Yokahama, Japan, June 16, 1875, 35° 28′ N, 139° 38′ E, to Portsmouth, Great Britain, 50° 48′ N, 1° 05′ W

From Japan, Challenger headed east into the immensity of the North Pacific. The dredging hauls were poor, because the seafloor in that region was rocky and barren. For those on board this leg was as dreary as their voyage from the Admiralty Islands to Japan had been. Many had had their fill of the cruise and none felt this way more keenly than Herbert Swire: “For nearly one mortal month we have been at sea without one sight of land and only once chancing across a ship. I am sick of it. Very much so. . . .”

At 3:00 P.M. on July 27, 1875, Challenger anchored outside the reef at Honolulu. Reactions to the town were mixed, Joe Matkin finding it “civilized” but Herbert Swire writing, “I was much disappointed on sighting these islands. From reading various books having reference to the group, I fully expected to see islands luxuriant with verdure or at least the beauty of an ordinary tropical coral island. Instead of this, however, I found Oahu, the island upon which stands the capital Honolulu, to be an elevated ridge of barren rock, stretching about 30 miles in a NW and SE direction.” Campbell’s account concurred and they were all glad to move on a few days later for the “big island” some 30 miles to the southeast.

They found Hilo Bay much more rewarding than Honolulu, although still not what they, with their experience of Indonesia, would call a tropical paradise. All the men eagerly anticipated the forthcoming visit to Mauna Loa to see the active volcano although

initial impressions, gained from the harbor, were not especially exciting. “Owing to their gradual ascent,” wrote Herbert Swire, “these two mountains look quite insignificant. . . . Mauna Loa especially looks ridiculously small, only a molehill, as many of us remarked.”

But this disparaging impression of Mauna Loa changed when they started to climb it. Campbell and Moseley set out at two o’clock in the afternoon of the day they arrived in Hilo but did not arrive at the hotel on the rim of Kilauea until 1:30 in the morning. But the view during the final phases of their ascent was worth it. “Presently a red glow appears among the clouds on our right, increases and then the clouds which before had covered it melt away and Mauna Loa reveals its long, low lying summit from the center of which a great column of lurid light and smoke is flaring. . . .”

The next morning the rest of the party joined them. The hotel was of a surprisingly high quality despite its location right on the edge of an active volcano. The plumbing arrangements, however, perplexed the travelers. A grass hut had been erected some distance from the hotel over a crack in the lava through which steam issued. The steam condensed in the grass and, together with any rain that might have fallen into the grass roof, ran back into the hut, where it was collected and stored in tanks. Over the tanks was a hand pump to pump the warm whiskey-colored water into a bathing tub.

Farther down the hill was an even more dangerous bathing contraption, a sulfur-vapor bath. A box had been erected over a volcanic vent from which issued sulfurous vapors. One disrobed, sat in the box, and closed a cover that left only the head and neck protruding. “In this horrid contrivance,” wrote Campbell, “you can either be skinned alive before you are aware of the danger or else you can be steamed into a damp pulpy condition.”

But the food and accommodations were unexpectedly good. “All is comfortable—and unexpectedly so—as a solitary house situated four thousand feet above the sea, on the brink of an always active volcano, on a plain constantly shaken by earthquakes, most of

whose luxuries have to come on mule back thirty miles from Hilo over a ragged lava track, could possibly be.”

Late in the afternoon they descended 600 feet into Kilauea crater so that they could observe it both in daylight and as night came on. They made their way across a cinder field, past tormented blackened spires of lava—“earth’s vomit” Campbell called it—while all around them steam and smoke issued from cracks in the ground. As the sun disappeared behind the rim of the crater they found themselves standing on the edge of a low cliff, watching as the dominant colors shifted from black, gray, and white until a dim crimson glow suffused the drifting clouds of smoke. Beneath them they saw delicate traceries of red and realized that only inches below their feet the molten lava of Hawaii ran in its broken arteries.

In the 1960s the new priesthood of the plate tectonic revolution had to deal with rather an embarrassing problem. They had explained how new crust is formed at the mid-ocean ridges and also how it is consumed at subduction zones. But how could they explain the volcanic activity in the middle of the tectonic plates, far from the regions where crust was created or destroyed? Nowhere is this process more active than in the Hawaiian Archipelago and nowhere is the problem more obvious, because Hawaii is more than 3,200 kilometers from the nearest plate boundary. Where do its conspicuous volcanoes come from?

The answer was provided in 1963 by the Canadian geophysicist J. Tuzo Wilson. Wilson was professor of geophysics at the University of Toronto from 1946 to 1974 and one of the architects of the plate tectonic revolution. He is perhaps most famous for explaining the long ridges that occur at right angles to the seafloor spreading centers. He named them “transform faults” and suggested that they are caused by different chunks of crust sliding past each other at different rates as they are formed at the spreading centers. But easily

as important was his explanation of volcanoes in the middle of plates. Wilson reasoned that volcanic islands far from spreading centers or subduction zones could form only if there was a localized region where molten magma from the earth’s interior welled up and heated the underside of tectonic plates forming localized “hot spots.” These hot spots would take the form of volcanoes on the surface. The idea was so radical that when Wilson put it forward it was rejected by all the major scientific journals and was eventually published in the relatively obscure Canadian Journal of Physics. In many ways Wilson’s experience was a reprise of Wegener’s difficulty in getting his theory of continental drift accepted several decades before.

But Wilson’s idea of hot spots elegantly explained the linear path of the Hawaiian Island chain from Kauai in the northwest to Hawaii in the southeast and also presented a testable hypothesis, always a sign of good science. The most northerly of the Hawaiian Islands, Kauai, should be both the oldest and the most heavily eroded, while Hawaii itself should be the youngest and least eroded. Radiometric dating of the rocks, as well as the observed degree of erosion on the islands, agreed with Wilson’s hypothesis, so the scientific community had no choice but to accept that he was right.

Further research has shown that the Hawaiian Island chain is but the most recent spoor left by the passage of the Pacific plate over this mid-Pacific hot spot. Examination of Heezen and Tharp’s map of the northern Pacific shows clearly a submerged line of extinct volcanoes marching northwestward through Midway and beyond. Strangely though, at a latitude of approximately 32° N and a longitude of 171° W, the line of volcanoes kinks abruptly and heads almost due north in the form of the Emperor Seamount chain. This suggests that the Pacific plate changed direction abruptly about 43 million years ago.

As the Pacific plate continues to move northwestward, the active volcanoes of the big island of Hawaii that so enthralled those aboard Challenger will gradually become quiescent. In fact, there is

evidence to suggest that this is already happening. Thirty-five kilometers to the southeast of the big island the seamount known as Loihi is busily being formed. Loihi is an active submarine volcano and has already risen 3 kilometers from the seafloor to within 1 kilometer of the surface. According to Wilson’s theory, Loihi will continue to rise and will one day become either part of the big island or the latest in the long chain of seamounts that extends all the way to the Aleutian Trench.

On August 19, 1875, Challenger weighed anchor and left Hilo, heading south for Tahiti and the Society Islands. It was another long dull passage, a full month at sea, because they dawdled as always to sound and dredge despite the growing desire of nearly all on board to get home. It was also on this leg of the voyage that tragedy struck the Scientifics. Von Willemoes Suhm, the young man whom Wyville Thomson recruited in Edinburgh and whose membership of the Scientifics was endorsed by Thomas Henry Huxley, died suddenly of erysipelas, a bacterial infection of the skin. He was only 28. Moseley was devastated:

With great sadness they buried him in 2,700 fathoms of water, some 300 miles from Tahiti.

It was on this leg of the voyage that they encountered the largest field of manganese nodules they had yet chanced across. On September 16, they brought up more than half a ton and filled two small casks with them. With an average diameter of three-quarters of an inch they resembled nothing so much as the marbles popular with children back home.

Arriving at Tahiti on September 18, 1875, Challenger anchored in the pretty harbor of Papeete. All on board were much taken with the beauty of the place, quite in contrast to the dismal scenery they had encountered in the Sandwich Islands. However, they were less impressed with Tahiti’s French colonial government. Campbell wrote, “The whole history of the manner in which the French came to occupy this island is irritable and lamentable. Although we may have occupied countries in a high handed manner as regards the natives, still we invariably have something to show for it besides the mere advantages of a naval station, whereas here the French have nothing to show worthy the name of a European power, and this is not because they don’t try, but because they do try and fail, which, in two words, is the history of all their colonial attempts.”

The French notwithstanding, there was something about the atmosphere Tahiti generated that was hard to put into words, but Joseph Matkin tried.

When the time came to leave the beautiful island, they were sorry to go, but Captain Thomson might have been glad to remove his crew from the earthly temptations of plentiful women, food, and drink. They had been at sea for almost three years and all were

more than ready to go home. However, there was one reason for relief. Joe Matkin’s fears about the tyrannical reputation of Captain Thomson had not been borne out. The new captain was proving himself to be as sympathetic and capable as his illustrious predecessor, George Nares.

They left Tahiti on October 3, played out of harbor by the local band. Under a favorable breeze they shaped a course southeast towards Valparaiso. At first the weather looked set fair for a quick passage and Spry wrote, “all seemed to promise a speedy run over the solitary waste of waters intervening in 5000 miles between Tahiti and Valparaiso.” But within a few days they found themselves becalmed and tempers once again became short. It was a great relief then, after six weeks of calm, to sight the island of Juan Fernandez lying in the immensity of the Pacific some 360 miles west of the South American mainland.

The crew’s and the Scientifics’ interest in the island was more than merely academic though, and more than just a relief from the monotony of the voyage. Juan Fernandez had inspired the setting of the greatest of all castaway yarns: Robinson Crusoe. Moseley was fascinated and wrote, “It was with the liveliest interest that we approached the scene of Alexander Selkirk’s life of seclusion and hardship, and an island with the existence of which, in the case of most of us, the very fact that we were at sea on a long voyage was more or less distantly connected. The study of Robinson Crusoe certainly first gave me a desire to go to sea and ‘Darwin’s Journal’ settled the manner.”

The basis for the story is that in February 1704, William Dampier, a noted British buccaneer and navigator, arrived at Juan Fernandez with two ships, both licensed privateers. The second ship was commanded by a Captain Stradling, who quarreled with his shipmates, most of whom demanded to be put ashore. Dampier intervened and his diplomacy eased the situation and, with all but five men left behind, set off into the immensity of the Pacific with the object of some lively maritime acquisition. Some months later,

Stradling returned to the island to find that three of those left behind had been captured by the French. This time the volatile Stradling quarreled with his sailing master, one Alexander Selkirk, so grievously that Selkirk demanded to be put ashore on the island rather than continue to serve with such an intolerable commander. Stradling left Selkirk well provisioned and set sail, ignoring entreaties from the castaway, who changed his mind at the last minute. Selkirk remained on Juan Fernandez until 1709 when he was picked up by Duke under the command of Captain Woodes Rogers. Rogers’ account of Selkirk’s hardship inspired Defoe, although he changed the location to the Caribbean.

Those aboard Challenger found the famous island beautiful, its dark basaltic cliffs contrasting with the bright yellow-green of the abundant vegetation, predominantly ferns. Hummingbirds were plentiful and hovered at every bush. A monument to Selkirk had been placed at the crest of a gap between the mountains, 8,000 feet above sea level. There he had sat and watched the sea on both sides of the island in the long-deferred hope of sighting a sail.

On November 15, 1875, Challenger said farewell to Juan Fernandez and set sail for Valparaiso, 360 miles distant. That day Captain Thomson issued wine to all hands to commemorate the third anniversary of their commission. They arrived in Valparaiso on December 7th and found it a marked contrast to the beauty of Tahiti. “How Valparaiso came to be called the Vale of Paradise I cannot well understand,” wrote Moseley “. . . The surrounding country has a most barren and inhospitable appearance, the red decomposed granite soil showing bare everywhere, and being only here and there sprinkled over with scanty bushes. Not a tree is to be seen anywhere from the anchorage in the harbor, though a wide view is thence obtained of the coast of the Bay.”

However, the city was large, prosperous, and very expensive. Matkin wrote, “I think it is the most expensive place that we have been to, a dollar won’t go as far as a shilling in England. . . .” By now Matkin, despite his sunny disposition, was feeling, like the rest of

the crew, that it was time to go home and get on with his life. Of one thing though he was sure: he would not be staying on in the navy.

Another two members of the expedition were staying in the navy but would leave the ship at Valparaiso: Sub-lieutenant A. F. Balfour and the literary bon vivant Sub-lieutenant Lord George Campbell. Both received orders informing them that they had been promoted to the rank of lieutenant. They left Challenger in early December 1875 determined to travel to Montevideo, on the other side of the continent, by land so that they could experience the wonder of the Andes and the pampas at first hand. Campbell wrote, “It had, as you know, long been a dream of mine (should I leave the Challenger at Valparaiso) to go home overland—across the Andes and the Pampas; and for once in a way my dream came to pass.”

Challenger left Valparaiso on December 11th, steaming out of the harbor at daybreak, and then pausing to calibrate the compass. She spent the last days of 1875 and the first days of 1876 surveying in the narrow coves and fjords of South America around the peninsula of Tres Montes, then further south in the Messier and Sarmiento channels before steaming down the Strait of Magellan to avoid the notoriously bad weather of the west Patagonian coast. All around them rose the Andes, the southernmost tip of the Ring of Fire that they had first encountered so long ago on the other side of the Pacific. They had been five months in the Pacific, traveled more than 12,000 miles and explored more than 62 oceanographic stations. On January 20, 1876, Challenger left Elizabeth Island in the midst of Broad Reach, the channel that separates “the dreary, barren, mountainous islands of Tierra del Fuego” (as Joe Matkin put it) from the rest of South America and headed for the Falklands. They arrived at Port Stanley, the first British colony they had seen for many months, on January 23, 1876.

They were delighted to be back on British soil once again. “We have never lived better since we left Britain than at this place,” wrote Matkin, while Spry commented wryly, “Draught ale and

porter at threepence the glass, and good spirits at about English prices, add to the sense of enjoyment of the ship’s company.” But the easy availability of cheap alcohol was to end in tragedy. After a particularly rumbustuous night of drinking in Stanley a young seaman named Thomas Bush fell overboard. One of the lieutenants, Carpenter, dived in after him and hauled him out but, wrote Matkin of the ship’s surgeons, “after persevering for upwards of an hour in the usual methods of resuscitation . . . they were compelled to decide that life was extinct.” It was one of the gloomiest days yet for those aboard because the deceased was both popular and engaged to be married on his return.

At Montevideo some days later, there was further sadness at the loss of another literary officer. Herbert Swire had contracted a sickness in Tahiti and was dangerously ill. He was invalided off the ship and sent to catch the first mail steamer home. Matkin wrote, “Sub-Lieutenant Swire was the tallest, strongest, and finest looking man we had in the ship, but now, through bad surgical treatment, he is physically ruined.”

From Montevideo Challenger headed north for Ascension Island, and then the Cape Verde Islands, where they arrived on April 16, 1876. They were following the line of the mid-Atlantic Ridge, first discovered by them three years before, and by mid-May were passing to the west of the Azores homeward bound. They were not far from a place that would, a hundred years later, see spectacular confirmation of Challenger’s discovery.

Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp used remote-sensing technology to make their earth-shattering discovery of seafloor spreading. But by the early 1970s scientists would settle for nothing less than actually seeing for themselves the place where new Earth was made. By this time the French and the Americans had developed Trieste into the undisputed world leader in deep submergence technology. It

was this shared expertise that, in 1971, led the French geophysicist Xavier Le Pichon to visit the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) with a proposition. He suggested to the institution’s director, K. O. Emery, that the two nations pool resources and work together to make the long awaited journey to the mid-Atlantic Ridge. Emery’s response was positive and the two scientists started soliciting ideas from submergence experts on how to structure and fund the project. And so was born Project FAMOUS (French-American Mid-Ocean Undersea Studies).

One of the people they approached was Bob Ballard, a young scientist who was interested in manned deep-sea diving since his childhood days in San Diego, where he first encountered Trieste. Ballard was working with the newly developed American submersible Alvin in the Gulf of Maine and thought it could do the job. Le Pichon and Jim Heirtzler, chairman of the WHOI department of geology and geophysics, were named project leaders. Both were strong supporters of the plate tectonic theory and both had trained at Lamont under Maurice Ewing.

The area that the FAMOUS researchers selected for their investigations lay between 36° and 37° N in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, some 400 miles southwest of the Azores. Challenger had passed nearby as she returned to Britain almost exactly a hundred years before. The region was selected because it was known from surface soundings to be seismically active and was considered typical of mid-ocean ridges.

Yet before anyone could go anywhere near the mid-Atlantic Ridge there was much preliminary work to be done. The planning sessions and simulations in many ways echoed those that had recently been so successful in putting a man on the moon. The project leaders managed to persuade the U.S. Navy to let them use its recently developed and highly secret SASS (Sing-Around-Sonar-System) technique to map the study area. SASS was an amazingly powerful tool but, because of Cold War paranoia, had never before

been available to the international scientific community. Even after they agreed, the navy brass were too nervous to allow the scientists personal access to the technology itself, so it was naval technicians who surveyed the area and produced topographic maps of extraordinarily good resolution.

The maps were accurate to the nearest 5 fathoms, yet all involved knew that the navy routinely supplied even more detailed maps to its submarine captains for their cat-and-mouse game with the Soviets beneath the Atlantic. The strata underneath the seafloor were mapped and logged using Ewing’s subterranean seismic-surveying technique while seismometers placed on the ocean floor around the ridge measured Earth tremors and showed that the sub-sea rift valley was in a state of eternal flux.

The FAMOUS scientists made precise measurements of the heat emanating from the ridge, which confirmed that in this area molten magma from the Earth’s interior was welling up into the ocean. In the words of Bob Ballard, this area was the Earth’s “crucible of creation.” The hopeful sub-sea field geologists also visited the handful of areas above water where they could see the types of features that they were hoping to meet at a depth of 2 kilometers: the volcanic islands of Hawaii and Surtsey and the one land area where a spreading center could be observed directly, the Assal Rift in the East African Rift Valley.

Before they began manned dives, the researchers sent down robotic submersibles, including the LIBEC (LIght-BEhind-the-Camera) system developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, and WHOI’s own ANGUS (Acoustic Navigated Geological Undersea Surveyor). The landscape they found was anything but silent. It was an alien, inhospitable, volcanic place. Great slumps of suddenly cooled lava made pillow-like formations that clung precariously to the side of the ridge. The ridge itself was a sharply defined hill that ran north and south out of sight into the endless night. There was danger too, such as Challenger’s Scientifics could never have

imagined. Sharp extrusions of lava were like saw blades ready to slice any unwary aquanaut to ribbons. The remote vehicles themselves returned to the surface bruised and dented, powerful witness to the sharp volcanic teeth that awaited the first manned divers.

Xavier Le Pichon himself made the first dive in the French bathyscaphe Archimede. He and his crew of two spent much of the time fighting bottom-water currents that almost exceeded the maneuvering ability of the craft. But they were the first to make a remarkable observation that would be confirmed on every one of the 17 other dives made that summer of 1973: The actual zone of crustal formation, that narrow shadow of the tectonic knife, was only a few meters across! This zone, which separated the two huge tectonic plates of Eurasia and America, was little more than the width of a small room.

The following summer the expedition reconvened off the Azores. By now the Alvin had been modified to reach the depths required to explore the mid-ocean ridge, using a surplus titanium sphere that WHOI had acquired from the Naval Applied Science Laboratory at the Brooklyn Naval Yards. The previous sphere had been safe only to a depth of 6,000 feet (a little more than a mile) and the mid-Atlantic Ridge lay 9,000 to 10,000 feet below the surface. Alvin’s superiority over Archimede in maneuverability could not be properly exploited until the pressure sphere had been changed.

The advantage of titanium was its strength: Weight for weight it was twice as strong as the stainless steel of Alvin’s existing hull. Titanium’s strength and lightness are what makes it the preferred material in the construction of jet fighters. However, it is hard to work and this caused persistent problems in fitting the penetrators, the openings that allowed vital services like communications and electricity to enter the crew chamber. This delayed Alvin’s deployment on the mid-Atlantic Ridge until the summer of 1974.

The 1974 dive series, when it did start, was far more ambitious than that of 1973. No fewer than three deep-sea vehicles—the

newly fitted out Alvin, the French submersible Cyana, and the bathyscaphe Archimede—began diving early that summer to conduct a coordinated survey of the mid-Atlantic Ridge. Special sequencing of the sonar transmitters on the vehicles and on the surrounding ocean floor was required so that their outputs would not interfere with each other and the three support ships on the surface could track them. Pinpoint accuracy was required to build up a proper set of maps and photographic images of the ridge. Together they made more than 40 dives that summer, retrieving 3,000 pounds of rock as well as dozens of water and sediment samples. In addition the expedition took more than 100,000 photographs.

In this series too they discovered that a much broader zone of tectonic activity flanked the narrow region where the molten magma welled up into the ocean. This process was more or less continuous while the processes that formed the cratered surrounding zone—earthquakes and faulting—were more episodic. The results of the expeditions were written up in an epic two-volume monograph published by the Geological Society of America.

Despite the success of the overall expedition it was clear to all involved that the more maneuverable submersibles Alvin and Cyana had outperformed Archimede and it was this that sealed the bathyscaphes’ fate. The French were the first to admit that their Archimede was simply too bulky, unwieldy, and expensive, and they retired it. By the end of the 1970s the U.S. Navy had made a similar decision about the world’s only remaining bathyscaphe, the Trieste II, and so it, too, was mothballed. Small submersibles like the Alvin and the Cyana had come of age. The availability of lightweight titanium pressure spheres meant that the huge gasoline floats of the bathyscaphes were no longer required and the deep-sea maneuverability that had so long been dreamed off was finally and routinely at hand.

These highly maneuverable deep-sea submersibles would be instrumental in one of the most staggering discoveries of twentieth century marine biology—the underwater volcanic vents where fluids and gases from the Earth’s interior blast into the sea, super-

heating the water around them. Because of the characteristic color of the venting gases, predominantly metal sulfides, these vents were quickly dubbed “black smokers.” Black smokers are common in tectonically active areas such as the mid-ocean ridges. Investigations of the black smokers by submersibles soon turned up strange forms of life. These included brightly colored “tubeworms” several meters long, together with clams and other mollusks.

One of the strangest features of the tubeworms is that they have no gut, but have instead a spongy tissue-filled structure known as a trophosome. For a long time it was a mystery how these creatures fed, but the answer came from the materials spewed into the water from the black smokers. These regions are rich in minerals from inside the Earth and support colonies of sulfur-oxidizing bacteria that thrive even at these extreme temperatures. The tube worms and other gutless animals live in symbiosis with these bacteria and exploit their ability to chemosynthesize, that is, to make carbohydrate by breaking down other molecules. It is a perfect partnership, these deep-sea organisms can live far from daylight and exploit a chemical food chain that is analogous to the photosynthesis that powers the sunlit world above. These high-temperature-loving organisms, called “extremophiles,” also have commercial uses. They are used to provide enzymes that can work at elevated temperatures and fuel faster chemical reactions in laboratories.

The further exploration of Challenger’s first great discovery—the mid-Atlantic Ridge—reached an important milestone when humans eventually visited that dreadful region to see it for themselves, but we should remember that there was an additional impetus for that effort. This came from another science program, another dream of “big science,” that also had its origins in the plate tectonic revolution. It was a scientific program that is arguably even more important, if possibly less glamorous, than Project FAMOUS—a scientific program that had the most mysterious of origins in the paranoia of the Cold War, the space race, and the missile gap.

For Harry Hess, as for many career scientists, the price of fame and success in science was a crushing burden of administrative duties, both in his home institution as the head of a department and also externally, in serving on committees. One of the committees Hess served on in the 1950s was an evaluation committee for the National Science Foundation, the branch of the U.S. government that doles out money for scientific research. The function of the committee was to determine the best proposals put forward that year by geologists around the country and recommend to the NSF those worthy of funding.

In July of 1957, just six months before Sputnik was launched, the committee met to evaluate a bunch of geological and geophysical proposals and concluded that many were laudable but none were earth shattering. This conclusion generated a feeling among the committee that the earth sciences needed their own big-science equivalent to developments in astronomy, which was in the midst of a growth spurt fuelled by the space race. Also present at that funding meeting was Walter Munk of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. Half in jest, Munk offered that, in the absence of anything else to fund, perhaps they should themselves put forward a proposal to drill through the Earth to the Mohorovicic Discontinuity.

This was discovered in 1909 by the Croatian geologist, Andres Mohorovicic, who had been measuring the time seismic waves take to reach different seismometers. The waves’ speed of propagation was known to be on the order of 5-6 kilometers a second but, to his surprise, Mohorovicic discovered that certain waves, those that took a deep routing through the interior of the Earth, appeared to reach seismic stations on the part of the Earth’s curve opposite their point of origin faster than those waves that traveled shallow. Mohorovicic concluded that there was a layer deep in the interior of the Earth below which seismic waves were accelerated. This layer

became known as the Mohorovicic Discontinuity or Moho. There was much debate about the nature of the Moho layer and it was this that sparked Munk’s suggestion. Hess suggested that they refer the project to the secretive and little known American Miscellaneous Society for action.

The American Miscellaneous Society (AMSOC) was formed in the summer of 1952 by Gordon Lill and Carl Alexis, two geologists working at the Office of Naval Research (ONR), to consider ideas that did not fit into established categories of thinking. It was deliberately loosely structured and had no statutes or formal membership, no minutes, no staff, and no organizational chart. It existed solely to get things done and commonly met in the rooms of the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C. where outré ideas were booted around freely. AMSOC was very unofficial, yet it attracted some of the best minds in America.

There seems to have been a kind of intellectual optimism in the air that had its roots in the scientific successes of the Second World War. Science was fun and the people who did it were determined to have fun, too. There were even divisions of AMSOC named “Committee for Co-operation with Visitors from Outer Space” and the “Society for Informing Animals of their Taxonomic Positions.” AMSOC’s power lay in its connection to ONR.

President Harry Truman formed ONR in 1946 to “plan, foster and encourage scientific research in recognition of its primary importance as related to the maintenance of future naval power and the preservation of national security.” The ONR was charged with establishing research programs in collaboration with universities and corporate laboratories across the length and breadth of the United States. Although the programs did not need to have practical applications to be approved, those that did would be able to apply for development funding, especially if they looked likely to have a military use. It is impossible to overstate the importance of the ONR in the postwar years and its influence in funding science because it underwrote so many fundamental scientific projects.

These projects included the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC), the first computer (“small enough to fit into a room”); the development of superconductivity, turbojets and gas turbines; and also, as we have seen, the development of deep-submergence technology in the form of the Trieste II and the Alvin.

On April 20, 1957, Walter Munk hosted a breakfast meeting of AMSOC at his home near Scripps to discuss the Moho proposal. AMSOC agreed to pursue it and called the project the Mohole. They knew already that land-based drilling would not allow them to reach the Moho. The thickness of the continental crust, some 30 to 50 kilometers on land, would wear out any drill bit through heat and friction long before it got anywhere close to the enigmatic boundary layer. Drilling from the ocean, though, was a different matter. Geophysical surveys had already shown that the thickness of oceanic crust was only about 5 kilometers, an amount they estimated as relatively easy to penetrate if only they could get the drill bit positioned correctly under water.

On April 27, the Mohole committee reconvened at the Cosmos Club. Also in attendance that day was Maurice Ewing. Since 1953, Ewing had been traveling America trying to get people interested in deep-sea drilling, not to reach the Moho, but rather to retrieve sedimentary sections that would illuminate the history of the oceans. By September 1957 the Mohole committee had acquired more members from the geological community and met to discuss the project in open debate at a meeting of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics in Toronto, Canada. In an eerie harbinger of the Soviet space spectacular that within weeks would spur America to commit to the goal of putting a man into space, a Soviet scientist stood and said that the U.S.S.R. already had advanced plans to drill to the Moho. To guard against supposed Soviet espionage, at the next meeting of the committee armed guards attended to ensure the security of the deliberations. Such was the paranoia of Cold War America.

In conjunction with John Mecom, a deep-drilling oil specialist,

the committee formulated a plan to reach the Mohole. There would be three phases: Phase One, a practice hole drilled on near-shore continental crust; Phase Two, a sedimentary section hole drilled in the deep ocean; and Phase Three, the final push, a hole drilled in the deep ocean to reach the Moho.

In early 1958 the AMSOC Mohole committee approached the NSF for initial funding of $15,000 to conduct a feasibility study. NSF declined to fund an enterprise conducted by such an informally structured organization, so Harry Hess asked that the AMSOC Moho committee be allowed to formally associate itself with the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Hess was already a fellow of the NAS and his proposal was well received. The physicist I. I. Rabi, one of the Nobel laureates on the committee that heard Hess’s request, remarked dryly, “Thank God we’re finally talking about something beside space.” It was an ideal association for the AMSOC committee. The NAS dates back to Lincoln’s time and is nothing if not respectable. It was and is the most distinguished scientific body in America, equivalent to Great Britain’s Royal Society, which had underwritten the original Challenger expedition.

At the American Geophysical Union meeting in Toronto that year it was agreed that the drilling barge CUSS I would be used for Phase One. CUSS I was specially constructed by the Global Marine Exploration Company of Los Angles, California, and paid for by a secret consortium of four oil companies: Continental, Union, Shell, and Superior. Engineer A. J. Field showed a movie of the vessel, carrying a full-sized rig, drilling an experimental well off the California coast in 200 feet of water. Until that moment the existence of mobile oil platforms had been kept a closely guarded commercial secret. No one present had even heard of such equipment. But all could see that the technology to reach the Moho was, after all, within reach.

Now that the Mohole committee was affiliated with the NAS and had the backing of the entire American geophysical community, the NSF immediately provided the cash for a feasibility study of

possible sites in the Atlantic and the Pacific. Rumors were beginning to fly in the press about the project: The hole would have to be 10 miles deep. The rock at the bottom would be too hot to permit conventional drilling. Secret and experimental technology was being devised to do the job. The cost of the project would be on the order of the space program. There was a whiff of terror in the air, too: What if the Mohole scientists destroyed the world with their experiment? That fear inspired a major film studio, Paramount, to make the disaster movie, Crack in the World, in which a deep-drilling project causes a huge crack to grow and grow until it threatens to split the earth in half. To scotch such rumors, the AMSOC committee decided to go public. In April 1959 they published an article in Scientific American outlining the goals and technologies of the project. It helped, some.

In late 1960 a contract was drawn up between the NSF and Global Marine to modify the CUSS I for truly deep drilling. Two technical solutions were needed immediately: a way to keep the drill string vertical above the drill hole and a way to keep the vertical motion of a floating vessel from smashing the drill bit to pieces.

At that time the Bendix-Pacific Corporation was heavily involved in providing high-technology solutions for the American space program. Because the Mohole project was being billed by Munk and his associates as the earth sciences’ answer to the space program, it was no surprise that Bendix, in collaboration with the Mohole project director, Willard Bascom, provided the answer to the first problem. Bascom and Bendix devised what they called a dynamic positioning system, whereby the drilling barge was ringed by a system of six “taut-line” buoys. A sonar transponder on board the vessel bounced signals off the buoys and a computer used this information to keep the vessel centered in the middle of the ring, using a series of propellers spaced around the hull, holding it stationary within a circle of 50 yards.

The second problem, damping the vertical motion of the drill string, was solved by the invention of bumper subs. Effectively, this meant disconnecting the drill string and enclosing it in an external

sleeve that could absorb the vertical motion of the ship. The sleeve was then attached to the drill string by a set of gears to transmit rotary motion.

CUSS I drilled the first hole near Scripps at the beginning of March 1961. The drill bit penetrated 315 meters into the seafloor while the ship floated on almost a kilometer of water. By anybody’s reckoning the first test was a success. In April the barge relocated to a site near the island of Guadalupe off the west coast of Mexico and successfully held station for three weeks, drilling five more holes in water as deep as three-and-a-half kilometers. Hundreds of meters of sediment were recovered as well as underlying volcanic rock. It was clear that the combined forces of AMSOC and the NAS did indeed have the technology. An exultant President Kennedy, already flushed with the success of Alan Shepard’s sub-orbital flight in May of that year, sent the barge a congratulatory telegram praising it as a “historic landmark.”

Yet there was another problem that the Mohole Project faced, and it appeared insurmountable. Everyone knew that the drill bit would have to be changed—probably several times—before the Moho could be reached, and for that the drill string would have to be pulled out of the hole. Just how were they going to get the string back into the same, tiny hole in the seafloor having lowered it again all the way from the ship?

It would be 10 years before that problem was solved, by a successor to the Mohole Project. The cost of drilling the Guadalupe experiment had been in the region of $1.8 million and initial estimates for the cost of the second phase were around $15-20 million. By 1965 that cost had escalated to a staggering $112 million and yet the project seemed to have made little progress. With technical problems and cost overruns dogging the program in August 1966, Congress cancelled the Mohole Project.

But every cloud has a silver lining. CUSS I’s drilling proved that deep-sea drilling was feasible and that if enough money were spent there were no technical problems that could not be overcome.

At the University of Miami a young geologist, recently hired, had been for some time very interested in another problem of the deep sea. For Cesare Emiliani the emphasis was not on the hard rocks that underlay the deep ocean’s sediments but on the sediments themselves. Emiliani was convinced that the way to calculate the number of ice ages in the recent past was to look at deep-sea sediments. He reasoned that if the ocean floor was really a silent landscape where sediments accumulated uniformly and undisturbed across millennia, surely it was here that the best evidence for the sequence of the ice ages would be found. The technique that he would use to calculate the number of ice ages was the oxygen-isotope technique of Harold Urey that he had learned at the feet of the master himself.

Emiliani was appointed to the staff of the University of Miami in Florida on January 1, 1957. His appointment there was strongly supported by faculty member Bob Ginsburg, the famous Caribbean coral scientist, who is legendary for his support of young geologists. Legend has it that one day in early 1962 Ginsburg passed Emiliani on the way back from lunch. He enquired how the new faculty member was getting on and they started chatting. Ginsburg listened sympathetically to Emiliani’s thoughts about the applications of oxygen isotopes to deep-sea cores and then said simply, “You should be thinking big.” Emiliani asked him what he meant. “Just think big,” said Bob and walked away.

As we have seen, at that time the oxygen-isotope technique of temperature measurement was producing estimates of the number of glacial stages that were quite at variance with the number suggested by those who counted fossils and Emiliani was desperate to defend the oxygen-isotope technique. He realized that his problems would be largely solved if he could get more, and especially deeper, holes—holes that contained more of the Pleistocene. On top of this was the fact that he had long been privately critical of the money being spent on the Mohole Project.

The lure of simultaneously vanquishing his bug-counting en-

emies and spiking the Mohole Project’s guns was too tempting to resist. He went back to his office and immediately telephoned R. F. Bauer, the president of the Global Marine Company of Los Angeles and enquired about the feasibility of drilling two holes in the deep water south of Puerto Rico. He was told that it could be done for $2 million. Immediately he wrote to John Lyman, program director of oceanography at the NSF, and asked for the money. To his amazement he was encouraged to put his proposal in writing, which he did in late March 1962. By June the first meeting of the so-called LOCO (LOng COres) committee (sponsored by Lyman under the auspices of the NSF) was convened in Miami.

Not only was Emiliani’s proposal endorsed, but the committee also recommended that more money be made available to drill more holes farther out in the Atlantic. Emiliani was elected chairman of the new committee and by September LOCO had agreed to elect four sponsoring institutions to guide the project. These institutions, the “big four,” which together became known by the acronym JOI (Joint Oceanographic Institutions), were WHOI, the University of Miami, Scripps and the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory of Columbia University in New York. The presence of Lamont was no big surprise, because Doc Ewing had got into the act early on as a vociferous and very well-connected supporter of Emiliani. For several months there was much maneuvering but finally a consensus emerged. When LOCO became CORE (Consortium for Ocean Research and Exploration), the original four were joined by the University of Washington (giving representation to an institution from the Pacific Northwest for political reasons) and the organization spawned JOIDES—Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling.

In April of 1965, when the Mohole Project was attracting enormous publicity and beginning to generate some criticism, a drilling vessel on loan to JOIDES known as Caldrill I put down several test holes in the Atlantic. The results were spectacularly successful and confirmed the viability of deep-sea drilling into sediments. Even as

the Mohole Project died in 1966, a contract to run the newly formed Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) was awarded to one of the founding JOIDES members, Scripps. A new drilling vessel was to be built especially for the enterprise by the same people who constructed the CUSS I and the GLOMAR Explorer, Global Marine. In honor of the expedition of 1872-1876 that founded the sciences of oceanography and marine geology the drilling vessel was named GLOMAR Challenger.

The keel of the GLOMAR Challenger was laid on October 18, 1967 in Orange, Texas, and the ship was launched on March 23, 1968 from that city. It sailed down the Sabine river to the Gulf of Mexico, where it underwent several months of testing before being accepted by the DSDP, the operational arm of JOIDES, on August 11, 1968. The voyages of the GLOMAR Challenger were named legs— the idea being that the legs would eventually follow one another seamlessly, without any time gaps to maximize the NSF’s investment, and keep the ship at sea as much as possible.

The GLOMAR Challenger was 400 feet long, displaced 6,281 tons, and supported a 45-meter derrick that could lift a drill string weighing one million pounds, equivalent to a pipe length of 7 kilometers. The ship was completely self-sustaining, carrying enough food, water, and fuel to remain at sea for up to 90 days at a stretch. In the center of the ship was the moon-pool, a circular opening directly beneath the derrick through which the drillstring was lowered into the water.

The vessel carried a crew of about 70 including the ship’s officers, drilling roughnecks and technicians, as well as the co-chiefs and staff scientists selected for the voyage by the DSDP. The scientific complement numbered between 9 and 16, depending on the length and complexity of the leg and they, like the co-chiefs, were divided into two shifts. When the ship arrived on station it was held in position by dynamic positioning thrusters based on the design used aboard CUSS I. The whole operation eventually became so streamlined that two samples (long plastic tubes of sediment) per

hour could be retrieved. Since its inception, this successor to the original Challenger expedition has enjoyed many successes some of which have been mentioned in this book, for example, the evidence, discovered early in Leg 13, of the Mediterranean’s desiccated past.

The very first leg of the DSDP was jointly overseen by Doc Ewing and geologist Joe Worzel, another scientist who would eventually make his name explaining the mechanics of continental drift and seafloor spreading. Ewing’s selection as the first chief scientist to guide the GLOMAR Challenger was a very public recognition of his pre-eminence in the field of oceanography. But the first leg of the project did not investigate the phenomenon of seafloor spreading; that would have to wait until the ship was ready to brave the true ocean environment of the Atlantic. The ship first drilled in the Gulf of Mexico and in the process managed to prove one of the Doc’s pet theories: that there were salt domes in the Gulf and that these were the cap rocks for oil reservoirs.

After the Gulf shakedown leg, the ship went to New York where it was prepared for one of its most important tests. Having proved itself in the relatively safe environment of the Gulf, the GLOMAR Challenger would sail across the Atlantic to Dakar, Senegal, in Africa, and attempt to bring back evidence to test the hypothesis that now had the geological world agog: continental drift and seafloor spreading.

Leg 2 of the DSDP was designed to test the hypothesis in light of Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews’s interpretation of the stripes of reversed and normal polarity that flank each side of the mid-ocean ridges. Assuming that the rate of new seafloor production is more or less constant, the age of successive magnetic stripes on the seafloor would directly translate to distance from the ridge axis. That is, the farther you go from the ridge crest, the older the seafloor you are standing on. This meant that the edges of the ocean basin should have the oldest basement rock and should have had time to accumulate the thickest sediment cover. Early calculations

had already suggested that the seafloor was spreading at a rate of 1.25 centimeters per year.

Here, then, was a test of the seafloor-spreading hypothesis that could be done only by a drilling ship. By drilling into these sediments and measuring their ages using the microfossils so lovingly described by the original Challenger expedition, it would be possible to prove or disprove whether time did indeed equal distance. Although Leg 2 was dogged with technical problems, it proved beyond doubt that the deepest sediments do indeed become younger as you approach the spreading centers at the mid-ocean ridges. The scientists aboard GLOMAR Challenger were even able to calculate the rate of seafloor spreading from their observations: 1.2 centimeters per year, a figure that agreed well with the estimate of 1.25 cm per year. Close enough for government work, as the saying goes, and certainly enough for the Washington Star to lead an editorial with the words, “It’s further to Europe, study finds. . . .”

On the next leg of the DSDP, the ship returned across the South Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro. This leg was as trouble free as its predecessor was troubled, and the results more than confirmed the data recovered by the GLOMAR Challenger in the North Atlantic.

Two voyages of the GLOMAR Challenger proved beyond doubt the theories of continental drift and seafloor spreading which combined underpin plate tectonics. Over the years the DSDP produced many other spectacular discoveries until it was replaced in 1983 by an even more ambitious program called the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP). The ODP comes to an end in 2003 but will in turn be replaced by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, involving more drilling vessels as well as standalone drilling platforms. Dreams of big science are still being dreamed, and they are all based on the earliest dream of them all, the voyage of HMS Challenger between 1872 and 1876.

The weather after the Azores was poor, “with strong and adverse winds,” as William Spry put it. It was decided that Challenger would put into Vigo (Portugal) to coal and this they did on May 20. They did not linger, because the lure of home was too strong. Early the next day they were again at sea. “The weather was still squally and unpleasant,” wrote Spry, “yet we managed to get round Cape Finisterre; and now with the wind somewhat fairer, a capital run was made across the dreaded Bay of Biscay.” On the evening of the 23rd they saw the light on Cape Ushant and the next morning gazed through welcome haze and fog at the soft green lines of Old England. “Onward we go, sighting the old familiar headland and landmarks—the Eddystone, the Start, the white cliffs at Portland and St. Alban’s head—until at last the Needles are in sight. . . .”

They were home.