The deep sea is teeming with life, most of which has gone unseen by human eyes. Scientists are beginning to explore this fascinating realm of unusual sea creatures and volatile volcanos, using once-secret military technology now freed up by the end of the Cold War. See the timeline for a short history of this. In the Universe Below, William Broad takes a fresh look at this recent surge of exploration and discovery, and brings his readers along on some of his journeys into the deep.
In 1993, author William Broad joined scientists on a two-week expedition off the Oregon/Washington coast. Their aim was to examine the Juan de Fuca Ridge and to study how volcanic heat spawns life on the ocean floor. The crew voyaged 250 miles off-shore on a 210-feet long carrier ship, The Atlantis II, which each day lowered three members 1.5 miles into the deep via Alvin, a 25-feet long submersible vessel.
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Links | Meet Alvin Garden of Eden Chimneys of the Deep Sea A Brief Chronology of Sea Exploration |
Pulitzer Prize winner William J. Broad takes us on an epic journey to the planet's last and most exotic frontier -- the depths of the sea. The Universe Below examines how we are illuminating its dark recesses in a rush of discovery, uncovering hidden worlds of alien creatures, living fossils, lost treasures, precious metals, and perhaps even the place where life itself first arose billions of years ago.
Broad takes us on breathtaking dives and expeditions -- to the Azores, to the Titanic,., to hot springs teeming with bizarre life, to icy fissures aswarm with gulper eels, vampire squids, and gelatinous beasts longer than a city bus. We meet legendary explorers at the forefront of deep research and go with them as they probe the ancient mysteries of the deep. This universe below encompasses the vast majority of the Earth's habitable space and nurtures perhaps ten times as many species of life as are known on land. Broad shows that the abyss also holds millions of humanity's lost artworks and treasures -- more than all the world's museums combined. Yet, remarkably, human eyes up to now have glimpsed perhaps only a billionth of this unfamiliar realm, a place of crushing pressure and eternal darkness.
Drawing on extensive fieldwork, including hundreds of talks and interviews, Broad takes us to the cutting edge of the exploratory surge and reveals how it is powered by a wave of once-secret technologies. At a cost of untold billions, the United States, the Soviet Union, France, and othercold-war contestants forged these marvels to spy and fight and plunder the deep. Today, these wonders and the poeple who made and ran them are catalyzing an unprecedented speedup in civilian efforts to illuminate the inky depths.
Broad shows how the rush into the deep is revealing not only great mysteries and riches but great dangers as well, including the deadly radioactive debris of the cold war. Deep pollution, mining, and fishing threaten this frontier with ecological upset and species extinction. We will either destroy the sea through ignorance or save it, and ourselves, with the kinds of knowledge we are now gaining in the exploratory speedup.
The Universe Below is an unforgettable journey to the universe in our own backyard.
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William J. Broad William J. Broad writes about science for The New York Times and has twice won Pulitzer Prizes with his colleagues there. He is the author of a number of hooks on science topics, including Teller's War and Star Warriors. He lives in Larchmont, New York, with his wife and three children.
The exploration of the ocean depths is one of the newest of sciences; here's a capable summary of the progress to date. Broad (Teller's War, 1991), a Pulitzer Prize winner and science correspondent for the New York Times, notes that the first serious attempt to discover what lay beneath the waves came in the Victorian era, with the three-and-a-half-year round-the-world voyage of H.M.S. Challenger, commissioned by the Royal Society to sound the depths and retrieve specimens. In the process, it founded the science of oceanography. In the 1930s, William Beebe devised the bathyscaphe, a heavy diving vehicle designed to carry human observers a half-mile beneath the surface, an unprecedented depth. That began the systematic exploration of the deep. But as with the frontier of outer space, it was the military that was responsible for the greatest breakthroughs, in vehicles originally designed for submarine rescue and espionage. With the end of the Cold War, naval technology became available to civilian science, and deep-sea exploration suddenly flourished. Broad takes us through a number of its recent triumphs; the reader gets first-hand accounts of trips in a submersible to visit new underwater volcanic eruptions and to examine the ``black smokers'' that arise around fissures in the ocean floor. The exotic fauna that live in the superhot water around these submerged chimneys--huge tubeworms and bizarrely colored shrimp--have demonstrated that life can thrive in environments once thought utterly hostile to it. And the entire picture of how the surface of our planet has evolved was revised with the discovery of midocean ridges. Broad's sympathetic portrayal of the new breed of underwater scientists and explorers, and of their state-of-the-art equipment, make this a fascinating account of the newest frontier. (illustrations) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
A tangible peace dividend was the redirection of deep-sea submarines from military work to scientific research. Based on his reportage in the New York Times, Broad gives readers a transfixing and creepy glimpse into the perpetual darkness of inner space. The black environment, pierced only by bioluminescence and transient searchlights, might as well be another planet, so alien are the living things that inhabit it, and Broad conveys in the best journalistic fashion descriptions of fishes, jellyfish, and microbes. At one point he rides down in Alvin, giving readers a fascinating narrative of the violent tectonic activity in the abysmal realm. Though science is the beneficiary of Alvin and its kindred vessels, the U.S. Navy was their inspirer, and Broad unveils such now-it-can-be-told stories as the navy allows out about its espionage against sunken Soviet nuclear submarines and warheads. Ending with speculation about the economic potential of mining and salvage and their environmental risks, Broad provokes a mix of wonder, concern, and excitement about the future of the deep. Gilbert Taylor
The deep sea is the last frontier whose secrets are just now being revealed. Broad, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer for the New York Times, offers an excellent personal overview of current explorations. As in his earlier works, technology is the focus, along with the personalities involved; most of the chapters are related to articles Broad has published in the Times since 1993. After a brief history of deep-sea exploration before 1900, the book is set firmly in the 20th century, concentrating on the ships, subs, divers, underwater vehicles both manned and robotic, and satellites used in a variety of applications, from discovering the Titanic to observing unusual or new marine species. As a readable introduction to deep-water oceanographic research and recovery techniques, this is recommended for public libraries.?Jean E. Crampon, Hancock Biology & Oceanography Lib., Univ. of California, Los Angeles
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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