The hairy truth about The Hoff and a crab

SCIENCE

ASK AN OCEAN EXPLORER   

by Dr Jon Copley (Hodder £8.99, 224 pp)

In 1930, the U.S. ocean explorers Otis Barton and William Beebe entered the sea off Bermuda in their ‘Bathysphere’.

‘Bathy’ is Greek for ‘deep’, and the pair were aiming to take the submersible further down than anyone had ever been before.

As they reached a depth of 100 metres, water began trickling in through the hatch. If you or I had been in that position, we would have screamed: ‘Get this thing back to the surface NOW!’, with one or two other words thrown in there as well.

But not Beebe. He decided to speed up the descent.

Was he mad? No — he reasoned that the increased water pressure would seal the hatch more tightly and stop the leak. He was right.

Dr Jon Copley is very much of the Beebe mindset. As a schoolboy, he pored over maps of the ocean floor in National Geographic magazine. But he also knew that those charts were incomplete — we have more detailed maps of Mars than we do of the deep ocean floor. Copley wanted to explore the depths for himself.

One career as a marine biologist later, this charming book is the result.

In 1521, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan tried to discover the ocean’s depth by lowering a cannonball-weighted line from his ship. But, after 700 metres of rope had disappeared without the cannonball touching the seabed, Magellan gave up. We now know that the deepest point — at 35,814 ft — is the Challenger Deep in the Pacific’s Mariana Trench. That’s nearly seven miles, enough to bury Mount Everest with more than a mile to spare.

Only three people have visited the Challenger Deep, the most recent being James Cameron, director of the film Titanic. His own purpose-built vehicle took him there in 2012. Three years later, the sub was irreparably damaged by fire while being transported on a lorry.

On Copley’s own first dive, the pilot in charge of the vessel let it reach the seabed more than a mile down, then began unlocking the hatch.

It’s a classic joke played on newbies, to see if they panic. Copley didn’t. He knew (like Beebe in 1930) that the pressure would hold the hatch in place.

The ocean’s deepest layer is known as the ‘hadal’ zone, from the Greek word for ‘hell’. There are underwater springs in the Caribbean that discharge water measuring 401c — that’s hotter than molten lead.

Life beneath the ocean waves is certainly strange. The darkness makes it hard for fish to spot mates, so some species of anglerfish engage in kisses that last for life.

The male hooks up to the female’s blood supply through her lips, then she ‘carries him around as essentially a parasitic bag of sperm’.

There is a worm known as Yoda purpurata (purple Yoda), because bits of its head stick up like Yoda’s ears in the Star Wars films.

There’s a crustacean called the Hoff crab, because its hairy underside resembles the chest of Baywatch star David Hasselhoff. And the next time you eat ice cream, say ‘thank you’ to the pout fish. This creature produces an anti-freeze protein that stops ice crystals forming in its blood. A replicated version of the protein is now used during the manufacture of ice cream: it stops crystals growing, making for a smoother product.

The deepest-ever scuba dive was 1,090 ft. It took Ahmed Gabr just 15 minutes to reach that depth off the coast of Egypt in 2014, but he had to stagger his ascent over 13 hours, to avoid the famous ‘bends’ — the pains caused by nitrogen bubbles forming in your body fluids.

The gas can make you feel drunk. Jacques Cousteau called it ‘the rapture of the great depths’.

Of course, you could just stay on dry land, reading this book. Other sources of drunkenness are available.