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Mysteries of the Deep premiered November 26, 2002:

				The Uncivilized Machine of War Historians raise the world's first successful submarine from her watery grave.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: ALDA: In a quiet corner of MagnoliaCemetery, eight men are buried. One of them is Horace Hunley-- the man who gave his name, his energy, his enthusiasm and finally his life to an extraordinary machine. All eight men drowned in a training accident in the submarine H.L. Hunley. This is the Hunley today-- a priceless relic of the Civil War, but also a war grave. On February 17, 1864, four months after the training accident, a new crew took the Hunley to sea and carried out history's first successful submarine attack. They never returned. It's a hot August day, 136 years after the Hunley vanished. A few miles out from Charleston Harbor, the sub is about to reappear. ( cheering ) ( cheering, applause ) Cradled in a specially built frame, the Hunley has been gently hoisted 30 feet from the floor of the Atlantic. She's coming to the old Charleston Navy Yard, and into the hands of a team of archaeologists. The Hunley is surprisingly well preserved-- probably because soon after sinking she was covered by sediment. The hull has about half an inch of rust and marine growth, but the structure's sound. The interior is completely filled with sediment-- that's what the archaeologists will go to work on. This is all the controls for the tank area... and here's the Hunley. God, it's really... Can you see how small it is? It's really small. Isn't that your first reaction: "How could people get inside?" It's so tiny. How many guys were in there? Nine men. Nine people. Nine men. The Confederacy wasn't the only group of people working on submarines-- at the same time, they were working on them in the North. What do you suppose the difference was? Why didn't they have the first successful submarine? I think that's a great question, Alan. I think it's "desperate times call for desperate measures." The blockade was taking its toll, the South was in the process where it became evident that they were starting to lose the war. And they had to free the blockade, they had to restart the trade in and out of Charleston, they had to communicate with the outside world. They were forced to it. ALDA: War became inevitable when in 1860 South Carolina seceded from the Union, soon followed by the five other Confederate states. Attention focused on Fort Sumter, at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, to which all the Union forces in the area had withdrawn. For four months there was a standoff. Finally, Confederate batteries opened fire, and after 34 hours the fort surrendered. With Sumter securely in Confederate hands, Charleston Harbor became the South's vital strategic link to Europe. The North set up a naval blockade-- a dozen or more warships in a ring around the harbor entrance, far enough off shore to be out of range of shore batteries. Charleston Harbor was fought over for the rest of the war. Fast Confederate blockade runners attempted to race in and out of the port. The new ironclads were used by both sides, with the Union mounting several attacks on Sumter and the other harbor forts, but to no avail. Then in August 1863, the South brought into Charleston from Mobile, Alabama, a secret weapon which they hoped would decisively tip the balance. It vas called a "torpedo fish" or "torpedo boat." Now we call them submarines. It's an emotional love story, too. So it's got elements for everybody. It's just phenomenal. ALDA: Warren Lasch is the Charleston businessman who's pulled the Hunley recovery project together. In the process, he's become a Civil War expert. The lifeblood of Charleston was its trade-- its textiles, its cotton-- that would ship to Britain and other trading partners. The intent of the North was to choke Charleston with this blockade, not only from a commercial perspective, but that also was... running the blockade was its only way of communication with the outside world. Is that Fort Sumter over there? Yes, right here, this is Fort Sumter. To the left we have the opening to the harbor. And further to the left... Over here is a lighthouse that's called the "Sullivan's Island Light." Directly east, out to sea, is where the Hunley engaged the Housatonic and sunk her. ALDA: Charleston was the Confederacy's only East Coast port, yet it was being strangled by the Union's much more powerful navy. When the Hunley sank the USS Housatonic, Charleston itself was coming under increasing pressure. In the summer of 1863, Union forces had taken Morris Island and set up batteries which threatened the entire harbor and the city. An enormous gun, the "Swamp Angel," lobbed 200-pound shells into the streets. kwrKkcvc Fort Sumter came under heavy bombardment from the new Union positions, which were only about a mile away. The siege of Charleston was gathering force. Several nights a week, the Hunley-- stationed on Sullivan's Island-- put to sea in an attempt to reach the blockading ships. It was dangerous work. 13 men had already died in her during training. And it was tough work. Her propeller was hand-cranked, so getting a few miles offshore took hours of exhausting labor. On the night of February 17, 1864, four miles off Sullivan's Island, the Union sloop-of-war Housatonic came into view. But then the Housatonic saw the Hunley. LASCH: General Beauregard, who was in charge of the defense of Charleston, had said several times after the first two crews had perished that the Hunley is more dangerous to its crew than it is to the enemy. So he basically ordered the Hunley to attack on the surface, which took away one of its big, big advantages: its stealth. ALDA: Although she was capable of submerging completely, the Hunley attacked semi-submerged. For a vital few seconds, the lookout on the Housatonic was not quite sure what he'd seen. By the time he realized it was something that was a threat to the Housatonic... he sounded general quarters, but the Hunley was too close, so they couldn't lower their cannons low enough to get an angle. So people came on deck and started firing upon the Hunley with small arms fire and rifles. ALDA: The Hunley jammed its torpedo, with a harpoon tip, into the Housatonic's wooden hull. The men backed away, then pulled a rope attached to a trigger on the torpedo. The Housatonic sank within three minutes, but with surprisingly few casualties: five men were killed, with the rest of the crew picked up by other blockade ships. But what about the Hunley? The system was that the Hunley would signal success by flashing a blue lantern. Oh, that doesn't mean that they were coming back on the surface of the water-- they had some kind of periscope or something? No, no, they were going to come back on the surface. Oh. Oh, absolutely. They signaled shore with a blue lantern. They were on the surface, opened the conning tower and somebody signaled shore. And two different people saw the lantern. One of them was a sentry on Sullivan's Island that lit a campfire to guide the Hunley to come back. ALDA: But she didn't come back. She was lost. She stayed lost until a team led by the author and shipwreck hunter Clive Cussler found the sub in 1995, after 14 years of searching. Cussler used a towed magnetometer to detect the Hunley's hull, which was completely covered by silt. The sub was farther out to sea than where the Housatonic had sunk-- not where you'd expect her to be if she was already on the way back. It took five years to complete the plans and raise the money to recover the Hunley. The big concern was that the hull would break up while being lifted. Working in near zero visibility, divers placed a line of slings along the entire length, padded with plastic foam. The slings were attached to a massive steel frame placed over the sub. The whole assembly would then be raised in one piece. Everything went without a hitch. Today the Hunley lies suspendedn in the same slings inside a huge tank on the dock at the Charleston Navy Yard. When work's not under way, the tank is filled with chilled fresh water to wash out the salt and minimize corrosion. Naval historians have been surprised at the Hunley's technical sophistication. Horace Hunley, who was a wealthy New Orleans lawyer, had pulled together a team of first-rate engineers. The hull was based on a steam boiler, but much modified. Everything was streamlined: rivets were finished flush, and tapered sections were added fore and aft. Buoyancy was regulated with two ballast tanks, with hand pumps to alter water levels. Dive planes, controlled by the captain, adjusted the sub's dive angle. There was a heavy ballast keel, which could be dropped from inside in an emergency, although no crew ever managed to do that. And there were two snorkel tubes with leather bellows to bring in fresh air while submerged. A 20-foot spar carried the torpedo-- 135 pounds of black powder, with a rope trigger leading back to the sub. The spar was still attached when the sub was found, then removed before the recovery operation. MAN: Very good. ALDA: Okay, close the door? Yeah. ALDA: One advantage of the Hunley sitting on the bottom for 136 years is that now advanced analytical tools are available. This is a state-of-the-art digital X-ray system. MAN: Look at that. ALDA: Yeah, amazing. And you're looking at something which is maybe completely gone. The iron has left the object and gone into the encrustation around it. ALDA: So what that means, it seems to me, is that if you chipped away the encrustation, you would never see the threads, because you don't get down to the threads, the threads no longer exist. They're now in the encrustation. Exactly. ALDA: It's taken the archaeologists more than a year to excavate the Hunley's interior-- tons of silt removed a spoonful at a time. Skeletons of all eight crew members-- with their clothing, their shoes, their personal possessions-- have been recovered. The human remains will eventually be buried with Horace Hunley and the other crew in Magnolia Cemetery. There's a high level of preservation, because the fine silt shut out oxygen. MAN: Oh, and look at that. Unbelievable. ALDA: It's believed that the crew were all Confederate soldiers. Here's one man's pipe-- did they smoke down there? A lead pencil. A thimble-- soldiers did their own sewing. Many different kinds of buttons, including one from a uniform of the Union Navy, where one crewman must have served before the war. And here's a Union soldier's I.D. tag-- probably a battlefield trophy. A matchstick and the candle it was used to light-- perhaps just for a moment-- to read the compass. Maria Jacobsen, the project's Danish head archaeologist, learned her trade excavating Viking longboats-- a trade which mainly seems to involve unpleasant working conditions. What's all this stuff here? JACOBSEN: What you're looking at is the forward end of the crew compartment. and this is the forward pump that controlled the water level in the forward ballast tank. This is probably the handle to operate the pump, and the crew members would sit on this wooden bench. There was only three and a half feet between the edge of the bench to the starboard side. ALDA: But look how little room there is between the seat, between the bench and the top of this. They must have been bent over like this. One of the things we wondered about-- because all the men sat on one side-- how did they balance the sub? Did they have#8 a counterbalance over here? But I think we're learning now that the sub was so cramped, in fact, that when they were sitting at their stations, the heavy upper torso and head was directly above the center line of the sub. ALDA: So they balanced it automatically. Exactly. Okay, now, you know what I see now that I didn't get before is these handles were what they turned to move the ship. They sat there and turned the handles. ALDA: It's this hand-cranking that's the sub's most astonishing aspect. Horace Hunley's engineers had tried electric motors, but couldn't get enough power. Others tried steam, but that meant never submerging. Seven Hunley crewmen were there as human engines. The eighth was the captain. For the attack on the Housatonic, the captain was a young lieutenant, George Dixon, who'd been wounded at the Battle of Shiloh. Maria Jacobsen will never forget that connection. Dixon's body was identified? Uh, yes. He had a very significant artifact on him-- the golden coin that was given to him by his sweetheart, Queenie Bennett. ALDA: The gold coin that Queenie Bennett gave Dixon had saved his life at Shiloh-- it had stopped a bullet. I got it. WOMAN: Really? Mm-hmm. MAN: Say the words. I have the gold coin right here. MAN: You feel it in your fingers? Oh, I feel it in my fingers, oh, I do. ( woman gasps ): Oh, my God! Oh, my God, oh, my God! MAN: Oh, man, I got chill bumps! WOMAN: I have the chills! MAN: Oh, my God, look at that! MAN 2: Holy crap, there it is. MAN 1: Oh, is that fantastic or what? Maria, why are you shaking? JACOBSEN: Why do you think I'm shaking? ( laughing ) Not only was it very clearly a gold piece that had been hit by a projectile, but he had actually had it inscribed as a memento of... What did it say on it? It said, "Shiloh, April 6, 1862. My Life Preserver." ALDA: Why could Dixon not bring the Hunley back that night? The sub is clearly damaged. There's a gash in the stern and there's a hole in the forward conning tower. It's plugged here with white foam. Was the damage perhaps caused by a collision with one of the other blockade ships racing to the aid of the Housatonic? The silt deposits seem to say no. There's a tell-tale band of coarse material halfway up the inside. For Maria, that's significant. So does that indicate to you that that coarse material came in through a larger opening than the fine silt? JACOBSEN: Exactly, exactly. Because it's a later deposit and it's scouring into the existing sediment, it tells me it occurred afterwards. ALDA: If coarser sediment could only get in after half of the fine material entered, that means the large holes in the hull happened after the sub sank-- probably caused by a ship's anchor or fishing gear. The project's high-tech equipment may be pointing in a different direction than a collision. This is the cover of the forward hatch here, okay, and this is the hatch itself. Now, if you measure this... At the front of the conning tower, there's a gap. If you play on the density, you see it's black. It means that there's no density. That's rubber. This is a rubber seal that sealed the submarine. ALDA: Now, why is the rubber thicker here than it is over here? You are going to draw the conclusion yourself. I'm guessing there was some kind of a leak here or some kind of a separation. MARDIKIAN: Or it's open. You think it's definitely open? My theory is that this is unlocked. The closing mechanism is unlocked. The hinge is over here, so it's compressing this part of the rubber, but it's not compressing this because it's not tied down. And the rubber itself has a tendency to pop up. The rubber pushes back if you're not locking it in place. Right, exactly, you've got it. ALDA: If the crew really did signal their success on the surface after the attack-- which means they'd survived their own explosion-- then something subsequently made them dive the boat. Maybe in a hurry, rushing to avoid an approaching ship, they didn't fully lock the hatch and it sprang open. We'll probably never know. Somehow this "engine of war not recognized by civilized nations"-- as a Union admiral described it-- went to the bottom.

				Into the Deep, Part 1 Alan Alda joins explorer Bob Ballard for a look at the technologies that have opened up the farthest reaches of the ocean.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: MAN: You can be anywhere you want through telepresence, so I decided, "Why not here?" ALDA: One recent afternoon, I found myself walking along a hillside overlooking the Connecticut River in the company of one of the world's greatest explorers, Bob Ballard. ALDA: How long do you think it will be before you're... under the ocean and never leaving your house? BALLARD: Right now, probably any time I want to do it. Really? ALDA: After 30 years of extraordinary successes opening up the mysteries of the deep ocean, Ballard now advocates a new kind of exploration, using remote control. BALLARD: Oh, yeah, but I won't have to... ALDA: It's the latest phase of a career that spans more than a hundred ocean expeditions, including at least a couple of scientific revolutions. We're going to devote this program to those expeditions, to those revolutions and to revealing the inner workings of our planet. ALDA: You seem to have been present at some of the greatest discoveries... and not only about the ocean, but about the planet. My strength is in the technology I developed. I've sort of used the technology as my passport to explore anything. And so, I have a love of geology, but I have an equal love of anthropology. And, fortunately, they're all under water. ( Alda laughing ) I got the only, you know, key to the car, so to speak, and that's been how I've been able to be at a particular point in human history when we've gone beneath the sea. TECHNICIAN: Have a good one. ( hatch hinges creaking ) TECHNICIAN: Sealing the hatch. PILOT: Hatch is secure. ALDA: This is the Alvin, a three-person submersible that's made more deep-ocean discoveries than any other sub, often with Ballard on board. Launched in 1964, Alvin is still going strong, diving for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Alvin's sister ship, the Turtle, was retired from the Navy in 1997. ALDA: Why is this called the Turtle? BALLARD: Well, it was really one of the earlier submarines; the first submarine ever built in America was the Turtle. Oh, really? BALLARD: And it attacked the British in the Revolutionary War. ALDA: Bob Ballard was a Woods Hole scientist for 30 years, while also a U.S. Navy officer, so he knows both subs well. All right. BALLARD: So this is the sail, and this actually floods, once you get out at sea. This is the important part, this is the hatch. Two inches thick... So, what keeps the water from going in here? Well, it's actually tapered. If you look at the hatch, it's like a porthole, and pressure pushes them down. In fact, you're most vulnerable at the surface. That's the most dangerous time. You don't have the pressure seating it. BALLARD: All right, well, let's get down inside here. So watch your step. ALDA: The heart of these deep-diving subs is the crew compartment-- a six-foot diameter steel sphere, built to withstand enormous forces. BALLARD: Absolutely a sardine. ALDA: My God, it's tiny! BALLARD: Oh, yeah. ALDA: Alvin can dive to 14,000 feet, where the water pressure outside is two and a half tons on every square inch of the sphere. ALDA: How long does it take you to get all the way down? Well, the average depth of the ocean is 12,000 feet. It takes you two-and-half hours each way, so you're talking five hours just commuting to work. And if you go even deeper, its even longer. PILOT: ID light on, request permission to dive. TECHNICIAN Roger. You're clear to dive. Depth here is 25-20. PILOT: Roger. Alvin diving. ALDA: With two 500-poundballast weights, the Alvin sinks at a steady 80 feet a minute. Gary, can you give me a vector to the target please? ( dispatch repeats over speakers ) ALDA: Sub and mother ship communicate with an acoustic phone, that echoes as it broadcasts sound directly into the water. TECHNICIAN: ...But you're 90 meters away. Target is at 0-8-0 degrees. Roger. Thank you. ( from speakers ): Roger. Thank you. ALDA: On the way down there's very little to do, and nothing to see unless you use the lights, but that consumes battery power that you'll need at the bottom. Eventually the pilot slows the sub's descent by dropping first one weight, then the second. PILOT: Okay, altitude is about 18 meters. Drop the second weight. You'll be able to hear it. ( speaker crackling ) Boom. BALLARD: You pop this, and then if you've done your ballast calculations right, you should stop. But everyone lies about their weight. Oh, you mean personally. Yeah, everyone lies, so I say, "Wait!" "Wait, Alan, you told me you were 180 pounds..." And we're still going! So then you have to go to what's called a "variable ballast system," and that's where you make up for the lying. And you start pumping ballast, and that will then take water outside and put it in a bag and that the bag, like a bladder, will expand and makes your volume bigger, and that slows you down until you finally get what's called "neutral trim." Now you're completely neutral; you're not falling or rising, and then you spend the last hundred feet and you drive down. When you get down there, you're really cold, huh? Oh, freezing. See, this hull is just two inches of steel and outside in the deep sea it's four degrees centigrade, I mean, it's just above freezing. And the ocean is like a giant heat sink. It just sucks the heat out of the submarine. Only thing that keeps you warm is your instrument panel. We can't afford the power to run a heater, because we're battery operated. ALDA: Maneuvering just above the bottom with their multiple propellers, deep submersibles like these have given scientists their first good look at the mysterious 70% of our planet that's covered by deep ocean. PILOT: This is Alvin, at the bottom. ALDA: It's been a slow process-- sometimes too slow for Bob Ballard-- but since the 1960s, it's truly a whole new world that's been revealed. BALLARD: We're going to a world that's totally dark-- complete darkness. We're going to be within a few feet of it, and it's... and there's no roads, so we're off track. ALDA: Yeah. We're going through the... over the ground and up and over and cliffs and walls and things like that. You don't want to go fast. In fact, the typical speed is like a half a mile an hour, and that's why it's so painfully slow. You get down here and if you're lucky, in three hours of bottom time you'll cover a mile. ALDA: In 1869, a hundred years before Alvin's launch, the French writer and ocean sailor Jules Verne published his classic story of the renegade scientist who travels the world's oceans in his fabulous submarine, Nautilus. None of Captain Nemo's technology existed at the time, of course, although in Hollywood's 1916 version the self-contained diving suits were a genuine technical advance. The adventures of Captain Nemo and his crew were an inspiration for generations of ocean explorers, including Jacques Cousteau and Bob Ballard. While some features of the Nautilus brilliantly foreshadowed later developments, Jules Verne did get one thing wrong-- the question of pressure. The design of submarines like the Nautilus, capable of accommodating large crews, developed rapidly during the Second Word War. Yet even the best of the German U-boats were limited to a depth of about 700 feet, and today's large submarines can go no deeper than a few thousand feet. It was Otis Barton, an engineer from Massachusetts, and his collaborator, William Beebe, who first solved the problem of how to reach extreme depths. The solution was to dive in a small, massive sphere-- they called it a "bathysphere." A spherical form offers the most effective resistance to the crushing pressures at depth. In a series of dives off Bermuda in the 1930s, they shattered the existing depth record of 525 feet, established by a diver in an armored suit. The bathysphere was simply lowered from a barge, a risky business since any fault in the cable would lead to a fatal plunge to the bottom. Beebe, who was a curator of birds at the Bronx Zoo, was greeted with disbelief when he reported seeing strange new creatures in the depths. We'll have a story about how right he was later in the program. It was the peculiar subs called "bathyscaphs," conceived by the Swiss balloonist Auguste Piccard in the 1930s, that finally reached the deepest part of the ocean-- the 35,000-foot Challenger Deep off Guam. A huge tank of gasoline provided flotation, so you didn't need a suspension cable. Bathyscaphs were safer, but very unwieldy, as Bob Ballard discovered. BALLARD: We were going in slow, but it's like if I just sort of took my hand and I had enough force to go right through this couch, you'd just see this... Well, that's what happened; the front of the submarine came down and I'm looking at it, and it's just the metal and everything... its just twisting in my eyes, like a giant just slowly, just very slowly, taking the submarine and just ripping it open. And then I see avgas... coming out. What's that? That's the flotation gasoline. We ruptured our tank. How did this turn out? Did you live? Well, here's what happened, you know. We then... he dropped the whole... then you could drop the whole door and he dropped ten tons. When he saw that, I said "Avgas!" When I yelled "Avgas," he dropped the doors open and we dropped ten tons. Now-- we're at 20,000 feet. It's a six-hour trip home. And here's what happens: you're leaking your gasoline and you start decelerating and then you start back down. Well, they had in the sub a little calculator-- you know one of those little LED displays? ( imitates electronic chirping ) Freezes up on a number? And so every few seconds, it was going... ( imitates gauge ) and telling you your ascent rate. Well, there was enough uncertainty in the calculation that it depended upon whether you were an optimist or a pessimist. You could get whatever you wanted out of those numbers. You didn't know whether you'd make it to the top before you lost the gasoline, which gave you the buoyancy. And then you'd go negative. And so we're looking... No one spoke. It was the most silent experience I've ever had. And we all looked at those numbers. For six hours? For six hours. ( imitating gauge ) And we were decelerating, because we were losing flotation. But we had enough to get home. ALDA: It was a technical breakthrough in the '60s that allowed the Alvin and her sister ships to shrink down to a practical size. Instead of a huge gasoline flotation tank, they used a new material called syntactic foam, packed inside a fiberglass shell. BALLARD: And what they were able to do is get rid of the gasoline, by taking... silicon, and they atomized it, and they made these little microspheres of glass with a little air in them. Billions of them. And it's sort of like a powder, but it has tremendous strength, but it weighs less than half of what seawater weighs. So by adding this foam, this is what basically makes the submarine float. ALDA: It turned out that the small, deep-diving subs were the perfect answer to a big question-- how to explore the vast undersea mountain range called the Mid-Ocean Ridge. During the decade of the 1950s, depth-sounding surveys had gradually revealed the Ridge as a 42,000-mile-long mountain range sometimes rising 15,000 feet above the sea floor, snaking around the globe between the continents. It's the largest geological feature on Earth. BALLARD: It really wasn't until 1960 that we knew that there was a great mountain range beneath the sea. But we didn't know how it got there. We didn't know the role it played in the earth-- until plate tectonics came along in the late '60s-- that we realized that it was actually the site of crustal creation, that it was along the axis of this great mountain range that the earth creates its outer skin, through this process called sea-floor spreading. And so we were the first human beings to go down in submarines and explore this mountain range. ALDA: The pictures of lava formations on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that Ballard filmed from the Alvin left no doubt that the mid-ocean ridges are volcanoes which create the earth's crust. And the next question was, where's the heat? In 1977, Ballard provided the answer with the discovery of hot water vents, 8,000 feet down on the Galapagos Rift. Then came the totally unexpected. Clustered around the vents were what seemed to be giant clams-- life, in the black ocean depths. It was the dawning of a scientific revolution which Ballard and the Alvin would pursue for the next several years. This picture you have =@>@.@?@.@on the wall. What is that a picture of? That is the moment of discovery of these life-forms. I think it's my proudest moment. People think maybe it was the Titanic. Actually, it wasn't. We didn't discover the Titanic, we knew it existed. It was the discovery of hydrothermal vents, these exotic creatures. See, prior to our discovery of hydrothermal vents in 1977, we thought all life on our planet was due to the sun-- that the photosynthetic energy we get from the sun, that plants capture, turn into organic matter that animals then eat, and then we eat the animals, was it. Yeah. But then we discovered in the total darkness, in a world alien to anything we can think of, creatures that were living not off the energy of the sun, but the energy of the earth itself. ALDA: It was not until 1979 that Ballard was able to get back to the Galapagos Rift, and uncover the tremendous variety of life that lives around the vents-- the tube worms, mussels, crabs, even fish that shelter in the warm, volcanic currents. On the '79 expedition, Ballard, who's a geologist, was able to bring astonished biologists to see the vent life-forms for the first time. It was the beginning of a whole new branch of biology, still going strong, which has figured out how the vent life makes a living down here in the dark. It's turned out that it's the composition of the water emerging from the vent's that's the secret. These creatures were living off of chemicals... BALLARD: Exactly! Down in the... Poisonous, toxic... Poisonous to the rest of us. Absolutely, particularly hydrogen sulfide-- H2S. Fill this room with H2S, we're toast. So are the plants. Everything dies. But there was a creature, a bacterium, that had figured out, over eons of time, how to duplicate photosynthesis in the dark by oxidizing this poisonous gas. And a whole new life system came into being-- a life system that is now, we think, where life began on Earth. ALDA: It's believed the early Earth contained widespread hot spring environments like this-- both on land and in the ocean-- long before the earliest photosynthesizing organisms, like algae, began to evolve. So perhaps the sulfide-loving bacteria we see at the vents might be related to the earliest life-forms on the planet. Hundreds of hydrothermal vent fields have now been found around the globe, even though only about one percent of the likely areas have been surveyed. The kind of bacteria which all vent life depends on was new to science. These bacteria can extract energy from hydrogen sulfide gas dissolved in the vent water. There have now been many expeditions to ocean vents with intensive study of the life, often including raising samples of clams, tube worms, or crabs up to the surface, wa mile or two above. Both weights away. PILOT ( echoing ): Both weights away. ALDA: Surprisingly, biologists have had some success in keeping deep-ocean animals alive in special labs onboard ship. In this system, the intrepid researchers remove the foul-smelling worms from their shell-like tubes. Plastic replacement tubes are then used, not without some difficulty. The plastic tubes can then be fitted into pressure cylinders, which are pumped up to simulate conditions at depth. The tube worms have what's called a symbiotic relationship with the sulfur-eating bacteria. In fact, the entire contents of the worm are just bacteria. Although it's still not clear exactly how these symbiotic relationships work, there's no doubt that sulfur-loving bacteria are at the base of the entire food chain at the deep ocean vents. Some animals, like crabs, eat the bacteria directly. Others, like the tube worms and giant clams, shelter them in their bodies. Still others, like vent fish, are predators, feeding on everything else.

				Into the Deep, Part 2 Alan Alda joins explorer Bob Ballard for a look at the technologies that have opened up the farthest reaches of the ocean.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: In 1979, Ballard made yet another historic discovery, in an area called the East Pacific Rise, off Baja California. They called them "black smokers"-- chimneys spewing out clouds of mineral-rich water, so hot that it must have come from deep in the earth's crust. It explained why the sea is so rich in minerals. BALLARD: The sea water, which is under pressure, goes right down into those cracks, goes down to the magma chamber. The magma chamber is hot-- 1,400 degrees... 1,200 to 1,400 degrees centigrade. And so it heats up the water, and then the water begins to interact with the magma chamber, and it changes its chemistry. Now, does the water turn to steam? No, it can't, because of pressure. It turns into superhot water. Superhot water, which means it stays... Liquid. Liquid, but it's really... Really hot. And it's now full of chemicals that it didn't have before. And it's those chemicals that are coming out of the black smokers that are responsible for the chemistry of the world's oceans. In fact, we now realize that the entire volume of the world's oceans is going inside the earth and out, every six million to eight million years. "Every six to eight million years." The entire volume. All the oceans in the world-- they all go down... Through this system. Under the floor of the ocean. Under the mountain ridge... into the mountain range, and come up in the form of black smokers. And it takes eight or ten million years... For the whole ballgame. That's a lot of water. Well, of course, yeah. And that's caused the chemistry of the world's oceans. And we didn't know that. ALDA: Ballard almost didn't live to tell the world about black smokers. It all began when they moved in to take a measurement. BALLARD: The first time we saw one, we're coming up on it, we're inching up and... and it's high, so we had to come up high. So we're now neutrally buoyant, and there's an updraft and it's pulling us towards it, okay? And we're trying to find out what the temperature is, and so we take our mechanical arm out, we stick it in there. And we look at the... and it pegs off scale. ( imitates popping ) And the pilot says, "That's hot." ( both chuckle ) And then he removes the equipment... the temperature, and it's melted. And then he says, "I just want to let you guys know that the probe's made out of the same material as the porthole." And we were, like, three feet away. And moving toward it. And moving toward it. So, like, what-- everybody go like that? Absolutely! Fortunately, the sub has a reverse. And we... we actually bumped by it, we bumped it and knocked it over. And when we came up, the side of the submarine was melted. The syntactic foam was melted. When you came up this close to it, had anybody ever seen a black smoker before? Never, never. So this... you were... you almost discovered it and disappeared with your own discovery. Yeah, yeah, no, it could've been a bad day. Could've been a while before anybody knew that there was a black smoker down there. Yeah, well, what would happen is if it hit your porthole at that high temperature, it would have shattered and imploded. Takes about a quarter of a second... to just... ( imitates implosion ). Because there's so much pressure. So much as to go off like a bomb. ALDA: In spite of the spectacular scientific advances that have been made with the use of small manned submersibles like Alvin, Ballard says we don't need subs like this anymore. He came to that conclusion right here on the Galapagos Rift. BALLARD: The turning moment for me was in a... in a submarine just like this one, when we found these unique life-forms. And we were down on the bottom of the Galapagos Rift. It was 1979, okay. And biologists had never seen these life-forms ever before, and we got them in the submarine, and a scientist by the name of Holger Jannish, who just couldn't wait to see these creatures. He knew he was going to be famous, just to be the first to see them biologically. And so we got down there and they were right outside the window. And I was sitting over here and I had brought down a new prototype camera system-- a digital camera system. And I was looking at the animals, and I looked up from my porthole and I looked at Holger, and he had his back to the window. I said, "Holger, what are you doing?" He said, "Well, I'm looking at the monitor." That's amazing. I said, "Let me see if I got this right..." We came all the way down here... We came all the way down here, and you turn your back to the window, and I went ( snaps fingers ). ALDA: The result of that insight is inside these blue shipping containers, on display at the Mystic Aquarium. It's the portable control room, which Ballard developed to run subs remotely. BALLARD: So this is where the pilot would sit, but see, remember, the pilot in the submarine was dominating the view. Yeah. Now the pilots sitting here and we get the view. So imagine these being multiple camera systems on the vehicle, multiple windows. So all of a sudden instead of a puny window that only one person could look out of, everyone gets to look out of many, many panoramic-view windows, okay? And talk about it together. And more importantly, it stays down 24 hours a day. ALDA: "What's the point of taking people down if they can't go outside when they get there?" says Ballard. Everything can be controlled from the surface, even collecting samples, so long as the communication link is good. Argo, a towed camera sled with a fiber optic link, was Ballard's first remote vehicle. After nine days, 24 hours a day, Argo found the Titanic, and that was thanks to an ingenious search strategy Ballard invented. ALDA: When a ship sinks, does it leave a trail of debris in the process of sinking? It can do that. The Titanic did that. Why does that happen? What's going on there? Okay, lets take the Titanic, because I looked for the debris trail. Everyone else looked for the Titanic. They didn't find it. Well, clearly it wasn't a good idea. because the Titanic was in a very complicated... badlands of the Dakotas, canyons and valleys, and you could hide a thousand Titanics in this rugged terrain, okay? So here's the Titanic up at the surface, okay? It goes vertical, then it snaps in half. Yeah. What's it now? Big salt shaker. What's coming out of it? Everything. Take this room, dump it. Okay, so lets take this room and throw it out the window, okay? Well, lets' say I took a heavy object, a stone. The stone's going to go ( "stone" zings ). But let's say my paper... I throw the paper. How long is it going to take the paper to sink? Longer than the stone? Yeah, it's going to take forever for the paper to sink. You know, this thing's going to... if it even sinks at all. So what happens is, there's a current running-- remember, that there's... there's rivers in the ocean. The Labrador current that brought the icebergs down, so that's a huge body of water. So an object will fall straight through it if it's heavy, but a lighter object will be carried by it. It may take it hours and hours and hours. Well, it's traveling miles before it finally falls through the upper current layer. And then it falls down. So you get a debris trail. Mmm. So, look for the debris trail. ALDA: In late summer of 1985, Ballard managed to get 11 days of sea time on the Woods Hole research ship, Knorr. You can see Argo's portable control room on the stern here. Argo was towed back and forth through the area where Ballard figured Titanic's debris trail should be. For nine tedious days, video of empty sea floor came back to the control room. Then... WOMAN: We're over something. MAN: Looking good. You can see it... MAN 2: Whoa! ( crew exclaiming and laughing ) MAN: What is it? MAN 2: I don't know, but it's manmade! MAN: More stuff coming. That is big. MAN: Boiler! I got boilers. MAN 2: Yes, yes. Fantastic! All right! ( crew exclaiming and cheering ) ( laughing ) God damn! MAN: Let's break out the champagne. ALDA: With only two days' search time left, Argo's cameras had picked up Titanic's ghostly shape-- 12,000 feet beneath the spot in the North Atlantic where she'd hit the iceberg that fatal night in 1912. Ballard's strategy had been exactly right. I knew that current was north to south, because that's where the icebergs come from. So I ran east to west. ALDA: Hmm. And I knew... I said, well, where do you start? Well, what's the lightest of all the debris that came out of the Titanic? Well, wouldn't it have been paper? The lifeboats. Oh, I see, yeah. They didn't sink at all. Yeah. So, if I know where they picked up the lifeboats the Carpathia... Yeah. it's got to be north. So I started my search underneath where they picked up the lifeboats with the Carpathia and then I ran my lines like that. And on the ninth line, picked up the debris trail, followed it home. It led me right to the Titanic. ALDA: The following year, Ballard returned to the Titanic but in the Alvin. He'd wanted to use a new remote, steerable vehicle called Jason, but it wasn't ready. So, he approached the Titanic using what he now regarded as outmoded technology, although it surely must have been a thrilling experience to really be there. Landing on the deck of the ship, Ballard deployed from Alvin a brand new remote vehicle called Jason Junior. And it was Jason Junior that shot those haunting pictures that we all saw, some from deep inside the wreck. It was the last Alvin expedition Ballard would conduct. Although he would make some dives in US Navy deep-dive subs, from now on most of his efforts would be concentrated on remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs. That's probably just as well, since his interest was turning increasingly to wrecks, and wreck diving is dangerous. BALLARD: When you go to a wreck, it's a mess. Uh, the Lusitania was the scariest dive. What, some of it can fall on you or what? It was full of fishnets. Oh, oh. So you can just... Go right into them all. You can't see it. And get stuck. We did! You did-- you got stuck? Yeah, the submarine got stuck in it. How did you get out of that? Well, it was sort of humorous in reflection. We had a little submarine and it had three people in it. And they went and they... You can't see the monofilament. It's like monofilament nets. Yeah, yeah. It's like a web. And the sub went into it and it sucked it up into its stern prop and it just ate up the net into the stern prop. So now it's tied to the ship. And it went around and around so fast, it fused it. It melted it and fused it by just spinning the prop there, trying to get out. And so now... then they... I wasn't on that particular dive. I was up on the surface talking to them. And then they dropped their weights. But what happened is, they went like that because they didn't know how they were trapped until they dropped their weights. Instead of going up, they rotated and now they're vertical. A submarine's not designed to be vertical. All the equipment, everything, all the people came-- like a big tube-- came roaring down that tube. And then the guys called up and said, "You know, we got a problem. We're stuck." And then it turned out the pilot's father was another pilot. And so... very moving. I mean, here's a father talking to his son saying, "Well, what's up?" You know, "What's going on?" They said, "Well, we're trapped." "Well, how do you think...?" "Well, clearly we're stuck on the nets or something or rope. I don't know, it appears to be in the prop." Well, they had a procedure where they could uncouple the propeller... shroud and drop it. And so we're all listening. You know, you got the underwater sound and everyone's tense... The tension and the... "Oh my God, these people are going to die." And they had a little rhyme that they'd memorized on how to turn the screw. And you hear this voice from the bottom of the ocean: "Righty tighty, lefty loosey" as he's turning it... Had a little jingle to teach him how to turn the screw. He'd memorized it. "Righty tighty"-- he didn't want to do that. "Lefty loosey." And he was turning it to the left and they dropped the prop and they came up. ALDA: Jason-- Ballard's first fully capable remotely operated vehicle-- was launched in 1989 after five years of development at Woods Hole. There was skepticism about what ROVs could achieve. But over the next ten years using Jason, Argo and a series of other vehicles, Ballard opened up a new field of deep-water archaeology, in the Mediterranean and Black Sea. As usual, Ballard's imagination was hard at work. BALLARD: If you were on a Phoenician ship and you were carrying 2,000 amphorae of a fine wine for the pharaoh of Egypt, what would you do along the way? You'd drink the wine... You got it! and throw the jugs overboard. Absolutely! And what if you did that for thousands and thousands and thousands of years? What would you find? A lot of these jugs. A trail. Yeah. So what I do is I say, okay, here's... here's an ancient seaport. Let's say it's Carthage. I'm going to drive along here until I pick up the trail and I'm going to follow it and that's exactly what I did. Now, how do you find it, visually? Yeah, just go along and look for empties. That's exactly what I did. And there were the empties. Yeah! That's... so... And they weren't broken either. They were throwing... They didn't throw 'em over because they'd broken. They threw 'em over because they drank 'em. ALDA: Finding shipwrecks 2,000 o3,000 years old in deep water has forced a reappraisal of how ancient sailors navigated. It was commonly believed that they hugged the coastline. But these discoveries have shown they took direct routes in open water. They were better sailors and navigators than we had supposed but inevitably some ships were lost. There are many whole ships, whole cargoes in these deep, cold waters. Ballard believes these discoveries are the first glimpse of a deep-sea archaeological treasure trove. BALLARD: Shipwrecks are time capsules. They're pure moments in time. Everything on that shipwreck went down that moment, and particularly in the deep sea, it's preserved. It's in a high state of preservation. So imagine that probably everything humans have done has caused them to go out onto the sea with their commerce, with their technology and then they lose it. And they lose it in the deep sea which puts it in sort of a warehouse. I think there's more history in the deep sea than all the museums of the world combined. We think there's maybe one million time capsules. A million ships that have sunk. In the deep sea. And you can find them no matter how deep they are. Absolutely. The deeper the better: the more preserved they are, the further they are from land to be buried. And just think what the historians are going to write when the generation of explorers that are in elementary school right now find those time capsules. And here we are in the Amazon, trying out some,Gl-,f lcacao-- chocolate-- the way it comes down here. ALDA: Ballard has extended the idea of remote exploration to education. The Titanic discovery had prompted an enormous response. Suddenly thousands of kids wanted to be ocean explorers. Why not mount a whole series of remote explorations, he thought, and beam them live into museums and classrooms? We're going to go ahead and take another question. How would our earth be affected if the Amazon River were to dry up? If the Amazon River were to dry up, we'd be in deep trouble. There's a type of insect... ALDA: "Telepresence" he calls it. and it looks a lot like a giant plant hopper... ALDA: So far, the Jason Project has conducted 13 expeditions, to the ocean floor, to shipwrecks and to forests around the world, involving thousands of students. Both of them are moving. One little part of a body... So, you guys ready to go? ALDA: Here's Ballard's latest use of telepresence. Alan, why don't you sit right down there in the copilot's seat. All right, so here we are-- the next step. Now, where are we; what is this? This is a live shot, coming in from Monterey Bay. This is like the ultimate webcam. Absolutely, but even better. The aquarium's on our left. Cannery row is on our right. We're going to zoom in on these rocks, and we're going to look at some seals-- looks like harbor seals-- and a cormorant. See the cormorant sitting there? Oh, yeah. So that's a live feed. There's one right down there, and there's one up there. So watch. We're going to back up. Bing! So that's the Aquarium. That's the Monterey Bay Aquarium right there. Hello. All right, that's their observational platform. We'll pan back. ALDA: So far, it's maybe a bit better than a webcam but don't go away. And I can move forward... ALDA: The real point of the system is out in the bay between these two white markers, underwater. So we're now going to jump underwater and there we are. ALDA: Now we're seeing live, high-quality pictures sent on a data link across the continent, from Monterey, California to Mystic, Connecticut. And we can control the camera, too. Oh, hello, guy! ALDA: Whoa. Look at that. What is that? BALLARD: That's a fish! I know it's a fish! ( laughing ): I know. "Get the biologist." I'm a geologist. And now I'll zoom back out because I'm going to give it to you. Oh, all right. Can I see your driver's license? All right, just... get out of the way. All right, that's up and back. Right, okay. Oh, wait, what's that moving around? ALDA: Telepresence, I found, does have its limits. BALLARD: Do it slowly because there's a little time delay. Watch! You're at the end of the line! Stop! Oh! Oh, I'm going to crash! You did! I did? ( laughing ) I thought it was a fish! No, no. That's our... that's the end of the line. ALDA: At the heart of the trans- continental telepresence system is another remotely operated vehicle. Thrust reverse. ALDA: It had been installed just the week before I tried it out, after a couple of years of work. MAN ( over radio ): Clamp one off. ALDA: Monterey Bay's a marine sanctuary, so it's hard to get permission to do anything here. But for Ballard, that's the attraction. This is the first of two remote vehicles to be installed in different parts of the Monterey sanctuary. Then the plan is for systems to go into marine sanctuaries in the Florida Keys and California's Channel Islands. Eventually, visitors to museums and aquariums across the country and around the world will be able to experience a wide variety of underwater environments by telepresence. It's the sort of crazy, ambitious idea that's typical of Bob Ballard's imagination. It was born of his lifelong obsession with ocean exploration but grew out of that crucial insight he had 8,000 feet down on the Galapagos Rift, when his biologist colleague chose the pictures on the monitor over the view out the window. Zoom back out. Zoom back out, you got it. And come around again. ALDA: And it is extraordinary. You can feel you're there, as you steer the camera and vehicle through the kelp and rocks. ALDA: You know what's interesting about that surging, I see this movement and it's out of my control, which makes it very different from a computer experience. Very different from a... from a virtual experience. ALDA: We did have a little help from our underwater cameraman in shooting some of these scenes but most of them could have been shot by remote control, and that's the point. With telepresence, the potential is there. It's up to you to do the rest. Ballard's not content with inspiring a couple of revolutions in marine science and archaeology, and then wiring up the country's marine sanctuaries. Now he's off and running with a new crazy idea. If 70% of the globe is covered in water, it's time we started living out there, he says. Here's a marine habitation you tow into place, then tip up and anchor. There's no budget in America-- zero, zip-- for colonizing the world's oceans, nothing. They're not even thinking about it. You're actively at work on this? I mean, you've designed... Yeah, we're designing it. See, also you can use heat exchangers, so that you can take advantage of the thermocline to have nice air conditioning. You can have this... solar panels, where this thing... You're just moving cold air up, or you're creating electricity or what? Yeah, no, it's cold, it's cold, cold air. It's down there, it's freezing down there, okay? You're just circulating the air. You've got vanes that you can control so your solar panel follows the sun throughout the day. You can helo out to it. I want to put it in a marine sanctuary, and have rangers living on it. ALDA: I have to admit, I was skeptical about the ocean colonization idea, but when I said so, Bob Ballard answered with the confidence of experience. All my life, I've had these ideas and people say, "You're nuts," till I do them. Then you know what they say? "You know, actually, that wasn't a bad idea, but it's the new one you have that's nuts," and then I go on with the new one and I do it, and then they go, "Well, actually, it wasn't such a bad idea, but it's the next one." This is the one they think I'm nuts on... right now. ALDA: Ballard's one of the most celebrated explorers of his generation. With his list of achievements, you could forgive him if he were to indulge in a little self-congratulation, but 30 years of underwater surprises have taught him not to be so sure. I just think we have this great arrogance, you know, that we know everything, and every generation laughs at the next one. Well, get ready to be laughed at by your grandchildren. I mean, I have no idea what's ahead of us, but I know it'll be very surprising and very fascinating.

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				Superhuman Subs Design and stamina are put to the test when human-powered subs race for the finish in a giant naval testing tank.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: ALDA: Neptune is a submarine, built by students at the University of Michigan. It will soon be filled with water and propelled by human pedal power. ALDA: How many people will be in this boat? There are two people in this boat. And we both pedal. ALDA: And is it the biggest boat here? PILOT: Oh, yes, oh, yes, it gets moving. ALDA: Neptune is one of some 15 boats entered in the 2001 human-powered submarine race. MAN: We ready to race? All right. We're going to do a race right now. ALDA: Okay. ( radios squawking ) MAN ( over radio ): Michigan, Michigan. ALDA: We've strapped a camera on Neptune to get a sense of what it's like to lunge at a fast walking pace through the nearly ink-black water of an immensely long indoor tank. Just outside Washington, D.C, the tank is more usually employed testing new ship designs for the U.S. Navy. Ten years ago, the human-powered sub races were held in the sunny waters off a Florida beach. Pairs of submarines raced each other around a circular course. ANNOUNCER: Okay, I see the first boat coming. It's the Benthos boat. Holy smokes, is it pulling. Whoo-whee! ALDA: Beating most of the opposition was a boat from the Benthos Corporation of Cape Cod-- one of the few boats built by people who construct submarines for a living. ANNOUNCER: And they've passed the finish line now. Divers are trying to grab that sub... One more race, that's all we got, one more race left. If they can get us off the starting block clean tomorrow, we should have a damn good chance at it. ALDA: Most of the other competitors in 1991 failed to complete the course, because of bad luck, bad driving... or bad design. But a boat built by students from Florida Atlantic University put on a flawless performance. As in the Benthos sub, one person steered, while a second person pedaled in the rear. One of the secrets of their success was plenty of practice in ocean conditions. MAN: Up till now we've kind of held back a bit, Made sure we got round the course didn't get tangled in any buoys. Today, we've got to... take a few chances. ALDA: So, into the starting gate for the final go the students of Florida Atlantic University and the professionals of the Benthos Corporation. The race is twice around the track-- a total of one-half mile. ( crowd cheering ) ( crowd cheering ) Let's go, all right, Benthos! ( howls ) MAN: We have launch. ANNOUNCER: They're going into the second turn right now, starting towards the back straightaway. Looks like they're still neck and neck and no more than five feet apart. They're really moving now. ANNOUNCER: At the finish line the the F.A.U. boat is... past the finish line and the other boat's right behind them. Going over the top of me now, they're about... ALDA: It ended in an upset win for Florida Atlantic-- and an opportunity to remember what contests like this are really all about. MAN: We took this... this baby from the... just the basic conception to actually building it and testing it and getting it to run. And that's what engineering's all about, and... So, basically, they're training us to be engineers, and this is the result. Uggy, uggy, uggy! TEAM: Aye, aye, aye! ( all cheering ) ALDA: With the human-powered submarine race now in the calmer waters of the Navy's testing tank, that 1991 race remains vividly in the mind of one of today's contestants. MAN: Back when I was younger, about nine or ten years old, I watched the program on Scientific American Frontiers about the initial races, and just being a scuba diver then and seeing what they were doing, became highly interested. It really played into which colleges I chose and I actually went and interviewed with those teams to see how organized the teams were and which one I'd want to join. You picked the school according to their chances for the race. I wanted to be with a good team. Isn't that great? The team that Justin eventually joined-- and now leads-- is from Virginia Tech University. Their boat, the Phantom, is very different from the subs of a decade ago. Most significantly, it's both powered and steered by only one person, making it much smaller, sleeker and faster than the subs of old. ANNOUNCER: V-Tech, V-Tech, V-Tech, V-Tech. ALDA: The race is different, too. It's now a pure time trial, the subs sprinting one at a time along a straight 100-meter course. The emphasis is on raw speed. In the early races it was rare for a sub to go faster than three knots. Justin is hoping to take the Phantom up to as much as six knots. MAN: Nice... pan right... good, hold. ALDA: The critical part of the course is the speed trap in the middle, a ten-meter section marked with illuminated white poles. MAN ( over radio ): Phantom coming to the final trap right now. MAN: There he goes. MAN: Got him. ALDA: At the end of the 100 meters, a team of Navy divers helps slow the subs to a halt. MAN: 4.161... ALDA: Justin's time on this run is still well short of the six knots he's hoping for. 1/60th of a second we can time it down to. So we're giving very accurate, you know... So somebody could win by a 60th of a second? Yes. ALDA: During the five days of the meet, everyone gets to take as many runs down the course as they can. While many of the subs here are single-person, like the Phantom-- and this one, the Bulldog, built by a high school team-- there are still a few two-person boats. Most of them are steered by one diver and pedaled by another in the rear, making them not much faster than the subs of a decade ago. An exception is the University of Michigan's Neptune, in which both divers pedal. This makes the Neptune quicker than the other two-person subs, but also harder to control. This isn't the first time that Neptune has ended a run by ramming into the side or bottom of the tank. How'd you do? MAN: Well, looks like we lost control. ( laughing ) What happens to you when you see you're going to crash? Uh... I prepare to crash. I know the bottom's coming, I dump my regulator, kind of back out of the way and... watch the nose cone implode into my face. You know, I've been asking people all day, why they do this, but I think you're the best one to ask because you have your face up in the nose... ( all laughing ) and you're liable to crash at any moment. Why do you do it? Put on my, uh... crash helmet. These guys thought I needed a crash helmet for all the crashing I've been doing this week. But, uh, I do it... I guess for the competition of it. And just... I'm one of the naval architects on the team and this is what we do, so... ALDA: Not everyone here is an engineering student pushing for raw speed. Bob Golobic, for instance. ALDA: Hi, can we talk to you for a second? Are you getting ready to go now? No, I'm in the queue. Oh... when do you go? Ah, like about last. ( both laughing ) How long have you been in training with this little boat? Uh, I've been training for 30 years. Did you build it? Yes, I constructed it in my garage. Do you have anything special about this that you think is a design feature that may put you ahead of other people? Uh, no. ( Alda laughing ) If I had electric motors, perhaps. ( both laughing ) ALDA: Bob's sub is called the Reef Cruiser, an elegant twin-propeller design built more for comfort than speed. ALDA: There he is, there he is. MAN: Come on, Reef Cruiser! ALDA: Bob's goal is simply to complete the course. Over to the right now. Everybody's cheering him on. "Come on, you're almost there." MAN: Come on, Reef Cruiser. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can... ALDA: He's got a few feet to go. He's twisting and turning. MAN: Give him a push! No... go straight. ALDA: After six starts, Bob finally finishes. ( crowd cheering ) ALDA: Do you have your breath? Oh, absolutely. Do you want to hold on? Yeah, I would like that. Good for you. That was fantastic. Did you go past the finish line backwards? No, no-- sideways, sort of. Sideways. Yeah, sort of sideways. ALDA: At the other end of the spectrum from Reef Cruiser is this slender, torpedolike submarine from the University of Quebec. MAN ( over radio ): Omer, Omer. ( radio beeping ) ALDA: Omer-4 seems hardly big enough even to contain its driver, let alone allow him to pedal. It leaps out of the starting gate and streaks down the course a good two knots faster than any other team here is even dreaming of. On this run, it sets a new world record. ( cheers ) ( crowd cheering ) ANNOUNCER: ...at 7.019 knots. ( both cheer ) ( crowd cheers and applauds ) Bring it home, baby, bring it home. ALDA: As well as its sleek hull that minimizes the drag of the water, Omer-4 has a unique design breakthrough in its tail-- a computer that can change the pitch of the propeller. As the sub's speed picks up, the bite the propeller takes of the water is gradually increased. In effect, the computer matches the pitch of the propeller to the speed of the sub, producing maximum thrust no matter how fast the sub is moving. Is the main thing that's helping you get that fast the ability to control the... the propellers? With the variable pitch, what it does it enables us to generate thrust even at speed zero, so it still can move forward. So as the pitch varies, we increase our speed more rapidly than other teams. ALDA: The Quebec team came with two pilots for their sub. This run is being taken by the junior of the pair, Jeremy Lebel. Wow, he's going fast. Where are you now? What was your speed? That... that race, it was 7.19. That one's not bad. So now... that's now the top speed for a human-powered sub? Exactly. ALDA: While Omer-4 has been steadily breaking records, another one-person sub has also been a surprise. It's manned by 18-year-old Logan Rainard. ALDA: Did you build this yourself? Yeah, I designed it last summer, and my neighbor and my friend Ed Liebolt, who's an ocean engineer here at David Taylor, and is right behind me... Ed, stop eating and come here. Hi. How you doing? Congratulations. Yes. He... he helped me build it. Probably built about... he built half and I built half. How you doing? How long did it take you? Oh, we started in January and we were finished in... it was in the water and running in April, so... ALDA: That's fast, huh? We built it really fast. RAINARD: Like any ship, you design it around the... the power plant of the boat, and the power plant is me in this case. ANNOUNCER: Scuba-Doo, Scuba-Doo. ALDA: Over the five days of racing, Logan's Scuba-Doo has completed every run it's taken, and on one run it's posted a speed of 5.088 knots, second only to Omer-4. The other boat competing for second place is Virginia Tech's Phantom, Justin Hlavin's boat. This run is being taken by the crew's female pilot, Dotty McDowell. A few runs before this one, Dotty broke the woman-powered submarine record with a speed of 4.348 knots. ALDA: How'd you do? Pretty good, a little faster this time. Worn out after that? Yeah. When did you give it everything you got? Usually by the time I can see any kind of light up in front of me, because they light the ten-meter section. Yeah. ( pants and chuckles ) You can... ( chuckles ) I need to catch my breath a minute. ALDA: Justin Hlavin has been hoping to push Phantom as fast as six knots. But he's using a makeshift propeller-- actually the tail rotor of a helicopter-- because the planned propeller didn't get made in time. So Justin's team has asked to borrow a propeller from Logan's Scuba-Doo. There is a propeller. Let's see if this'll work. ALDA: You're using a propeller that you borrowed from the... the high school team? Yes. They are going faster than us. We asked them to borrow it. We just want to see what we can do. That... the hull shape itself is a very fast hull shape. It was specifically designed to go above six knots. We just need to find the power to do it now. ALDA: With Logan's propeller providing the power, Justin's run was just seven one-hundredths of a knot slower than Logan's. ALDA: Justin, you looked like you were flying. HLAVIN: It's the prop that made the difference. I was very conservative on that run just trying to figure out what it could do. And now that I know how to control the boat and how that prop feels, I'm prepared to let her loose, see what she can do. ALDA: But Justin never did attempt another run, not wanting to use Logan's own propeller to snatch away his second place. We're still second place as it is right now by very, very, very close. And Michigan is in the process of going right now and they're looking pretty fast, too. So, I'm a little worried but there isn't anything I can do about anything right now except sit here and watch the... watch the times come up. ALDA: With time left for one last run, the huge Michigan sub containing 1 1/2 tons of water as well as its two-man crew, slowly accelerated away. Unlike most of the other subs, Neptune takes much of the 100-meter course to reach its top speed. But when it did... That was a great run. 4.9. Yeah. Wow. Great. Best one ever. ALDA: Best one ever at 4.905 knots,but still not quite enough to overtake Justin Hlavin's Phantom in third place or Logan Rainard's Scuba-Doo in second. Omer-4, over two knots faster than the rest of the field, remas the boat to beat in the next human-powered submarine races set for the year 2003.

				Dust Busting A Caribbean coral disease is traced to fungus-filled dust from new African farmland. Researchers also investigate a link betweeen the dust and increased asthma in the region.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: ALDA: The Virgin Islands. From here down to Venezuela, it's a 500-mile loop of beautiful, small islands set in a sparkling sea. They're some of the world's most popular tourist destinations to find the sun or catch a wave. Below the surface, things get even better. Coral reefs, the rain forests of the ocean delight the eye and the imagination. But here they're the setting for a most surprising alien invasion. It's a coral disease which came from another continent and a completely different environment. In the winter of 1998 I found myself being thrown around in a small boat in the company of three coral experts-- Gene Shinn and Ginger Garrison of the U.S. Geological Survey and Garriet Smith from the University of South Carolina. We're off St. John, but this is no vacation. "Caribbean," they said "We're going to shoot in the Caribbean. It'll be nice." All these great stories, sun, surf... ALDA: We found a spot that was sheltered and got ready to check out the reef. The scientists and I are going to be free-diving while our underwater camera crew will be using scuba. Free diving's a lot simpler than scuba and just fine for seeing shallow reefs like these ten or 20 feet deep. The bad weather has stirred up sediment so it's not as clear as it could be, but it's more than enough for Ginger to point out the problems. Here comes the free dive... and here's the problem. On this boulder coral, large patches, called "white plague" where the living surface has died off. GARRISON: Looking pretty slick now. ALDA: As we head back down I realize that white patches of different sizes are everywhere on the boulder coral. It's one of the Caribbean's principal reef-building corals so this is a disturbing sight, to say the least. When I see the white stuff down there, what am I looking at? Well, the white area that's surrounded by the normal-looking coral tissue that's brown is actually just the skeleton. What's happened is the disease, whatever the pathogen is has evidently killed the polyp and that tissue has sloughed off. So it's as if we lost everything except our bones so that we wouldn't have any flesh on them. ALDA: Next Ginger takes me down to check out the sea fans. There are clumps of them all around waving lazily in the swells. Sea fans are one of the soft corals-- not reef builders but an important part of the reef ecology providing shelter for many inhabitants. But the sea fans are in bad shape. This is a typical example-- chunks of the fan rotted away, with bright purple patches. Once you know the symptoms, you notice them everywhere. Garriet Smith outlines a light purple infected area. Eventually it'll die off leaving a gaping hole in the fan. Here the process has already started. This is not just a local problem-- sea fans all over the Caribbean are affected. On the reef there are fans at every stage of deterioration. This one's lost almost all its living tissue. So out we came-- cold and wet, tired depressed at the state of the reef. And as if that weren't enough... I have a blister from my flipper. ALDA: Then I realized that my companions don't care about working conditions. It's knowledge they're after. (laughing) I love it-- science! ALDA: This is a diseased Caribbean sea fan in Garriet Smith's lab at the University of South Carolina. You can see the skeleton from which the living white tissue has died back. The brown growth is some kind of secondary infection and the purple is an immune reaction that shows the coral is trying to fight whatever is attacking it. So, what is attacking it? The team's now pretty certain they've nailed it down. Here's what they did. Samples were taken from diseased sea fans from six different islands. After culturing for a few days, this is what they got... a whole mix of about a dozen fungi and bacteria. It looked to Garriet that only one was common to all the sea fans. It had the typical threadlike appearance of a fungus. Garriet confirmed that it caused the disease by deliberately infecting healthy sea fans. So now it was time to identify the fungus. It's routine nowadays to map out the DNA of organisms. T-A-G-T-A-A... ALDA: Garriet and Kim Ritchie mapped out the fungus's DNA looked it up in the databases, and got a big surprise. Sea fan disease was caused by a common soil fungus calledAspergillus. You could find it in any backyard. But how wasAspergillusgetting to coral reefs in the Caribbean? Take a look at this. This picture was shot from the space shuttle over the Atlantic. The brown stain is dust, millions of tons of it coming from new farmland in Africa. In drought years, when there are often dust bowl conditions huge quantities are swept across the ocean on the trade winds to settle on the Caribbean. Gene Shinn suspected that the dust could be delivering a constant dose of damaging material to the water and to the coral. And it could explain why coral diseases appear all over the Caribbean at the same time. Gene takes up the story. I got talked into presenting this as a hypothesis at the Oceanographic Society annual meeting last year on April Fool's Day, by the way and a lot of people took it that way and one thing's that common... They didn't go along with this idea. I had discovered that everyone who studied dust in the past the common denominator is they all got laughed at at one time or the other. And they were studying dust in the late '60s and early '70s, and there wasn't that much dust. But it's a hundredfold greater now. Is it pretty clear to you therefore that this... this rise in disease here in the coral is because of the desertification effect? Well, it was just an observation that the peak years of... for dust, like '83 and '87-- these were big years for the coral reefs and things changed. It seemed like there was a link. ALDA: To find out what the Caribbean winds contain Ginger Garrison sampled the air above St. John. The filter papers went to Garriet Smith in South Carolina. And along with dust particles he saw thousands of tiny fungal spores. So, next step-- culture the spores. A few days later, another mix of organisms and among them-- you guessed it--Aspergillus. SoAspergillusspores are flying 4,000 miles across the Atlantic settling onto the reef, and then attacking the sea fans. It's an important breakthrough in understanding coral disease and a remarkable example of how alien species can behave in unexpected ways in a new environment. Ah, wee in luck; the gods are with us. ALDA: I'm getting to be a real pro at this now. Gene Shinn is moving on to the next phase of the investigation. He's drilling a deep core sample from a large boulder coral. The aim is to look at the recent history of the reef to see if what happened from year to year can somehow be matched up with dust conditions. There you go. That's about 30 to 40 years of growth. Not as easy as it used to be. (Alda chuckles) Can you see anything on this that... that... Can you read this in any way now without... without taking it to the lab? Well, you can see these are the... this is the growth axis these lines pointing this way and that's each individual polyp and you can see the little polyps. It's like a little jellyfish that secretes calcium carbonate and so our plan is to take these segments cut them out with a diamond saw dissolve them in hydrochloric acid and then we get a residue and that residue will be... hopefully will be African dust. ALDA: It took a lot of work but eventually they were able to find African dust trapped in coral cores corresponding to the recent bad dust years. Since the breakthrough with sea fan disease the team has found a second coral type, called sea whips being attacked byAspergillus. And they're on the track of a second soil microbe which may be causing white plague the coral-bleaching disease. They've also started to look into the idea that African dust may be connected to the huge increase in asthma around the Caribbean-- up 17-fold in the last 30 years. We're going to be hearing a lot more about dust in the years to come. Come visit us at PBS Online.