The Strangest Places
By Storm
Chip Morton gazed out the
front view port of the DSV Sojourner for one last look at the brine pool
they had discovered a couple of days previously. Behind him he could hear
Admiral Nelson and Dr. Wilton snapping last shots of the intriguing vista of an
underwater pond. It really was an amazing sight, he had to admit. Deep blue
water with an actual white ‘beach’ - although the ‘sands’ had been found to be
grains of barite rather than actual sand - surrounded by mussels, sea urchins
and amphipods. To get any stranger than this a place was going to have to be
weird indeed.
He heard the Admiral lean
forward, papers rustling.
“Chip, we’ve still got plenty
of time on this dive. I’d like to break off and head south of here to this
location.” Nelson passed him a chart with the coordinates marked on it. “The
sonar survey indicated what looks rather like a crater there. I’d like to see
if it’s another mud volcano.”
Morton couldn’t help the
twitch of his eyebrows. An active mud volcano had been their first odd find on
this expedition.
“Okay, Admiral. It’ll take us
about thirty minutes to get there.” The indicated target was roughly a mile
south of their current position and Sojourner’s maximum safe speed was
only two knots.
Nelson merely nodded in
response, so after calling in the course change to Seaview - thankful
that it was O’Brien at the other end of the communications link who got the
news and not Lee Crane, who tended to fuss at changes in the dive plans -
Morton eased Sojourner around onto the new heading and pushed the
throttles forward. The electric motors wined in response and the little DSV
surged ahead head at a rate that was for her full speed.
The time and distance passed
relatively quickly. As Sojourner approached the designated position,
Morton throttled back and all three occupants began looking for any indication
that they’d reached their target. After just a few minutes a dark line appeared
at the limit of their vision that soon resolved itself into dark blue water
with a white shoreline.
Another brine pool and not
a mud volcano, despite the information generated by the sonar scan. Morton let
out a small sigh of relief. As pilot, he was responsible for the safety of Sojourner
and everyone aboard. Charging boldly into the unknown, as Nelson was
occasionally wont to do, really got on his nerves sometimes.
“Which way, Admiral?” The
prudent course was to follow the shoreline around and see what the extent of
the pool was - though the sonar scan had indicated a rather large
crater-like feature here rather than a pool. He wrinkled his forehead in
thought. Maybe this thing wasn’t as straightforward as he’d assumed.
“Hmm.” Nelson was peering out
the portholes on both sides. As Morton also scanned both directions, he
realized that this pool was big enough that the other sides were out of sight
all around. Finally the Admiral gave a shake of his head and said, “Let’s head
west. Tell Seaview what we’re doing.”
“West, aye, aye, Admiral.”
Morton replied and again contacted O’Brien. Once that task was taken care of,
he turned the DSV on her axis and headed west along the shoreline, knowing that
Seaview would be shadowing them above - and that her captain was
probably be on his way down to the DSV bay to bend the Admiral’s ear about the
change in plans. Morton gave a mental snort to himself. Crane was getting just
a small taste of the anxiety they felt when he was off on some ONI
mission. Privately, Morton thought the experience would do the captain good.
Thirty minutes later the
other end was still not in sight. This was no pond, but a full-fledged lake.
The shoreline, however, was
beginning to become indistinct, having broken into a series of channels and
pools, making finding the actual edge of the brine lake more difficult. Clumps
of mussels had also begun to appear, first as small groups of ten or so
individuals, clustered together on high spots. Occasionally they passed a
cluster that had become submerged in the brine. As they proceeded onward, the
clumps of mussels began to get larger and closer together, becoming dense mats.
The mats merged.
Morton brought Sojourner
to a stop, hovering while the three men looked out in amazement at a vast field
of mussels, stretching as far as the lights of the DSV could shine even on high
power. None of them had ever seen that many mussels in their entire lives.
There had to be millions of them - perhaps tens of millions. And amongst the
mussels were shrimps, snails, fish, amphipods, pink sea cucumbers…
“My God,” Morton heard the
Admiral mutter, “It’s like a city made of mussels.”
After several long moments
(and several samples) Sojourner moved on. The scheduled end of their
dive came and went, but they continued to work their way around the rim of the
lake. The vast assemblage of mussels eventually curved away, following what
appeared to be a vast network of outflow channels from the lake; no end to them
was visible in the DSV’s lights.
“Another dive,” was Nelson’s
suggestion, so Morton kept the DSV following the shoreline until at last the
inertial navigation said they were directly opposite the side where they’d
started. The lake was almost a third of a mile wide.
“Let’s cross back to the
original point and circle the other way,” said Nelson. Morton nodded and
brought the DSV around, pointing her bow out across the dark blue water,
expecting to see nothing but a vast expanse of nothing until reaching the other
side.
He was wrong.
The shoreline had only
shortly vanished in the void behind them when the dark blue water abruptly and
unexpectedly ended. Morton brought Sojourner to another halt as he and
the others all simply stared at the sea floor ahead of them. Where they had
anticipated blue brine was a rugged zone of what appeared to be chaotic folds.
Adding to the confusion was the stark color contrast between the tops of the
folds - which were a pale gray with the trails of some sort of bottom dweller -
and what could have been some sort of dark blue-black sediment at the bottoms.
Morton traded looks with the Admiral.
“We need samples,” was
Nelson’s only comment. With a wry shake of his head, Morton complied, wondering
as he did so what else this bizarre place was going to unveil.
At a distance about fifty
yards from what their navigational instruments said was the center he found
out. The chaotic folds abruptly flattened, becoming uncannily smooth and the
seafloor took on a chalky white color. The change prompted another stop, with
more samples taken. Morton eyed the pushcore crate with trepidation; there was
only one empty core sampler left. After that, to take any more samples, they’d
have to dump something.
As he put Sojourner in
motion again, Morton scanned the seafloor ahead. The center should be coming
up… He blinked and had to look again, sure that what he’d thought he’d seen
couldn’t have been. But it was.
“Admiral,” he called back
over his shoulder, “look there to port. Do you see anything?”
Nelson looked. And spluttered,
“What the devil?”
Obviously he wasn’t seeing
things then. Nelson saw it too, the streak of creamy red swirled through the
white. If it had been weird before, now it was getting just a tad creepy.
It got more bizarre. The red
streaks began coalescing until it was the white that was the occasional swirl.
Stranger still, the seemingly solid surface was covered with swarms of
amphipod-like animals that skated across the surface. Neither the red seafloor
nor the animals were like anything any of them had ever seen before. The entire
landscape was so alien it looked like it belonged on another planet. Morton
brought Sojourner to a stop again. There was no question in his mind
that the admiral would want samples of this. He wanted to know what the heck it
was himself.
Unlimbering the last of the
pushcores, Morton brought Sojourner as close to the seafloor as he dared
without stirring up the red substance. Since the composition was unknown, he
deemed it prudent not to get the DSV covered in the stuff. Rotating the DSV’s
arm, he brought the pushcore down and inserted it into the surface. It sank in
with no resistance for about a foot, where it finally stopped. Morton’s
eyebrows climbed and he frowned. The surface wasn’t as solid as it looked,
apparently.
He lifted the pushcore, which
was promptly obscured by a muddy red cloud. That wasn’t a good sign. Rotating
the remote arm to bring the core sampler in front of the view port, he looked
it over carefully. It was smeared with the red gunk, so he couldn’t see if it
held a sample or not, but the heft of it felt wrong. Unless he was seriously
mistaken, the red stuff was too liquid to be sampled with a pushcore; it had
run out when he‘d lifted the device.
“Admiral, we’ve got a
problem.”
“I see,” came from just over
his shoulder.
Morton scratched thoughtfully
at his chin, trying to think of a way to collect a sample. “What about a Niskin
bottle?” Those were the small sealable tubes they used to take water samples
with. He knew that had one left that they hadn’t used.
“Hmmm. That might work,”
admitted Nelson. “We’ve nothing to lose by trying.”
Morton nodded and restored
the pushcore to it’s crate. They might get something off the inside surface,
even if the Niskin bottle didn’t work. Using the manipulator arm, he rummaged
through another basket attached to the front of the DSV and came up with a
small tube with both ends open and twin stoppers that could be snapped
simultaneously into place to trap a sample. If this didn’t do the trick, they’d
have to go back to Seaview and invent something. He didn’t want to leave
without a sample though - the red stuff was starting to bug him. It was too
thick to be a proper liquid, but too thin to really be called mud.
Morton once more stretched
out the manipulator arm and eased the tube into the red stuff. When it appeared
full, he triggered the stoppers. They slid smoothly into place.
“Yes!” he exulted softly
under his breath as Nelson clapped him on the shoulder.
“Good job, Chip. Let’s finish
crossing and see if there’s any more surprises.”
Morton glanced over his
shoulder and warned, “Admiral, we used our last pushcore and Niskin bottle
here. If we need any more samples we’ll have to dump something.”
Nelson made a face and
humphed. “In that case, let’s go back to Seaview. We’ll come back
tomorrow.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral. Back to Seaview.”
As Morton pulled back on the yoke and increased power to bring Sojourner
up, he reflected on the site they were just leaving. The downward pointing spotlights
illuminated the red center surrounded by white - he was struck by the
reflection that the center of the crater bore an uncanny resemblance to a giant
red eyeball.
He couldn’t help the shiver
that ran down his spine.
Author’s note: As fantastic
as this place sounds, it really exists, just as described. It was discovered
July 2007 in the Gulf of Mexico by the ROV Jason operating off the NOAA
Ship Ronald H. Brown.
It is a prime example of the old adage that the truth is stranger than fiction….