Below the Edge of Darkness Read online

  Below the Edge of Darkness is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

  Copyright © 2021 by Edith Widder, Ph.D.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Counterpoint Press for permission to reprint “To Know the Dark” from New Collected Poems by Wendell Berry, copyright © 2012 by Wendell Berry. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Widder, Edith, author.

  Title: Below the edge of darkness : a memoir of exploring light and life in the deep sea / Edith Widder, Ph.D.

  Description: New York : Random House, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020051565 (print) | LCCN 2020051566 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525509240 (Hardback : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780525509257 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Widder, Edith. | Marine scientists—United States—Biography. | Women marine biologists—United States—Biography. | Bioluminescence. | Underwater exploration.

  Classification: LCC GC30.W54 A3 2021 (print) | LCC GC30.W54 (ebook) | DDC 551.46092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020051565

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020051566

  Ebook ISBN 9780525509257

  randomhousebooks.com

  Design by Fritz Metsch, adapted for ebook

  Cover design and illustration: David G. Stevenson, based on images © Shutterstock

  ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction: A Different Light

  Part I: Deep Seeing

  Chapter 1: Seeing

  Chapter 2: Fiat Lux

  Chapter 3: First Flash

  Chapter 4: The Stars Below

  Chapter 5: Strange Illumination

  Chapter 6: A Bioluminescent Minefield

  Chapter 7: Seas Sowed with Fire

  Part II: To Know the Dark

  Chapter 8: Glorious Puzzles

  Chapter 9: Stories in the Dark

  Chapter 10: Plan B

  Chapter 11: The Language of Light

  Part III: Here Be Dragons

  Chapter 12: The Edge of the Map

  Chapter 13: The Kraken Revealed

  Chapter 14: Talking to Cannibals

  Epilogue: A Case for Optimism

  Photo Insert

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Further Reading

  About the Author

  Introduction

  A DIFFERENT LIGHT

  There was a high-pitched whine coming from the starboard side of the sub. I leaned to my right, trying to pinpoint the source. It didn’t necessarily sound alarming, but it was different, and one thing I have learned from diving in submersibles is to pay attention to different. Since this was the untethered single-person submersible Deep Rover, I was both pilot and crew, and there was no one to ask, “Do you hear that?” I was alone, just passing 350 feet beneath the ocean’s surface, surrounded by water as far as the eye could see in every direction, and descending toward darkness. The whine, initially almost imperceptible above the whir of my scrubber fans, was growing louder and more concerning. Trying to identify the cause, I shifted around in my seat, a padded pilot’s chair in the center of the five-foot clear acrylic sphere. I bent at the waist, contorting to bring my right ear almost level with the instruments in the armrest. As I did, my stockinged feet slid down the inside of the sphere, into something you never want to encounter inside a submersible: seawater. Lots of it.

  This was bad. Abject terror was the appropriate response, which I certainly felt in spades. Fortunately, I was able to maintain just enough of my faculties to begin taking action to save myself. Locating the source was step one. No problem: The water was flowing in through an open valve below my seat on the starboard side. Stopping it was step two. Big problem: The valve handle was missing! There was only the valve stem, which I couldn’t possibly turn without leverage. The water kept streaming in through the small orifice, the whine’s rising pitch providing an audible measure of the sub getting heavier and sinking faster as the water rose. I blew my ballast tanks and jammed on my vertical thrusters while my mind raced. Is it too late? Am I already past the point of no return?

  The fact that I am writing this proves, of course, that I wasn’t too late. I made it to the surface and was pulled to safety, but it was definitely more harrowing than I would have liked, and I can’t deny that the memory lingers.*1 Over the course of my career as a marine scientist, I have made hundreds of dives in submersibles, which means there have been other bad moments—not many, but enough. This was not the worst,*2 but it did happen early in my career and could have cost me my life, so why, you might ask, do I keep doing it? Honestly, it never crossed my mind to stop.

  I became hopelessly addicted in 1984, on my first dive using a metal diving suit called Wasp. That initial spine-tingling exposure to deep-sea bioluminescence occurred during an evening dive off the coast of Santa Barbara. I was dangling on the end of a cable at what at the time seemed an incomprehensible depth—800 feet—where the pressure outside my protective metal shell was 355 pounds per square inch (24 atmospheres). I was there to explore and learn about life in the largest living space on the planet, the ocean’s midwater. I hoped I would see bioluminescence, which is why I turned out the lights. I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, I was so dazzled, the experience changed the course of my career.

  * * *

  —

  The first major scientific collecting cruise of marine life in the diverse Sea of Cortez was organized by Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck in 1940. Their explorations and scientific discoveries were published in The Log from the Sea of Cortez, which was written by both of them but is generally ascribed solely to Steinbeck. Their vessel was a chartered purse seiner called the Western Flyer. During their expedition, Steinbeck and Ricketts and the rest of their crew made most of their collections at low tides. With their bent-over posture and slow head-scanning movements, they would inevitably draw questions from the locals:

  “What did you lose?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then what do you search for?”

  This line has always made me laugh, not least because I’ve been asked this question or something close to it many times in my forty-year career of exploring the ocean. And the truth is, I’ve asked it of myself more than a few times.

  Encounters with bioluminescence at scale can make that question seem quaint. The open ocean is a fantastically strange and wonderful place. In this world without apparent hiding places, the game of hide-and-seek is played out on a daily basis with life-and-death consequences. One successful survival strategy is to hide in the depths during the day, below what we call the edge of darkness, and come up only to feed in food-rich waters at night, as the edge of darkness makes its way toward the surface. This is such a common solution to the problem of no hiding places that it is responsible for the most massive animal migration pattern on our planet.

  Vertical migration happens every day, in every ocean, and the masses of ascending animal
s form a layer so dense that more than one ship’s captain, scanning with sonar at sunset, has been fooled into believing they were about to run aground. Because so many of the ocean’s inhabitants have adopted this survival strategy, these migrants spend most of their lives in near darkness. To compensate, almost all of them make their own light.

  Drag a net behind a ship almost anywhere in the ocean below the edge of darkness, and most of the animals you bring up in that net will make light. Given the volume of the open ocean and the vast watery realm between the ocean’s surface and its bottom, which constitutes the largest ecosystem on the planet, we’re talking about a world teeming with light makers. To put this in perspective, if most of the animals in the ocean are bioluminescent (from single-celled bacteria to colossal squid), then a majority of the creatures on the planet are communicating using language-of-light dialects that we don’t comprehend.

  Bioluminescence’s power to captivate is evident in the descriptions of anyone so fortunate as to experience it firsthand. The adjective heard most often is magical. The pure magic of living light hearkens back to childhood fantasies of secret grottos, wizards’ caves, and unicorn haunts, where the mushrooms in fairy rings glow with cold green fire and a wave of the hand sends multicolored sparks streaming from fingertips. Real-world encounters with such enchantments manifest as children chasing fireflies on warm summer nights, lovers strolling a beach hand in hand with the Milky Way overhead while sprinklings of sea sparkle gild their footprints in the sand, and kayakers on a moonless night creating luminous blue explosions and sprays of liquid light with each dip and arc of their paddles. For these lucky few, bioluminescence is not one of nature’s obscure and little-known oddities; it is one of their most precious and lasting memories.

  That there are even more spectacular light shows in the inky depths of the ocean was little known when I made that first deep dive. There was plenty of scientific evidence of bioluminescence’s presence in the form of light-meter measurements and net-captured creatures (mostly dead) studded with light organs, but there were very few direct observations, and none that captured anything like the spectacle I witnessed. This was a light extravaganza unlike anything I could have imagined. Afterwards, when asked to describe what I had seen, I blurted, “It’s like the Fourth of July down there!”—a highly nonscientific description that got quoted in our local newspaper and for which I took a healthy dose of ribbing from my colleagues. However, I have had many opportunities since then to take people on submersible dives, and I have lost count of the number of times I have heard them described as “like the Fourth of July!”

  Fireworks are an extraordinary art form—light painted onto the black canvas of a night sky. Each brushstroke is a splash of photons defined not just by color and contour but also by movement through space and time. Transience is what saves these spectacles from the kitschiness of a black velvet painting, as each burst of light morphs from moment to moment, rocketing up, blooming out, cascading down—incandescent for mere moments before disappearing into nothingness. There are identifiable components to the displays, each unlike any that has come before or will come again—but still recognizable as chrysanthemums, palms, Roman candles, or horsetails. Their frequent repetition produces a visual echo—variations on a theme, like literal light jazz—in the pictorial rather than the teeth-grinding musical sense.

  I once purchased a book of photographs for a single image. It was a photo, captured by Life magazine’s Gjon Mili, of Pablo Picasso drawing with light. The story goes that Mili had been experimenting with light painting by attaching tiny lights to ice skates and then photographing the skaters jumping in the dark. Picasso, who originally had been less than thrilled at the prospect of being photographed for the famous magazine, became intrigued when Mili showed him these experiments. Picasso was so tantalized by the possibilities that he ended up posing for five sessions, in which he produced thirty light paintings. The one that prompted my book*3 purchase is the best known. Taken in Picasso’s pottery studio, it is a black-and-white and shows a flash image of the famous artist in a semi-crouched position, staring directly into the camera, holding the small illuminated lightbulb that he then used to draw a centaur in the dark while the camera shutter remained open. In the photograph, the centaur hangs suspended in space between the artist and the camera—an ephemeral phantom—disappearing even as it was being created, but preserved in its entirety on photographic film.

  Just as fireworks are a kind of light painting, so is bioluminescence. But instead of the product of incandescence and human ingenuity, bioluminescence is cold chemical light, a consequence of millions of years of evolution resulting in fantastic light-emitting creatures with evocative names like crystal jelly, cockeyed squid, bearded seadevil, shining tubeshoulder, stoplight fish, and velvet belly lantern shark. Their bodies are adorned with all manner of light-emitting structures—nozzles that spew liquid blue flame, incredibly complex light organs that look like flesh-encrusting jewels but behave optically like eyes that emit light instead of collecting it, and absurdly elaborate glowing appendages that resemble abstract sculptures of alien life-forms from the planet Zork.

  On that first dive in Wasp, I had no idea who was producing the dazzling light I was witnessing. It was so extreme and otherworldly that the only description I had for it was my lame Fourth of July comment, but of course that didn’t do it justice.

  It’s true that there were evanescent sprays and swirls and squirts of flashiness glittering in the darkness that resembled the “light jazz” of a fireworks display, but they weren’t every color of the rainbow. Instead, it was a mixture of the most brilliant blues ever to grace an artist’s palette—azure, cobalt, cerulean, lapis, neon—supernatural hues, emitted rather than reflected light.

  And, unlike on Independence Day, I wasn’t a passive observer from afar. I sat at the very center of this show. In fact, I was part of it, because, as I quickly discovered, any movement I made was a trigger. Even very slight motions would stimulate spreading spheres of aquamarine sparkles and flashes. And if I activated the Wasp’s thrusters, glorious streams of light would erupt from the propellers in vortices of shimmering cobalt-blue liquid mixed with what looked like glowing embers swirling up off a campfire as you toss on a new log, only these were icy blue. But if I attempted to see who was making the light by turning on my floodlights, I saw no one; the space was devoid of any recognizable life-forms.

  All of this bioluminescence was the product of life, but in this case, it was apparently generated by creatures too small or too transparent to show up in my floodlights. I knew how much energy it takes for life to generate light*4 (a lot!), so I was keenly aware that this was no trivial phenomenon. Energy expended on this scale has enormous significance, but on that very first dive, I had no idea what that significance could actually be. That tantalizing mystery hooked me then and has kept me going back again and again to try to better understand the role living light plays in the vast oceanic realm that is so frequently described, incorrectly, as a world of eternal darkness.

  Marine biology may be one of the careers kids most say they want to get into. But what is the point of this labor-intensive, not un-dangerous, sometimes expensive, and vastly underappreciated science? Just what are we searching for, and, most important, what have we found?

  The desire to understand the natural world resides in all of us. Exploring and sharing knowledge about how the world works is foundational to our survival. In primitive humans, the drive to uncover the secrets of nature advanced essential life skills such as finding sustenance and shelter and determining what animals were deadly and what food was safe to eat. In modern times, our drive to explore has led us to extraordinary discoveries, ingenious innovations, and some of our most fantastic achievements. So how is it possible that we have yet to explore what constitutes the largest living space on our planet—the deep ocean?

  Inaccessibility in the form of crushing pressures is
certainly a challenge, but it is one we have met and overcome. Cost, too, poses a stumbling block, but it can’t be the only reason for the dearth of exploration, when we have spent trillions to land on the moon and Mars. Rather, the greatest obstacle may be the widely held misperception that there is nothing left to discover on Earth. One of the rationales sometimes given for space exploration is that everything on this planet has been climbed, crossed, and spelunked.

  The truth is that the staggering reaches of the ocean that remain unseen exceed, by many times, all the territory ever explored. We seem to be in a catch-22 scenario where we haven’t explored the deep ocean because we don’t appreciate what a remarkable, mysterious, and wondrous place it is, and we don’t know what an astonishing place it is because we haven’t explored it. What makes this situation all the more untenable is that we are managing to destroy the ocean before we even know what’s in it.

  In the course of human history, our pattern has been exploration followed by exploitation, but in the ocean we have managed to reverse the order—massively exploiting the ocean’s resources before exploring what’s actually there. In the past sixty years, we have altered the ocean more than in all of the preceding two hundred thousand years of human existence. We have stripped it of its big fish, using nets so enormous they could hold a dozen jumbo jets, and we have deployed hook-studded longlines as much as a hundred miles long that target big predators like tuna, swordfish, and halibut but also snag turtles, dolphins, and even diving seabirds. We have harpooned whales, driving these magnificent, intelligent creatures to near extinction. Our bottom trawlers drag vast weighted nets across the seafloor, turning exquisite undersea gardens full of living beings into rubble piles that won’t sustain life again for hundreds of years.