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In this fascinating account of undersea exploration, we go diving with Jacques Cousteau, Walter Cronkite, Pierre Trudeau and James Cameron. As well, we spend time inside the U.S. Navy's SeaLab in the Pacific, MacInnis's Sub Igloo under the ice in the Arctic and “America's inner space station” in the Atlantic. Combining insight, anecdote and scientific fact, Dr. MacInnis recreates an undersea journey where survival hinges on trust and teamwork and the skillful use of new and complicated technologies. As his stories unfold, MacInnis reveals the some-times lethal consequences of the struggle to master the universe below. Breathing Underwater offers a new perception of the ocean's depths and our relationship to them.
With beautiful illustrations by Glen Loates, this book celebrates one of the last great journeys on Earth-and the pioneers who made it possible.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR BREATHING UNDERWATER
"Joe MacInnis writes of a time when the oceans' depths were a vast unknown and a few brave souls were pushing the boundaries of human capability to shine light into that darkness. In eloquent prose, he has captured the golden age of undersea exploration."
—James Cameron, Academy Award-winning director of Titanic
"Breathing Underwater is not only a riveting memoir, it's an indispensable record of the men and the machines that changed forever our relationship to the sea."
—Peter Benchley, marine conservationist and author of JAWS
"Joe MacInnis is Canada's Renaissance Man: medical doctor, diving scientist, poet and environmental advocate. This book, which brings to exciting life his many qualities, is an essential read."
—Peter C. Newman, author of The Canadian Establishment
SAMPLE: Chapter One
April 1963. She is war’s ultimate weapon. From her smooth, round bow to her slowly rotating propeller, her massive cylindrical body spans a distance of almost 300 feet. Below the steel curves of her conning tower, which houses her periscopes and antennae, she is as high as a three-story building. She is completely black. At a depth of about 50 fathoms, she is invisible.
She is the USS Thresher, the lead ship of America’s most advanced class of nuclear-powered attack submarine. Inside her huge pressure hull are 16 officers, 96 sailors and 17 civilians from the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. Her commanding officer is John “Wes” Harvey, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy. Thresher has just spent nine months being overhauled in the shipyard, and Lieutenant Commander Harvey is beginning the second day of her sea trials.
Thresher is a lethal machine of the Cold War, one of thousands that include strategic bombers and land-based missiles built by the United States and the Soviet Union. She is part of a nuclear threat that says terrible things about forces beyond our control, about a part of our history when men are thinking seriously about killing millions of people with a weapon that creates the heat of the sun.
Yesterday, Thresher sailed out of the shipyard where she was launched three years earlier. On the ocean east of Boston, Skylark, a 205-foot-long submarine rescue vessel, joined her. Lashed onto Skylark’s fantail is a McCann chamber, a diving bell that can be winched down on a steel cable to rescue the survivors of a stricken submarine.
In April 1963, the American nuclear Navy consists of 30 submarines in service and another 40 in various stages of construction. They are designed to defeat the menace of an even greater number of Russian nuclear attack and ballistic missile subs operating in the Atlantic and Pacific. Behind these facts is a larger truth. During the early years of the Cold War, both Navies developed a new kind of submarine—fast, deep-diving and completely independent of the surface. Until nuclear power came along, military submarines were limited to the upper few hundred feet of the ocean. Now they range to depths five times as deep, pushing their long black hulls into an unknown universe.
The cold, dark waters of the world’s oceans and its adjoining basins are the oldest and largest physical feature on the surface of the planet. More than three billion years old, they cover some 140 million square miles or 71 percent of the earth’s surface with an average depth of two and a half miles of water. Within their enormous volume of 350 million cubic miles are crushing pressures, piercing cold and perpetual darkness.
In spite of the vast weight of the ocean above them and the unseen fathoms below them, the men inside Thresher feel secure. They are surrounded by well-lit engineering spaces and softly humming mechanical systems that give them a sense of order and command. They carry out their tasks—steering, navigation, engineering and communications—with scripted diligence. They are young and come from farms, small towns and big-city tenements across the United States. They are loyal to each other and their ship, and there is a rough assurance in the way they work and in the way they talk to each other in nonchalant, teasing voices. Most of them have made this kind of voyage many times before.
Yesterday, Thresher conducted a series of shallow tests over the continental shelf, the submerged shoulder of North America that begins at the shoreline and descends to a depth of 600 feet. Worldwide, these broad, shallow regions adjacent to the continents lie under almost 8 percent of the total ocean and form the boundary of the deep ocean basins. While underwater, Thresher communicated at regular intervals to Skylark through her UQC, or underwater telephone system. Because of differences in water density and temperature, the transmission between the two vessels was frequently distorted.
Last night, her shallow tests completed, Thresher headed east, out over the edge of the continental shelf. This morning, the water below her keel is more than 8,000 feet deep.
As always, the unknown energies flowing through the ocean in which the huge sub is suspended include up-wellings and down-wellings and sliding layers of currents and near-freezing temperatures. These energies haunt Thresher’s every move. Some of the older men inside her pressure hull regard them with distrust. They know they are inside a machine made up of several million parts and pieces, and each one has been designed, fabricated, tested and installed by someone who is now on land. Any fear is hidden behind small gestures, old habits and practiced rituals.
At 6:35 a.m., following a radio check with Skylark, Thresher’s crew begin the procedures that will take her to her maximum operating depth. Directly below her conning tower is a small room called the command and control center. Inside, a dozen men, including her skipper, are standing or sitting in front of display consoles, instrument panels, chart stands and plotting tables. Just above their heads are gray pipes, black wires and red phone boxes.
At 8:10 a.m., Skylark receives the following message on her underwater acoustic telephone:
“We are now at 400 feet.”
At 400 feet, the pressure on Thresher’s hull is almost 200 pounds per square inch. In a few minutes, when she reaches 1,000 feet, the pressure will increase to 445 pounds per square inch.
Thresher’s massive hull is a series of steel rings and two end domes welded together into a single unit. It is designed to operate safely down to depths of 1,000 feet. Beyond 1,500 feet—called the “crush depth”—it will rupture.
Despite the hull’s ability to withstand immense pressures, it is penetrated by dozens of pipes, periscopes, access hatches and torpedo tubes, as well as the propeller shaft. One of the reasons for this dive is to inspect the integrity of every valve, pipe and seal throughout the ship.
At 9:10 a.m., Thresher descends through 900 feet. Her circular frames groan under the pressure, her bulkheads creak. Throughout the length of the submarine, from the torpedo room to the wardroom, from the reactor compartment to the main engine room, groups of men study instruments and dials. The officers are experts in physics, electrical engineering, heat transfer, reactor theory and radiological control. The members of the crew are among the most carefully selected and best trained in the Navy. The men with the most responsibility are thinking fast and working quickly. Some off-duty men are sleeping.
Without warning, there is a hard, sharp sound in a machinery space behind the reactor. A narrow pipe filled with seawater bursts open.
As word of the emergency spreads through the three-story vessel, men rush to repair the damage, but the cold water roaring out of the pipe fills the room with a freezing fog, tearing out wires, flooding control panels and short-circuiting electrical switches. Circuit breakers trip. Panels go dead. Officers call out hoarse commands. Sailors respond with subdued voices and rapid movements. Minutes later, Thresher’s nuclear reactor shuts down and her turbines lose steam. The 4,000-ton submarine slows to a stop, stalls and begins to slide backward toward the center of the earth.
At 9:13 a.m., Lieutenant Commander Harvey reaches for the phone and calls Skylark.
“Experiencing minor difficulty. Have positive up-angle. Attempting to blow.”
These are words the men on board Skylark have never heard before. They lean in toward their radio trying to understand their meaning. They hear the sound of air moving under high pressure, as if Thresher’s men are trying to bring her to the surface by forcing water out of her ballast tanks. Three minutes later they hear a distorted voice saying:
“Exceeding test depth.”
Inside Thresher, streams of visual and auditory information are overwhelming the men in the command center. Everything tells them that the steel protecting them from the ocean is about to give way. Some men are breathing so fast they can’t handle the rush of air going in and out of their lungs.
Inside the saline darkness, Thresher descends through gathering forces. Somewhere below her crush depth, driven by the weight of half a mile of water, the ocean slams through a section of her hull, tearing away bulkheads, filling every space with super-heated air at a pressure of more than 700 pounds per square inch. Lights go out. Motors stop running. Throughout the sub, things break and smash together. Diesel fuel and hydraulic fluid ignite. Some men are blown against instrument panels and impaled on pipes. Arms and legs are sheared off. Men are torn open and burned, their bodies reduced to smoke. The suffering is brief; everyone dies within seconds.
The thunderous implosion breaks Thresher into three large pieces.
After falling through several thousand feet of water, Thresher’s remains hit the sea floor at more than 70 miles an hour, digging deep impact craters. Her nuclear reactor buries itself under several yards of sediment. For hours afterward, the contents of her interior, including torn sheets of insulation, pieces of matting, charts and clothing, descend slowly through the water. According to its weight and shape, each object is drawn down-current into a long, curving debris trail. Toward the end of the day, lighter materials, including a blizzard of torn envelopes, candy wrappers, crushed cigarette packs, pages of half-written letters, dollar bills and faded photographs, are still leafing onto the sediments. Far above on the surface, all is distance, gray water and sky.
Thresher has fallen to the depths of Earth’s second-largest ocean. The Atlantic covers nearly 32 million square miles and runs from the Arctic to the Antarctic. The South Atlantic is a barren realm of water with only a few islands, including the Falklands and Ascension, breaking its monotonous surge and sweep. The North Atlantic is an ocean of immense variety; it includes the Mediterranean Sea on its eastern flank and the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of St. Lawrence on its western. Thresher has disappeared into the blackness and landed on a poorly charted, little-known sea floor.
Within hours of her loss, other U.S. Navy vessels steam out to join Skylark at Thresher’s last known position. The sailors on board are searching for traces in the water with eyes and minds blunted by the fact that the pride of the fleet has been swallowed by the sea, taking 129 good men with her, men like themselves with brush-cuts and cowlicks, men who were friendly and capable and quick.
The two dozen sailors on Skylark are still trying to make sense of the words “exceeding test depth,” spoken in a voice with its color and shading drained out. Then there was the hard thump followed by the loud implosion, a sound so powerful it reverberated through the depths of the ocean and was picked up hundreds of miles away by the hydrophones of the Navy’s underwater surveillance system.
The officers commanding the gathering of ships converse in subdued voices. How did this happen? Is there a flaw in Thresher’s design? Are her sister subs carrying the same flaw? Some officers are secretly relieved to be commanding ships that float on the surface. It is their unspoken belief that steering a 4,000-ton vessel into the depths is a game of chance played with every dive.
Everyone knows that rescue is not an option. What’s left of Thresher lies deeper than 8,000 feet. The Navy’s primary rescue device, the McCann chamber, works only to 850 feet.
As the days pass, the Navy’s objective turns to finding the lost sub and determining the cause of the accident. Because warships are not equipped to search the bottom of the sea, the Navy asks the scientific community for help. Among the first to respond are the deepwater scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on nearby Cape Cod.
As soon as the deepwater search begins, it becomes apparent that trying to locate an object lying under a mile and a half of ocean—even something as large as a nuclear submarine—is almost impossible. The search ships lack precision navigation systems and their tracks across the surface may be in error by as much as 300 yards. This means that a 100-yard-long object on the bottom could easily be missed. And when deep-sea cameras are lowered into the abyss, mid-water currents push them in unknown directions.
After two weeks, the Navy’s plotting charts show about a hundred possible “contacts.” Unfortunately, so little is known about the sea floor in this part of the North Atlantic that it is impossible to distinguish between normal geological features and objects of human construction. As the weeks pass, the Thresher disaster becomes an assault on the U.S. Navy’s confidence.
The Navy persists, and in time a new deep-sea camera from MIT provides hundreds of photos of the wreck, including torn sheets of steel and twisted pipes. Taken together, they provide a rough map of Thresher’s main pieces and the debris field that surrounds them.
Back in Washington, the Navy is being challenged: What about the nuclear reactor? Will it explode or contaminate the surrounding waters? The reactor contains more than 20 tons of fuel rods holding enriched uranium and deadly by-products such as plutonium. People want to know if the radioactivity will affect the health of the ocean.
In June, the Trieste is brought to the site. The U.S. Navy’s only vehicle capable of surviving at Thresher’s depth, the Trieste is a big and ungainly bathyscaphe and looks like a throwback to a lost mechanical age. Her main feature is a thin steel tank 60 feet long and 12 feet wide, and filled with 34,000 gallons of lighter-than-water gasoline. Suspended beneath it is a seven-foot steel pressure sphere that holds her three-man crew in the kneeling position. Jammed into her awkward architecture are 16 tons of steel pellets that are released when the pilot wants to surface. In simple terms, Trieste is an up-and-down elevator; horizontally, she is about as maneuverable as a slug on a saltlick.
On Trieste’s fourth dive to 8,400 feet, her crew spot a yellow plastic shoe cover, the kind used by sailors inside the reactor compartment, lying on top of the tan-colored sediment. Printed on its sole is SSN-593, Thresher’s ship numbers. Several days later, Trieste’s crew take pictures of part of the debris field containing shredded electrical cables, twisted battery plates and large pieces of superstructure. As the weeks go by, they use mechanical manipulators mounted on Trieste to recover debris that might point to the cause of the accident.
At the court of inquiry convened at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Admiral Hyman Rickover is asked about the reactor. He states that it is “physically impossible for the reactor to explode like a bomb … the core of the reactor is well protected from seawater corrosion.”
Two weeks after the disaster, the Secretary of the Navy organizes the first meeting of the Deep Submergence Systems Review Group, 60 experts in oceanography, underwater engineering and submarine operations. They are asked to study the accident and assess the U.S. Navy’s capabilities in the deep ocean environment. In the months that follow, these distinguished admirals, scientists and engineers devote themselves to their task with determination and discipline. Behind every thought and every decision is the image of a black-hulled submarine, as long as a football field, her living quarters, wardroom and control center slowly falling through the ocean until there is a sound so violent that it bursts every eardrum, collapses every lung and stops every heart almost simultaneously. One hundred and twenty-nine men are now dead, the remains of their bodies diffusing slowly into the currents and nearby sediments.
The head of the group’s civilian sector is a wealthy inventor-
businessman in his late fifties. Edwin A. Link began his career during the first third of the twentieth century, when aviation was changing from conquest of the air to an essential mail service. In those days, the rules of safe flying were still being made up in the cockpit. In a fog or thunderstorm, a pilot’s instruments couldn’t be trusted, so he flew “by the seat of his pants.” By 1923, this undisciplined approach had killed 31 airmail pilots.
As a high school dropout who flew the same skies as Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, Ed Link worried about the fatalities. His response was to invent a device that would allow pilots to acquire their flying skills without leaving the ground. Using abilities he had mastered in his father’s organ factory in Binghamton, New York, he mounted a stubby wooden cockpit and fuselage on top of a pedestal containing an organ bellows. An electrically driven vacuum pump moved the bellows in and out, causing the fuselage to pitch and roll as the pilot “flew” it. As the years passed, Link’s invention, called the Link trainer, was modified and improved upon until it became a rapidly expanding commercial enterprise. During the Second World War, advanced versions saved countless lives and led to dramatic improvements in instrument flying, navigation techniques and simulators for commercial airline pilots. By 1963, the descendents of the Link trainer were helping train Mercury and Gemini astronauts and were the technical heart of a billion-dollar industry.
In the 1950s, the father of the simulation industry began focusing his engineering proficiencies on another frontier, the ocean. He started by searching for Spanish treasure ships lost in the sunlit shallows off the east coast of Florida. Working with Mendel Peterson, the Smithsonian Institution’s diving curator of naval history, he recovered material from an eighteenth-century British frigate. Then, supported by the National Geographic Society and using bottom-sounding and metal-detecting devices, he conducted the first underwater archeological survey of the sunken city of Port Royal in Jamaica. He built a research ship called Sea Diver and sailed across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. In the Sea of Galilee, using his own search techniques, Link discovered the remains of an ancient city.
Link’s genius was in building machines that solved problems. After thinking about what he had learned from spending hundreds of hours underwater, he decided that working divers needed a device to protect them from cold, wetness and pressure. He built a combination diving bell and decompression chamber that carried two divers to the ocean floor, allowed them to exit for work and then carried them back to the surface. He called his new underwater elevator a submersible decompression chamber, or SDC.
In 1962, with support from the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet, Link lowered his submersible chamber into the Mediterranean off the south of France and suspended it beneath his ship at 60 feet. Then he dove down, entered the chamber and began breathing a mixture of oxygen and helium. He remained inside for the next eight hours. It was the first time that anyone had breathed this synthetic gas mixture for such a long time under the ocean.
It took Link and his associates on the Deep Submergence Systems Review Group months to absorb all the details surrounding the loss of the Thresher. The outcome was a report to the Navy, written in language that conveyed the authority of men well acquainted with the interior of the ocean. The report charged that nuclear submarines were routinely using depths far beyond the U.S. Navy’s capabilities to rescue them. In it, they recommended that a major effort be made to improve the Navy’s ability to recover personnel from sunken submarines and to salvage objects from the ocean floor. One priority, they wrote, was to develop the engineering systems and techniques to permit divers to work on the ocean floor at the 600-foot depths of the continental shelf. The report went on to urge that its recommendations be carried out as soon as possible, pointing out that if Thresher had sunk on the outer margins of the continental shelf, her crew would have lived on for weeks in a world unable to save them from a prolonged and agonizing death.
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Book is available at most major bookstores or can be ordered online from http://chapters.ca or http://amazon.ca