Digital Extra: Mountains in the Sea

NOAA

The ship Ronald H. Brown, a state-of-the-art oceanographic and atmospheric research platform, is the largest vessel in the NOAA fleet. It is named in honor of the late secretary of commerce, Ronald H. Brown, who was killed in a plane crash in 1996 while on a trade mission to Bosnia.

By early Monday morning, after steaming through the night, the NOAA ship Ron Brown reached the waters above Bear Seamount. We're almost 200 miles offshore. From the decks of our ship, the world revolves around us now. Nothing lies between us and the horizon except the wide, flat, empty, dark-blue sea.

The weather is being kind to us so far. A thin overcast, no wind, calm seas. All the scientists are ready to start the dives they came here for. But breakfast comes, it goes, the hours roll past, and still the technicians and engineers are strolling the aft deck, tweaking and testing and peering intently at their machinery. They are talking through headsets and working through checklists.

Meanwhile, the science team keeps busy in the lab, planning more details of their tasks, reviewing data from past explorations, and training some of the newer crew and graduate students on data-logging duties. Every few minutes someone asks, "Won't the ROV get launched today? Does anybody know when?" But everyone knows that for this first deployment, the best thing is to leave the technicians alone and let them take their time. When will the ROV launch? When it's ready, is the only answer that's forthcoming, and the only answer that makes sense.

Finally, at about 2 p.m., the Argus tow sled was let down gently into the sea off the stern. Argus is tethered to the ship with a thick steel line, 4,000 meters of it, rolled on a massive winch on the deck. Hercules, connected to Argus with a long blue-and-yellow cable, follows next. Right from the start, a three-foot-wide plasma screen in the main Science Lab lights up with the video feed. The scientists gather and gaze.

Oohs and ahhs are heard for every glimpse of a darting fish, a luminescent copepod. "Oh! Did you see that? It looked like an eel." "Whoa! That might have been a squid." "That was a sea butterfly... a Gonionena jellyfish..." "Look at all that bioluminesence - it sparkles." Tiny bright particles flurry by as Hercules sinks in the darkness. "They look like little cephalopods, drawn to the light, like moths." Bright-red and glowing-white creatures dart past. It's kind of like watching fireworks in slow motion. Everyone is waiting for that first look at the seamount structure.

But the ROV never made it there. Suddenly, in the Science Lab, the screen grew dark. A scout to the aft deck came back to say the winch had stopped turning. A few minutes later, it was reported to be turning again - but in reverse. It took almost an hour to pull Argus and Hercules back to the surface, and secure them in their places on deck. Early reports said the control cable between the two machines suffered some kind of internal breakage. The good news is, there's a spare cable on board. The plan is to make the fix and try for another dive sometime before midnight.

We encountered several creatures out here today, besides us on our lonely ship: a huge whale breached just by the aft stern deck, rolled on his back and smashed out a wave. We saw a tiny yellow-and-brown wood warbler, not more than four inches from beak to tail, wandering exhausted on the weather deck, nearly 200 miles from shore, in the early afternoon. And in the evening, two storm petrels turned up on deck, attracted by our lights, and seemed dazed. A crewman picked them up gently, one in each hand, and brought them into the lab in search of biological advice. Throw them off the rail on the dark side of the ship and they'll fly away, was the consensus. Beyond these few, there is only our ship alone out here, beneath the stars.