Valerie Schultz: Fascination with the sea stirs deep wonder
| Friday, Jan 23 2009 03:31 PM
Last Updated Friday, Mar 27 2009 01:34 PM
“How much do I love you?
I’ll tell you no lie —
How deep in the ocean?
How high is the sky?”
— Irving Berlin
My husband is a lover of mountains. He likes to visit them, climb them, photograph them. I, on the other hand, prefer the ocean, to visit, to wade in, to ponder. Perhaps these differences between us are more than geographic: He is an avid seeker of challenges to conquer, and I like to float along on the waves of life. He dreams of climbing Mount Everest, the highest point on God’s green earth, while I would rather magically peer into the Mariana Trench, the deepest canyon under the sea.
We humans are enamored of extremes — the highest, the deepest, the longest, the shortest. Why else would the “Guinness Book Of World Records” so captivate us? We like to measure things, but even more, we like to push ourselves, to see how close our puny human stature can come to the divine. Scaling the highest mountain in the world, or plunging into the deepest earthly depths, is our way of grasping at the edges of the infinite. As if that were possible.
My fascination with the ocean has been reawakened by the news that George W. Bush, on his way out of office, declared three new marine national monuments, conserving and protecting, among other splendors, the Mariana Trench. Nearly 200,000 square miles of the equatorial Pacific, including waters around the Rose Atoll of American Samoa and those surrounding some of the uninhabited Northern Mariana Islands, are now protected from all commercial activity. The former president, who has not exactly been a model of environmental awareness, took a bold step on behalf of planetary well-being.
Marvelous, mysterious things happen 36,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. We actually know more about outer space than we do about our ocean depths. The Mariana Trench was first explored in 1951 by a British survey ship called the Challenger II, and so was first nicknamed the Challenger Deep.
Subsequently, the U.S. and Japan both sent vessels into the canyon. It is a daunting venture: In that environment, the unaided human eye can no longer see color, and the human body cannot withstand the exponentially magnified water pressure. The pioneers of the deep have discovered enormous, active mud volcanoes, and only the second pool of boiling liquid sulfur ever identified, the first being on one of Jupiter’s moons. Thousands of seemingly prehistoric species of fish, coral and plant life exist in the Mariana Trench: fantastic creatures that have adapted to a very cold, very dark, insanely pressurized home.
A fun fact for mountain lovers: If all 29,000 feet of Mount Everest were set upright in the bottom of the Mariana Trench, 7,000 feet of salt water would still remain above its peak.
When I was a kid, my brother told me that if we dug a very deep hole, we would reach China on the other side of the globe. We tried for a whole summer. We never made it. Thinking about our new marine monument makes me feel like that kid again, plunging my fingers into the rich and wriggly earth, awash in wonder at the vibrant, pulsating immensity of our world.
