Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (23 page)

The navy had used the most sophisticated underwater technology in the world to defuse the most politically sensitive situation anyone could imagine. Cost was irrelevant. Yet the search and recovery in a narrowly defined space had taken almost three months, and as arduous and tense and dangerous as the recovery was, no one could explain its success without including a large dollop of luck.

After the
Thresher
went down, the navy had begun designing and building an array of underwater vehicles that could descend to the bottom of the deep ocean. Besides the
Alvin
and the
Aluminaut
, the navy built
Sea Cliff
and
Turtle
, which were bigger, slightly faster versions of
Alvin; Halibut
, a submarine with a hangar-sized bay in its belly, which could cruise undetected several hundred feet below the surface while a crew lowered cables and cameras to the seafloor; a small nuclear-powered submarine called the
NR-1
, which could remain submerged for weeks, roll along the bottom on wheels, and came with lights, cameras, viewing ports, and manipulators; and the DSRVs, or Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicles, which could descend to sixty-five hundred feet, clamp on to a downed submarine, and take on the trapped submariners and transfer them to the surface. The original cost estimate for one DSRV was $3 million; eventually, the navy built two for $220 million in the early 1970s.

During the Cold War ’60s and ’70s, more and more of the funding for these deep-water submersibles came not from the navy, but from a group with even deeper pockets, the intelligence community. The most notable was the 1974 ultrasecret
Glomar Explorer
, a six-hundred-foot ship created under the ruse of a Howard Hughes attempt to mine the deep ocean but really with only one mission: to send a giant mechanical claw into twenty thousand feet of water and pick up part of the hull of a downed Soviet submarine. In raising the nearly two-hundred-foot section of hull to the surface, the claw cracked, and most of the section was lost. The project cost half a billion dollars.

Twenty years after the
Thresher
had gone down, we now had submersibles that could dive much deeper and stay much longer than Halley’s diving bell. They had gauged currents in the Gulf Stream, located scallop beds, recovered spent torpedoes and missiles, explored manganese deposits, studied geology, and inspected offshore drilling rigs. But if you stripped away the computerized guidance systems, the propulsion systems, the fresh air recyclers, the hydraulics, the new acrylics and seals, the sonar, and the cameras, these new submersibles could do little more than attach grappling hooks to objects and let a crew topside winch them to the surface, or grasp something in an awkward claw and hold on.

* * *

A
LMOST ANY OCEAN
engineer who wanted to recover a historic shipwreck in deep water could drop a steam-shovel clambucket on the site and indiscriminately munch it up. But things would break, specimens would be crushed, the archaeological value would be destroyed, and the treasure would be scarred and devalued, or lost again and never found. Historic shipwrecks were so complex and difficult to read, it would be easy to pile overburden on top of the treasure, burying it even deeper. Tommy wasn’t thinking about clamping a big claw around a ship’s hull, or draping a line around a part, or dropping a clambucket on a wreck site. He wanted to explore and document a wreck, then dismantle it piece by piece, like pick-up-sticks, moving one piece without disturbing another. He wanted to recover delicate objects and preserve them on their way to the surface, and he wanted to film and photograph it all with 35mm cameras and video cameras, black-and-white, color, and 3-D. He once said, “You have to do it smart, like a surgeon.”

He envisioned an automated machine shop that he could operate from thousands of feet above; the ultimate Swiss Army knife of underwater technology, a tool for everything with but a flick of the topside wrist: saws, grabbers, backhoes, drills, blowers, pickers, and camera and light booms. Given time and money, knowledgeable scientists and engineers could design and build a robot that could do all of these things on land; they were only sophisticated technological gadgets, and that was the easy part. The secret to making them all work in the deep ocean was in the back end, away from the sophisticated technology, all the way back to the concept itself. In 1983, we had submersibles that looked like sharks, bullets, grasshoppers, tugboats, and blimps, many minds with many solutions, and not one on the bottom could do any more than Halley had done with the diving bell in the seventeenth century. The problems remained, and after ten years, Tommy at least had sorted them out, so he could see them clearly.

They began at the surface: You had to have some way of getting your submersible off the ship and into the water. But winds of only ten knots pushed the sea into three-foot waves, which slapped against the submersible as you tried to lower it through the air-sea interface. That three-foot wall of water with the weight of the ocean behind it ripped off manipulators and sometimes mashed the submersible’s hull. At the first
test launch of the prototype for
Trieste
, the French-built bathyscaphe used to find the
Thresher
, the waves had kicked up only a little, destroyed the gasoline-filled flotation chamber, and spewed almost nineteen thousand gallons of gasoline into the sea. You couldn’t launch or recover your submersible in seas greater than three feet or you risked losing it. And not often did blue water lie calmer than that.

If you got your submersible safely into the water, your ship at the surface was rising and falling while your submersible was descending; each fall caused the cable to go slack, and each rise snapped the cable taut, like pulling a car with a chain. That load suddenly became ten times heavier than the submersible itself, and the cable often broke and you lost your submersible. That armored cable was filled with electromechanical wires that carried signals down to the sub and back again. If the snap loading didn’t break it, every time that cable passed over a pulley, the wires bent and straightened with the weight of the vehicle, and often ten times the weight of the vehicle, and the wires fatigued and parted. A replacement cable took three months to manufacture, and carrying a spare cable on board meant needing more space on a bigger ship, tended by a larger crew, for much more money.

Attempting to land on the seafloor was risky and difficult for two reasons: First, the rocking of the ship would jerk the vehicle—one minute you’d be looking at the bottom, the next minute you’d see nothing, the next minute the camera would be in the mud. Second, hanging something heavy on the end of a cable twisted the cable; if you set that heavy weight on the seafloor and slackened the cable at the same time, the twisted cable tied itself in knots, like the cord on a telephone. When an armored cable with several thousand pounds on the end kinked up, and the bouncing of the ship topside jerked on those kinks, the cable again often broke, which meant you left your vehicle on the bottom and headed back to the beach for the rest of the season.

One way around the problems with impact loading and snap loading and cable fatigue and twisting and breaking was to pack all of your power on board the sub, forgo communication, and put humans inside, let them drive around at will, like the
Alvin
or the newer
Trieste
. But this put lives at risk, so every system had to have a backup; 90 percent of
the engineering would go to designing redundancies, and the vehicle would have to be much heavier. Often, an entire mother ship had to be built around the submersible, driving the cost into the tens of millions of dollars. Tommy’s attempt would not be a government project, national security would not be at stake, and he would not have an unlimited budget. Whatever technology he created would have to be done as cheaply as possible, a few million for the equipment, a few million more for the rest of the project.

Others in the deep-ocean community already had seen the limited future of manned submersibles. The navy was experimenting with “autonomous vehicles,” because they were much lighter and far less dangerous than the manned submersibles, and they could be programmed ahead of time to go to the bottom and perform simple tasks. The French-built
Epaulard
had been the first, but it could only work on a flat, known bottom; it couldn’t react to the terrain; it could shoot film and take photographs, but it couldn’t send back real-time information, so the results would not be known until the film was developed at the surface. If the operators then saw something in the photos, trying to find their way back to that point would be nearly impossible. Tommy wanted something that could stay, that he could control, that would tell him what was happening as it happened, so he could make intelligent decisions from the surface.

The real problem with every system, manned or unmanned, tethered or untethered, was that it couldn’t perform significant work tasks on the bottom. And that problem arose because no one had been able to overcome this fact: Submersibles were unstable. To allow them to “float” underwater, they had a narrow, unchangeable center of buoyancy, and their manipulators had to be extremely short; extending them shifted the center of buoyancy and tipped the vehicle. When you sit at the dinner table and reach out to pick up a bowl of peas, you unconsciously tense certain muscles and shift your center of gravity. Submersibles couldn’t do that. If you were a submersible, as soon as your hand tried to lift the bowl, your face would drop into your plate. Even if a manipulator had a short reach that would not tip the sub, it couldn’t do anything that required force, or an equal force transferred to the vehicle and turned
it upside down. The
Alvin
weighed seventeen metric tons, but at the bottom it had no muscle.

Tommy already had eliminated systems that required the presence of humans on the bottom, anyhow. They were too expensive, too dangerous, too limited. “I figured that the secret was to build a stable unmanned system that could work on the bottom for days at a time with as many mechanical functions as possible.” A robot, an underwater Remote Operated Vehicle, or ROV. The oil industry was starting to use them to replace divers, and the military had used them underwater for years. In 1982 only ten existed, and they still presented all of the cable problems with launch and recovery and trying to land on the bottom, and none that Tommy knew of could really work down there. But those were problems Tommy now thought he understood and could solve, because the secret to working in the deep ocean was not in the technology, where everyone else had been looking. Most of the technological pieces were there; they just hadn’t been put together properly. The secret was in the concept behind the system and in the interrelation of all of the subsystems, and the keys that would reveal the secret lay in Tommy’s innate, insatiable, sometimes irritating need to know why two plus two equals four. What had driven teachers and friends to apoplexy when he was a boy would be at the core of what enabled him as a man to begin dismantling a series of barriers to working in the deep ocean, to examine the pieces, to understand them, and to proceed toward what others had thought impossible. The secret was in his naive, at times arrogant insistence on the absolute simplicity of the quest.

B
EFORE HE COULD
do anything on the bottom, Tommy first had to find the ship; that was the other difficult technology: the ability to image things lost at sea under thousands of feet of water. Historical documents for any deep-water ship would only reconstruct an approximate location of the sinking; the error could be fifty miles in any direction. To be sure he could locate the site, Tommy would have to sweep an area of ocean so large that traditional sonar would require years of summer weather, dragging a tow fish back and forth.

In 1977, engineers working for the mining consortium that had surveyed the deep ocean had also developed a vacuum that could suck
up potato-sized nodules of manganese from the fields they imaged. After dragging their vacuum along the ocean floor, the techs had returned for a second look with their imaging system, and they had seen a little white band in the middle of the manganese field: a stripe created by the vacuum sucking up the nodules. The water there was eighteen thousand feet deep, and that white stripe was only six feet wide. And the signal bouncing back from below was much stronger than it needed to be. They could open it up and search over three miles of ocean floor in one track.

Three years later, Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Institute had received funds from a benefactor to build the Sea-MARC I, a sonar prototype by the same engineers who had conceived the mining consortium’s high-speed exploration system. Lamont-Doherty wanted the sonar to survey underwater mountain ranges and other large geological formations in deep water. Tommy understood the technology, and he thought that with some adjustments he could use it to find shipwrecks in the deep ocean, but the Lamont SeaMARC was already under contract with various organizations for the next two years during the summer weather window. Tommy also discovered that since Lamont-Doherty was a public institution, any information on deep-water shipwrecks he collected while using its SeaMARC automatically entered the public domain.

In five years of traveling and talking on the phone, Tommy had built a large and diverse network of scientists, engineers, and oceanographers. In 1983, one of those contacts introduced him to Mike Williamson, the geophysicist who had sailed with the mining consortium tech team to find manganese. Williamson still remembered the day six years earlier, when they had seen that thin white stripe cutting through a manganese field. He couldn’t believe they could image something that small, that deep. And they could do it in swaths three miles wide. “You could really start herding up the real estate,” thought Williamson. If he had one of those imaging systems, he could quickly search large areas of deep ocean, not for underwater mountains or manganese fields, but for downed aircraft, flight recorders, bombs, missile parts, and finer geology for the oil companies. The only thing holding him back was the million-dollar price tag.