The Bottom of the Sea

Like everybody else, scientists have long wanted to know what Davy Jones's locker holds, besides sunken ships. Oceanographers have done some probing and charting, but the bottom of the ocean is still mostly a vast unknown. A Columbia University geophysicist, Maurice Ewing, recently reported that he had found a way to explore that sunken scene: a camera with which he has photographed the ocean floor at depths up to three miles.

Deep-water photography is not new: cameras dropped with ropes or cables, or enclosed in bathyspheres, have reached depths of half a mile or more. But Ewing, working out of the Woods Hole (Massachusetts) Oceanographic Institution in the research ship Atlantis, has plumbed depths that no cable could reach.

His first camera was an aluminum-cased affair which was taken to the bottom by iron ballast attached to a block of rock salt. An extending "trigger" rod stopped the camera at the correct height above the bottom for proper focus, and in doing so automatically set off a flash bulb and snapped the shutter. When the salt dissolved, the camera was freed from the ballast and bobbed to the surface.

Three Miles Down. With this device Ewing got several pictures at 2,700 fathoms (about three miles), but this camera and an improved second model were eventually lost, probably crushed by the great pressure. Since then Ewing has built a camera encased in thick pyrex glass, shaped like a giant test tube. All told, he has more than 1,000 pictures of the ocean floor, from Florida to far out in the Atlantic.

Ewing's lenses have caught wrecked ships (he is now working for the Navy), "dust" storms, some strange fish. His method makes it possible to observe certain fish which cannot be caught alive with nets because they live only at ocean-bottom pressures. He also hopes that his camera will clear up an old baffler: why do fish from the presumably dark ocean bottom have well developed eyes, while those at slightly higher levels seem nearly blind? Ewing's guess: there are large amounts of luminescent organisms on the ocean floor.

Among the chief things oceanographers would like to know is the nature of 1) the mud and silt deposits, believed to range from 600 feet to seven and a half miles thick, which cover the ocean bottom, and 2) the earth's suboceanic ribs under these deposits. Ewing has already discovered sand ripples in ocean bottoms as deep as 600 feet, indicating previously unsuspected currents. To pursue a theory that cold water moves along the ocean bottom from the poles to the equator, Ewing plans to photograph the movement of dye released on the ocean floor.

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