Life Below The Sea: Part 2

About four days into the research cruise aboard the Thomas G. Thompson, problems began to emerge with the submersible as well as other components of the research venture.

"There's no joy in Mudville today," Johnson remarks as he paces among the cranes, winch and unused buoys crowding the ship's aft deck.

A dozen albatross gather off the stern. Nature is siding with science on this calm, sun-drenched afternoon, but the machines are not. Once again the engineers are reeling Jason back to the ship. The robot had nearly reach the bottom when they discovered that its claw, supposedly repaired, was still paralyzed.

Johnson, who has lived some two years of his life at sea, expects this kind of trouble in deep-ocean research.

"At least half of what goes on are disasters," he says. Yet he claims to never grow weary. His childhood dream was to go the moon, but polio left him with a limp.

"So," he explains, "I went the other way." That decision took place a quarter of a century ago.

Veterans like Johnson know that their most agonizing moments at sea will be selecting which carefully planned activities to abandon. Scientific American, June, 2000.

What We Need to Know

The above excerpt describes the nature of science. How is it possible that the scientific community has made so much progress with so many failures?
Have you ever had a day like the one mentioned above in your biology laboratory?
Did your attitude match that of Paul Johnson? Why or why not?

Then out of the blue, with only three sampling columns left to recover, the basket holding the sampling columns was locked on the seafloor. Nightfall was only five hours away and further work would be impossible. The robot was sent back down to release the weights holding the basket tight to the ocean floor. The retrieval task could not wait until morning due to deteriorating weather conditions. The basket took three hours to float to the surface. Swells were surging to nine feet and the Thompson was heaving. The basket holding the columns was brought up and began swinging. The chief mate tried to snag the basket with a hook. Stretching over the ship's rail the chief mate lifted the basket above the water where the floats could no longer stabilize the basket. A giant swell caused the basket to tip leaving the collection columns sticking out one side of the basket. Another swell flipped the basket on its side and a third swell dumped over the basket.

It was a tense moment when the crew saw the basket emerge from the large wave-completely empty!

Twenty-five thousand dollars worth of equipment was lost in an instant-but more importantly, an entire year's work sank to the bottom of the sea. Johnson turned to look at the crew. An air of complete shock prevailed on their faces, and no one spoke until later that evening.

All Johnson said was that there it was, "the wrong wave, at the wrong time." All the money from the grant was gone; they would not be able to come back and try again.

Enough material had been saved to allow scientists at the University of Chicago to provide some scant information on the organisms collected from the first columns retrieved before the final disaster. There were enough unusual bacteria to suggest a different type of life in the rock floor; however, scientists could not prove that the microbes were actually from the basalt rock, the ocean mud floor, or from the seawater above. Many biologists would remain skeptical about the new organisms until more evidence was collected.

Johnson is in the process of writing another grant to the National Science Foundation to finance a return trip to the site of the lost columns. He is now proposing to insert a 10-foot titanium pipe into the bare basalt rock to act as a permanent "hypodermic needle", which will allow samples to be collected more easily.

"It would be like giving Mother Earth a type of blood test, only in this case, we would be quite pleased if she came up 'infected.' "

What We Need to Know

Why would other scientists not believe in the discovery made by Paul Johnson?
What is the problem with use of the sample columns?
What type of organisms would you expect to find in the basalt rock?

Assignment

Pretend that you are on the National Science Foundation panel that judges the merit of a grant proposal. Explain why you would fund or not fund the return project.

RESOURCES

Simpson, Sarah. 2000. Looking for life below the bottom. Scientific American. June, pp. 94-101.

http://www.ocean.washington.edu/ships/tgt.html

http://www.ocean.udel.edu/deepsea/level-2/mission/scientist.html