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Introducing Our Galaxy to a Child

A clear night with our Milky Way galaxy seeming to glow iridescently is unforgettable. I remember seeing it once as a child, looking up from a field in the darkness of rural Texas, once from the deck of a rolling ship in the tropics, once from my aircraft on a beautiful night flight headed home, and once on the deck of a beach house on Cape San Blas, Florida. In each instance the conditions were ideal; no clouds, no moon, with very little obscuring moisture in the atmosphere.

The most thrilling time was the last time, when I left the bed where a three-year old was snuggled next to me, and joined my wife and our 11-year old granddaughter on the deck. It was late, and I was surprised to see them up, but when I looked up into the night sky I saw why they remained.

“Isn’t that the Milky Way?” my wife asked.

The eleven-year old had never seen the bright swath of starry light that is the interior of our galaxy. She was puzzled. “If we’re in it, how can we see it?”

The Milky Way and comet McNaught Druckmuller (Image credit: Miloslav Druckmuller.)

I was thrilled to have the chance to explain, best I could, how on just such rare nights we could see in the direction of the galactic center, but yet we can’t see the actual center because of obscuring dust. I further explained that lurking in the center of the billions of stars in the galactic center is a massive black hole.

Our neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy

I know she had seen pictures of galaxies, like M31, Andromeda. She knew how galaxies should look, and what she saw did not match the photographs. She had never thought about how a galaxy, our galaxy, appears from the inside.

When our children were still young I drove the family from the Washington suburbs to the Blue Ridge Mountains to go star-gazing with binoculars and a telescope. But I think the most wondrous experience for them was what they saw unaided, the vast panorama of visible stars relatively bright and close to our planet. At the time, my preteen daughter, then about the age of our present eleven-year old granddaughter, was sleepy and complaining about the cold. Now that she’s an educated adult she  recognizes what a special experience that was.

One of the benefits of keeping children up past their bed times, at least on occasion, is the chance to see the stars. It will have a lasting effect on them; at least it did for me. Before my first night of star-gazing, my world had ended a few feet ahead of me, and a few hours ahead in time. My concerns, like those of most children, were immediate. But after that one starry night experience, my perspective stretched to the stars.

That is a wonderful experience to share with children of an appropriate age, lest they forever close their visual boundaries to all things lying beyond our Earth’s horizon.

[Milky Way in the desert photo (top) by Jurvetson (flickr)]

If Whales Could Fly

When Ottorini Respighi wrote his symphonic poem Pines of Rome, he was not imagining flying whales. Instead, the last movement of his work invokes the imagery of a Roman Legion marching along the Via Appia Antica.  When I would listen to the drumming and droning of the orchestra I never imagined whales flying either, at least prior to the year 2000.

But somebody at Disney Studios did, as evidenced by Fantasia 2000. The flying whales animation, accompanied by Respighi’s score, is now one of my favorite segments of the Fantasia 2000 DVD.

With a name like Fantasia, we should fully expect fantasy, fantasy being defined as an art form devoid of any requirements for plausible scientific foundations.  And Fantasia has always delivered that art form in abundance.

In contrast, science fiction may have fantastic elements in it, but there is an expectation that the writers’ creations be somewhat defensible on the basis of known scientific principles. So, what if whales could fly? What would be the real world consequences of such an improbable occurrence? What does science have to say about it?

For one thing, flying whale babies would not have to worry about being eaten by Orcas, as mentioned in my last posting. So whale populations would increase, unless the inexperienced calves flew into wind farms and airplanes.

As a pilot and airline passenger, my first concern would be whether airborne whales could be detected on radar. Is the whale’s smoothly rounded shape, it’s tough but flexible skin and potentially radar absorbing blubber stealthy in the same way that stealth bombers elude detection by radar?  If so, the air traffic control system would have real problems. Sure, flying whales would be easy to see in day light, but can you imagine encountering them at night or in clouds without benefit of radar? I shudder to think.

And yes, whales migrate continuously, night and day, so they would be a gargantuan risk to air traffic in low visibility conditions. Compared to a whale strike, bird strikes would be a minor affair.

What if flying whales blunder into restricted air space, like over the White House? There are missiles there, I hear, capable of shooting down intruders. But would I want to be the one to pull a trigger that blows a whale to blubbery bits all over Washington D.C.?

Perhaps whales would be granted an exempt status, like migrating geese. But what if terrorists took advantage of that and managed to bring down an intact whale in the middle of the White House Rose Garden? I haven’t calculated the kinetic energy of a full grown falling Gray Whale, but at a weight of 40 tons or so, I doubt anything trapped under the  whale would survive the impact.

Unfortunately, a science fiction writer envisioning flying whales can’t avoid the inevitability of whale poop. While bird poop is an inconvenience, falling whale products of digestion would likely prove lethal. What a lousy way to die. (OK, I admit I was thinking of using a different adjective.)

The Achilles’ heel of any flying whale story would have to be buoyancy. It has been estimated that approximately half of a grown whale’s weight is derived from blubber. What if a whale replaced all of its blubber with hydrogen? [While I could choose helium as a buoyant gas, helium is not produced biologically, whereas hydrogen is, as a product of flatulence.]

Hydrogen has a specific buoyancy of approximately 71 lbs per 1000 cubic ft, so a 20,000 lb whale (stripped of all blubber) would need about 282,000 cubic feet of hydrogen to be neutrally buoyant (to float in air). To put that into perspective, the Goodyear Blimp weights 12,840 lbs, and has a volume of 202,7oo cubic feet. So a flying whale would have to be roughly 50% larger than the Goodyear blimp. [I leave a more exact calculation to high school physics students looking for an imaginative problem to solve.]

From a science fiction standpoint, that is entirely conceivable. Buoyant whales would be much larger than modern whales.

As for a means of propulsion, I don’t think whale fins would suffice; they don’t look enough like wings.  But with a little imagination, I bet most school kids could think of a means of propulsion that would be akin to, dare I say, jet propulsion.

I think I now have the makings of a science fiction novel. I’ve got the science figured out: all I need now is a plot and some interesting human characters.

To be continued, perhaps …

Battle of Titans: Orcas vs Gray Whales

It is an ageless story, mothers banding together to protect their young from instinctive killers. The fact that it was a battle between behemoth Gray Whales and Killer Whales (Orcas) made it all the more epic in scope, and worthy of the telling.

A fellow scientist and I had driven south early one springtime morning from Anchorage, Alaska to Seward. At 11 AM our glacier view cruise boat left the docks at Seward and headed for the glacier fields at the Kenai Fjords National Park where the glaciers sliding slowly down from the mountains calved into the Gulf of Alaska.

Heading south from Seward.

From there we motored on until we were attracted to a near-shore area by the blowing of water and foam from a group of migrating Gray Whales. The rapid pace of their exhalation was a sure sign that something was wrong. We had stumbled upon a battle involving another type of calf just as the combatants were taking their positions on the battlefield.

A female Gray whale weighing between 30 to 40 tons had birthed her baby during the winter in Baja California and now the mother, quickly growing baby, and two female caretakers (often  called “aunties”) were almost through with their migration to the Bering Sea. But as they swam beyond Prince William Sound, not far from their final destination, they were attacked by two adolescent transient Orcas who wanted that baby whale.

Our boat stopped far enough from the battle to not hinder the fight, but close enough for us to witness the events. Our biologist guide warned us that if we had a weak stomach we might not want to watch because often times the Orcas succeed in killing the baby Gray.

I don’t think anyone on the boat averted their eyes as the three massive females arranged themselves head to tail into a triangular defensive formation, with the baby in the middle. There was no way for the Orcas to get past the females on or near the surface, so they made repeated dives trying to enter the center of the triangle from underneath and attack the baby. But with each dive, the wily Grays maneuvered to block the Orcas.

The Orcas were nothing if not persistent. Perhaps sensing that, the whales started moving closer to a rock cliff face, and then they did something clever, but potentially risky. There was an opening in the rock wall and the baby whale had been nudged into that opening. One whale, probably the mother, was completely blocking that opening with her body. The Orcas tried repeatedly to find a way past her to the baby, but between the blocking action of the other two Grays and the blubbery plug of the cave entrance by the mother, there was nothing the Orcas could do.

We of course saw the riskiness of that defense. It looked to us like the baby was trapped underwater. Even a whale has to breathe sometime.

The other boat was too close to the action, but provides scale for the "cave".

But as I look at the photo I realize now that the cave was tall enough and just deep enough to allow the baby to breathe even with water access cut off. Obviously, the Gray Whale mother had made good use of her 4.3 kg brain. Nevertheless, from our elevated vantage point we could see over the mother whale, and we saw that the baby remained submerged. I’m guessing it was wedging itself in as tightly as it could. The anxiety on our boat grew perceptively as the minutes ticked down with us knowing the baby was holding its breath.

The tactic worked, for the Orcas eventually tired of the game, and after making one or two leaps out of the water they moved away from the whales and headed north toward seal colonies we passed on the way south. The seals would be easier pickings than those highly protective Gray Whales.

There was jubilation on our boat. I think we’d all been holding our breath like the baby, at least a little.

When the coast was clear, literally, the Grays moved back into the open water near where the battle had begun and caught their breath, heaving great geysers of watery air as they panted. They had obviously been very stressed, but their cleverness and strategic cooperation saved the day, or at least the moment.

Two Orcas. Copyright by Rolf Hicker. Used under fair use.

Things could have been different, both better and worse. Local Orcas were so-called residents who don’t attack Gray Whales. Residents tend to be fish eaters. Fortunately for the Gray baby, the more lethal transients were not as experienced with the local geography. They were also adolescents, not as experienced as adults, and there were only two of them. A pack of them, with adolescents being guided by adults, might have been more succesful. Transient Orcas, genetically different from Residents are reported to kill a third of the baby Gray Whale population each year.

Interestingly, the Grays seem to know where transient Orca populations are the most active, and in those regions they tend to stay close to shore. In this case that strategy paid off by allowing the baby to be protected by a rock wall and its mother.

On the boat we celebrated all the way back to Seward; we had witnessed a frightening conflict with, for us and the whales, a happy ending.

To learn more about Orcas attacking mother Gray Whales and their calves, see the excellent photos and story at the following website. http://creagrus.home.montereybay.com/MtyBayOrcaattack.html

Going Nowhere Fast – Military Aviation Centrifuges

I was securely strapped into one of the world’s largest human centrifuges at the Naval Air Development Center (NADC) Warminster, Pennsylvania, jocked-down like a pilot in a high performance fighter. As the gondola started moving, I felt the pneumatic cushions in my G-suit inflate, squeezing my legs and abdomen, helping to prevent blood from pooling. Excess pooling would cause a decrease in the volume of blood being pumped to my brain, potentially resulting in unconsciousness. That type of blackout is called G-LOC, or G-induced loss of consciousness.

G is the term for the acceleration of gravity, about 9.8 m/s2. I was being exposed to a relatively mild but prolonged 3-Gs. To put that acceleration into perspective, the shuttle astronauts are exposed to no more than 3-Gs near the end of their climb to orbit, and briefly during reentry. The Apollo astronauts headed to the moon were limited to a maximum of 4 Gs, again during only a brief period of time.

The author at NADC

But my three-G exposure was not brief. If I had been launched upwards with a 3-G acceleration for three minutes  I would have been travelling at almost 12,000 miles per hour at the end of those 3-minutes, over mach 15, and would have climbed 296 miles, well above the altitude of the International Space Station. It would have been a sight to behold.

Another 3 and a half minutes and I would have been going fast enough to escape Earth’s gravity.

Alas, in reality I wasn’t going anywhere, except in circles around the inside of the centrifuge room, attached to a 4000 hp electric motor by a 50-foot long arm.

Author going for a spin

During the run I experienced about what I’d expected — I felt heavy, very heavy, like 3 times my body weight heavy. But I was not at all expecting the sensation I got when they put on the brakes. I felt like a bowling ball careening down a bowling lane. I felt like a gymnast doing impossibly fast forward somersaults.

It was not pleasant.

And I’m very glad the photographer took a photo before the run, rather than after.

I was at Warminster to study the stresses imposed on F/A-18 fighter pilots during high-G exposures.  In the 1990s, losses of aircraft and pilots were an all too frequent occurrence during high-speed maneuvering flight due to G-LOC. To prevent G-LOC pilots need to perform, with precision, an anti-G straining manuever, even though they wear the same anti-G suit I was wearing.

From the cockpit of an F-18

To understand the fighter pilots’ problems, anti G-suits provide at most 1-1.5 G protection advantage. and most people lose consciousness above 3-5 Gs without a G-suit. But a fighter like the F/A-18 can easily pull 8-9 Gs during close in combat. That is where the anti-G straining manuever comes in. The pilots grunt and strain, contracting their leg and abdominal muscles during the high-G portion of the pull, forcing blood from their abdomen into their chest cavity, making blood available for the heart and brain.

Astronaut Alan Shepard

The NADC centrifuge had been used to train the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts. Quoting from the Air & Space Smithsonian magazine, “John Glenn called it a “dreaded” and “sadistic” part of astronaut training. Apollo 11’s Michael Collins called it “diabolical.” Time magazine referred to it as “a monstrous apparatus,” a “gruesome merry-go-round,” and, less originally, a “torture chamber.”

http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/the_g_machine.html

Compared to the centrifuge ride, a flight to the moon was a cake-walk, except for Apollo 13 of course.

The NADC centrifuge was closed by the BRAC committee in 1996. The Navy Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory in Pensacola FL also has a centrifuge in which I’ve ridden, but NAMRL is closing as well, in September 2011.

It seems like military man-rated centrifuges aren’t as popular as they used to be.

Click for a larger image.

Fortunately, NASA has a modern centrifuge, although its maximum G-force capability is about half that of the NADC centrifuge. Nevertheless, anyone who has ridden a centrifuge will tell you the 20-G capability of the NASA Ames centrifuge is more than enough to test human endurance to the forces of acceleration.

Divers In Space

Signs of flowing water have been found on Mars. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/05/science/space/05mars.html?_r=1

That of course makes Mars even more tantalizing than it is already.

Now Mars has been added to a growing list of bodies in our solar system that are believed to have water, and in some cases entire oceans. Let me be so bold as to pronounce, where you have water, you will eventually need divers.

Biosphere 2

I once attended a joint NASA – Diving Conference at Disney World in Orlando. It was largely devoted to discussions of the science and engineering that would be required to send men and women to Mars and to sustain them in a colony. I was presenting a diving related talk at the invitation of one of the editors of the Life Support & Biosphere Science journal, a short-lived scientific journal that reported on the science conducted in Biospheres and other life-support systems.

After hearing a number of fascinating NASA accounts, I talked about a rather arcane subject: A Priori models in the testing of diving life support equipment. That work was published in 1996. At the end of the talk, a NASA engineer asked, somewhat smugly I felt, how diving had anything to do with space.

Well, that wasn’t at all the purpose of the meeting, or the reason why I was talking. The organizers believed, correctly, that sojurns in space and underwater share elements in common; namely, people and breathing equipment. We could, and should, learn from each other.

Now, regarding the question: I can ad lib with the best of them. Knowing that Jupiter’s moon Europa was believed to be hiding a large ocean beneath its icy surface, I responded that someday astronauts will be carrying a dreadfully expensive piece of hardware to an alien moon or planet with water, and that priceless tool will get dropped  — into the water. It happens all the time on Earth.

Now what? You can’t go on-line, order a replacement, and expect an overnight FedEx shipment.  That is when a space diver would be worth his Earth-weight in rhodium.

Saturn's moon Enceladus

Since that time, we’ve learned that Saturn’s moon Enceladus jets water from its south pole.  As reported in the journal Icarus, that suggests that, like Europa, there may be a liquid ocean beneath the moon’s icy crust.

My suspicion is that long before we’ll need cowboys in space, we’ll need divers in space.

So divers, keep your diving helmets oxygen clean. You may get the call any day now.

Scalloping – What If the Tide Turned?

It’s scallop season in the fertile waters of the Florida Panhandle. Almost completely surrounded by a peninsula called Cape San Blas sits a shallow body of clear water and sandy bottom that is an ideal location for bay scallops. Unfortunately for the scallops, the shallow water makes a yearly harvest of scallops by boaters and waders almost too easy.

Recently my extended family of eight descended on the unsuspecting bivalves as if our lives depended upon them. We spent most of a day in a hunter-gatherer mode, reaping the benefit of a bountiful crop, imagining an earlier day when local tribes did in fact depend on the local scallops and oysters for their survival.

I had been scalloping in Saint Joseph’s Bay once before, but this year the scallops were larger, and seemingly more bountiful. They attempted to hide in the sea grass, and I suppose those that hid well were passed over. But fortunately for us, many could not hide from the practiced eyes of determined snorkelers.

Usually scallops react to being picked up by snapping their shells together in an attempt to protect their vulnerable innards. However, one large scallop which had apparently lived long enough to be the equivalent of a wise scallop, or perhaps simply an inquisitive scallop, started to close his shell, and then stopped. We remained locked in a gaze, me with my green eyes staring through a diving mask, and it staring at me with its multiplicity of luminous, iridescent blue eyes.

Photo credit: Bill Capman, 2002.

I know this is blatant anthropomorphism, but it seemed like it was saying, “Well, hello. What’s this? Are you a deity? I’ve heard about you, but you’re not at all what I was expecting.”

I must admit I stared back quizzically, surprised by this little fellow’s bravado. He truly seemed to be checking me out.

It was bad luck for him that his telepathic powers of communication didn’t make a dent in my determination to eat him, or at least to eat his adductor muscle after discarding the rest. So into the bag he went with the growing collection of other scallops. In the end, his bravado did him no good at all.

It was somewhat of a pitiful sight as the captives were poured in a heap on a wooden platform just above the water of the bay. I bet they could smell it, the safety of water so close, and as the cliché says, so far away. They all tried to escape, to jet away, sounding like a chorus of  castanets. Of course, in air, jetting just doesn’t work for them. They were stranded. I could almost sense their collective panic.

I suspect the mechanics of scallop butchery came as quite a shock to this little guy. I’m just glad that this year I didn’t have to do it — my son took my place at the sacrificial altar. After all, shucking is, at its best,  tiring and a little bit gross. Beer helps of course.

In the unlikely event that now jaded scallop had seen me, had watched me with its sixty or more eyes as I began to take a shucking knife to it, could I really do what my family was expecting of me? Probably, but I don’t know for sure.

Well, I didn’t have to face that, and I will confess, I felt only pleasure, no guilt, as I finished off the last of those pure white scallop muscles, sautéed with butter, garlic and a dollop of lemon juice.

It was about 48-hours later, when the delicate flavor of those fresh scallops began to fade from my memory, that I had a sobering thought. Could those bivalves in fact be more sentient than we assume? After all, I’ve been mistaken before about the intelligence of invertebrates.

I’ve heard that scallop eyes can’t really see shapes, only shades of light, and movement. Arguably there is not enough neural matter for them to generate anything like a thought — at least in human terms.

But what if we’re wrong? Even worse, what if a highly advanced alien species, hungry after traveling interstellar distances, encounters humans? Would they consider us with the same lack of respect that we consider scallops? Could we be considered to have too little cerebral grey matter to create an organized thought — at least in alien terms? Would we be considered insentient and therefore unworthy of pity as we’re “shucked” and sautéed for dinner?

In Stephen Hawking’s opinion, that is a real possibility. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7107207.ece

So, maybe we shouldn’t be trying so hard to attract the attention of extraterrestrials. If they show up hungry, maybe our communication, telepathic or otherwise, would do us no more good than it did that inquisitive scallop.

He sure was tasty.

If You Were a Human-Animal Hybrid, What Would You Want to Be?

James Patterson’s Maximum Ride series about a flock of flying kids is, for me at least, some of the most interesting reading a bird man (aka aviator, pilot) is likely to find in an airport bookstore. What a fun way to spend a cross-country flight!

Even though Patterson’s series is written for adolescents, it fulfills in me an inner need to fly.  What could be better than flying with your own magnificent wings? At the same time, it poses ethical questions about science and genetic experimentation. The flying kids despise their evil scientist creators, but the ability to fly sure gets them out of some tough scrapes, just in the nick of time of course. Up and away! (If you’ve read the books, you know what I mean.)

Now comes news that animal-human embryos have been created in secret, apparently for several years. (See the link, below). While the cries from ethicists and the public are a rising crescendo, and probably overstated once you understand all the facts, the hybridization concept raises an interesting personal question. If I was a hybrid, what would I want to be?

Without a doubt, being a human with wings, with the ability of flight, would be my number one choice. Of course, that does bring some hazards; collisions with aircraft being foremost. I don’t think being ingested by the engine of a passenger jet would be a fun way to go. Or being sucked into the updrafts of a potent thunderstorm and spit out, frozen, unable to fly, at the top of the storm 43,000 feet up. That would be a long fall for a bird-human ice-cube.

And of course you have the ever aggressive hunters and cryptozoologists anxious to get a piece, or more, of you. But if you’ve read any of the Maximum Ride series, you’re familiar with those human threats. It’s always the humans who seem to be the meanest and most determined.

Moving from the avian world to the aquatic, there are lots of options. But I think foremost would be my choice to be a top predator. After all, big fish eat little fish, so who wants to be a little fish?

Dolphins rank right up there in predatory prowess, although they’re not a fish, but a mammal. And they’re cute and smart. No one wants to be even part of a dumb, ugly animal.

For land animals, polar bears are undoubtedly the coolest predator, in an emotional temper sort of way. They don’t seem to fear anything, certainly not humans, who they consider dinner. But they never get to migrate to the tropics for vacation, so I consider that to be a real negative for any potential hybridization. And besides, their favorite food, seals, are cute, especially the baby ones. What humans, even part humans, would want to eat cute food?

Of course, I suppose if you’re hungry enough …

I think it is easier to think of being all animal than to think of being an animal with human traits like intelligence, speech, artistic and scientific creativity. Nevertheless, Planet of the Apes provided one well-known artistic example of that possibility. Another is a muscular, arguably intelligent walking frog, as seen here, borrowed from a now-obscure internet site (meaning I can’t find where it came from*). You’ll read more about such creatures in Children of the Middle Waters, when that book becomes available.

One unfortunate consequence of being an animal is that most animals are short-lived. There are exceptions of course, like the tortoise, but the 100-year or so life span of a tortoise must seem to drag on forever for them.

Certainly a long life span offers some advantages, like the odd mixture of mirth and despair we get from watching our fellow humans repeat the same mistakes over and over. For me, I think the blessed part of it is watching the generations of our offspring growing up and generating offspring of their own.

The more I think about the choices for being part animal, the more I think about what it is to be human; all human. As I ponder that thought, I keep returning to the simple fact that, to me at least, being human means we are able to love our spouses and children and parents with a pure unadulterated, non-judgmental,  joy; sort of like a dog welcoming its master home.

Well, actually, maybe we’re not so different from some animals after all!

In case you missed it, the news of the human-animal hybridization efforts was cited at the following link, and elsewhere

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2017818/Embryos-involving-genes-animals-mixed-humans-produced-secretively-past-years.html

*My apologies if you created the walking frog drawing. Send me your information and I’ll give you proper credit. Same thing for the other graphics which I believe to be in the public domain.

How to Teach Ice Diving When the Arctic Is Melting

In 2007 Michael Lang of the Smithsonian Institution’s Scientific Diving Program sponsored a spring-time ice diving course in the high Arctic at Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, in an area generally called Spitzbergen.

Ny-Ålesund, an international Arctic research town situated at 78°56’N, 11°56’E, is the most northern continuously operated community. It sits on the shore of a fjord called Kongsfjorden. In the springtime, the sea ice on the Kongsfjorden is usually several feet thick, providing an inviting platform for ice-diving operations.

North Pole Hotel, Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard

However, during the last decade the sea ice has been becoming thinner and sparser. By the time we arrived, there was virtually no ice on the fjord. The closest ice source was a glacier over two miles away. With no ice, polar bears could not capture their ringed seal prey, and were thus hungry, leading undoubtedly to the polar bear encounter described in an earlier posting (April 12).

It also left the course instructors, and I was once of them, in a quandary. It was expensive transporting diving scientists to the high Arctic to learn ice diving operations, and there was no ice to be seen. It appeared to us that the Arctic really was melting, surprisingly early in this case.

Although we had a few frigid days during our week-long stay, frigid enough to remind us we were close to the North Pole, one memorable day was almost balmy, reaching 0° C (32° F). Looking out over the fjord I saw mini-icebergs, recently calved by the rapidly melting glacier a few miles away.

Mini-icebergs, born on an unusually warm day

The word went out to launch all divers.

Dry land and underwater cameras, and high-definition video were working overtime to record the encounters between divers and ice. The result was some striking photos of delicately scalloped floating ice, with divers getting into the frames — just to prove they were indeed “ice-divers.” Unfortunately, that was not the type of experience that had been planned for those scientists.

Transparent glacial ice

As you might imagine, the water in the fjord was still bitterly cold, so the part of the course designed to teach about human and equipment survival in cold water was fully accomplished.

However, due to the growing sparseness and unreliability of the Arctic sea ice cover, the Smithsonian Diving Program has now moved its training and testing operations to McMurdo Station, Antarctica (see April 11 and May 26th posting). There, at least for the time being, lies plenty of thick sea ice covering the Ross Sea during the austral springtime.

I had not been impressed by the global warming rhetoric before I traveled to the Arctic. However, having seen the consequences first hand, at least in the far North, I get the strong impression that there are undeniable local climate changes occurring. Whether it is a truly global change, and whether man is somehow responsible, is an area of speculation that I will not venture into.

Only time will tell.

Why Deep Saturation Diving Is Like Going to the Moon, and Beyond

This week, as the Space Shuttle is making its last circuits around our planet, I lament what has happened to our space program. Yet, I am reminded of another exploration program that has, like the shuttle and the moon programs, reached incredible milestones only to retreat to a less exotic but still impressive status. That other program is experimental, deep saturation diving.

I have been privileged to conduct human physiological research on several deep saturation dives, one being a record-breaking U.S. Navy dive at the Navy Experimental Diving Unit (NEDU) in 1977 to a pressure equivalent to that found at 1500 feet sea water (fsw), or 460 msw*, and on a 450 msw (1470 fsw) dive at the GUSI diving facility at the GKSS Institute in Geesthacht, Germany in 1990. For perspective, the safe SCUBA diving depth is considered to be 130 fsw, although technical and cave divers often descend deeper, to 300 fsw or so.

NEDU, Panama City, FL

Dives in hyperbaric chambers like at GUSI and NEDU are simulated; the divers don’t actually go anywhere. But the effects of the high pressure on the divers’ bodies are just as they would be in the ocean. Of course, even in simulated dives, divers wear Underwater Breathing Apparatus, and descend into water contained within the hyperbaric complex.

In 1979, NEDU again set the U.S. Navy record for deep diving to 1800 fsw (551 msw). At Duke University in 1981, the U.S. record for pressure exposure was set by three saturation divers inside an eight-foot diameter sphere. The internal pressure was 2250 fsw (686 msw). One of those divers went on to become the senior medical officer at NEDU, none the worse for his high pressure exposure.

The French company Comex, of Marseille used an experimental gas mixture of hydrogen-helium-oxygen to reach 675 msw, before being forced back to 650 msw due to physical and physiological problems with the divers. However, like teams attempting the summit of Mount Everest, one diver from the dive team was pressed to a world record of 701 msw (2290 fsw), just squeaking past the U.S. record.

There is a poorly understood physiological barrier called the High Pressure Nervous Syndrome (HPNS) that limits our penetration to ever deeper depths. In spite of the use of increasingly exotic gas mixtures, helium-oxygen in the U.S. Navy, helium-nitrogen-oxygen at Duke University, and hydrogen-helium-oxygen at Comex, all attempts to dive deeper have, to date, been rebuffed.

Just as I had thought as a young man that trips to the moon would be common-place by now, I had also assumed diving to 3000 feet would be routine. But it is not.

In my early research days I was interested in the effects on organisms of very high pressure, 5000 psi, which is equivalent to a depth of over 11,000 feet (3430 meters). We now know those effects can be profound, altering the very structure of cell membranes. Reversing those effects while maintaining high pressure, at great depth, is a daunting scientific task. We don’t yet know how to do it.

What we do know is that reaching 1500 feet can be done without too much difficulty. In the 1980s it became almost routine to dive to 1000 feet at both the Naval Medical Research Institute (Bethesda) and NEDU. Deep saturation diving is a thriving business in the oil fields of the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea.

Click for a larger image.

But as for the similarity between deep saturation diving and NASA’s moon missions, in the Apollo program it took slightly over three days to get to the moon, and almost an equal time to return. But as the above dive profile shows, it took sixteen days to reach the maximum depth of 1500 fsw, and seventeen days to safely return. Over that period of time astronauts would have whizzed past the moon and been well on their way to Mars. Unlike spacecraft and astronauts, divers must slow their descent to avoid HPNS, and must slow their return to the surface to avoid debilitating and painful decompression sickness. Diving without submarines or armored suits is very much a demanding, physical stress.

Politically, exceeding our current depth limits of approximately 2000 feet is akin to returning to the moon, and going beyond. We could do it, but at what cost? Should we? Will it ever be a national priority?

Maybe not for the United States, but I have a suspicion that other countries, perhaps not as heavily committed to space as we, will find the allure of beating current diving records irresistible. If there are medical or pharmacological interventions developed for getting divers safely and productively down to 3000 feet, then that would be a scientific achievement comparable to sending men to Mars.

*[The feet to meters conversion is slightly different from the feet of sea water to meters of sea water conversion. The latter represents pressure, not depth, and therefore includes a correction factor for the density of sea water.]

Searching for Native American Roots

A few years ago I sat next to a half Native American woman at a family Thanksgiving dinner. Among our conversation topics was reincarnation; she believed in it, strongly. That interested me enough to do a little research, whereupon I discovered a book called  “Amerindian Rebirth: Reincarnation Belief Among North American Indians and Inuit.” It was published in 1994 by the University of Toronto Press, edited by two anthropologists, Antonia Mills and Richard Slobodin.

I had no idea that American Indians ever believed in reincarnation.

Shortly after that discovery, I began work on the manuscript for a science fiction novel that includes segments on the Osage Tribe in Oklahoma. The Osage were originally from the Missouri River valley, later “relocated” to Oklahoma, close to the location of the Cherokee Nation.

One of my first discoveries on the Internet was a set of historic photos in various archives. Two of them, immediately below, struck me as being particularly noteworthy.

Click for a larger image.
Click for a larger image.

The first photo of a young Osage mother with a child (pappoose) on her back continues to hold my attention. Although the mother is only in profile, the way her baby is looking toward the photographer is particularly fetching.

As I studied the mother’s face, I realized that she had what I perceived to be, in my ignorance, a European appearance. Her cheekbones were high, her nose appeared slim and her face looked silky smooth, showing none of the effects of the rigorous native lifestyle I would have expected. Her skin tone, her clothing, and the manner in which she carried her child were the only signs that identified her as Osage. Her overall appearance was one of lustrous youth. The second photo also showed a young mother; and I would guess the ages of both girls as no more than sixteen.

As I write this, I remember that I used to call my two young children “pappoosem”. I don’t know why, but it was obviously a term of endearment.

A Cherokee in Osage Country

My interest in the Osage compelled me to travel last year to Pawhuska, OK, the seat of the Osage Nation. My only disappointment was that there appeared to be no Osage in town, at least on the weekend.

The Osage aren’t mentioned in “Amerindian Rebirth”, but many closely located tribes are, like the Ponca, even the Seminole. They’re both tribes on reservations near the Osage Nation, although presumably they’re not closely related, genetically. And to be fair, once the Tribes became Christians, many of their former beliefs became hidden.

Now, as my family of descendents is enlarging, my daughter and I are searching for possible Native American relatives. Both my granddaughters are reputed to have relatively close genetic ties to various tribes, one being Cherokee, and the other from an unknown tribe from the North.

Even my wife’s family has an oral tradition, on the female side, of a Georgian who married a Cherokee Princess. I am dubious of that claim, since my genealogical research has so far turned up nothing. And besides, I suspect Cherokee Princesses were few and far between back in the 1700s, when my wife’s relatives were in contact with the Cherokee.

But we’re still looking.