Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [29]
In the nineteenth century, scientists dropped dredges and nets to grab samples from the deep, while divers wearing heavy helmets, thick rubberized canvas suits and lead-weighted boots walked the shallower depths. In 1930, the first submersible to go deep, William Beebe’s round steel bathysphere, made a 3,280-foot dive off Bermuda, suspended on a steel cable from a surface ship. It was followed in the late 1940s and 1950s by bathyscaphes—self-propelled undersea vehicles with tanks for buoyancy and ballast. In the 1960s, the Cold War with Russia inspired the development and construction of deep submersibles, as the ocean depths became a strategic frontier. The famous Alvin, as well as France’s Nautile, both deep-ocean submersibles developed during the Cold War, were involved in the earliest dives on Titanic. Back home, at my own Vancouver Maritime Museum, is another Cold War-era submersible, built in 1968: Ben Franklin is capable of diving to 3,280 feet and staying down for thirty days, the largest deep-diving submersible ever built.
Mir 1 and Mir 2 were built in Finland in 1985–87 at a cost of $25 million each, for Russia’s Shirshov Institute of Oceanology. The builder, Rauma-Repola, was awarded the contract after the United States pressured the Canadian government to block the sale of Vancouver-built Pisces submersibles to the Soviets. Each 18.6-ton Mir is an engineering marvel capable of diving to (and returning from) depths of up to 4 miles. The heart of each sub is a 6-foot diameter nickel-steel pressure sphere 1½ inches thick. Inside that small sphere, three persons—a pilot and two observers, as well as life-support equipment, sonars and the sub’s controls—have to fit. It is a tight, cramped workspace.
After we load our gear, Keldysh clears the harbor of St. John’s and begins the twenty-hour cruise to the Titanic wreck site. We arrive in the early morning hours of September 1. The crew of Keldysh prepares for the dive by dropping three acoustic transponders around the wreck to help the two Mirs to navigate and to give mission control aboard Keldysh an indication of where we are 2¼ miles below them.
Five days of diving—a total often dives, each with two passengers and a Russian pilot—follow. As we slowly circle this famous patch of ocean, I stare out over the dark blue water and then up at the clear night sky, the stars burning brightly, unobscured by city lights. I can’t help thinking about what happened at this very site eighty-eight years ago. Ballard was right when he said this is a spooky spot on the ocean. The power of the human imagination, and the fact that I am exactly where the tragic events happened, bring to mind that ill-fated ship poised on the brink of her final plunge, the silently bobbing bodies, deck chairs, broken wood and steamer trunks. The next morning, some people confess that during the evening they came up on deck, or like me, looked out of an open porthole, and felt the impact of being here—it was an emotional moment. Those of us who will be diving in the subs are wondering how we will feel, how we will react, when we reach the ocean’s floor and see Titanic.
In conversations with the other divers and participants, the motive for their presence on the expedition is a constant and early question. Each of us wants to know why the others chose to do this dive. One motive is historical interest—a British non-diving passenger is a keen student of Titanic’s history, and many others have more than a passing acquaintance with the ship’s famous story. Another is that it is an opportunity to participate in the exploration of a shipwreck and to see a part of our world that few ever visit. There is a powerful intellectual curiosity afoot, stoked not just by this famous shipwreck but also by working with a top team of scientists and technicians to experience first hand these amazing submersibles and to view the ocean depths. By volume, the sea covers 99.5 per cent of our biosphere, with 78.5 per cent of that taken up by deep ocean.