To The Bottom Of The Sea

The radio program was the first of its kind: an explorer visiting an unknown realm and broadcasting his experience live to the American people. It was September 1932, and the naturalist William Beebe was descending through the waters off Bermuda to a depth of 2,200 feet. A telephone line linked his tiny craft, cramped as a space capsule, to the ship above. From there his voice—along with that of his topside assistant, Gloria Hollister—would reach the nation via the National Broadcasting Company.

On a dive two years earlier, Beebe had seen traces of deep-blue light even at a depth of 1,400 feet. This time, however, at 1,700 feet he declared that the surrounding sea was “black, black, black.” There was light nevertheless: luminescence from fish and other animals, so abundant and active as to leave him bewildered. Here was a host of species that Beebe knew from their photophore patterns: lanternfish, hatchetfish, round-mouths, and the saber-toothed viperfish. A school of shrimp appeared, visible in silhouettes provided by their own illuminations, and was suddenly attacked by a pair of large fish. Another fish swam near a porthole, displaying an inner luminescence that revealed its outline.

All too quickly it was time to ascend. The broadcast was ending; what was more, the ship above was pitching in a rough sea, causing the undersea craft to bounce and toss about at the end of its suspending wire cable. Just as the ascent began, however, Beebe made his most astonishing observation. Two barracuda-shaped fish slowly swam past, each about six feet lone, with large eyes and numerous luminescent teeth. A string of some twenty bluish lights ran along their sides, and additional lights hung from long whiplike protrusions below them. Beebe later classified them as members of a new species within a group known as the sea dragons.

This mix of science, exploration, and showmanship was quite in keeping with Beebe’s career. Years later he would be described as having been a Fifth Avenue Thoreau: a scientist who knew nature first hand, who had been equally at home in the jungle and in the parlor of his longtime friend Theodore Roosevelt. He was an avid organizer of expeditions, visiting the Himalayas to study pheasants there and observing a volcanic eruption at such close quarters that he was nearly overcome by fumes. He was also an avid popularizer of science, writing a host of books and articles in the wake of his travels. Despite his extensive scientific research, discovery, and writing, he was by no means an academic; in fact, he never even earned a bachelor’s degree.

Beebe was a thoroughly private man. He wrote no autobiography and insisted that his personal papers never be made available to anyone. But his influence persists in one important respect: He was the first to visit the ocean depths and to point the way to their eventual exploration.

Although he had made his reputation as an ornithologist, Beebe took to oceanography with a will during a 1925 expedition to the Galápagos Islands. He was far from the first person to descend into the sea using a diving helmet, but he was the first professional naturalist to do so as part of his work. The helmet was of copper and weighed twenty pounds; a pump on deck supplied it with air through a hose, and an additional forty pounds of lead counteracted its buoyancy. For all its clumsiness this diving gear sufficed to introduce Beebe to an enthralling new world.

Characteristically, he soon was writing of this undersea realm and even predicting that enjoying it would become part of people’s common experiences. Equally characteristically, he also talked of expeditions far below the reach of a helmeted diver. Late in 1926 he declared that he would pursue such explorations by building a diving chamber of his own design. The New York Times carried the story on page one.

Among the readers was Otis Barton, a wealthy engineer with his own interest in deep-sea exploration. He was not impressed with Beebe’s design concept, which the Times said was “like a laundry boiler hanging from the mother ship by a steel cable … equipped with neither lights nor telephone wires.” Barton preferred a spherical chamber whose shape would better resist the crushing pressures of deep water. Beebe’s fame made Barton reluctant to pursue his competing vision, but as months went by and no further news was heard of Beebe’s plans, Barton grew bolder.

At last he met with Beebe, whom he described as being as “unapproachable as an Indian potentate, and twice as wary.” But Beebe’s interest rose when he saw that Barton had brought detailed blueprints, and rose further still when Barton declared that he would draw on an inheritance from his grandfather and pay for the construction entirely from his own assets.

By now it was the beginning of 1929. Barton took his design to the Watson-Stillman Hydraulic Machinery Company in Roselle, New Jersey, which proceeded to cast his chamber out of steel. It weighed five tons. Then Barton visited Beebe’s research station in Bermuda and discovered that his sphere was too heavy for the available equipment. He promptly had the first casting melted down and a lighter one made, with an empty weight of two and a half tons. It was four feet nine inches in external diameter; its steel shell had a thickness of one and a half inches; and it would carry both Barton and Beebe. Beebe, meanwhile, made his own contribution. “We spoke of it casually and quite incorrectly as tank and cylinder and bell,” he later wrote. “One day, when I was writing the name of a deep-sea fish— Bathytroctes —the appropriateness of the Greek prefix [ bathys , meaning deep] occurred to me; I coined the word Bathysphere , and the name has stuck.”

The bathysphere was more than a thick-walled telephone booth. It had oxygen tanks and trays filled with chemicals that would absorb moisture and carbon dioxide. It also had three portholes made of three-inch-thick fused quartz, with a searchlight rigged to shine out through one of them. On the other side was what Beebe described as “the entrance, politely termed the ‘door.’ This round, fourhundred-pound Hd had to be lifted on and off by a block and tackle.” Its passageway was fourteen inches across, a diameter fitted to the slenderness of the intended occupants.

All this heavy construction was essential, for the pressures at depth would approach 100 atmospheres. On one occasion the pressure forced fourteen feet of telephone cable into the chamber, the line looping in coils over Barton. Worse mishaps occurred during two unmanned test dives to 3,000 feet. Water leaked in, nearly filling the bathysphere and greatly compressing its interior air. When the craft was lifted back to the deck, the best way to release the pressure appeared to involve loosening a bolt in the door. After a few turns the bolt “shot across the deck like a shell from a gun,” in Beebe’s words, to cut a half-inch notch in a steel winch thirty feet away. Water roared from the sphere, drenching the deck.

During subsequent manned dives Beebe called out descriptions of what he was seeing through the portholes. Gloria Hollister, herself an experienced naturalist, sat on deck with earphones plugged into the telephone circuit and took notes. These were mostly ichthyological: “2 black fish 8 inches long going by, rat-tailed, probably Idiacanthus … 30 Cyclothones , greyish white; can see every movement.” But Beebe also noted with care the changing light of the sea itself as his descents went deeper.

Even at less than 50 feet, the sea absorbed the sun’s red wavelengths. Beebe had a book with a color illustration of bright-red shrimps; these appeared “black as night.” Below 600 feet the view through a porthole “was of an indefinable deep blue quite unlike anything I have ever seen in the upper world.” It was “brilliance which yet was not brilliance,” a “dark, luminous blue,” bright to the eye and yet “so lacking in actual power that it was useless for reading and writing.”

Sounding still greater depths, he felt that “the terrible slow change from dark blue to blacker blue was the most impressive thing.” At 800 feet he found “the deepest, blackest blue imaginable.” At 1,250 feet the blue was “of some wholly new color term—a term quite absent from the human language … the characteristic most vivid was its transparency.” Another 150 feet and “we were sitting in absolute silence, our faces reflecting a ghastly blue sheen.” The ocean outside was “a solid, blue-black world … blue, blue, forever blue.” Finally, somewhat farther down, “the last hint of blue tapers into a nameless gray, and this finally into black.”

Beebe and Barton reached 1,426 feet during the summer of 1930. Two years later, in the descent broadcast by NBC, they reached 2,200 feet. Then in 1933 Gilbert Grosvenor, president of the National Geographic Society, agreed to sponsor a new series of dives. The bathysphere was extensively refurbished, with new portholes, telephone equipment, and oxygen system. In August 1934 Beebe and Barton reached a record depth of 3,028 feet; they might have gone deeper, but the supporting cable was about to run out.

These descents of 1934 were Beebe’s last visits to the abyss. Barton would renew his work with bathyspheres after World War II, building a new one that he called the benthoscope and reaching a depth of 4,500 feet off California in 1948. Already, however, its replacement was in view, in the form of a fully independent deep-diving craft that could maneuver in the depths without having to dangle at the end of a cable. This was the work of a Swiss physicist, Auguste Piccard, and it not only would go eight times as deep as Barton’s benthoscope but would open the abyss to routine research and even to salvage operations.

Piccard went to the abyss by way of the stratosphere. He was the son of a physics professor at Switzerland’s University of Basel, and he held a similar post at Belgium’s University of Brussels. He thus might have spent his life in the quiet world of Europe’s academies. But from his college days onward he had been an ardent balloonist, and by 1930 he was also pursuing a strong interest in cosmic rays. The combination of these two activities would set him on his path, first to the sky and then to the sea.

As early as 1913 a German researcher, Werner Kolhoerster, had reached 30,000 feet in a balloon and had found the intensity of cosmic rays to be twelve times greater than at sea level. But this was close to the limit in the open and unpressurized gondolas then in use; at higher altitudes a balloonist would die for lack of air.

Piccard envisioned a solution: a pressurized gondola with an oxygen supply and chemicals to absorb exhaled carbon dioxide. He approached Belgium’s science agency, the National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS), and won a grant to build it. In May 1931 he and an assistant took off from Augsburg, Germany, and rose to a record altitude of 51,775 feet.

Fifteen months later Piccard reached 55,563 feet, but at this point Madame Piccard put her foot down. She would not have her husband, who was nearly fifty, risking his neck in such a fashion. She expected an argument, but to her surprise he assented. He knew that he had shown the way to the stratosphere; other nations, wealthier than Belgium, would follow him now. He would leave the new records to them and instead seek a new area of activity where he could again be the pioneer: the deep sea.

For some time, even before his stratospheric ascents, he had been thinking about applying concepts from aeronautics to build a radically new type of deep-sea craft, one that would amount to an undersea dirigible. Its gondola would take the form of a thick-walled sphere resembling Barton’s. But rather than dangling from a cable, it would hang beneath a large and buoyant float filled with gasoline, as the counterpart of a balloon’s gasbag. Ballast held on board, in the form of iron pellets, would make the craft descend; releasing the ballast would cause it to rise. To ensure safety, the ballast would be held in its containers using electromagnets; any interruption in the current would shut off the magnets and drop the ballast automatically, assuring a return to the surface. Battery-driven propellers completed the picture, giving the craft full freedom to maneuver at depth. Piccard christened his vision the bathyscaphe, from the Greek for “deep boat.”

Piccard’s design offered several advantages over the bathysphere besides maneuverability. The bathysphere moved up and down with the rocking of the mother ship which made it quite uncomfortable to the people inside. The bathyscaphe, by contrast, would ride at its ease in the waveless depths, permitting longer and deeper descents with comfort. Most important, if a bathysphere’s cable were to break, the crew would sink irretrievably into the depths.

Playing on his reputation as an inventor of the pressurized balloon gondola, and with the encouragement of King Leopold III, Piccard approached the FNRS again in 1937, and again he won a grant, of $25,000. He proceeded to carry out experiments, including testing a model of the thick-walled cabin at a pressure of 1,600 atmospheres, corresponding to a depth of ten miles. He also wrestled with the problem of portholes. The thick slabs of quartz Barton used had been brittle and barely adequate even at depths of less than a mile. Piccard thought of using glass shaped like a cone with a truncated peak opening outward within the steel; he would look through the narrow flat surface and gain a wide field of view, while the outside pressure would force the glass firmly against a seal and prevent leaks. High-pressure tests showed that even with this new design ordinary glass would crack. But in 1938 Piccard learned of a new material, Plexiglas. It had both strength and resilience and could withstand high pressures without cracking.

Then came World War II, and Belgium was overrun. Peace in 1945 brought the restoration of Belgium’s government, including its science agency. Piccard was past sixty now, but he proceeded with his plan and soon was arranging to have the cabin cast from steel. Its internal diameter would be six feet seven inches, making it rather more commodious than Beebe and Barton’s bathyspheres (which was fortunate, as Piccard’s son Jacques, who was assisting him, was six feet seven inches tall); the three-and-a-half-inch walls would be more than twice as thick.

In 1948 the bathyscaphe was ready. Piccard named it FNRS 2 (he had called his stratospheric balloon simply FNRS ). To support its sea trials, the Belgian government gave him the use of an aging 3,500-ton ship, Scaldis , that was about to be sold to Bulgaria. Knowing that he could not go far with it, and seeking deeper water than could be found off Belgium, Piccard arranged to make the initial trials in the Cape Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa, near Dakar. The admiral in charge of a French naval base there proved quite cooperative; he arranged to accompany Scaldis with two frigates and a sloop that carried an echo sounder for determining ocean depths.

An early mission called for FNRS 2 to descend unmanned to 4,600 feet, where an automatic timer would release the ballast. Half an hour later FNRS 2 came bobbing back to the surface, with an on-board depth gauge showing a successful descent to 4,500 feet. But that was far from the end of the matter. Loaded with its buoyant gasoline, FNRS 2 was too heavy for the Scaldis ’s crane, so its float had to be empty while the craft was being set in the ocean or lifted back to the ship’s hold. By the time the crew was ready to pump out the gasoline, night had fallen and the seas were choppy; despite repeated attempts, the heavy hose would not connect. There was nothing to do but take FNRS 2 in tow and try to solve the problem later. The seas beat on the float, and Piccard became convinced that it had sprung a leak and his beloved bathyscaphe was sinking. Deeply disappointed, he ordered the gasoline dumped into the sea. He had no way to secure a new supply. The unmanned dive indeed had shown that this craft could reach great depths, but for the time being there was nothing to do but return to Belgium.

There Piccard found his project denounced as a failure. He had made no major manned descent; he had not even been able to keep the craft in condition for further dives. The Belgian science agency cut off his funds. Some French navy officials, including Jacques Cousteau, were interested in Piccard’s work, however, so in April 1949 the Belgian science agency proposed that the French take over FNRS 2 and rebuild it at their own expense. This went nowhere. As 1949 wore on with no response from the French, Piccard fils proposed to raise funds in Switzerland. Dives would take place in the Mediterranean; France would merely permit the use of its naval base at Toulon.

While negotiations dragged on, in 1950 the Belgians reversed themselves, offering the French $25,000 to build a new float for the bathyscaphe and test it off Toulon. The rebuilt craft would be called FNRS 3 . The eventual agreement stipulated that Piccard père would support the effort as a consultant. However, he soon found that while he could submit designs and reports, the French expected to go ahead on their own, without his direct involvement. In Jacques Piccard’s words, “the situation became so tense, the lack of Toulon’s goodwill so obvious, that separation seemed imminent.”

Again Jacques came to the rescue. He had already been discussing prospects for collaboration with officials of Italy’s navy. Late in 1951 he fell in with one Professor de Henriquez of Trieste, a historian. Henriquez hoped to see his city emerge as a center for advanced technology, and he proceeded to steer Jacques to a group of local industrialists. With their support, and with the funds he had already raised in Switzerland, Jacques soon found that there was enough money to start building a second bathyscaphe, in Italy. Early in 1952 the senior Piccard received a message from Trieste inviting him to direct its construction. In honor of this new source of support, it would bear the city’s name.

FNRS 3 went on to a distinguished career in the French navy, setting a depth record of 13,287 feet off Dakar in 1954 and then making dozens of additional dives. When it set its record, however, it was already following in the path of Trieste . Auguste Piccard had never given up his hope, cherished for twenty years, that he would personally follow up his balloon-borne records by leading the way into the deep. In September 1953 he was sixty-nine but still game. With Jacques he took Trieste 10,392 feet to the bottom of the Mediterranean off Naples, declaring afterward that the landing on the seabed was “as on a soft wadding.”

Soon, however, an old source of difficulty swam into view: lack of funds. The Piccards sent a proposal to the National Science Foundation in Washington; it was rejected, and Trieste spent most of 1954 and all of 1955 in dry dock, never venturing below 500 feet. Its owners were so strapped for cash that they were unable to purchase as basic an instrument as an echo sounder.

Prospects began to brighten during 1955. Jacques appeared on television in London, and Sir Robert H. Davis, an expert in undersea salvage, saw the show and invited him to speak to a group of engineers. There he met Robert Dietz, a civilian oceanographer with the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR), whom Jacques invited to visit the vessel at its dock in Italy. Dietz joined him in climbing into the cabin, marveling at this “privately owned submersible of radical design” built in an era when “submarines should be built by government alphabet agencies.”

He soon came for another visit, this time with the ONR’s chief scientist, Thomas Killian. The two Americans quickly invited Jacques to Washington. There, at the National Academy of Science, he gave a paper on bathyscaphes to a meeting of more than a hundred oceanographers, who passed a resolution urging the start of an American bathyscaphe program. Early in 1957 the ONR arranged to charter Trieste for a program of trial descents into the Mediterranean that summer. It made more than two dozen dives, reaching as deep as 10,500 feet, with Jacques at the controls (only the Piccards knew how to operate the craft) and a succession of mostly American scientists as his passengers. The Navy was so pleased with the results that in 1958 it bought Trieste outright for $200,000 and shipped it to a new home port in San Diego. The Cinderella tale could hardly have ended more happily.

Trieste was initially slated for a program of dives into the mile-deep waters off Southern California. Even before the purchase went through, however, several ONR officials were looking ahead to a descent to the deepest part of the ocean: the Challenger Deep, 35,800 feet down in the Mariana Trench, and 200 miles from a major naval base at Guam. It is indicative of the rapid advance of oceanography that this chasm had been found only as recently as 1951, during an expedition by the British research ship Challenger II . Gordon Lill of the ONR asked whether Trieste could make such a dive. Jacques said yes, but “the margin of safety would be narrow. An unmanned robot test would have to be made first.”

“And if the sphere failed?” Lill continued. “What then? Scratch one bathyscaphe?” Jacques agreed that that would be true. The upshot was a Navy decision to rebuild Trieste completely. It would get a new and particularly strong sphere forged in Germany at Krupp, one of the world’s leading steelmakers. The new sphere would add weight, so the float would be enlarged to give more buoyancy. Ballast capacity would also increase, from eleven to sixteen tons. The new Trieste was ready in September 1959, and the following month it was bound for Guam.

After manned preliminary dives as deep as 23,000 feet, Trieste was ready for the Challenger descent late in January 1960. The Navy had continued having Jacques pilot the craft while carrying a passenger, but for this ultimate dive it wanted the pilot to be an American. Jacques objected strongly. He felt that the Yankees lacked experience, an objection that by itself would have carried little weight. But he also had more powerful ammunition: a clause in his contract permitting him to participate in “dives presenting special problems.” This brought a hurried exchange of messages between Guam and the ONR in Washington, which settled the matter. Jacques Piccard would indeed take the controls. Accompanying him would be Lt. Don Walsh, a project officer whose friends called him ComBathPac: Commander of Bathyscaphe, Pacific.

An oceangoing tug, the USS Wandank , towed Trieste for four days through high seas in the company of a destroyer escort, the USS Lewis . Piccard and Walsh spent a restless night on the eve of their descent, stirred not so much by excitement as by the ship’s rolling and by repeated test explosions, whose shock waves, rebounding from the sea floor, were used to measure its depth. Early on the morning of January 23, the bathyscaphe slipped beneath the sea. Only a few hundred feet down a succession of cold and dense layers forced Piccard to valve off some gasoline to continue the descent.

The ride down took several hours but was largely uneventful. The bathynauts struggled into warm, dry clothing, ate a few chocolate bars, and exchanged occasional messages with a topside officer over an acoustic telephone—one that used no wires or radio but relied on ordinary transmission of sound waves through the water. Then, at around 32,500 feet, in Walsh’s words, “we heard and felt a powerful, muffled crack. The sphere rocked as though we were on land and going through a mild earthquake.” Careful checks failed to find anything amiss, and they continued downward. Instruments indicated that they were below the depth at which they expected to find the sea floor. Piccard joked that they might have missed the bottom; Walsh replied that the chances were against it.

Then the echo sounder picked up the bottom, and Trieste came to rest a few feet above its powdery grayness. Piccard describes what happened next: “Lying on the bottom just beneath us was some type of flatfish, resembling a sole, about 1 foot long and 6 inches across. Even as I saw him, his two round eyes on top of his head spied us. Eyes? Why should he have eyes? Merely to see phosphorescence? The floodlight that bathed him was the first real light ever to enter this hadal realm. Here, in an instant, was the answer that biologists had asked for decades. Could life exist in the greatest depths of the ocean? It could! And not only that, here apparently, was a true, bony teleost fish, not a primitive ray or elasmobranch. Yes, a highly evolved vertebrate, in time’s arrow very close to man himself.

“Slowly, extremely slowly, this flatfish swam away. Moving along the bottom, partly in the ooze and partly in the water, he disappeared into his night. Slowly too—perhaps everything is slow at the bottom of the sea—Walsh and I shook hands.” The acoustic telephone had lost contact at 15,000 feet, probably because the Wandank had drifted from its starting point directly above the bathyscaphe, but Walsh tried it anyway: “ Wandank , Wandank , this is the Trieste . We are at the bottom of the Challenger Deep at sixty-three hundred fathoms. Over.” To his astonishment a voice came back: “ Trieste , Trieste , this is Wandank , I hear you faint but clear. Will you repeat your depth? Over.” Walsh did so, and the voice that came back was charged with excitement: “ Trieste , this is Wandank . Understand. Six three zero zero fathoms. Roger. Out.” (It actually turned out to be 5,966 fathoms, or 35,800 feet, after the depth gauge was recalibrated.) The two bathynauts took a series of readings (the water temperature was 2.4°C) and noted how smooth the sea floor was in comparison with the bottom of the Mediterranean. Then Walsh looked through the aft porthole and called out, “I see now what caused the shock at 30,000 feet!” An auxiliary window had cracked under strain, which was worrisome. It was set within a flooded passageway that would have to be cleared of water for Walsh and Piccard to exit from their sphere. If it gave way, the passageway could not be cleared.

With this, Piccard agreed that they should head for the surface while there was still plenty of daylight. Skin divers could make an emergency repair. The alternative would be quite unpleasant: Unable to emerge, they would remain cooped up in the sphere during a long tow back to Guam, breathing through a snorkel and living on chocolate bars. “We had a feeling of anticlimax,” Walsh recalled later. “The big moment had passed. We knew Trieste ’s achievement had been extraordinary, but all we could think of was whether we would have to spend four more days cooped up in this sphere.” But the cracked window did not shatter, and Piccard and Walsh exited without difficulty.

Then the honors rolled in. Adm. Arleigh Burke, chief of naval operations, hailed the two explorers and declared that “there is no whale in the world who has been so deep as you have.” President Elsenhower received them at the White House, accepted a flag that had been taken along on the dive, and presented medals to the project leaders. The Navy proceeded to give Trieste another thorough rebuilding and sent it in subsequent years on such missions as a visit to the wreck of the submarine USS Thresher , lost in 1963.

Yet the future would not belong to bathyscaphes such as Trieste , even when fitted with a manipulator arm and other improvements; their gasoline-filled floats made them too unwieldy. The successors were deep-diving submarines, the most successful of which was Alvin , built in 1964 by Litton Industries for use by the Woods Hole Oceanographie Institution in Massachusetts. The name came from its designer, the Woods Hole engineer Allyn Vine. His craft featured the traditional thick-walled sphere, first of stainless steel and later of titanium. Buoyancy came from an outer skin of syntactic foam, a material containing millions of tiny bubbles embedded in epoxy. It was ballasted with four 200-pound iron blocks. Alvin started its dives by flooding air-filled tanks at the surface, then blew the tanks clear upon returning from the depths. The craft proved highly maneuverable, easily carried by air as well as aboard ship, and readily equipped with lights, manipulators, and cameras.

Alvin went on to make a firstrate scientific discovery in the mid-1970s: deepwater vents near the Galapagos Islands (where scientific deep-sea exploration had gotten its start with Beebe’s 1925 expedition). Here mineral-rich water, heated in a zone of undersea volcanism, supports a flourishing community of animals: tube worms, mussels, giant clams, sea anemones, crabs. They do not follow the usual practice of bottom dwellers by subsisting on bits of food that filter down from far above; instead they live on bacteria that grow by oxidizing hydrogen sulfide within the water from the vents. The energy source for this community thus is not the sun but rather the heat of the deep earth, which produces this sulfide.

From Beebe’s bathysphere to Alvin , as it had turned out, deep-sea technology had developed almost entirely in response to human curiosity and to the lure of exploring a new frontier, with no monetary profit motive. Even the Navy’s work with Trieste had the character of basic research, of building the ultimate deep-diving craft, with no clear idea of how this effort might assist such practical goals as developing the next generation of submarines. There remained the question of whether such deep submersibles might have commercial significance.

Such prospects might have emerged from another oceanographic discovery: that large areas of the seabed, particularly in the Pacific, are carpeted with nodules rich in manganese, copper, nickel, and cobalt. These nodules were found as early as 1891; the years after 1960 saw a number of proposals to mine them using deep-sea dredges. But in the early 1980s such prospects ran up against a barrier that was not technological but legal, an international treaty on the law of the sea. This treaty, negotiated under United Nations auspices, stated that such seabed resources were “the common heritage of mankind.” To lawyers this meant that the nodules were the shared property of all the world’s people, an arrangement that would make commercial development unlikely. The treaty contemplated an international authority to license mining ventures, but the proposed arrangements drew little response from business. The United States refused to sign the treaty, and the exact form its provisions will take remains under negotiation to this day; the nodules continue to lie undisturbed.

But in another area the prospects may prove to be different and disturbing. This involves salvage from shipwrecks, for which existing marine law offers a long-standing precedent: that a wreck and its cargo belong to those who accomplish the salvage. The opportunities for such deep-sea recoveries came dramatically into view in 1985 and 1986, when Alvin visited the hulk of the liner Titanic at a depth of 12,500 feet. A popular speculation had been that this great ship, which sank in 1912, had reached the bottom little the worse for the experience. But Robert Ballard of Woods Hole, the oceanographer who carried out the exploration, found that the vessel had been thoroughly wrecked.

Even before she foundered, one of her funnels had broken loose. Ballard found that the other three were also gone and that the mast, supporting the crow’s nest from which the lookout, Frederick Fleet, saw the iceberg, had broken at its base. What was worse, the sternmost third of the ship had also broken away and had come to rest on the seabed about 1,800 feet from the rest of the hull. Ballard argued that this part of the ship had still been filled with air when the ship sank, rather than with water, which could resist the pressure at depth. A thousand feet down, then, the stern had given way like a submarine being crushed below its rated depth. “You really felt it when you were there, the sheer carnage,” he commented to Time magazine. “It looked violent and destructive. The bow is majestic. It still has some nobility but the stern …”

Equally significant, Ballard had the ability to take more than photographs. Alvin had carried a robot, Jason Jr. , that could swim into the Titanic , making its way through a hatch and exploring the ship’s interior. At once this raised the unpleasant prospect of recovering souvenirs from her grave, such as an unbroken porcelain coffee cup that was resting atop one of the boilers. To Ballard this was unthinkable, yet the possibility would remain: items from the Titanic might one day be sold in tourist shops on Nantucket.

With this, exploration of the deep sea has reached the uneasy state that characterizes so many of our other technologies. Once the epitome of inaccessibility, then a place of high achievement, the sea floor is now simply one more place where people can carry out their wishes. Here too, then, the future of human activities will not be shaped merely by technical feasibility. Instead this future will demand wisdom and forbearance, to prevent taste, decency, and propriety from being lost amid the new realms of activity that have now become achievable.