Seven-Tenths Read online

  Very occasionally from a chance position down in the hull, at some freak acoustical window, it is possible to hear GLORIA’s peculiar yodel. The instrument emits a correlation signal; instead of a single bleep its pulses take the shape of a whistle which swoops up and down. This is so the echo will be unmistakable, the electronic ears listening for its return being tuned to exclude all other signals. Even so, knowing how to read the GLORIA trace as it emerges from the plotter is a matter of much experience. Since parts of the signal are making a round journey of 60 kilometres or so, while others may travel only 5 (that edge of the fan nearest the ship) the returning echoes become mixed up with the fresh outgoing pulses, even with still fainter returns from previous signals. There may also be leakage and scattering, with stray echoes reflected back down from the water’s surface.

  How different the Farnella is from the old Challenger! The real distinction between this kind of oceanography and all that went before is not merely that the technology has changed, and with it the techniques for analysing data. It is that the scientists themselves are using different senses. Nobody is actually listening to these signals returning from unexplored regions laden with information. The lab is filled, not with the hollow pinging familiar from submarine war film soundtracks, but with the click and whir of plotters and jocular bouts of repartee. No one now wears headphones and a rapt, faraway look, attentive in ambient hush. For all that modern oceanography relies so much on acoustic techniques, it is machines which do the listening. When I flip a switch on a panel which feeds through a tiny speaker the actual noise of the signals, the American technician Bob sets his face into that expression which in TV shorthand stands for displeasure. ‘That sound gives me a headache,’ he says. ‘It’s so goddamn monotonous.’ I refrain from babbling about hidden subtleties, since they are still there; it is just that they are on an inked printout.

  Allowing electronic devices to replace our senses while reducing so much information to visual imagery must have its consequences. Generally speaking, under-used faculties tend to atrophy. It has long since become a cliché in the pages of The Lancet and the BMJ to wonder whether the old-fashioned, pre-war family GP with his training in how to watch, to listen, to smell, touch and even taste may have understood more about his patients’ health than does his modern counterpart with his reliance on laboratory techniques and diagnostic machinery. Perhaps in dealing with the natural world at an electronic remove scientists in certain disciplines may also risk missing as much as they learn. How many naturalists nowadays have the artist’s eye, like the great nineteenth-century scientists who so lovingly sketched their specimens in the field? It is not only sensibility but memory itself which atrophies, since the need for attentive observation is less. The camera takes the place of the eye, the recorder of the ear, the computer of the memory. A laconic finger on a keyboard summons up data, an image. Less need, less time now for Edward Lear’s scrupulous parrots or Audubon’s American birds, for the hundreds of sketches made aboard the Challenger or for anatomical drawings as fine as Jan van Rymsdyk’s of the human uterus. Nor is there much call for writing that describes specimens as Philip Gosse described Cleodora, a tiny snail known as the sea butterfly, which floats in tropical oceans. ‘A creature of extreme delicacy and beauty … The hinder part is globular and pellucid, and in the dark vividly luminous, presenting a singularly striking appearance as it shines through its perfectly transparent lantern.’*

  Roger agrees that until well after World War II sonar operators and scientists had spent much of their time with headphones on, listening to the seabed and to anything else whose noises fell within humanly audible wavelengths. They gave their own nicknames to certain familiar sounds, especially those which resisted all identification. One of these became known as the ‘North Atlantic Boing’.

  ‘Now and again something uncanny happens which makes you wonder about what’s down there. We’ve sometimes picked up signals which aren’t GLORIA’s own echoes but imitations. The electronic analysis is quite clear. They’re definitely some kind of deliberate response. But what could possibly imitate a sound as complicated as a correlation signal? There are really only two possibilities: either a submarine or whatever creature produced the “North Atlantic Boing” while flirting with sonar operators. Sometimes even our other sonars – the “fish”, for example – provoke an almost angry response. We’ve had the single bleep of the 10 kilohertz being answered by a double bleep, or a triple, even a quadruple, as if something’s deliberately mocking it.

  ‘You’ve got to remember that sound travels well in water and we’re making a godawful noise down there. We’re sending out four different signals powerful enough to bounce off the seabed 30 kilometres away, two of them capable of penetrating hundreds of metres into it. That’s a huge amount of sonic energy and we must be absolutely deafening, maybe even lethal, to some animal species. Certainly a whale would find us audible for hundreds of miles, perhaps a thousand.

  ‘So who or what is the author of the “North Atlantic Boing”? What creature are we enraging or provoking to mimic us? I presume cetaceans. We haven’t the first clue what goes on in a whale’s mind. We don’t even know what’s in a parrot’s mind.’*

  At this point a very sober, older scientist breaks gently in to refute Roger’s account of the ‘Boing’. He has the air of someone who has long ago signed the Official Secrets Act and has never regretted it. It makes his explanation oddly dark, vague with the pregnant ellipsis of someone in the know who cannot tell all he knows. It comes as a reminder that the military has its own interests in oceanography and a good deal of knowledge and technology overlap. There was never any such thing, he says, as the ‘North Atlantic Boing’. The fact is, it was only ever audible on one particular occasion off one particular part of the east coast of the United States. Significantly close, in fact, to one of the major naval bases. What is more, GLORIA uses what used to be a naval signal on the same carrier frequency. Quite possibly it was a submarine communicating with an underwater beacon.

  As for Roger’s cetacean theory, there are a good few holes in that, too. All cetaceans are far-ranging and one would expect this ‘Boing’ to have cropped up in widely separated areas. Second, GLORIA’s 6.5 kilohertz is in the 5 to 10 kilometre range, and why would any cetacean be interested in anything at that distance? As for the allegedly angry responses to the ‘fish’, Roger will – he is certain – recall a good deal of active porpoise noise in the Bering Sea, especially at 10 kilohertz. There was indeed enough energy to break through the correlator return, but it was continuous ‘active’ noise, not a genuine return signal, and it was also associated with biological activity in the water column. It could well have been caused by numbers of animals all fleeing the GLORIA sound at the same moment. Nor should we forget that porpoises can produce all sorts of noise and interference merely by breaking the surface of the water as they swim. Air bubbles are one of the richest sources of noise – look at the swim bladders of hatchet fish – and sudden frothing and foaming plays havoc with signals and can produce the oddest effects. …

  This is not dissension, of course. The man merely drifts amiably away, leaving behind a feeling of official cold water having been poured, as well as a suspicion that perhaps not everything has been neatly explained after all.

  The next day it is discovered that existing charts of this area, which like most maps (other than those of pirate treasure) look completely authoritative, are quite wrong. Whole features are either absent or misplaced. We examine the printouts. Entire mountains flicker in and out of existence somewhere down there in the cold darkness. The bathymetry is all haywire. GLORIA knows best. There remains the experience of being present when a portion of the Earth’s surface is discovered. This is a rare sensation for the layman in the late twentieth century, and the diminishing opportunities for experiencing it must belong almost exclusively to potholers and cavers, apart from oceanographers themselves. At this moment, except for the handful of people present in the Farnella
’s laboratory, I know more of the range of hills we are traversing than anyone else in the world, be they professors, explorers, Nobel laureates, fellows of distinguished societies or captains of industry. In fact, I know more of this piece of America than the President himself, and I am not even a US citizen.

  This schoolboy superiority is too brief and dubious to be at all satisfying. Moreover, it is imbued with a certain sadness. One more thing has fallen under Homo’s rapacious gaze, and as always the knowledge is not neutral. By its very nature this project makes one constantly aware of the question of ownership. Effectively, anything we find down there belongs to the United States which, by annexing its tranche of the seabed, is actually adding a prodigious 2.9 billion acres to the 2.3 billion acres of dry land it already commands: rather more than the same again. Quite apart from any military consequences, the economic aspects are plain. This makes the fixing of all EEZ boundaries a matter of great importance, both scientifically and bureaucratically. As soon as one starts to consider it in any detail, obvious difficulties present themselves. On this cruise we are supposed to be mapping the EEZ around Johnston Atoll. Are the 200 nautical miles to be measured from the island’s coastline or from its centre? There again, if they are measured from the coastline does the boundary have to describe a neat circle or should it faithfully follow every little promontory and indentation so that on a chart Johnston Island will eventually appear as a small blob in the middle of a dotted outline of its own hugely magnified ghost?

  According to Roger everything depends on the size of the island. International law stipulates how big an island has to be before the EEZ may follow its coastline. There again, a mass of guidelines define a coastline and how to treat it. If the mouth of a bay is less than a certain width it must be considered as if a straight line ran across it. Such niceties are far from being purely academic. According to Colonel Gaddafi the Gulf of Sirte is entirely within Libya’s territorial waters whereas the US Navy, which is constantly on patrol there, claims the Gulf is international.

  ‘It usen’t to be like this,’ Roger says. ‘When I first started in oceanography – and this is only about ten or fifteen years ago – you could still go where you liked to do your scientific cruises, just as they did in the last century. Nobody ever objected if a British survey vessel chose to do some sounding or coring 40 miles offshore. Nowadays if we want to do fieldwork inside somebody’s EEZ we have to apply to the Foreign Office, can you believe, to get permission on our behalf and like as not we’ll have to agree to take appropriate foreign observers on board. It’s a ridiculous hoo-ha.

  ‘It’s all about wealth, of course. Round here there are some huge fields of nodules that are potentially rich pickings. It’s up to us to locate them precisely. But here, for example,’ he points to a chart taped to the bulkhead, ‘south-east of where we are now, that’s the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone, famously rich in nodules. As you can see, it’s in the middle of the Pacific. It doesn’t fall into anybody’s EEZ. Yet in the early eighties President Reagan declared it to be an area in which the US would regulate all mineral mining licences. Incredible, when you stop to think about it. It’s not even US territory. Reagan’s argument was that there was a sort of power vacuum there and that someone had to supervise things otherwise there’d be all kinds of skulduggery. Pure altruism, you aren’t thinking. So the whole thing has now been pretty much carved up by about four consortiums. No skulduggery there, naturally. Now, the question we’re asking is, supposing somebody starts mining manganese nodules in an area like that and you come along wanting to do your bit of oceanography? Neither they nor you have an obvious legal claim. It’s international waters. But I somehow can’t see a deep sea mining outfit sitting idly by while a fully equipped research vessel heaves-to a mile away to do some close investigating of the field.’

  One afternoon I spend time in the dark room where Roger is making prints of the laser printer films of GLORIA scans. It is drudgery but needs constant vigilance. The contrast between the high technology outside in the lab and the low in the dark room is marked indeed. The ancient printer is suspended on a wooden tray by four cords from the ceiling. The scale of the prints changes fractionally all the time and focusing is critical. The reason is the fundamental cartographer’s problem of how to represent a curved surface on a flat one. On the variant of the Mercator’s projection the Survey is using the latitude lines grow further apart the further north one goes. At the levels of accuracy required, the Farnella’s slightest northward drift can make a difference.

  ‘It’s not for fun, all this,’ reminds Roger’s voice in the darkness. ‘It’s about potential megabucks. We’re likely to find nodules hereabouts. If so, somebody else will come along on a sampling trip to see what the quality’s like and they’ll want to be able to arrive at the precise point and drop a sonar buoy. And they’ll be doing it from our GLORIA scans. I know it’s a bore, fiddling about with the focus and scale and stuff, but I do quite like that it’s a tangible effect of ordinary physics. … Hey, you know the Forth Bridge? Well, its two towers are absolutely plumb vertical, but their tops are a centimetre further apart than their bases. Curvature of the Earth. I love that, don’t you?’

  The enthusiasm of his voice in this stuffy cubicle full of the reek of developer and fixer is contagious and banishes the monotony of the task. He is apologetic in case his recently completed doctoral thesis sounds dull. ‘Actually, it’s on acoustics and sedimentation. … Basically, why is it that GLORIA’s signal comes back at all, rather than simply scattering away all over the seabed?’ While still young, Roger is a veteran of field trips all over the world, from Tahiti to Alaska. One of the surprises of modern oceanography has been the discovery of undersea fans and river systems which, as mapped by GLORIA, bear a great resemblance to aerial and satellite images of river deltas and similar land features. This, too, has a commercial aspect. ‘Take gold. A glacier shield like the one north of Alaska liberates gold from the Earth’s crust as it grinds away. This, in the sediment, eventually flows into an undersea river system. Over millions of years that’s a lot of gold. But at the same time the crustal movement shifts these ancient deposits about while the actual sources don’t necessarily change position. So an old auriferous sediment may today lie deep beneath a shallow modern fan system containing practically no gold at all.

  ‘Now, if you’ve been looking at GLORIA and seismic scans for years, and happen also to have a geological nose, you can make some pretty shrewd guesses as to where there might be an awful lot of gold. Certainly where it’d be worth sinking a borehole.’

  ‘Roger the Klondiker. You’re an adventurer at heart.’

  ‘I’m sure as hell not staying in academic geology all my life. I want lots more fieldwork, the more the better. I’m thinking of joining this sailing clipper to investigate a fjord system in South America. Lovely stuff: a proper sailing ship. I want to see things.’

  He has already seen things, including Mount Paramount in Alaska – minus the halo of stars – which any moviegoer would recognise. I remark that this is not the first time he has sounded bored with his present niche in geophysics.

  ‘Well, of course, for plenty of geologists, including some aboard this ship, I may say, it’s just a job. They could be doing anything, really. They mostly do it perfectly adequately but with no particular enthusiasm, so they bring no particular imagination to bear.’

  Nobody ever seems to go up on deck just to look at the sea. They go up to inspect gear or sunbathe obsessively with a dog-eared best-seller from the ship’s library, but on the whole are not to be found staring into the scud and dazzle and maybe wondering about the strangeness of being in a floating speck suspended miles above mountains, like the silver dot of an airliner over the Alps. Nor, with a few exceptions, do they seem aware of sailing across a wasteland which, even five years ago, would have teemed with dolphin and porpoise and now stretches to the horizon unbroken by anything other than the occasional flying fish. To see the world’s greatest oc
ean suddenly empty within a few years is to be filled with a foreboding which cannot be dispelled. Something is happening below us which geophysical oceanography, its electronic gaze fixed firmly on the lumps and hollows of the seabed, is missing. Yet it needs only to come up on deck and look at the empty waves, the nearly birdless sky.

  If the scientists aboard Farnella split, unsurprisingly, into those with imagination and those with less, odder fractures become apparent. On a tour of the ship on the first day Roger had showed me the bow thruster room. This led down to a horrible cubbyhole containing cramped catwalks above bilges and the hydraulic columns of an electric motor and auxiliary propeller which could be lowered through the hull for fine manoeuvring when core samples were being drilled from the seabed. It was into this cubbyhole that, last 4 July, a British oceanographer had lured some American colleagues and closed the hatch on them, lowering gruel through a hole and placing a sizzling steak on a grid just beyond reach. After two hours he alerted a hapless seaman to odd noises coming from the bow thruster room and made himself scarce as the released scientists roared through the ship. The incident of the bow thruster room had entered the unofficial annals of oceanography even as, at the other end of Farnella, GLORIA was patiently mapping an unknown section of the planet’s surface. Pranks and discovery.

  ‘They take themselves so seriously, the Yanks,’ Roger observes in what he thinks of as the confidentiality of the dark room. This Independence Day caper was recounted as a lark, not as savage. Still less was it an act which had quite precisely emphasised dependence. Aboard this ship the British are in numerical superiority and sure of themselves. The knockabout humour is such that a female scientist is required to become one of the lads, to the extent that when a woman geologist refers to her fiancé in San Diego I am momentarily as surprised as I would be if the bos’n himself had alluded to a boyfriend in Dutch Harbor: surprised not by the fact, but by the evidence of any adult life elsewhere. One evening a dozen of us are watching a ho-hum video film about a hard-boiled American cop who goes to Japan to track down the Yakuza gang member who offed his buddy. This provokes one of the British scientists into giving a commentary in ‘Japanese’ (high-pitched exclamations, aspirated ‘h’ sounds, ‘Carry On Samurai’ syntax and all). The strange thing is that Elly, a Japanese-American geologist, is sitting three feet away. She elects gracefully to ignore the whole thing. From time to time throughout the trip this most amiable man’s hysterical Nipponese, presumably quite unconscious, can be heard now in the lab, now in the dining room (Brussels sprouts apparently being reminiscent enough of bean sprouts to set him off). Elly betrays no sign of offence except now and then shooting him a weary glance. Maybe oceanographers prefer their bonhomie ruthless. This is not the first occasion that she and several others, including this fellow, have sailed together; conceivably she has built up the necessary tolerance.