“Over the next two-and-a-half months, a team of scientists and marine engineers will complete the installation off British Columbia of NEPTUNE Canada, the world’s largest and most advanced cabled ocean observatory. Using three ships and at least one ROV, the team will lower five thirteen-ton nodes and more than four hundred instruments and sensors to the seafloor where they will be attached to n five hundred mile loop of powered fiber-optic cable laid in 2007.
“Led by the University of Victoria, NEPTUNE Canada pioneers a new generation of ocean observation systems that—using abundant power and the Internet—provide continuous, long-term monitoring of ocean processes and events, as they happen.”
“This is truly transformative science,” says Dr. David Turpin, president of the University of Victoria. “At a time when our understanding of the oceans is clearly becoming more essential than ever, NEPTUNE Canada will play a leadership role in advancing our knowledge of the oceans in ways not previously possible. We are launching a new era of ocean exploration.”
Reading this in the news online this morning reminded me of a dive I made fifteen years ago off Key Largo, Florida, to visit what was then the cutting edge of “live-aboard” underwater research stations. Called AQUARIUS the eighty-one ton, school-bus yellow “habitat” – it looked like a cross between the Starship Enterprise and a double-wide trailer anchored to the reef – was home to five marine biologists who could stay comfortably one hundred and twenty feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean for up to two weeks.
AQUARIUS, at sixty feet below
I went down for the maximum time allowed a visitor, one hundred minutes, before risking what the scientists jokingly called “fizzing” (the bends). At the time it was the world’s only underwater laboratory. Connected by an umbilical cord to a barge on the surface, which delivered air and electricity, it was a forerunner of NEPTUNE (it had been preceded by the HYDROLAB and the ALVIN, which was used in the discovery of the “Titanic.” Once-acclimated to underwater living, its scientists could spend up to nine hours diving each day they were under, then more than six times longer than they would if they’d been surfacing each day.
A project of NOAA, administered by the University of North Carolina Wilmington, AQUARIUS was when I visited being run by thirty-year-old Steven Miller. “When you’re down under for that kind of time you begin to tune in differently,” he told me. “Each day is literally like tuning into a different channel on the television. The scenery changes constantly. So does the way you see the sea.”
Frenchman Alan Hulbert was living in AQUARIUS when I dove down off the Florida Keys and entered via a horizontal porthole into a “wet porch,” a three-by-four foot room open to the sea. I popped into the air cavity, which smelled like a funky locker room, on day four of a ten-day mission. Hulbert looked at me through a porthole and using hand signals walked me through the process involved in entering the station. “What we know from our work with AQUARIUS is that we know every little about the ocean,” I remember Hulbert saying to me.
AQUARIUS is still hard at work.
Since I visited – it was1994 – we’ve learned a lot about the ocean, its reefs, its floor and marine life. But there’s obviously still much to discover. This, from NEPTUNE’S press release, sounds very familiar despite the passing of years; the exact sentiment was in the announcement of the AQUARIUS: “Observations will have wide-ranging policy applications in the areas of climate change, hazard mitigation (earthquakes and tsunamis), ocean pollution, port security and shipping, resource development, sovereignty and security, and ocean management. Its cutting-edge technologies are already generating commercialization and job creation opportunities.”
One big change? NEPTUNE’S divers will be able to read this blog on the Internet, two miles below the surface of the cold Pacific Ocean.
Afloat on the Dead River in northern Minnesota just a few miles south of the Canadian border on a – finally – beautiful early summer day with my friend Will Steger we are on the lookout for the critters that habituate this part of the world – beavers, moose, painted turtles, loons, otters, minks, black bears and many more. The sky is indigo, studded with big white cumulus clouds, and the river’s banks lined with just-blooming lily pads backed by tall reeds. The river got its name not because it’s a dumping ground for bodies or badly polluted but because it is so still. Which is perfect for us, as we float its length after exiting Burnside Lake.
While much of the afternoon is spent in silence, listening to the wind, feeling the sun burn on pale skin, we talk about the state of, well, everything … from politics to small town gossip, climate change to the best way to plant rhubarb. I ask Will, whose dog sledded, skied, canoed and swum around the Arctic as much as anyone alive, what he’d heard about recent North Pole and Arctic adventures. (He’s casually starting to talk about an ambitious dogsled expedition tracing the Northwest Passage in a couple years time.) He mentions John Huston, a mutual friend, who managed Will’s 2007 expedition across Ellesmere Island. “What John did was really incredible, quite different from when we went to the North Pole in 1986 with dogs.”
Just a few days before I’d had an email from John, with some insight into his recently completed North Pole expedition:
On April 25, 2009 we Tyler Fish – and -myself became the first Americans to reach the North Pole unsupported and unassisted. Our 55-day journey, which began at the northernmost point in North America, Ward Hunt Island, Canada, has been called ‘the hardest trek on the planet.’ We skied and snow shoed over 480 miles on the frozen dynamic surface of the Arctic Ocean.
The Arctic Ocean is perhaps the place on earth most affected by climate change. So having just spent almost two months living there, people always ask us “Did you see the effects of climate change?” or “Did you see the ice melting?” The answer is never simple, but surely the ice we traveled over is quite different from the ice 25 years ago.
According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, over the past 30 years the ice on the Arctic Ocean has decreased drastically in area and in thickness. Thinner ice is weaker, more susceptible to melting and cracking than older sea ice.
During the last month of the expedition we donned dry suits and swam across 10 or 12 open leads (cracks of water between ice flows). Swimming is not that cold of an experience since the water temperature can be up to 60°F warmer than the air temperature. In recent years most expeditions to the North Pole from Canada have not had to swim more than just a few times.
Over the last two weeks of the expedition we were battered by winds out of the northwest. These winds pushed the pack ice to the southeast 6 to 8 miles every 24 hours, in a direction away from the North Pole. In order to reach the pole in time for our scheduled pick up by a Russian helicopter we slept only 3 of the 66 hours before setting foot on the North Pole. Most of that time we were skiing on the extremely slippery snow/ice crust that has not been visible this early in the season until the past few years.
Some scientists say that the Arctic Ocean may be ice-free during the summer within 30 years. In as few as 10 years it may not be possible to ski to the North Pole.
Especially around his native Minnesota these past four years, Will’s been leading the charge in regard to trying to get local governments to start including warming temperatures in any long-range planning. Like John Huston, Will has seen the changes happening across the Arctic up-close, and is both saddened and angered about what’s happening. But on a warm July day on the edge of the Boundary Waters its best to keep those sentiments – sad and angry – at bay and instead keep your eyes peeled for painted turtles slipping off logs into the Dead River.
Ten years ago today we were in the heart of the Aleutian Islands, pushing off from Herbert Island and headed back to Chuginadak. Last night I went back to the voice messages I’d left on National Geographic’s website – we weren’t able yet to send text, photos or video via the satellite phone, only audio – and got a kick out of both the brevity of the messages and the slight tone of fear I could hear. (“Probably our wildest days of adventure were left for the last days of our 25-day trip…. we got out in the middle of a pretty strong current…swamping the boat…it was a good ride. What we expected to be the homestretch was a monstrous wind…Mother Nature was not making that last day easy for us.”)
This morning – home comfortably but soggy in the Catskills, about to spend the long weekend in the Boundary Waters with my friend Will Steger – I’ve gone to the book about our Aleutian Adventure, “Birthplace of the Winds,” to remind myself exactly what we we’d gotten ourselves into.
“When I awoke I had virtually no anxiety about the upcoming – most likely final – crossing. Rested by a good, eight-hour sleep, feeling as good as I had all trip, I was anxious to get going.
“Our first clue should have been aural. From the beach at Herbert the roar coming off the pass was ominous. It isn’t the sound of the wind or waves, but like a locomotive river splitting Chuginadak and Herbert. I’ve never heard a current so loud before. That alone should have warned us this would be a wild day. But by the time the tents are down, we are anxious to get moving. We’ve been camped on Herbert for four nights, and it has been most luxurious. Now we’re ready to get back to base camp, in part for that dry bag of ‘real’ food that waits. Plus, once we are back at Applegate, the trip will have been a true success. All five islands explored, all crossings made safely.
“As soon as we push the boat onto the water, I am overwhelmed by an ominous feeling. The normally kelp-filled cove is wind-churned, foamy. We push out first and try to wait for Sean and Barry, which proves impossible. We are forced to paddle full-strength, right off the bat, just to avoid being sucked out to sea. Beyond, the roar grows louder.”
Suffice to say the day, eight hours later we were still paddling, into an offshore wind blowing from the four-mile long beach on Chuginadak. I remember shouting back to Scott McGuire, suggesting maybe we should hunker down in the kelp – like the seals do, during big storms – but he was afraid it would only grow worse and we’d spend the night on the water.
When we did finally pull the boats up on shore we were cold and cramped, but thrilled. It was our last big paddle of the adventure. I remember my partner Barry Tessman’s words to this day: “It doesn’t get any better than this!”
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