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PHOTOGRAPH BY KEITH LADZINSKI
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By Robert Kunzig, ENVIRONMENT Executive Editor
One of the most strangely exhilarating experiences I’ve had as a journalist happened in the spring of 2000, inside a shipping container on the deck of a ship in the Indian Ocean. The ship was the R/V Knorr, operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. A mile and half below us, a tethered robot was puttering over the ocean floor, and in the darkened control room inside the container, a dozen of us were grouped around the robot’s pilot, staring at the video from its cameras. In a few hours, we’d be steaming back to Mauritius after a month at sea.
Until we arrived, this region of the seafloor had been unexplored. With the ship’s sonar, the scientists had just mapped a new 4,900-foot-high volcano and baptized it Knorr Seamount. The robot was nosing around the top of that mountain, flying along a deep, five-foot-wide fissure—the rift separating the African tectonic plate from the Australian one. On either side stretched a landscape of black lava, which had erupted and then frozen into pillows, ropes, and corrugated sheets. It was a haunting, barren prospect.
Then something red flashed in the robot’s floodlights: Some nameless shrimplike creature, maybe four or five inches long, was swimming languidly along the fissure. We followed it for a bit, and in that moment, the presence of another lonely being, and the striking contrast of red on black, transformed this obscure underwater mountain into a place I felt connected to. I remember thinking, no other humans have ever set eyes on this place. It was a new experience for me.
Oceanographers who explore the seafloor have it often. Sometimes in those undiscovered places, though, they find human trash that has preceded them into the deep.
That’s the beauty and the heartache of the ocean today, World Oceans Day: so much left to explore, so much damage already. And so much possibility for doing better.
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