OCEAN DEPTHS

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 71, 21 September 1933, Page 22

OCEAN DEPTHS

WHAT DO THEY CONTAIN?

MAN'S EFFORTS TO DISCOVER

INTEEPID PIONEERS

Down at the ocean floor, "Davy Jones's Locker" —what will the pioneer explorers find there? H. G. Wells visualises an imderseas city of strange aquatic beasts possessing rudimentary intelligence, who captured the diving bell of a scientist and imprisoned it in a roofless temple as a deity dropped from their sky, writes H. C. McKay in the Sydney "Daily Telegraph." Others have postulated sunken continents (Atlantis, Lemuria, Paciflca) with perhaps remains of a lost civilisation which was drowned in somo great cataclysm in- late prehistoric timesi Still others imagine thousands of • wrecks still existent there, hiding untold riches; and some talk of minerals and metals (including gold), which future scentists may mine for on the ocean bed. So faT all the information about this undersea world has' been revealed by-deep-sea sounding and dredging. The latter has been only cursory. It has shown queer deposits of iron oxide (one "red clay" bed covers over 51 million square miles) and. black manganese oxide; but no precious metals worth diving for (beyond wreck treasures), though there are millions of tons of dissolved gold in the ocean as a whole. IN DIVING BELLS. Intrepid explorers are now fired with the idea of going down in diving bells and finding out exactly what conditions prevail in the ocean abysses. The great obstacle is, of course, the constantly increasing pressure as one descends. There is a limit to what even steel will withstand. In ordinary rubber diving suits the limit is put at 120 feet. This record has been beaten. A Spanish diver got down to 182 feet, and reached the wreck of the steamer Skyro off Cape Finisterre, retrieving £5000 worth of silver bars. As a tour-de-force divers of the British Navy reached 210 feet but suffered severely, and could do no work at the depth. ' ■ In steel diving suits much greater depths are possible. The Artiglio divers recovering gold from the wreck of the Egypt have been working at 400 feet. This beats the record depth for a submarine, at present held by the Italian submarine Mameli, which in 1929 reached 353 feet. Diving bells have eclipsed all theae records. Dr. William Beebe, the famous naturalist, is credited with a depth of 2200 feet in his "bathysphere"—a metal globe with thick glass windows. Beebe had powerful searchlights, and made "photographs and'sketches of what the light revealed. But as a matter of fact there is not much to see.' Seaweeds end at 600 feet. • A few, deepsea .fish exist at 16,500 feet, but there is no other life.'i . NO LIFE FOUND. At the bottom of the abysses such as Tuscarora Deep, off the. Japanese ooast, no life has been found by dredging. This, of course, does not denote that strange monsters may not exist. The wildest scheme yet devised at first sight for exploring these deeps in person is that of Professor Piccard, the Swiss scientist who ' recently attained the record height in the upper air (10.56 miles). He plans to descend to the bed of the Pacific in a balloon. His sea-balloon is a perfectly practical proposition. The "gas-bag" is replaced by a light aluminium globe filled with olive oil. Beneath it swings the spherical diving bell, a sphere to carry two observers, Similar to that in which he ascended on his air flight. Olive oil being lighter than water, the "bag 1' at great depths will act as a; container of light gas acts in an airballoon. - To get his sea-balloon down, Piccard will carry weights, which can be released when he wishes to rise. Piccard will carry oxygen apparatus and soda-lime to keep the enclosed air breathable. The great advantage of his sea-balloon, is that (unlike Beebe's) it does not need to be slowly lowered from a ship by a chain and winch. ONLY FOSSILS. piccard proposes to dive somewhere in the Pacific. In view of recent stories about the sunken civilisations of Lemuria and Pacifica, it is interesting to recall that material has been removed (in small quantities) from the shelves of all the ocean floors from time to time. So far all the traces of life recovered, are fossils from the early ages of the earth; most are from the Triassic and Cretaceous. The latter dates back about 100 million years. Man did not exist then, but some primitive, warmblooded creatures did.- A kind of opossum was extant. The common ancestor of ape and man did not appear till millions of years later. Scientists believe that when the last drowning occurred in Pacifica and Lemuria no human being civilised enough to. build cities or civilisations had yet evolved. A city underneath the sea was discovered by an explorer in a diving-bell in 1928 in the Mediterranean. Hans Hartman (who claims to have beaten Beebe's depth record by 300 feet), saw between Sicily and Africa, at 360 feet depth, ruins of an ancient city, which must have been built in prehistoric "times when there was a landbridge'' between Sicily and the African continent. The word "city" seems, an exaggeration, but the ruins may be those of an ancient settlement in the days when huge stone monuments and temples were built.