This article was originally featured on MIT Press Reader. This article is excerpted from James Lawrence Powell’s book “Mysteries of the Deep“.
When HMS Challenger set sail in 1872, some scientists still believed in the azoic theory: that life cannot exist below 300 fathoms, or 550 meters. Others thought that creatures lived in the abyss, but that the cold and dark prevented them from evolving. With no more than their dredges, the Challenger scientists soon disproved both ideas.
The exploration of life at and below the surface of the dark seafloor began with a 1936 article by Claude ZoBell and Quentin Anderson of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, who found abundant bacteria in the surface layers of sediment cores 40 to 75 centimeters long taken off the coast of Southern California.
The deep sea and its creatures became a subject of great interest in the 1930s, prompted by the invention of the deep-sea submersible, a sort of mini submarine built to withstand the great pressures of the abyss. The most notable of these early vessels was the two-person “Bathysphere” used by famed scientist and author William Beebe (1877–1962), whose books with their photos of bizarre deep-sea creatures fascinated and inspired youngsters of an earlier time. Engineer Otis Barton designed the vessel and he and Beebe used it to make a number of deep dives off the coast of Bermuda. In 1934, the two reached a record depth of 923 meters.
The successor to Beebe’s Bathysphere was the Alvin, named for its inventor, the eponymous Al Vine, and launched in 1964 by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. It was designed to carry two scientists and a pilot 4,500 meters down and allow them to stay at that depth for nine hours. Alvin made over 5,000 dives and fostered an estimated 2,000 research publications. But it had a rocky start, to say the least. Alvin’s first dive was in 1965 to 1,800 meters. In March 1966, Alvin was used in an unsuccessful…
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