The end In the 1960s, a submersible named Alvin crashed off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. The white onion-shaped ship, carrying a crew of three, was being lowered to dive when the cable broke. Suddenly, Alvin is sinking. The scientists climbed out, shocked and slightly bruised, as the ship plunged, half-opened, eventually sinking to the seabed about 4,500 feet below. Alvin was in a somewhat embarrassing situation. Although the submarine is only a few years old, it is already an eclectic resume including, in 1966, helping to recover a 70-kiloton hydrogen bomb that had been dropped when two military planes collided over the coast of Spain. Now it is something that needs to be saved.
Ten months later, Alvin was pulled out of the abyss—a blip in the life of a ship make diving to this day (although parts are constantly being replaced which means no original spare parts are left). But the crash left its own legacy in the form of a mysteriously preserved lunch. During the frantic escape, the crew left behind six sandwiches, two water jugs filled with broth, and a handful of apples. After retrieving Alvin, researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution were amazed at the state of this submerged party. The apples look a bit soaked in the brine, but are otherwise intact. The sandwiches smelled fresh and the bologna (this was 1968) was still pink. The researchers confirmed that they were still delicious even after a few bites. Likewise, even though the thermos has been crushed by the pressure of the water, the soup after being reheated is still considered “absolutely delicious”.
Those observations were published in a magazine Science in 1971, after amazed scientists raced to study the meal before it spoiled — which it did within a few weeks in the refrigerator. In addition to sipping bologna, the researchers measured the chemical properties of the food and the activity of the bacteria that concentrated on it. In the end, they concluded that deterioration was occurring at a rate of 1% of the rate it had at the surface, temperature-controlled. The question—one that has puzzled researchers for decades—is why. In the 1960s, researchers had little experience in the cold, high-pressure deep ocean, but they assumed it was filled with bacteria ready to break down organic matter, even under extreme conditions. Perhaps the number of bacteria is less than they thought, or not the right kind. Or maybe not enough oxygen. Either it’s too cold or too pressurized. The answer is difficult to determine.
Over time, the core question of the preserved lunch mystery has become more and more pressing as scientists have figured it out. that role the oceans play in isolation carbon. About a third of the carbon that humans release into the air has been sucked back into the ocean, and much of that is thought to be stored in the deepest waters. So an accurate picture of how much carbon goes in and out into the air is important. This is especially important if you want to control that process, like some people, by doing things like seaweed farming—removes carbon from the air through photosynthesis to create its tentacles—and then sinks it into deep ocean trenches to store that carbon.
In large part, the difficulty for researchers studying deep-water carbon is that seafloor conditions are difficult to replicate at sea level. Usually, researchers pull water onto the deck of a research vessel where they have equipment that can measure microbial activity. This leads to a mismatch, says Gerhard Herndl, a biological oceanographer at the University of Vienna. On a ship, bacteria are generally happy to consume the nutrients available to them. In fact, their appetite is so great that it doesn’t make much sense, because it’s far greater than the nutrients found in the deep ocean can provide. “When you take these measurements on the surface, there is always a gap,” he said.
So instead, following the long legacy of Alvin sandwich, Herndl’s team tried a new experiment. By sending automated tools to the broodstock where they actually live, they quickly discovered that the bacteria at the depths were much less happy and hungry. The element of difference, they wrote in a Research published recently in natural geosciences, is the pressure. Some creatures enjoy extreme pressure—they’re called piezoelectric creatures—and happily transmute matter in the depths. But they represent a small fraction of the microbial community that Herndl studied—about 10%. The rest are not adaptable; most likely they are suitable for some other environment, shallower and have drifted downwards.
