The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus by Susan Schiefelbein

Author:Susan Schiefelbein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9781596917552
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES

I always wondered what lies under the sea—not under the surface of the sea, in the water, but under the water, under the sands of the seafloor. Sonar’s cryptic messages concealed these secrets; its taunting signal only bounced back off the bottom, simply profiling the topography of undersea terrain. My longtime friend, the electrical engineering genius Dr. Harold Edgerton of MIT, shared my intrigue with the unknown geological provinces buried below. He and I spent hours lowering cameras into the depths, but even film of the deep-sea floor didn’t quell our nagging need to know what mysterious strata the bottom muds engulfed. At last Doc Edgerton devised a way to peer into these subterranean recesses: He invented instruments he called boomers and sparkers, which could hurtle powerful signals more than a mile down into the bottom. The intricate electronic echoes that reverberated back would reveal the various marbled layers of sediment that blanketed our planet’s sunken crust. I eagerly outfitted Calypso with the new equipment, hired a crew of electronic specialists, and set out to find what tiers of earth undergirded the Mediterranean basin.

As in most oceans, steep underwater canyons at the Mediterranean’s coastline dropped precipitously to an abyssal plain—a vast expanse that usually stretches out as smooth and level as a ballroom floor. But then, halfway between Nice and Corsica, we noticed a few low, barely discernible mounds swelling up slightly from the table-flat bottom. They looked like nothing more than ordinary drifts of sand. But were they? Sheer curiosity took hold; we stopped; we crisscrossed the mounds from above, on Calypso; we bombarded them from every angle with our signals. The sparker readouts were like X-rays of planet Earth; they showed that deep within the bottom sediments lay a vast, horizontal layer of hard material, spreading out for miles in all directions. But just below us, this layer had buckled, rising in fingerlike columns that pushed upward, their tips nearly touching the surface of the seafloor, forcing up our mounds. Salt domes!

Geologists had long believed that the Mediterranean was once an inland sea; here was physical evidence. Our discovery indicated that, without its present inflow from the Atlantic, the Mediterranean had at one time actually dried away; the evaporated seawater had left behind a blanket of salt perhaps 245 feet thick, which had undulated up into our domes. We eagerly submitted the find to the French Academy of Sciences, which published our paper.

Throughout the excitement, one disconcerting fact kept rubbing uncomfortably at the back of my mind. Every oil tycoon knows that salt domes often entrap petroleum. Our domes were located in deep water, some eighty-five hundred feet down. Drilling there would be extraordinarily hazardous and accidents, inevitable. Oil spills from drilling in relatively shallow waters off Santa Barbara and in the Gulf of Mexico have been damaging enough; a spill in the deep Mediterranean would induce nothing short of disaster. The nearly enclosed waters would be renewed only very slowly; oil would irreparably

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