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A school of large amberjack circle the JSL during its descent into the sinkhole.
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Dropping from the surface to 1000 feet, each frame of this video shows a 100-foot descent as seen through the porthole.
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A surreal vision out my window...a soft cone of artificial daylight illuminates a white-sand bottom at 1800 feet.
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Tim Askew, Jr. and Phil Santos, both sub pilots, inspect the JSL. On average, this workhorse of a sub will dive twice per day throughout a mission. |
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For some reason, the hole was very difficult to read with sonar. The sensitive instruments aboard the Research Vessel EDWIN LINK (RVEL) displayed nothing but random numbers and ghost images. Perhaps the sinkhole's confounding influence on sound waves is the reason that it had never been explored, never been mapped.
Enticed by the unknown, we descended into the light scattering waters. Color quickly faded. Beyond 100 feet, there were no colors except endless hues of blue and varied shades black. At 300 feet, the water took on an ethereal quality, glowing like blue neon as if the water itself were the source of light. By 750 feet, the water calmed to the most serene blue imaginable -- the richest blue of blues, enveloping, comforting, resonating with tranquility and beauty.
The sub continued its descent...800 feet...900 feet. Blue faded to a dark, nameless gray. My eyes struggled with the dark, playing tricks with my mind as they tried to find recognizable forms in the nothingness. Particles of dead marine organisms fell like snow, further confusing matters. By 1,000 feet only an eerie near-lightlessness remained -- like moonlight barely filtering through a thick blanket of clouds.
Liberatore powered up the sub lights.
We passed 1,100 feet and the sub's lights searched in vain to find the bottom. Nothing. The sub continued to sink...1,200 feet...1,300 feet. Liberatore called from the sphere, "Everyone keep an eye out. We may already be in the sinkhole."
At 1,450 feet, from the darkness appeared a vertical wall of black stone. It was as shear as El Capitan -- an undersea cliff with subdued dots of yellows and whites and pinks -- sponges mostly, which was good news for the scientists.
Terrestrial words like "cliff" and "wall" and seem hopelessly inadequate in describing such an inaccessible, alien environment. The underwater realm needs its own lexicon with more powerfully descriptive terms like "seamount" and "abyss". Why are there not more such words? Perhaps our logical minds need comfortable earth-based comparisons in order to wrestle with the impossibility of the sea. On this dive, as I looked down the wall disappearing into the black sea below, my logical brain would not shut up. It kept saying things like, "I can't be here." And, "This is not possible." Unconsciously, I took a deep breath and held it as we continued to sink...1,650 feet down.
After what seemed like hours a white-sand bottom finally became visible beneath us. Twenty minutes after leaving the surface, we came to rest softly in the sand, 1,790-feet deep. I made the mistake of quickly calculating the pressure outside...each square inch of the sub had over 800 pounds of pressure pushing against it from every direction. More than 20 tons pushed against my small porthole alone. I crossed out the calculations and decided not to double check.
August 20, 8:39am, 10 miles southwest of Vaca Key, Florida -- Our exploratory dive signaled a fundamental shift in the scientific focus of this mission. From here on out there would be more unknowns than before. Over the last two weeks, researchers concentrated on the collection of sponges with known anti-tumor properties. Now, they were looking for entirely novel compounds in an entirely new set of animals.
The process is underway, at this moment, on the deck of the ship. Scuba teams are loading onto small boats and heading out to collect the first assortment of marine invertabrates from the shallower depths of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.
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CLICK HERE to learn more about
our correspondent, Mark Carroll. |
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