Sylvia Earle Interview (page: 4 / 6) Undersea Explorer	Print Interview

The idea of a suit like an astronaut's suit that I first became aware of was a suit called the Jim Suit. I really wanted to see what it was like. Could we use this technique as scientists to gain access to greater depths than were possible just scuba diving? It isn't exactly freedom; scuba divers can fly, and stand on one finger. The Jim Suit looks like a human being but it weighs 1000 pounds. It's not something that you are likely to just step into and jump off a dock. If you do, the question is how do you get back up the ladder? It's necessary to play by the rules. These atmospheric diving suits resemble a walking refrigerator or the Michelin Man, or a big white bear with joints.

This Jim Suit is cumbersome, but it does provide access, and it is a step in the right direction. Other suits are now being devised that provide greater flexibility of the limbs. The idea is simply to have a case around you, that gives you one atmosphere, surface pressure, no matter what depth you are at outside. The life support is supplied, as with astronauts, or as we Tektite aquanauts used, and that is through a re-breather like device, with oxygen being added as needed, carbon dioxide scrubbed out chemically and air otherwise circulated regularly. Breathe in, breathe out, and you just forget essentially that anything special is going on. It seems very natural. The time that I used the Jim Suit, a special arrangement was worked out. Typically it is deployed by a cable, launched from the surface and a big winch is used to reel it in and reel it out, like a fish on the end of a line. But in this case, deployment in this way was not appropriate. Also, I really prefer, when possible, to not be tied to a tether.

The combination inspired the system that ultimately was devised. And that is to be deployed on the front end of a little submarine, the Star II from the University of Hawaii, that took me down like a taxi. I was a taxi cab passenger, but I was riding on the front end of the taxi instead of in the passenger seat. We went down to the bottom, 1,250 feet. A strap that kept me attached to the submarine was then released, and I walked off. I was still attached to the submarine by a communication line, but I was not attached back up to the surface by any cable. It's the only time that this atmospheric diving suit, or any of the atmospheric diving suits have been used in this way. Typically they do have the cable going back up to the surface.
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The whole idea is to improve access and avoid decompression. This system is transportable, and enables people who are not superman or superwoman, just ordinary people, to have access to almost 2000 feet. There were 18 of these so called Jim Suits built. They were named after the first person willing to put one on, Jim Jarratt. It seemed at the time to be at the cutting edge of modern technology but, in fact, that suit was first devised back in the 1930s. It was devised in response to another kind of frustration. In this case the reason was to go down and salvage the Lusitania, the passenger liner that was sunk in the North Atlantic. The suit was proven successful with Jim Jarratt salvaging some things from the Lusitania, but was essentially put aside and ignored for a number of years. In the early 1970s the offshore oil and gas industry needed cost-effective alternatives to traditional diving techniques, and someone thought of using this one-atmosphere diving suit approach. That someone was Phil Newton who, through Oceaneering International, the owners of the most of the suits, helped inspire the technique. Graham Hawkes was one of the engineers who helped reconfigure it for modern application. Both Phil Newton and Graham Hawkes were along on the expedition and helped make the whole thing possible. Al Giddings filmed it from inside the Star II submersible and I had the great fun of simply enjoying the experience and using it to explore and evaluate the potential for scientific possibilities.

I saw in the Jim Suit at 1,250 feet in midday, in Hawaii, six miles off shore, 1,250 feet down. I imagined that it would be completely dark, just black, black dark, but it wasn't. There was enough sunlight coming down at midday in this clear ocean water that it looked like the deepest indigo, like twilight. There weren't stars visible to me, but there were bioluminescent creatures flashing with their blue fire, some of the same creatures that I had become enchanted with in childhood reading the works of William Beebe. He looked out of the porthole of his little bathysphere and saw little fish go by with blinking lights, saw octopuses that flashed with blue fire. Instead of squirting a puff of black ink, the squids and the octopuses that he described sometimes squirted a puff of bioluminescent ink. What good does black ink do in a black environment? It's nice to have something that flashes, that will distract a would-be predator. A puff of bioluminescent glow-in-the-dark substance is what they do. I saw a shark, but it wasn't a big one. It was only about 18 inches long, with a luminous green eye. So many wonderful creatures!
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Most interesting perhaps was a whole field of coral, but not branching coral, just single, whisker-like spirals of coral that grew from the sea floor, up over my head. Some of them were six feet tall or so. Bamboo coral. Generally a pale white structure, like a big bed spring, a big spiral, with bands of black. When I touched the living polyps, they just flashed with rings of blue luminescence. If I touched up near the top, you could see the pulses of blue, like little blue donuts of light, pulsing all the way down the spiral of the coral. If I touched it near the bottom, I could set in motion, simultaneously, pulses of light coming from the bottom and from the top. It was just extraordinary.

It was wonderful to be able to be there. If I had used a net, or a dredge, the typical oceanographic techniques, I might have captured some of that coral, but, I wouldn't know that they flashed with that blue fire, or that the creatures around behaved as they did. I'd only get their dead remains, and that's a poor substitute.

This was also a very dangerous dive. That there were some big risks. In the prologue to The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe talks about the way the rest of us just shake our heads when we look at a guy who gets into a 30-story rocket, and is lifted into space. Why do something like that? How do you get up the courage to risk your life to make these technologies possible?

Sylvia Earle: I get a lot of practice. I drive on the freeways almost every day. On the highways you can control what you do, but you cannot control those people who are coming at you at high speed from the other direction. I didn't feel that I was risking anything extraordinary making the Jim Suit dive. There were dangers involved, but they were known. I worked with good solid professional, engineers who racked their brains, trying to think of all the things that could go wrong. I think I was safer in that than I was driving home.

You minimize the danger, but I get the feeling you think this is a cause worth risking your life for.

Sylvia Earle: When you think about the pros and cons of doing something for the first time, you should weigh the risks and decide whether it's worth the trade-off. I am not a daredevil. In this case we really did think about the dangers, but we planned for them. We planned for the "what-ifs", and practiced. If this happens, then we'll do that. There were back-up contingency plans. No, you cannot plan for everything that can go wrong, and yes, you do know that there are some inherent risks. But at the end of the day, what are you going to do with your life? I could walk out on the street, and a truck could come by that I didn't plan for. I could inhale bacteria and find myself in the hospital. I'd rather do things that I think are worth achieving. When you have a chance to do something, and make a difference, and you have weighed the pros and cons, and you feel the odds are much better than even, go for it.

Though you have made these record-breaking dives by yourself, it sounds like this is a field in which team work is extremely important. Is that so?

Sylvia Earle: Absolutely. Team work is essential to the success of those who appear to be out there by themselves. I certainly haven't been, it's always been the effort of a lot of people. And all of us stand on the shoulders of those who preceded us, historically. There is this treasure house of mechanical solutions and other engineering solutions. We just pull all this stuff together and use it. It may seem as though some individual is doing something, but it's an individual in the company of this network of others. It's an illusion if you think you are out there all by yourself.

You rely on other people, in a very urgent way to protect you.

Sylvia Earle: In the Jim dive, as an example, the focus quite naturally was on the individual inside the Jim Suit. 'Twas I, that is to say. But think about those on the surface who are communicating with me. Think of those in the submarine who transported me to the sea floor, who are watching and also talking with me. Those who are operating the ship, the support divers who helped attached the Jim to the submarine. The whole team of people who made that specific exercise possible. Then, on top of that, there is the history that goes back prior to the development of the ship, the development of the suit, the first test diver, Jim Jarratt, after whom the system was named. I just happened to step in and enjoy one moment out of this great history of events that interlocks to form who and what we are.

Another great detour in your career was your work with humpback whales. How you were you first attracted to that field of study?

Sylvia Earle: In New York I attended a talk given by Roger Payne, who is a specialist on whales. At that occasion I also gave a presentation about diving. And after the two presentations, Roger and I sat down and began talking about these possibilities. Why not realize the vision that Roger Payne had of using diving techniques to get to know whales on their own terms. His work, along with his wife Katie Payne and associates, had been done from small boats, seeing whales on the surface, lowering microphones into the sea, recording their sounds, and trying to understand something about the nature of the songs that humpback whales create.

He knew a place in Hawaii where there is a wind shadow. There are high waves and winds elsewhere, but this is a place where the whales come, and you have calm water most of the time. We talked, back and forth, and finally said, let's dream up a project, and go see what we can do.

What followed over the next few weeks were telephone calls, and messages back and forth, writing several proposals to a number of individuals and institutions to patch together the wherewithal to make this happen. A critical element was being able to document what we saw, to make this more than just a scientific research project, and communicate with a broader audience. Al Giddings was the natural ally in this, a really fine underwater photographer and film maker. In a matter of six months, we had assembled the various ingredients needed to spend the next year getting to know humpback whales on their own terms, underwater. Survival Anglia Television Organization, in England, backed the film. That was one component. The National Geographic came through with support for part of the research funding. The New York Zoological Society, my home institution, the California Academy of Science, and the World Wildlife Fund also came through with additional support. Some individuals who had a sailing vessel allowed us to use it as our base of operations in Hawaii. For three months, we lived on this boat and used small rubber boats for our excursions back and forth.

In February 1977, the magic moment came when Al Giddings, Chuck Nicklin, and I, along with another individual, Terry Firm, were in a boat, a Zodiac vessel. We saw five humpback whales, cruising along, stopping and fooling around. We kept a respectful distance, but all of a sudden the whales decided that they weren't going to keep a respectful distance. They did a sharp turn, and came right over to our boat. We turned off the motor and stopped and looked. Having convinced the National Geographic, the World Wildlife Fund, the New York Zoological Society, the California Academy of Science, all these institutions that what we really wanted to do was to get in the water with whales, we had that heart-stopping moment when we had to convince ourselves that what we wanted to do was get in the water with these 40 foot-long, 40-ton creatures, who were really interested in us. They were rollicking like puppies.

Old time pictures of whales look like Greyhound buses, or loaves of bread. Big static-looking lumps. Whales are like swallows, they are like otters. They are in a three-dimensional world, and they move in any direction. They swim upside down. They're vertical. They're every which way. Sometimes they are horizontal, but not always. Once and a while they are horizontal. And they are so supple! Many of the renderings of whales that you see in books make them look big and fat and ponderous and lumpy. They are sleek and elegant and gorgeous, among the most exquisite creatures on the planet. They move like ballerinas. Well, all of this came to me in a very short few minutes, after I finally did convince myself. And it didn't take long, maybe 30 seconds before I went into the water. Here were these rollicking, frolicking creatures, doing all this wonderful dancing in the sea.
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Al Giddings and Chuck Nicklin were preoccupied with their cameras. I had the freedom to just look around. And I saw, with my eyes getting increasingly large by the moment, this huge whale coming straight at me. I knew that if I didn't do something I was going to get smashed by this whale who probably didn't notice me anyway. I was so small, and she was so big. Would she notice?

I felt like a mouse next to a freight train. She did notice, at the last moment, before this seemingly inevitable collision took place. She simply turned, and moved on past. I could have reached out and touched her. I didn't. I was just watching this creature go by. Then she went over in the direction of Al. He was so busy filming another whale, that he didn't see that he was about to get clobbered by this whale. In fact, it looked as though this 15 foot-long flipper would decapitate him. Chuck Nicklin saw it too, and both of us started to hoot. You can yell underwater, and people can usually hear. I knew that Al heard us, but being a good photographer, he was really concentrating, wasn't going to be distracted. When the whale passed him, she lifted her flipper up and over his head to miss him. It created enough of a wash so that he was certainly aware that there was something very big, very close, and he almost dropped his camera. I've never seen him come so close to putting it down, forever. But he didn't, and the collision didn't happen. After that moment though, first my encounter, and then watching how this near-accident didn't occur, we just stopped worrying. It was very clear that they knew exactly where their big bodies were. They had no intention of bashing into us, they had complete control. And for the next two and a half hours, these five whales and these three human beings just had, at least from our standpoint, the most incredible experience perhaps of my entire life up to that point. It was just amazing.
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Our goal was to try to get to know individual whales, just as Dian Fossey got to know individual gorillas, to track them. There had been some success already on the east coast getting to know individuals by their tails. Each tail is like a fingerprint. The patterns, and the configuration of the tail itself are very distinctive. But it's not just the tail. The whole whale is distinctive. We know they are all humpbacks, of course, but like cats and dogs and horses and people, if you look carefully, you can see the distinguishing characteristics. By photographing them, it's possible through time to make matches, and see who is who. Just as people have done with chimpanzees and with the great apes, and with other creatures. It isn't necessary to tag them, you get to see them and know them and recognize them, and verify it with these very distinctive photographic records.

Well, this was the beginning. In that first year, we did not have too many satisfactory opportunities to get to know the idiosyncrasies of individual whales, but we started the catalogue, and started the information gathering. After more than a decade, year after year, people now have information on individual whale . That first whale, that I saw, Daisy, has been seen now with different cows over the years. One of the questions no one knew at the time we started was, how long does a calf stay with it's mother? How many calves does a female have in the course of her lifetime? If you only study dead whales, you get one point in time. Lots of information, but it's stopped with that one dead body. By getting to know individual whales and following them for a lifetime, you get these interactions, you get to know the society of whales, worlds of information that are only possible by getting to meet them on their own terms.

In that same year, 1977, we went to Alaska to get to know whales on their feeding grounds. They appear to be mating and giving birth to young in the tropics, and then go to cold water where food is abundant, and they really concentrate on getting fat. They grow up in the cold water areas where krill, and small fish are abundant. That is in the northern hemisphere. In the Southern Hemisphere, the same species of whales do a similar pattern, but in reverse. They go down to the Antarctic in that case, and then come to the tropical areas for breeding and calving. In between, they travel thousands of miles. They communicate with these hauntingly beautiful sounds. The sounds that Roger and Katie Payne have made so well known through their recordings and records, have largely been recorded in the tropics. When they are in the feeding grounds, they're a little quieter. Some people say it's because they don't sing with their mouths full, but that's just a joke of course. They do make sounds, but the songs seem to be associated with courtship and other forms of behavior that inspire song in many creatures.

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