Strange Places

By Storm

 

Chip Morton peered through the small forward view ports of NIMR’s small submersible Soujourner at the murky water outside and scowled. He really hated the Gulf of Mexico. It was apparent to anybody who bothered to dive in these waters that there were serious troubles afflicting the area. Some of the problems were clearly the result of large scale drilling; the source of some of the others was still unclear, but seemed unlikely to be natural. As of yet these challenges were not insurmountable, but if the abuse continued….

 

He gave a small snort. If it meant changing the way they did things, nobody in this part of the US was going to lift a finger. He sometimes wondered if their intransigence was a holdover from the Civil War - or if it was just the result of inbreeding. He mentally chastened himself for the thought almost as soon as it flitted across his mind. It was uncharitable, he knew. Besides, some of his best friends were from the South. He couldn’t help but notice, however, that the ones with any ambition seemed to always live somewhere else besides the South, at least during part of their life.

 

He shook his head, catching the attention of one of the other two people sharing Sojourner’s cramped cabin.

 

“Problem, Chip?” asked the red-haired man sitting opposite.

 

“No, Admiral, just feeling frustrated at not being able to see anything.”

 

His boss, Admiral Harriman Nelson, harrumphed, but it was obvious to Morton that Nelson was a bit restless himself. The cloud of suspended sediment that Sojourner had blundered into was proving to be larger than expected and the time they were spending trying to find the cause was cutting into the bottom time for their main objective. That is, provided they could even find the location in this cloudy soup, something Morton was beginning to believe was going to be impossible. If it wasn’t for their side scanning sonar, he’d have had to abort the dive. Blundering blindly through the murky water was definitely getting on his nerves, even if the sonar was telling him the bottom here was unusually flat and had no discernible obstructions.

 

Against that backdrop of homogeneity, the sudden flare of an anomaly on the edge of the sonar screen instantly caught his attention.

 

“What the hell?” He leaned closer to the display, trying to puzzle out what the sonar was showing him. Nelson and their passenger, Dr. Wilton, a NOAA researcher from Woods Hole, leaned in behind him to look as well.

 

“That’s odd,” commented the Admiral. Chip heard the note that said Nelson’s curiosity had been aroused and mentally grinned. It was certainly an odd echo return though. A bright yellow slash cut across the muted reddish and purple colors that indicated the bottom. Something was definitely happening out at the edge of their sonar scan. He manipulated the thruster levers, bringing Sojourner around on a new heading without being told to.

 

As they crept closer, he could see on the sonar that the bright slash looked like it was moving. He cast an uncertain eye over at Nelson. Just how close did they want to get to this thing? In the murk they were going to have to be right on top of it to actually see anything - and there was no way to tell if what was there was a threat to the little research sub.

 

On a hunch he turned on the passive sonar to see if he could hear anything. A sound that reminded him of rushing water filled the earphones. He felt his eyebrows climb. Running water? Under the ocean? That didn’t make any sense. He flipped a switch and let the sound filter out of the cabin loudspeaker for Nelson to hear.

 

The Admiral and Dr. Wilton both looked as perplexed as he felt. Chip studied the sonar display and thought he could discern a direction of movement. He also noted that the object represented by the bright slash seemed to be centered directly under the sediment cloud. It was possible the two were in some way connected; perhaps if they rose above the cloud and followed it upstream…

 

“Admiral,” he suggested, “if this phenomena is connected to the sediment cloud, maybe we can get above it and follow it back to the source.”

 

Nelson looked thoughtful; Dr. Wilton was emphatically nodding agreement. It beat the hell out of fumbling around on the bottom in an environment where they were basically blind and clearly weren’t going to be able to achieve their original objective.

 

“Do it, Chip.”

 

“Aye, aye, sir.” Chip pushed the throttles forward to increase speed, and pulled back on the controls to bring Sojourner’s bow up. Fortunately the cloud seemed to be hugging the bottom, so they didn’t have far to move upwards more than a couple of hundred feet to get back into relatively clear water. Keeping a close eye on the sonar display, Chip set the little sub on a course ‘upstream’.

 

The steady ping of the sonar continued to show flat featureless seafloor directly below them. As the minutes ticked on, Chip began to wonder if there was an end to the strange cloud, or if they would end up following it all the way to the shore. However, to their astonishment, once they reached the edge of a small rise in the sea bottom, the cloud of silt abruptly ended.

 

The source of the odd sonar anomaly did not. The bright slash across the display became even more pronounced. With a glance over at Nelson, Chip turned the control that positioned Sojourner’s powerful floodlights to point them direct down, then started easing the small submersible towards the bottom. As they approached their goal , they found themselves staring at what looked uncannily like a small river flowing in an incised channel across the seafloor - except that it appeared to be comprised of fluidized greasy looking grey mud rather than water.

 

The three men exchanged puzzled looks. This was a phenomenon none of them had ever encountered before.

 

“Let’s see where it’s coming from,” suggested Nelson.

 

Chip nodded and brought Sojourner back up to a distance of about forty feet above the turbulent flow before once again tracking upstream.

 

As they progressed, they found that the seafloor was losing it’s flat character and becoming what could best be described as ‘lumpy’. The stream of mud appeared to be behaving exactly as a stream of water flowing on land, swirling around obstacles in the terrain in a fashion oddly similar to small rapids. It even had sand waves in the channel just like any terrestrial river. Dr. Wilton and Nelson were pressed against the viewports, taking notes and making sketches, while Sojourner’s cameras rolled.

 

It was almost an hour later when they found the source of the mud. As Chip brought the DSV to a hover, the floodlights showed a surreal spectacle below them.

 

It was a miniature volcano, complete with a central caldera - that was churning out mud and gas.

 

The central pit was perhaps twelve feet across, with several distinct columns of gas bubbles ascending through the water column. The fluidized grey mud was slopping out over a break in the caldera rim, flowing into the channel they’d followed. Nelson shook his head at the sight and commented, “I’ve heard about this sort of thing on land, but I never dreamed a mud volcano could occur under the ocean. Especially at..,” he glanced over at the depth gauge, “six thousand feet. The gas pressure in the central mud column has to be astounding.”

 

“I wonder what’s fluidizing the mud, Harry?” asked Wilton.

 

“Humph.” Nelson eyed the churning flow speculatively. “Chip, do you think you can get one of the sampling tubes into the flow?” He turned to the other scientist and commented, “Given the geology of the area. I‘d say the most likely candidate was brine. But it could be something more exotic, I suppose.”

 

Chip took a quick glance at the dial that registered the outside temperature - which hadn’t budged, so the flow didn’t appear to be hot - then eyed the gurgling mud and considered. “Maybe. I’ll hold us by the edge and reach over the rim so if something does bubble up we hopefully won’t be in the direct path.”

 

“That should work. Do it.”

 

Chip set about maneuvering the little sub completely around the circumference of the caldera, carefully inspecting the terrain, looking for a safe location from which to make the collection attempt. He even extended the instrument arm with the temperature probe over the roiling mud and was relived to find that while the mud was a bit warmer than the seawater around them, it wasn’t by much. Once he was satisfied that any one place was as good as another - except perhaps where the rim had collapsed - and that they were as safe as they could be under the circumstances, he unlimbered Sojourner’s collection arm and selected a steel core sampler. Reaching out as far as the arm would extend, he lowered the tube into the mud. Once fully in, he triggered the slide on the bottom of the tube that would seal in the contents, then lifted it back out and returned it to the collection rack on the front of the sub. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of life forms around the mud vent, but he suspected that was probably due more to the instability of the bottom than any toxicity in the mud. After all, they’d dived on the hydrothermal vents in the Pacific where not only was the temperature hot enough to melt the first temperature probe they’d used, the water contained toxic levels of sulfides and heavy metals. If life could thrive there, it could thrive just about anywhere. He suspected that even here there’d be at least bacterial life forms, no matter how inhospitable the environment seemed.

 

Backing Sojourner away from the edge of the caldera, he brought the sub up away from the bottom intending to head back to the Seaview.

 

“Once more around, Chip. I’d like to get a few more samples and some more pictures,” said Nelson.

 

“Once more around, aye,” Morton replied, mentally grinning. Even if they hadn’t found their original objective, any puzzle was a puzzle to be solved as far as the Admiral was concerned, especially where the intricacies of the ocean were involved.