James Cameron’s digital giant-screen film is produced by Walden Media and distributed by Buena Vista/ Walt Disney Pictures
“JOIN TITANIC DIRECTOR JAMES CAMERON AND A CREW OF NASA SCIENTISTS AND MARINE BIOLOGISTS on an extraordinary mission to document Earth’s most extreme environment. Aliens of the Deep plunges deep below the sea to explore hydrothermal vents, where mineral-charged water spews from the Earth’s crust and helps support thriving communities of football-sized clams, eyeless shrimp, red-tipped tubeworms, and lavish layers of microbes. These extraordinary animals are as close to alien life as anything seen on Earth and offer tantalizing clues about the life that might exist elsewhere in our solar system.
“Veteran ocean explorer and writer Dr. Joseph MacInnis follows Cameron and his crew as they overcome technical and physical challenges to provide an astonishing view of an extreme world and dream about one day exploring oceans—and life— beyond Earth.
Sample Chapter
Copyright Dr. Joe MacInnis 2004
MAKING WAVES PREPARING FOR THE EXPEDITION
It is after midnight and I am standing at the stern of the EDT Ares watching the ship’s wake unfold under the vast vault of the sky. The horizon is a blur of black water and bright stars. The wake is an expanding white ribbon streaming out behind the ship and then disappearing into the dark. In places it dances with patches of bioluminescence.
I have spent the past fifty years exploring the universe that lies below the bioluminescence. Since my first scuba dive in 1954, I have made thousands of dives in the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Each time I slip beneath the surface I ask myself the same questions. What is down here? What does it mean? What’s the best way to share it with the rest of the world?
Three weeks ago I sailed out from the coast of Florida on a new expedition. We are asking the same questions, but on a scale I have never before imagined. We have two large ships and 170 talented scientists, technicians, and filmmakers, as well as four state-of-the-art research submarines. Our purpose is to explore a part of the deep ocean that few people have ever seen, a world so different from what exists on the surface that some people have likened it to another planet. In the process we will probe some billion-year-old mysteries lying hidden in the depths and speculate about what this strange environment can teach us about exploring worlds beyond our own planet. And we’ll incorporate everything we see into a large-format, 3-D film.
Thousands of feet below the deck of the Ares, the Earth is breaking apart. Along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a mountain chain that snakes the length of the Atlantic from Greenland to Antarctica, the crust of the planet is splitting along its tectonic plates. At the plate boundaries hot magma wells up from beneath the crust creating a central rift valley and countless openings called hydrothermal vents. In the superheated vent environments, far from the reach of the sun, scientists have discovered bizarre communities of life. They thrive in a place where there is no life-giving photosynthesis, temperatures reach upwards of 500 degrees, toxic chemicals spew forth, and the intense pressure is lethal to humans. Even more astonishing, the vent organisms include some of the most primitive life forms on the planet, offer tantalizing clues about the rise of life on Earth, and may hold the key to finding life on other planets.
Only a handful of research subs can dive to these depths and explore these unfamiliar landscapes. Everyone on these two ships is awash in the excitement of seeing this alien world —Earth’s final frontier.
The 247-foot-long Ares has a wide main deck and a high white superstructure. She is a new ship with accommodation for 50 people working on deep-sea survey and recovery projects. The Ares has been chartered for this expedition because she has the crew and the machinery to put heavy objects into the ocean and a combination of computers and thrusters that allow her to hold a fixed position — in strong winds and currents — without using her anchors.
We are more than a hundred miles south of the Azores, steaming towards our next dive site. Two miles ahead are the lights of a second vessel, the Akademik Keldysh. Operated by the Russian Academy of Sciences, Keldysh is the world’s biggest research ship. Within her 450-foot length are 130 people, 17 laboratories, a sauna, and a swimming pool. Secured to her main deck is a pair of twenty million dollar mini-subs called Mir One and Mir Two. Slightly larger than a cube van, each Mir can take three people to 20,000 feet and work at that depth for eight hours. A few years ago, one of them carried me down to the rusting decks of the Titanic.
A few steps away, in the center of Ares main deck, sit two smaller subs, Deep Rover 1 and 2. As sleek as a pair of jet fighters, each Rover is equipped with a transparent Plexiglas sphere that gives their two-person crew a panoramic view of the inside of the ocean. A titanium pressure housing mounted on the bow of Deep Rover 1 holds a 3D high-definition camera. One of only four such cameras in the world, it is worth a quarter of a million dollars.
For the past week we have been using the Mirs and the Rovers to explore and film hydrothermal vent fields in this section of the Atlantic. Most vents lie in water more than two miles deep, but we have been visiting some much closer to the surface.
A tall man in a dark, blue T-shirt steps up to the railing beside me. Jim Cameron leans forward, places his strong forearms on the cool steel and gazes at the black continuum of sea and space. Riding high in the heavens to the east is the full moon with Mars above its shoulder. Light from the moon falls upon the sea like a magic, unearthly dawn.
“It’s beautiful,” I say.
“Sure is.” His voice is quiet.
As the leader of one of the most complex deep-sea expeditions ever conducted, Cameron has a lot on his mind tonight. How good is the footage he has just shot on the volcanic vent fields 2,500 feet below the surface? Can the sub crew resolve the electrical problems haunting both Deep Rovers? But for the moment, his thoughts are on two glowing objects — the moon and Mars. In a few days the red planet will be as close to the earth as it has been for 60,000 years. Taking advantage of this proximity, NASA recently launched two robotic vehicles, Spirit and Opportunity that are currently heading toward its dusty surface. When they land, they will begin searching for signs of ancient water in the nearby rocks.
Recent data from an earlier orbiting spacecraft hints that Mars’ northern lowlands may have once been covered with an ocean. An ancient Martian sea would be a tantalizing sign that life once thrived on the red planet.
Most people know Jim Cameron as the Hollywood director who made Aliens, The Abyss, True Lies and Titanic. But he’s also a serious undersea explorer. For him, exploration — the fierce combination of novelty, challenge and knowledge — is the elixir of life. Since his first dives to the Titanic in 1995, Cameron and his team have been using research subs and mini-robots to probe some of the ocean’s great secrets. Given the opportunity, Cameron would join the first team to fly to Mars, land on its dusty red surface, and see if the red planet is home to life. But he knows that the first humans-to-Mars mission is decades away. So this summer, he’s doing the next best thing — working with scientists, ships, and submarines here on Earth — trying to learn how to explore the surface of another planet. And recording every step of the journey on film.
This two-month expedition is the latest expression of Cameron’s passion for the deep ocean. It began when he was a teenager growing up in Niagara Falls, Ontario. In the mid-1960s he started reading everything he could about the pioneering undersea work of Jacques Cousteau, Edwin Link and the U.S. Navy. He watched the Sea Hunt television series, took diving lessons and became a certified scuba diver. By his early twenties, he was already thinking about how to incorporate advanced undersea technology into a feature film.
But Cameron’s ambitions went beyond making films about the ocean. A true explorer, he wanted to make films under the ocean. This is why he started the production of his $200 million movie Titanic by chartering the research vessel Keldysh and the Mir subs to make twelve dives to explore the world’s most famous shipwreck. It’s why he and his team made a 90-minute documentary on the Bismarck and went back to the Titanic to take audiences inside the wreck of the infamous ship for a a large-format film called Ghosts of the Abyss.
Cameron is taking a similar approach to this summer’s expedition. He’s invited a team of ten scientists to participate in dives at hydrothermal vent sites in the Atlantic and Pacific. Among them are experts in microbiology, marine biology, planetary science and astrobiology.
The scientists on this leg of the expedition are young, burning with enthusiasm and eager to share their knowledge. Astrobiologist Kevin Hand, 29, is short and soft-spoken. The first of his three degrees was in geology. As a graduate student at Stanford University, Hand is studying the possibility of life on Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter. He told me that his dives in the Mirs and Deep Rovers would give him his first view of the seafloor and help him think about possible connections between Earth’s deep-sea vents and the life-support processes of other planetary bodies.
I spoke to Kelly Snook as she took her first look at the Deep Rover subs. She is tall, dark-haired and appears much younger than her 34 years. Snook is a planetary scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston who develops programs that use the Earth and the Moon to prepare for the eventual exploration of Mars. At her workstation on the Keldysh, she documents the scientific dives, records the geological and biological samples brought up from the seafloor, and discusses the results via satellite phone with other scientists back on land. One of her objectives is to “learn how to explore space without leaving the Earth.”
Cameron steps back from the railing into the sodium glow of the ship’s lights. “It’s a good science team,” he says. “ They’re hot-blooded about their specialties and they’re giving us the latest thinking on the fundamental processes of extreme life.”
“And you’re giving them a chance to explore a world most of them have never seen.”
He gazes out on the shimmering surface of the sea, and repeats a favorite catchphrase: “Exploration is a like a muscle,” he says, “To maintain it’s strength and coordination, you have to keep exercising it.” He turns and strides quickly down the deck to join the group of men working on the subs.
Human exploration isn’t what it used to be. When I began working under the ocean as a physician-scientist in the 1960s, John Glen and the other “original seven” astronauts were being fired into space and making their first orbits around the Earth. Then came the Apollo program and the drama of the first men walking on the moon. At the same time we were diving to great depths and learning how to live for weeks under the ocean in undersea stations. In both realms it was the golden age of exploration.
Today, the money for deep-sea research is much harder to find and the human exploration of outer space is restricted to an expensive, low-orbit space station. Underlying these facts is a disheartening report from the National Science Foundation confirming that the numbers of young American seeking careers in science is in decline.
This expedition is Jim Cameron’s way of pushing in the other direction. He is treating parts of the project like a simulated space mission. He is producing a film that will show that science and exploration can be fun and fascinating.
After leading three major deep-sea expeditions, Cameron knows that the ocean is a big, complex place with lots of surprises. “Exploring the ocean is ten times as hard as you think it is,” he says, “And you start off thinking it’s really hard.” He has learned through bitter experience that exploring the depths and filming what’s in them, is fierce and consuming work. Because of this, everything he does is grounded in scientific principles and heavy-duty research.
Two years ago, after he and his team filmed the Bismarck in 16,000 feet of water, they steamed to these remote waters south of the Azores and aimed their 3-D underwater cameras at five hydrothermal vent fields called Lucky Strike, Lost City, Broken Spur, Snake Pit and TAG site. The spectacular images confirmed that the undersea part of the story was there, waiting to be told.
Five months ago, Cameron invited a small group of us to a two-day meeting at his ranch near Santa Barbara, California. On a sunny day in mid-February, I joined eight men and one woman around a big table next to the great fieldstone fireplace in the ranch’s main building. The table was covered with computers and notepads. Among those present were Cameron’s brother Mike, an aerospace engineer who designed the two mini-robots that probed the interior of Bismarck and Titanic and his brother John David or “JD”, a computer-media specialist. Sitting next to them were Ed Marsh, the creative producer and senior editor at Cameron’s Earthship Productions; Andrew Wight, Earthship’s producer; Vince Pace, director of photography; and Patrick Lahey, the leader of the Deep Rover sub team.
During his twelve dives to the Titanic in 1995, Jim Cameron learned that a deep-sea expedition consists of two kinds of technical assets: those you can depend on and those you are less certain about. The Russian ship the Akademic Keldysh and its Mir subs were as dependable as a Swiss train schedule. With hundreds of successful dives behind them, the pilots of the Mir’s could put the scientists and the Earthship 3D cameras at any depth down to 20,000 feet.
But Cameron was less sure about the Deep Rovers that he and his friend Mike McDowell had recently purchased in France. They were eight years old and their wiring and electronic components were suspect. They would have to be taken apart, completely rebuilt and certified according to the exacting standards of the American Bureau of Shipping. New lights would have to be added inside and outside their pressure hulls. And Deep Rover 1 had to be modified to carry a 3D high definition camera in a titanium pressure housing.
For two days, as the sun climbed into the sky and then slid like a blood orange into the nearby Pacific, we talked about subs and cameras and robots. We discussed deadlines and dollars, logistics, seaworthiness, schedules and safety. Because we were planning to take four subs and put two dozen people deep into the ocean — some for the very first time — our thoughts never strayed too far from the subject of safety.
Thirteen days before we drove up the long, winding road to the ranch, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it re-entered the atmosphere at 12,500 miles-an-hour. The break up of the shuttle started a few miles north of where we were sitting. The sun-bright streamers of white vapor and flame, seen over and over on television, were graved deep in our minds.
At the end of the two-day meeting, I drove down to the wide, curving beach below the ranch and stood next to the Pacific. The first people to explore the world’s biggest ocean were the Polynesians some 2,000 years ago. They used stick maps, stars clusters and cloud formations to find their way. We were going to go below the surface of the sea and use transponders, sector scanning sonar and global positioning satellites to find our way. The technology was different, but the danger was still there.
The ocean is so huge it is easy to get lost in or even disappear. There are so many currents, so much darkness and so many directions to go. And any technology, no matter how advanced or sophisticated, is as vulnerable as the people who use it. Thirty-four years ago, in cold waters not far from this beach, a young man named Berry Canon was killed on a $10 million U.S Navy project called SeaLab 3. He died because the people in charge of the project were overworked and overconfident. How do I know this? Because I was there the day after it happened.
Two weeks after the meeting, a pair of 18-wheel semi-trucks rolled through the gates of the ranch and came to a stop inside a steel-frame building below the main house. Lahey, the sub-crew and six ranch hands unloaded the two Deep Rovers onto the building’s concrete floor and began stripping them down to their bare hulls. In the process, they uncovered a gumbo soup of technical problems.
The sub’s main batteries and their protective pods had to be replaced. Most of the electrical cables, cable connectors and junction boxes were corroded. The penetrator plates — round pieces of polished metal where electrical cables and gas pipes ran from the exterior to the interior of the pressure hulls — were pitted with rust. A routine service-and-maintenance job turned into a costly and time-consuming major overhaul.
In addition, the Deep Rover team had to mount heavy-duty HMI movie lights and the 3D camera with its pressure housing and pan-and-tilt unit on the bow of Deep Rover 1. This meant weaving thick bundles of wires from the lights and cameras into the junction boxes that also controlled the propulsion, communication and hydraulic systems.
At first they worked 16-hour days and six-day weeks. As the problems mounted, they shifted to 20-hour days and seven-day weeks. “It was a much harder job than we thought,” says Lahey. “As soon as we solved a problem, another more serious one jumped its place.”
During the same period of time, in his engineering facility 80 miles away in Valencia, California, Mike Cameron and his two-man staff were working at flank speed, trying to get the two robots ready. Each morning before sun-up, they parked their pickup trucks next to a modest cream-colored building and walked through a door next to a small sign that said Dark Matter LLC. Cameron’s company specialized in the design and development of systems for deep ocean exploration and filmmaking. As soon as they got to their workbenches and large-screen computers, they focused on inspecting, testing, and packing the thousands of items that would have to be shipped the Akademic Keldysh in St. Johns, Newfoundland.
The identical robots, called Jake and Elwood, had proven themselves on the 2001 expedition to the Titanic and become the mechanical stars of “Ghosts of the Abyss.” They had also taken some astonishing footage of the interior of the German battleship Bismarck. The 2,700 precision parts jammed into each of their interiors included high-energy batteries, a small computer, a television camera, LED lights, low-rpm thrusters and dynamic buoyancy control. Their technical heart was a slim, white spool that automatically spun out 2500 feet of fiber-optic cable. The world’s most advanced deep-sea robots were designed to slip through one of the Titanic’s cabin windows, explore her collapsed interior and send high-resolution video images back to their mother subs.
The multiple precision parts and complex internal architecture of the bots made them difficult to prepare, test and operate. “To give you just one example,” says Mike Cameron, “the fiber optic threads that carry the data into and out of the bots are two-thirds the diameter of a human hair. The tips of the threads have to be hand-polished to remove any micro-scratches. It’s a painfully slow, don’t-make-any-mistakes-or-you-kill-the-patient process.”
As the time for readying Jake and Elwood ran out, Mike Cameron made the decision to use just one robot. He scavenged parts from Elwood and integrated them into Jake. Then he and his team packed hundreds of spare parts, tools and a launch and recovery enclosure into thirty large cases and shipping containers. Late one hot California night they lifted them onto a long-haul van that backed out of the industrial loading area and disappeared down the street. Like everyone else trying to meet the departure deadline, Mike Cameron knew that their toil was unfinished and they would have to work overtime on the Keldysh while she was underway to the first dive site.
Ever since the meeting at Cameron’s ranch, Andrew Wight, the film’s producer, had been trying to figure out how to pay for what was rapidly becoming the most expensive documentary film ever made.
Cameron the ocean explorer has always had a fierce appetite for the science and technology of outer space. He reads journals, scans the Internet, talks to senior scientists at NASA, looking for facts of compelling interest. He knew that Europa was covered with ice several miles thick. He was aware the ocean under the ice could be at least as big as all the oceans on Earth. For him there was only one thing to do. Fuse what he knew about Earth’s ocean and outer space and into a compelling, believable story.
Like all his stories, it had to have an authentic context. And that meant going to the bitter black bottom of two oceans and creating a moon-bright landscape for a first-hand look at what was down there: the smoking chimneys that roar; the legion of animals that live under deadly plumes of minerals; the sulfur-eating microbes that drive the whole ecosystem.
Late in June, Wight was informed that the film contract was ready for his signature. It was a good thing. The Keldysh was already steaming across the Atlantic toward Saint John’s and the Ares had left her homeport in Cyprus for Fort Lauderdale, Florida. At the same time, two flatbed truck convoys loaded with tons of diving and filming equipment were driving across the California desert heading for the two east coast seaports.
At a desert junction east of Palm Springs, one of the truck divers of the southern convoy stopped his 18-wheel vehicle and got out for a routine inspection of the strange, tarpaulin-covered cargo he’d picked up at Cameron’s ranch. As he walked around the back of his 40-foot truck, he noticed a pool of clear liquid oozing out of a container next to one of the Deep Rover subs. It had no smell, but it sure as hell looked suspicious and on this tar-hot, post 9/11 day in the desert he wasn’t taking any chances, so he called the local police who called the local fire fighters who rushed to the scene.
A few hours later when Mike Cameron arrived, he found a dozen men standing around the truck wearing orange-colored, head-protecting Haz-Mat suits. They stared at him, looked down at the pool of mysterious fluid expanding in the heat and stared at him some more. Mike Cameron tried to tell them it was a non-toxic, mineral-based oil used to pressure compensate the sub’s batteries and the 55-gallon drum holding it must have punctured because the truck had been packed too tight. The men in the Haz-Mat suits kept looking at him as if he was a specimen on a swab. Being a Cameron, Mike knew that every ambiguous story needs a clear resolution, so he dipped his finger in the liquid, stuck his finger in his mouth and smiled. As soon as he did this, the Haz-Mat suits started coming off and the men wearing them broke into grins. In less time than it takes to uncap a case of Coors Light, the lonely stretch of cactus-fringed road was deserted.
About a week later, on a fiercely hot July night the Ares was tied up to a long, concrete pier in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. There was no wind and the temperature was pushing ninety degrees. Every few minutes, in the grainy, black haze overhead, another jet aircraft from the international airport roared out over the Gulf Stream.
The men working on the main deck of the Ares did not hear the planes taking off in the humid sky above them. All they heard were the sounds of hammers and chippers and welding torches. And when they lifted their heads and looked around, all they saw were showers of sparks, steel turning white hot and a narrow gauge railway track being welded to the center of the Ares’ main deck. At one end of the 72-foot-long track were the two gleaming Deep Rovers, squatting on their trolleys. At the other end, mounted over the stern like a giant wishbone, was a two-story, industrial A-frame that would lift the subs off the deck and lower them into the ocean.
Launching and recovering a sub is the most difficult part of any dive. As soon as it is lifted off its cradle, the sub starts to swing, slowly at first, but if the ship is rolling in big waves, the sub gains speed and momentum. If the launch crew loses control, they are confronted with a six-ton wrecking ball trying to destroy their ship.
During the past 20 years, the deck crews of French and American scientific institutions learned how to launch their research subs without harming the ship, the sub, or the people inside. They use a big A-frame and lift the sub over the stern, the most stable part of the ship. They attach at least two control lines to each side of the sub and employ winches, capstans and a strong-armed deck crew to dampen any sideways motion. They perfect their technique and practice it over and over.
I looked down the deck at the seven men in hardhats and sweat-stained coveralls swarming over the Deep Rovers. Tomorrow, when the tracks were finally laid down, they would start rigging a network of nylon lines around capstans and bollards. They would winch Deep Rover 2 on its trolley along the narrow gauge track until it was directly under the A-frame. One of them would climb on top of Deep Rover 2, reach up and hook a lift line from the center of the A-frame into a ring on top of the sub. Control lines would be fastened to both sides of the sub and then drawn tight. The A-frame operator would lift the sub off its trolley, and swing it slowly backward until it was suspended over the stern of the ship. Then, inside a web of taut lines, he would lower it gently into the water.
Normally it took weeks of practice for a crane operator, the winch-men and the line handlers to turn themselves into a smoothly functioning launch and recovery team. But time was a luxury the men on the Ares did not have. They were behind schedule and had only a few days to learn how to get it right.
During a break in the welding, Jim Cameron and Mike McDowell walked across the deck, stood in front of Rover 1 and stared at the 3D, high-definition camera mounted on its bow. Cameron leaned into a hand-held intercom and began talking to Vince Pace sitting inside the sub. A powerfully muscled man in his late 40s, Pace was the director of photography whose team built the camera and fitted it inside its gleaming, pressure-proof housing.
The 3D-HD camera and three others just like it, was the technical centerpiece of Cameron’s expedition. It was a complex, precision instrument that made two identical, high-definition video images and sent them through a bundle of wires and processors to a pair of high-definition recorders. However, in spite of all the money and man-hours lavished on the camera mounted on Rover 1, in spite of all the redundancies that protected it against the salt air, the summer’s heat and the weight of the ocean, the camera was not working.
Vince Pace was staring at the camera’s video monitor and trouble-shooting the problem. Sweat crisscrossed his forehead and ran down his arms. As he spoke to Cameron, he selected his words carefully. He knew the pressure Cameron was under to make this complex expedition succeed. A veteran of the expeditions to Titanic and Bismarck, he was also familiar with Cameron’s highly combustible temper. He took little comfort in the knowledge that on this sticky, steamy night, it was not just the camera in front of him that wasn’t working. If the sub he was sitting in were a patient, it would be headed for the Intensive Care Unit.
At about this same time in Saint Johns, Newfoundland, Anatoly Sagalevitch was glancing out the window in his big cabin on board the Akademik Keldysh as he talked to two visitors. A short, impatient man with thick glasses and a ring of white hair, Sagalevitch was anxious for the two semi-trucks on the dock below the ship to finish unloading their cargo. It was mid-afternoon and the scientists and film crew and their mountain of crates and containers were on board. So were Mike Cameron’s team and their mini-robot. But boxes and other large objects were still coming off the trucks. And there were only a few hours left before the captain wanted to cast off the lines and take the Keldysh out into the Atlantic.
An electronics engineer by training, Sagalevitch assisted in the design and construction of the two Mir research subs in 1987. Since then, he and his eight-man Mir team have made hundreds of dives in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. Today, as head of the Manned Submersibles Laboratory at the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology in Moscow, he is responsible for planning and coordinating every dive made by the Mirs.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, the Shirshov Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, had to turn to its international friends to help pay for the ship and the subs. One of those friends was Jim Cameron.
“Cameron chartered the Mirs for his first dives to the Titanic because they have twice the battery supply of any other deep-sea sub,” he says. “This meant he could add thousands of watts of high-intensity lights. In addition, he wanted to dive the two subs together so he could put one in front for scale and lighting — while the other filmed it from behind. This is how he got some of those great dramatic shots in the opening scenes of his movie.”
Sagalevitch glanced around his cabin. On the wall opposite his desk were framed, full-color posters from Cameron’s three undersea movies. Then he looked out the window and saw the semi-trucks driving away from the pier. Without smiling, he walked slowly across the room, lifted a bottle from the table in front of his visitors and poured a stream of ice-cold vodka into three small glasses.
The stern of the Ares is one of the few places on the ship where you can go for a moment of solitude. Whenever there is a break in the work I walk past the subs until I am standing next to the chest-high railing. It’s a good place to reflect on the immutable sun that burns down from the sky and the immeasurable ocean we are steaming across.
Sunlight —the beam of life —travels more than 90 million miles from its thermonuclear origins and penetrates the atmosphere and the upper layers of the sea. At a depth of one thousand feet it is almost extinguished and the ocean below it is a cosmic black. Most of the surface of the earth — 118 million square miles — is covered with seawater more than a mile deep. This means that the deep ocean is by far the planet’s dominant habitat. Most of this water is forever dark, illuminated only by brief flashes of bioluminescent organisms generating their own biological light. That is where we are taking the subs. Loren Eiseley had no idea how prescient he was when he wrote: “If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.”
JAMES CAMERON’S “ALIENS OF THE DEEP”
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC BOOKS in 2005
It has 80 color photographs and 35,000 words.
Copyright Dr. Joe MacInnis 2004
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