Sixty-five years ago this week, William Beebe and Otis Barton became the
first people to visit the largest habitat for life on our planet鈥攖he deep
sea. Crammed into a steel sphere, Beebe (who was 57 at the time) and Barton (35)
were winched down to the then record-breaking depth of 923 metres off the coast
of Bermuda on 15 August 1934. Tour their bathysphere鈥� which had an
internal diameter of just 1.37 metres鈥攖hrough The Official William Beebe
Homepage at http://hometown.aol.com/chines6930/mw1/beebe1.htm
Beebe was a great writer as well as a zoologist. You can read his evocative
description of a dive, taken from his book Half Mile Down, at
http://seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/OCEAN_PLANET/HTML/ocean_planet_book_beebe1.html
During the record-breaking dive, Beebe鈥檚 running commentary on what he saw
through the quartz windows of the bathysphere was broadcast across the US by a
radio network. Many biologists were scornful of these first direct observations
of deep-sea life, however, with some even suggesting that Beebe was
hallucinating from lack of oxygen. But researchers at the Harbor Branch
Oceanographic Institution in Fort Pierce, Florida
(www.hboi.edu/marine/biolum2/biolum.html) are still unravelling the secrets
behind the bioluminescence that Beebe saw as a 鈥渄ark, luminous blue鈥�.
Advertisement
Plunge into the waters where Beebe and Barton dived without getting your
feet wet, courtesy of the Bermuda Biological Station for Research and the
College of Exploration at
www.coexploration.org/bbsr/coral/html/introduction.html.
Although Barton designed the bathysphere, he was somewhat eclipsed by the
media-friendly Beebe and the web sadly lacks an Otis Barton homepage. But his
words sum up their achievement: 鈥淣o human eye had glimpsed this part of the
planet before us, this pitch-black country lighted only by the pale gleam of an
occasional spiralling shrimp.鈥�
