OUT IN THE OPEN

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 152, 26 December 1945, Page 4

OUT IN THE OPEN

HIDDEN WORLD

(By I. W. T. Munro.)

Our aeroplanes not only fly faster than any bird but have reached altitudes to which no bird can soar; our motor-cars can outstrip any terrestrial animal; our speedboats are faster than the fishes or even the whales; our telescopes and spectroscopes analyse the constituent matter of stars vas* distances away, and our miners burrow into depths of the earth; but there is still one region to which no living man has yet penetrated. Many strange creatures must await study in the deepest abysses ot the ocean. No creatures have yet been brought up from a depth of more than - four and a half miles, and there are deeps that go down nearly seven miles. Man himself has penetrated only to a depth of half a mile, when Dr. C. W. Beebe was lowered to that depth m a spherical steel chamber, the bathysphere, with tremendously thick quartz glass windows. Almost all the deep sea creatures hitherto known, though nightmarish in appearance, had been under a foot long, but Dr. Beebe saw weird creatures six feet long, that no net has ever brought to the surface. The tremendous pressure at great depths has so far proved an insuperable barrier to man's intrusion. At the bottom of the deepest abysses it is about 960 times the ordinary pressure of air at sea level, and-.equals the weight of a column of mercury half a mile high. Fish feel that pressure no more than we feel the pressure of the atmosphere, and for. the same reason, that it is the same within their bodies as outside, but when they are hauled to the surface those with swim-bladders are sometimes blown to pieces by the expansion of the gas. Assuredly the abyss will not keep its secrets for ever. Some of the new plastic materials are tremendously strong and at the same time transparent Even if men themselves cannot go down into the depths, it may be possible some day to make, pf transparent plastic, some form of bathysphere strong enough to withstand enormous pressure and large enough to contain a movie camera and a powerful searchlight, that can be lowered down to make records of the creatures of the deep. Even the searchlight might not be necessary. With highly sensitive film, or perhaps film sensitive to infra-red rays, it might be possible to photograph the fish of the abyss by the light of their own phosphorescence, for a great proportion of them are equipped with luminous organs, apparently as recognition marks in the eternal darkness. .