Rich Worlds Beneath The Oceans

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31327, 25 March 1967, Page 4

Rich Worlds Beneath The Oceans

The Deepest Days. By Robert Stenuit. Hodder and Stoughton. 222 pp. Man is reaching for the stars without having given much more than a cursory glance at his own back yard. News of space travel has become almost commonplace to the public, but the sea, which covers seven-tenths of the earth’s surface, is still alien, treacherous, and unexploited.

: A great step forward was taken with the “Man In Sea” project, devised and supervised by Edwin Link, who had already become famous as the inventor of the Link Trainer—a cockpit designed to help airmen to train safely and cheaply. An immensely successful businessman, Mr Link turned his genius to diving. Until he set his mind on the problem, divers had succeeded only in very short deep dives, or longer periods spent in shallow water. The prospect of spending long periods of time at far deeper levels was attractive and exciting to all divers, but there were many dangers to overcome. The physiological and technical problems were enormous. The divers in the “Man in Sea” operation were to descend in a decompression chamber—invented by Link—and to take up residence in an undersea hut on the ocean floor, filled with a mixture of helium and oxygen for breathing. From this house, the divers could make expeditions into the sea without clumsy equipment, and do valuable work without having to re-surface for some days. (Robert Stenuit, the author of this fascinating book, was Link’s chief diver, and first spent a day and a night at 200 feet, and then, with a companion, stayed for 49 hours at 432 feet Stenuit writes in detail about this exciting and dangerous venture. The implications of the record-breaking dive are perhaps not clear to the layman. As one journalist said — “What good will it do?” Stenuit’s answers to this, and general observations on the future of man in the sea, form one of the most absorbing parts of the book. He points out that while the world’s population creeps up towards 4 billion, and two out of three people are hungry, the ocean contains enormous

sources of food. It is estimated that the sea could provide over 100 billion tons of human food a year—while so far only 45 million tons of fish are snatched from the sea. Fishing needs to be industrialised, and we must become much less fastidious about selecting only the choicest specimens. Fastgrowing common fish could be produced farmed in great quantities, to be converted to fish-meal. This is a tasteless, odourless powder which is far richer in protein than meat, and which is highly economical to produce. Already Scandinavia, France and South Africa are pro-

ducing it industrially—and in Nelson a less-refined version is being produced as stock food. The riches of the sea are not only edible ones. Under the sea lie vast oil fields and reserves of coal, copper, cobalt, nickel and manganese. We believe ourselves to be in the Space Age. But under water, we are still in the Stone Age, claims Robert Stenuit “We fish, we hunt we set crude traps.” He visualises a future in which farmers live under the sea with their families in houses, caring for their fish and shell-fish, and cultivating their fields of sea-weed. The “Man in Sea” project has brought this, and many other wildly improbable dreams, into the near future