, Kaiko will do basic scientific research. One possible future assignment could be to position seismometers in the Japan Trench, where two continental plates grind together, causing the nearly constant tremors that rattle Japan. A Japanese government panel has set a goal of developing a manned vehicle that can dive 11 kilometers by the year 2000. Jamstec senior engineer Shinichi Takagawa says he, too, wants to “speed up the commute” but needs something that can stop and work on the bottom; if Deep Flight II stops, it would float to the surface.
What the new adventurers might find on the bottom is a matter of some dispute. “An inner-space race-God save us! I tell you, it serves no purpose,” says marine biologist Robert Hessler, who in 1966 was the first scientist to dive in the first research submarine, the U.S. Navy’s Alvin. “Japan is a lot like the United States was in the 1960s. They have a lot of money to throw around, and they can afford to go on a fishing expedition.” To skeptics, the “inner space” metaphor is misleading: on the moon, Neil Armstrong walked around, Alan Shepard hit golf balls and the pictures were spectacular. The bottom of the ocean is a world of total darkness. “When we go to the sea floor, we don’t get out, so are we really there?” asks Robert Ballard, a submersible pioneer who believes a robotic “telepresence” will replace man in undersea research. He calls going to the Challenger Deep “a stunt. There’s nothing down there but mud.”
On Jan. 23, 1960, the Trieste touched bottom, 35,800 feet down at the Challenger Deep. Walsh and Swiss explorer Jacques Piccard floated back to the surface with a window cracking from the pressure. Life magazine put them on the cover. President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave them medals. But the adventurers had no samples, no “science” to show for their effort. They say they saw a “flat fish,” which they presented as evidence of life at hadal depths. Many scientists were unimpressed. Says marine biologist Richard Rosenblatt, " Everyone agrees it was a sea cucumber."
_B_Strange oases:b In recent years, however, scientists diving in submersibles have discovered strange oases of creatures living around deep-sea hot springs down to 4,000 meters, and around cold seeps of natural gas. Some say these cold seeps could also be found at the bottom of trenches. “You’re doubling the pressure, which means you could find some really spectacular life forms down there, a winter-wonderland environment,” says Rutgers University biologist Richard Lutz. “Then again, you could find nothing-but you don’t know until you look.”
Scientists who study gelatinous animals have found that these creatures grow larger in deeper waters: jellyfish three feet in diameter, 100-foot wormlike predators. These could also be found at hadal depths, scientists say. “All of us have questions about life in that extreme habitat that we’d love to investigate,” says biologist Bruce Robison, science director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California. “What lives at those depths, and how do they do it? The enzyme system would be radically different. The biomolecular structure would be grossly distorted. How do they behave? Where does the food come from?”
The problem, however, is keeping specimens alive. Jamstec is building Deep Star, a $40 million system of pressure chambers to cultivate microorganisms retrieved at depths down to 6,500 meters. Deep Starwill focus first on basic questions like gene and protein analyses, says a Jamstec spokesman, “but our research will become useful for medical or industrial use in the long haul.”
For some Americans, Japan has become the land of last opportunity. Sylvia Earle, Hawkes’s ex-wife and a marine biologist, and John Craven, one of the U.S. Navy’s early “deep submergence” visionaries, have been working as consultants to governor Morihiko Hiramatsu of Oita Prefecture. Craven is in Hawaii, trying to mold concrete 3,000 meters under the Pacific and to generate energy and grow strawberries with deep-sea water. He dreams of “floating cities” off Oita, which could be used as platforms to send tourist submarines to the Challenger Deep. Hiramatsu says he has a “keen interest” in the idea. “It’s frustrating, because we’d like the United States to be doing this,” says Craven. “But we’re so far out here in Hawaii, we do things the mainland won’t even come and look at.”
_B_Return voyage:b Tourist submarines to the Ocean Everest? It has taken a long time just to mount a single return voyage to the deepest place on the planet. In 1961, a year after his descent into the Challenger Deep, Piccard wrote: “That man is headed for ultimate adventure at the basement of earth, there is no doubt at all.” Now 70, Piccard says he, like everyone else, expected too much back in the ’60s. But he’s not discouraged. “The sea is something that will be there long after we are gone,” he says. “We have a long time to do this.” He’s pleased that humans may go back soon. “We opened the door, and now we must go and see what’s behind the door.” In the meantime, he’ll continue his current business-building tourist submarines in Lausanne. For now, they operate down to 100 meters-a bit short of the Challenger Deep.
