Under the sea
“I think I broke [the rules] with logic and good engineering behind me. The carbon fiber and titanium, there’s a rule you don’t do that—well, I did. … There’s picking the rules that you break that are the rules that will add value to others and add value to society, and that really to me is about innovation.”
— Stockton Rush, in a YouTube video of a tour of the Titan submersible he gave to Mexican actor Alan Estrada in 2022
Think of darkness. It is the absence of light, black is its color. True darkness is not something human beings experience often. Our bedrooms are merely dim. You have to work at finding darkness. One way is to submerse yourself in the ocean.
Oceans are very deep, and light can only penetrate so far below the surface. We might think of an ocean as teeming with life; that is true so far as it goes, which is only about the upper 200 meters or so—what scientists call the photic zone.
This is where life swims and floats; microscopic marine organisms that engage in photosynthesis can survive only in the photic zone.
Below this layer, from 200 to about 1,000 meters, is the aphotic zone. Here the filtered sunlight is weak and blue-green, insufficient for photosynthesis. All that’s left is a dim, dark, blue-green light, too weak to allow photosynthesis to occur. Most of the light is by bio-luminescent organisms—glow-in-the-dark creatures.
The aphotic zone is the realm of goblin and frilled sharks, of tubeworms and dinoflagellates, a sparse carnival of glowing freaks feeding on detritus, bits of decaying plants, and animal waste falling from above.
You hit complete darkness about 1,000 meters below the surface. You have to cut the black with a flashlight. Which will hold out as long as your batteries.
Cut that light and your eyes suddenly have nothing to process. Depending on your psychological makeup, this can be anything from mildly disorienting to panic-inducing. Maybe your brain will race as it struggles to pick up any sensory information.
The brains of people born blind make new compensatory connections in the absence of visual information. Your brain may scramble to do the same, or you might imagine sounds or sensations. You might feel phantoms brushing against your thigh.
Think of five men, trapped in a metal box about the size of a minivan, with a single 7-inch thick Plexiglas porthole to stare out of while they wait. At the darkness.
I am neither brave or rich enough to book a voyage on a submersible to look at the ruins of the Titanic. I do not have the spirit for that kind of adventure, to dive down to where it is lifeless and cold and dark.
★★★
British billionaire pilot Hamish Harding, one of those on board the Titan submersible, posted on his Facebook page that he was “proud to finally announce” he had “joined OceanGate Expeditions … as a mission specialist on the sub going down to the Titanic.
“Due to the worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years, this mission is likely to be the first and only manned
mission to the Titanic in 2023. A weather window has just opened up and we are going to attempt a dive tomorrow. We started steaming from St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, yesterday and are planning to start dive operations around 4 a.m. tomorrow morning. Until then we have a lot of preparations and briefings to do.
“The team on the sub has a couple of legendary explorers …”
Harding might be talking about himself; a year ago he flew to space on one of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rockets.
In 2021, he and American explorer Victor Vescovo dived to the deepest point of the Mariana Trench, a depth of 36,000 feet, and crawled along the ocean floor for more than four hours, setting records for greatest length covered and greatest time spent at full ocean depth on a single dive.
In 2019, he set a world record for the fastest circumnavigation of Earth via both the geographic poles (46 hours, 40 minutes) in a business jet, a Gulfstream G650ER.
Other passengers on the Titan are Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a former French navy officer who has made more than 35 trips to the Titanic’s wreckage over the past 40 years. He’s the director of underwater research at RMS Titanic Inc., a company that has exclusive rights to salvage artifacts from the ship.
British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son Suleman are on the Titan. The Dawoods are very rich.
And then there’s the pilot, Stockton Rush, CEO and founder of OceanGate Expeditions, the company that operates the Titan.
★★★
I once had a friend—a high school classmate of Victor Vescovo’s—who became a nautical archaeologist; he trained at Texas A&M, which is widely regarded as the world’s finest program. The Aggies established the world’s first academic program in nautical archaeology and the primary graduate program in the world that offers extensive courses in nautical archaeology with interdisciplinary training.
He helped excavate a Bronze Age ship off the coast of Kaš in Turkey; he briefed Walter Cronkite on the work of the expedition. He dove for wine bottles and galley wares, not for gold. He loathed treasure hunters like Mel Fisher, whom he considered destructive and greedy, grave robbers who destroyed history as they pillaged historic shipwrecks. Worst than that were the thrill-seekers and tourists.
I do not know that he would have sympathy for these rich men whom reportedly paid a quarter of a million dollars to take a 12-hour tour in an experimental submersible vessel piloted by a PlayStation controller.
★★★
I woke up from a guilty dream at 3:30 a.m. Thursday; got out of bed, walked upstairs to my office, and checked the live updates on the search. It is four hours later now and the 96-hour “deadline” for when the Titan would run out of oxygen has just passed.
That deadline was not precise, they tell us. They might have 100 hours. Someone could have stopped breathing, leaving more air for the rest of them. Maybe they bobbed to the surface and somehow figured out a way to force open the hatch. Maybe there will be a remarkable ending to this.
They think they heard banging. Somewhere, about 1,000 miles off Cape Cod, ships and planes and helicopters are swarming an area of the Atlantic that’s twice the size of Connecticut, looking for a 22-foot-long limited-use vessel that, because it operates in international waters, is not regulated or inspected by any governmental body.
★★★
They found it Thursday evening. Or at least they found a debris field consistent with a “catastrophic implosion.” Horrible as it is, there could have been worse outcomes.