Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves

by James Nestor

All the stress, noise, and distractions of life are left at the surface. The ocean is the last truly quiet place on Earth. These more philosophical freedivers

Other than BASE jumping — parachuting off buildings, antennas, spans (bridges), and earth (geological formations) — freediving is the most dangerous adventure sport in the world.

Each of us begins life floating in amniotic fluid that has almost the same makeup as ocean water.

Sperm whales may communicate with one another in ways that could be more complex than any form of human language.

Fabien Cousteau, the grandson of the famous French ocean explorer, is planning a thirty-one-day mission in Aquarius in 2014.

Every year on the same day, at the same hour, usually within the same minute, corals of the same species, although separated by thousands of miles, will suddenly spawn in perfect synchronicity.

Distance seems to have no effect; if you broke off a chunk of coral and placed it in a bucket beneath a sink in London, that chunk would, in most cases, spawn at the same time as other coral of the same species around the world.

The aquanauts all laugh, then fall silent. They laugh again, then go silent again. I can’t help but feel that everyone down here is a little off.

His plan was to join a troop of voluntary marine researchers, including a Réunion-based engineer named Fabrice Schnöller, and freedive down about eighty feet, to the seafloor. There he would place satellite tags on the bull sharks’ dorsal fins. These tags would track the sharks’ swimming patterns and locations, alerting locals if they came too near shore. It would be the world’s first real-time shark-tracking system.

Buyle told me the safest, most effective way to tag Réunion’s sharks is to meet them on their own terms by freediving down deep enough to slap on a transmitter. Still, he acknowledged, it was a risky operation with no guaranteed results.

The deep sea, Sars posited, was not only abundant with life but also a link to our planet’s ancient past. And the farther down we went, the farther back in time we reached.

The results were startling. Half of all known species spent much of their time in the cold and dark waters of the deep ocean. At that depth, they’d migrate thousands of miles in schools of hundreds, swimming head to tail in perfect unison, following an invisible line. Then they would return to their point of origin, following the same invisible line with the same precision.

It was as if the birds had an innate sense of their location and destination, even when they couldn’t see anything.

When he put the robins in a magnetically shielded chamber, their sense of direction disappeared.

that robins had a magnetic sense of direction.

magnetoreception)

SharkFriendly is an acoustic system that follows a shark in real time.

This sense is five million times stronger than anything humans can feel. It’s by far the most acute sense yet discovered on the planet.

Humans also have magnetite deposits. They’re found in the skull, specifically in the ethmoid bone, which separates the nasal cavity from the brain. The location of these deposits in a human head corresponds closely to their position in sharks and other migratory animals — a relic from the magnetosensitive fish from which humans and sharks both evolved five hundred million years ago.

Yes, they were swimming where no human had been before. But this struck me as maddening, like an explorer arriving in previously undiscovered wilderness and focusing only on his GPS coordinates.

This disconnect between athlete and ocean

Nishina,

Sawada, a grungy little port full of broken boats and acrid smells.

Japanese society revolves around a tangled web of confusing customs.

“He thought we were really talking to him,” says Schnöller. “Like we had learned their language or something!” In the months that followed, when Schnöller went to sea, QuackQuack would often find his boat, approach, and start vocalizing, as if he were picking up the conversation where they’d left off.

Dolphins use these name signatures when they approach other dolphins, to identify themselves.

Cetaceans have disproportionately large and complex brains compared with other animals. The brain of the bottle-nosed dolphin, for instance, is about 10 percent larger than that of a human, and in many ways more complex. For instance, the dolphin neocortex, the part of the brain that performs higher-order thinking functions like problem-solving, is proportionally larger than the human neocortex. To Schnöller, who had spent months in a brain lab while in college, this was no coincidence. It proved to him that dolphins and other cetaceans were very intelligent and capable of sophisticated communication.

1961, he joined renowned scientist Carl Sagan and Nobel Prize–winning chemist Melvin Calvin, among other esteemed astrophysicists and intellectuals, in a semisecret group called the Order of the Dolphin.

On one level, it worked. Peter took a renewed interest in English lessons. His inflection and pitch improved, and he could clearly pronounce simple words like ball, hello, and hi. He started talking in “humanoid” language when he was alone. When Howe talked on the telephone to people outside the wet lab, Peter became jealous and would speak English words louder to get her attention. When Peter approached her with an erection, she recalled, “I feel extremely flattered at Peter’s patience with me in all this … and am delighted to be so obviously ‘wooed’ by this dolphin.”

The scientists plotted the whistles and click trains and identified a particular whistle signature, which they believed was used as a warning word, meaning something like “Shut up. Someone is listening!” But they could never conclusively determine what it was. –2,500

One way the body prevents drowning is by closing the larynx when it comes in contact with water. We’re all born with this reflex. When a newborn is put in water, his larynx automatically closes; the baby will open his eyes and instinctively begin swimming underwater.

A conductor announces that we’ll be disembarking in three minutes. He taps me on the left shoulder and I hand him my ticket with the index finger of my left hand. The blue fabric of the seat is soft, like silk. I stroke it with this finger. The conductor taps me on the shoulder again; I reach in my pocket to hand him the ticket, but the ticket is gone. I motion with my finger for him to wait while I look in my bag. I can’t find my bag. The cabin is too dark; the sun is gone. I hear someone nearby splashing water in a sink. The conductor taps me again on the shoulder. I point to the door and ask if I can get off. You can do this, he says. You can do this.

Longer-wavelength colors, like red and orange, are easiest for water molecules to absorb, and so they drop out first. The color red becomes invisible to the human eye at around fifty feet down; yellows disappear at around a hundred and fifty feet; greens at two hundred feet, and so on, ultimately leaving only stronger, shorter-wave colors like blue and purple. The blue ocean water (and sky) we see from the surface has nothing to do with the color of water or air — both, of course, are colorless. Tropical water appears intensely bluish-purple because the visibility extends for hundreds of feet, allowing you to peer into the depths where only blue and purple light can penetrate.

Blue fish are exceedingly rare in the ocean, because they would be highly visible until they reached the lightless waters of the bathypelagic. Meanwhile, red fish are fairly common because red is the best camouflage in deep water. A fish like a red snapper looks red at the surface, but as it descends, the redness appears to fade away until, at around a hundred feet, it becomes virtually invisible to its prey and predators. This is why snapper spend almost all their time at between fifty and two hundred feet.

Phytoplankton, the microscopic algae that make up at least half of all biomass in the ocean, absorb about one-third to one-half of all CO2 and produce more than 50 percent of all the Earth’s oxygen. As the oceans warm, phytoplankton will die off. Carbon dioxide levels will rise and oxygen levels will fall.

From 1950 to 2010, the number of phytoplankton species dropped 40 percent — an astounding number. As phytoplankton continue to die off, it will become increasingly difficult for animals on Earth to breathe.

Oddly enough, I feel comfort in this. Before the dive, I expected to feel panicked and stressed at these depths, but now, beneath two thousand feet of seawater, I feel calm, almost serene. Absolutely nothing is in my control — I can’t get off, I can’t stop the walls from caving in. There’s no use complaining or worrying about what will happen next.

Think of your nerves as rivers, and your brain as a lake into which all those rivers empty.

Tibetan Buddhist monks who practice the Bön tradition of Tum-mo meditation. These monks can raise the temperature in their extremities by as much as 17 degrees, and they can dry wet sheets on their backs in ambient temperatures of 40 degrees. Their power is nowhere near as great as the electric

Valsalva maneuver,

Frenzel method, which traps air inside the closed circuit of the sinus cavities and allows for immediate and thorough releases of pressure.

“is that in Valsalva, the throat stays open; in Frenzel, it’s shut.”

crowded restaurant in Kalk Bay, a trendy former fishing village about twenty miles west of central Cape Town, South Africa.

At the end of her stay, she rediscovered a “stillness” in herself. It was the same stillness that had first attracted her to freediving fifteen years earlier, but it had been lost in her ambition to keep going deeper. “In Dharamsala, I remembered that freediving was all about letting go,” she says. “After

Freediving is more than just holding your breath, it’s a perception shift. Don’t kick down the doorway to the deep; slide in on your tiptoes. Never, ever dive alone. Always enter the ocean in peace with yourself and your surroundings.

Whales Weep Not, narrated by Jason Robards, became an international sensation and helped spark the Save the Whales movement. Our crew hopes to have a similar impact

Yet, in two related and crucial ways — language and culture — sperm whales more closely approximate human culture and intellect than any other creature on the planet. “It’s sort of strange.

At their maximum level of 236 decibels, these clicks are louder than two thousand pounds of TNT exploding two hundred feet away from you, and much louder than the space shuttle taking off from two hundred and fifty feet away. They’re so loud that they cannot be heard in air, only in water, which is dense enough to propagate such powerful noises.

It’s also possible that whales have emotional lives not unlike our own. In 2006, researchers at New York City’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine discovered that sperm whales had spindle cells, the long and highly developed brain structures that neurologists associate with speech and feelings of compassion, love, suffering, and intuition — those things that make humans human.

Nathaniel Philbrick’s non-fiction bestseller In the Heart of the Sea.