30 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
AREPORTERAT LARGE
FIVE OCEANS, FIVE DEEPS
The explorers who set one of the last meaningful records on earth.
By Ben Taub
S
ea level—perpetual flux. There is
a micromillimetre on the surface
of the ocean that moves between
sea and sky and is simultaneously both
and neither. Every known life-form ex-
ists in relation to this layer. Above it,
the world of land, air, sunlight, and lungs.
Below it, the world of water, depth, and
pressure. The deeper you go, the darker,
the more hostile, the less familiar, the
less measured, the less known.
A splash in the South Pacific, last June,
marked a historic breach of that world.
A crane lowered a small white submers-
ible off the back of a ship and plonked
it in the water. For a moment, it bobbed
quietly on the surface, its buoyancy cal-
ibrated to the weight of the pilot, its only
occupant. Then he flipped a switch, and
the submarine emitted a frantic, high-
pitched whirr. Electric pumps sucked sea-
water into an empty chamber, weighing
the vessel down. The surface frothed as
the water poured in—then silence, as the
top of the submersible dipped below the
waterline, and the ocean absorbed it.
Most submarines go down several
hundred metres, then across; this one was
designed to sink like a stone. It was the
shape of a bulging briefcase, with a pro-
truding bulb at the bottom. This was the
pressure hull—a titanium sphere, five feet
in diameter, which was sealed off from
the rest of the submersible and housed
the pilot and all his controls. Under the
passenger seat was a tuna-fish sandwich,
the pilot’s lunch. He gazed out of one of
the viewports, into the blue. It would take
nearly four hours to reach the bottom.
Sunlight cuts through the first thou-
sand feet of water. This is the epipelagic
zone, the layer of plankton, kelp, and
reefs. It contains the entire ecosystem of
marine plants, as well as the mammals
and the fish that eat them. An Egyptian
diver once descended to the limits of this
layer. The feat required a lifetime of train-
ing, four years of planning, a team of
support divers, an array of specialized air
tanks, and a tedious, thirteen-hour as-
cent, with constant decompression stops,
so that his blood would not be poisoned
and his lungs would not explode.
The submersible dropped at a rate
of about two and a half feet per second.
Twenty minutes into the dive, the pilot
reached the midnight zone, where dark
waters turn black. The only light is the
dim glow of bioluminescence—from
electric jellies, camouflaged shrimp, and
toothy predators with natural lanterns
to attract unwitting prey. Some fish in
these depths have no eyes—what use
are they? There is little to eat. Condi-
tions in the midnight zone favor fish
with slow metabolic rates, weak mus-
cles, and slimy, gelatinous bodies.
An hour into the descent, the pilot
reached ten thousand feet—the begin-
ning of the abyssal zone. The tempera-
ture is always a few degrees above freez-
ing, and is unaffected by the weather at
the surface. Animals feed on “marine
snow”: scraps of dead fish and plants
from the upper layers, falling gently
through the water column. The abyssal
zone, which extends to twenty thousand
feet, encompasses ninety-seven per cent
of the ocean floor.
After two hours in free fall, the pilot
entered the hadal zone, named for the
Greek god of the underworld. It is made
up of trenches—geological scars at the
edges of the earth’s tectonic plates—
and although it composes only a tiny
fraction of the ocean floor, it accounts
for nearly fifty per cent of the depth.
Past twenty-seven thousand feet, the
pilot had gone beyond the theoretical
limit for any kind of fish. (Their cells col-
lapse at greater depths.) After thirty-five
thousand feet, he began releasing a se-
ries of weights, to slow his descent. Nearly
seven miles of water was pressing on the
titanium sphere. If there were any im-
perfections, it could instantly implode.
The submarine touched the silty bot-
tom, and the pilot, a fifty-three-year-old For more than a year, the team trying to
