Robert D. Ballard: The Eternal Darkness

(Allen & Unwin $49.95)

Review: Jack Leigh*

There is nothing wrong with Robert Ballard's latest book that a whopping great sea monster couldn't fix. The alternative is to keep on reading about his earlier discoveries - with recycled pictures.

Ballard, foremost maritime scientist, seeker of deep-sea wonders and discoverer of the Titanic, the nuclear sub Thresher and other notable wrecks, says it is "more alien than Mars" down there in the ocean depths.

There are probably "tens of millions" of unknown species along with the "incredible riot of life forms" already seen. Ship-wrestling squids are not mentioned, but we might timidly hope for a monster or two of cartoon calibre.

Not so. Scientists obviously have a lower amazement threshold than their readers, and the author is still enthusing about what he gave us in earlier writings and TV documentaries - 30cm-long clams, blind crabs, tube worms, anemones and volcanic vents gushing water at up to 350 deg C. One such "searing hot smokestack" at 3000m depth in the eastern Pacific melted bits of the manned submersible Alvin in 1979.

Subtitled A personal history of deep-sea exploration, this book has tense adventure and cool scientific appraisal in equal measure. But Ballard's remark that all expeditions of the past 20 years have probably not investigated even 1 per cent of the seafloor makes you wonder if information intake is keeping up with output.

Exploration is bound to be slow, with 330 million cubic miles of ocean spread over 71 per cent of the planet and providing 97 per cent of the biosphere, its life-sustaining volume.

Three main obstacles to deep-sea exploration are the abysmal darkness, the cold which hovers at 4 deg above freezing near the ocean floor, and the crushing weight of water which reaches 18,000lb a square inch at 7 miles down (1265kg a square centimetre at 11km). A badly made vessel would be crushed to a blob. A pinhole leak would drill a human body like a laser beam.

Ballard rejoices at the achievements of manned submersibles in all sorts of important tasks including the study of plate tectonics (seafloor spreading occurs at the speed a fingernail grows), but a new standard is no sooner set than it is overtaken, in this case by the use of remotely operated vehicles.

"By 1990 we had demonstrated all the components of a new paradigm for deep-sea exploration." It was a so-called "tethered eyeball" that found and explored the Titanic. And with the dramatic new technology has come "telepresence," whereby scientists and students half the world away can guide a probing robot.

Itself a treasure trove of undersea research information, this book also gives a 59-page list of further reading.

* Jack Leigh is an Auckland journalist.