What was going on that day, on and around the Atlantis II, could almost have been called boring. It was August 12, 1991. Aboard the ship, a research vessel operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, were 42 people doing their daily chores, sleeping, or just waiting. There were another three people below the ship, inside a submersible whose inner diameter is six and a half feet, the size of a nice walk-in closet, except that this closet was separated from the sky and safety by 6,900 feet of Pacific water. This was routine. It was more routine than a space shuttle mission, certainly. Maybe it was as routine as flying an F-16. Cindy Lee Van Dover, who was piloting that day, claimed you were safer inside that submersible, Alvin, than in your car. After all, Alvin had made 2,427 dives over the past quarter century and no one had gotten seriously hurt. That day only one or two neophytes had stood on the fantail to watch the launch, and to see Alvin sink into the abyss, untethered, for the 2,428th time.
Inside the sub were Rich Lutz, a fortyish deep-sea biologist from Rutgers who was responsible for bringing everyone to that particular spot in the ocean, 100 miles off the coast of Oregon; Randy Hinderer, a former Navy diver and an Alvin pilot in training; and Van Dover, a biologist who just a year earlier had been elevated to the status of first scientist- pilot and first female pilot. For two hours that afternoon Van Dover and her passengers whirred along the seafloor at a knot or less. Lacking a precise map, they followed hunches. They drove up the muddy slope of a canyon, to a muddy summit, along a muddy ridge. Their purpose was to find clams. Lutz was looking for a clam bed that other oceanographers had discovered a few years earlier--a place where a rich colony of clams thrived on bacteria that thrived on gases seeping out of the sediments. But all he and Van Dover and Hinderer saw through their four-inch-wide portholes was mud: boring mud.
Sometime after four o’clock, just as their clamlessness was beginning to get frustrating, their priorities changed. Halfway through the dive the clams didn’t matter anymore, Lutz said later. Van Dover said: I was driving along this real gentle slope, and I wasn’t even using the lift propellers. Usually when the slope is gentle you don’t need them; the ski on the bottom of the sub just carries you along. Then it got a little steeper, and I went to turn the lift props on. And I saw that we weren’t lifting off the bottom. That’s when I started to think something was wrong. It was 4:28 P.M. when Van Dover’s voice, transmitted acoustically through 6,900 feet of water and reverberating tinnily from a loudspeaker on the top deck of the Atlantis, shattered the shipboard routine: I think we may be snagged on something, she said blandly.
Working in the deep sea is occasionally dangerous but always hard. Think about what it would be like to study our own world the way biologists must study the deep sea. Imagine a race of scientifically inclined space aliens. Having discovered Earth, they set out to understand the life on its surface. These unfortunate aliens, however, lack advanced tools of research. Their wispy bodies cannot withstand the crushing pressure of our atmosphere. It is utterly opaque to their eyes, which are sensitive only to a small range of wavelengths in the infrared. For want of a better idea, they decide to drag a large, sturdily framed net from their spacecraft as it cruises safely above the clouds.
The net first touches down one Friday evening in Paterson, New Jersey, where it clips a flagpole off the top of City Hall. Next it bounces through a high school football stadium, scattering fans and players without snaring a one; collects a pensioner hobbling along Main Street, as well as his cane; scoops through a backyard on Elm, where it picks up a picnic table, a clothesline bearing some exotic black undergarments, and a patch of lettuce with its associated groundhog. Finally it nearly comes to grief in a dark corner of the K mart parking lot, where the weight of a 1972 Chevy Nova and the teenagers in its backseat causes the net cable to groan audibly and prompts the aliens to quickly reel in their catch.
