Note:
I’ve written a number of stories concerning the Imax film,
Coral Reef Adventure. Now approaching the one year anniversary
of the film’s theater debut, I’ve decided to revisit
the reefs of Mount Mutiny one last time. This version of the
story was published in National Wildlife Magazine April, 2003.
The Final Coral Reef Adventure
Howard Hall
©Howard
Hall |
The reef was named Mount Mutiny
after the infamous command of Captain William Bligh. Set adrift
in a launch by mutineers of the sailing vessel Bounty, Bligh
sailed past this reef as he navigated between the two main
Fijian Islands of Viti Levu and Vanua Levu, a passage now
known as Bligh Waters. Mount Mutiny was roughly circular in
shape and small, approximately two hundred yards in diameter,
and it rose to within a few feet of the ocean surface. Viewed
from the deck of the motor vessel, Undersea Hunter, it looked
like an indistinct mosaic of iridescent gold and turquoise
colors surrounded by a placid sea of indigo blue. In all ways
Mount Mutiny appeared to be just another exceptionally beautiful
Fijian coral reef. But Mount Mutiny had other exceptional
qualities besides its beauty.
Before mooring the Undersea Hunter
to the top of Mount Mutiny, we circumnavigated the reef, passing
as close to the coral as possible. Our captain, Yossy Naaman,
struggled to avoid scraping the hull against the reef’s
jagged edge, as we watched the display on the digital depth
sounder. Although able to sense the ocean floor in over one
thousand feet of water, the display was blank. All the way
around the reef, the depth sounder could sense no bottom.
It seemed impossible. This tiny reef was shaped like a needle
thrust up from the ocean floor. If somehow removed from the
depths and placed on land, it would be a narrow spire taller
than the world’s highest skyscrapers. Just as Undersea
Hunter nearly completed her survey, the depth sounder momentarily
recorded a ledge at 350 feet before once again reading only
bottomless abyss. Yossy threw Undersea Hunter into reverse.
We had found our dive site.
A few hours later I rocked gently
in the dive skiff watching the numbers on my digital dive
watch tick by. A label on the watch face boasted a test depth
of 100 meters. Well, we’ll see, I thought. Good thing
the watch only cost $35. We had given our safety divers a
five-minute head start. They would descend to one hundred
feet carrying two massive IMAX underwater cameras and an assortment
of scuba tanks filled with various mixtures of breathing gas.
Some of these extra tanks would be attached to a line draped
over the reef wall. The rest would be handed off to me and
my team, along with the IMAX cameras, as we passed the safety
divers during our descent.
My watch ticked over to display
five minutes. “Okay, guys,” I said. “Time
to go. Check your lists.” Richard Pyle, Bob Cranston,
Mark Thurlow, Dave Forsythe, and I glanced at the checklists
we wore on our left forearms and began powering up our life
support systems. Instead of standard scuba tanks, we wore
complicated electronically controlled devices called closed-circuit,
mixed-gas rebreathers; machines very similar to the life support
systems worn by astronauts. With the proper gases turned on
and the rebreather computers booted up, we verified with each
other that our checklists had been completed and one-by-one
began slipping over the side of the skiff.
Fijian coral reefs are among the
most beautiful in the world and Mount Mutiny is one of their
best. As we drifted down toward the edge of the reef, we passed
myriad colorful reef fish, several enormous sea anemones surrounded
by their anemonefish tenants, a pair of hawksbill turtles,
and an improbable artist’s pallet of colorful hard and
soft corals. It was spectacularly beautiful and Dave Forsythe
and Mark Thurlow, who were making their first visit to Fiji,
were hard pressed to imagine anything more breathtaking. But
as I took in these visual wonders, the experience was tempered
with a twinge of sadness. My baseline was different than Dave’s
or Mark’s. In preparation for making the MacGillivray
Freeman IMAX film, Coral Reef Adventure, my wife, Michele,
and I had scouted Fiji’s reefs in April of 2000. The
reefs were much different then.
By the spring of 2000, history’s
most severe El Nino episode had released its death grip on
the Eastern Pacific. Many of the Pacific’s most beautiful
coral reefs had been severely damaged by El Nino’s tepid
waters. But Fiji seemed to have been spared. Then as the millennium
came, El Nino was followed by its evil twin sister the La
Nina current and the waters around Fiji began to change. La
Nina brought colder than normal waters to many areas of the
Eastern Pacific. But to the waters surrounding Fiji, La Nina
brought heat.
As water temperatures surrounding
Fiji’s coral reefs soared past 86 degrees Fahrenheit,
the algae that lived symbiotically within transparent coral
tissues and supplied coral animals with energy, began to leave
their hosts. Vast expanses of hard coral gardens turned ivory
white. It’s called bleaching and, ironically, it was
awesomely beautiful. Michele and I were dazzled as we swam
above the reefs that spring. Normally brown coral structures,
now white as bone, branched out in stark contrast to surrounding
bouquets of pink, purple, and yellow soft corals. In the spring
of 2000, many of Fiji’s reefs were bleaching with heartbreaking
beauty. But the true heartbreak came later when we returned
to Fiji the following November to begin actual IMAX filming
for Coral Reef Adventure. By then, the bleached coral had
died. What remained of those hard corals that had bleached
were dusty gray skeletons covered with brown algae.
For Mark and Dave, who had never been to
Fiji before, November’s dives revealed the most magnificent
coral reefs they had ever seen. For Michele and me, Fiji’s
reefs showed severe and saddening damage. There is a term
for the varied perspective from which people of different
experience or different generations view wilderness. It’s
called “shifting baseline syndrome.” Those of
us who have experienced a wilderness over a ten-year period
equate our first experience to what appears to be pristine
wilderness. Ten years later we can almost always bare witness
to environmental decay. Those who visit the same damaged wild
place for the first time today, whether a coral reef or a
rainforest, have no memory of past splendor and so find a
paradise of amazing beauty and dazzling diversity. They can’t
imagine it more so. This then becomes their pristine wilderness,
their baseline. For each new generation, the baseline tends
to shift, tempering our awareness of environmental decay.
The coral bleaching episode experienced
by Fijian reefs during the 2000 La Nina is being repeated with
increasing frequency on coral reefs around the world. This year
the Great Barrier Reef is experiencing the worst bleaching epidemic
in its known history. There is no question that coral reefs
are in decline worldwide. Today, twenty-five percent of the
planet’s coral reefs have been destroyed. Of the reefs
that remain, many scientists believe half or more may die during
the next thirty years. Certainly global warming contributes
to the increasing water temperatures that seem to cause coral
bleaching. But bleaching alone cannot account for the dramatic
loss of coral reefs worldwide. Reef building corals are being
crushed under multiple layers of environmental change, most
of which are man-made. Coastal development and deforestation
chokes rivers with silt that spill into the ocean to smother
reefs. Over-fishing disrupts the ecologic balance on reefs,
decimating populations of species that keep reefs healthy, especially
species that clean reefs by removing algae from reef surfaces.
Pollution poisons reef-building corals or promotes algal blooms
that overwhelm them. There is even evidence that deforestation
in Africa has resulted in dust storms that sweep algal and bacterial
spores high into the atmosphere to later settle on coral reefs
thousands of miles away causing epidemics of coral disease.
Just when it seems corals might recover from one impact, another
layer of environmental degradation crushes down on the reef.
At one hundred feet we joined our safety divers
on a small six-foot wide ledge that jutted out from the reef
wall like a window ledge on a tall building. Our first task
was to adjust the breathing gases in our rebreathers. I reached
down next to my left hip and turned off the valve supplying
air to the breathing circuit. Then, moving my hand a few inches
by feel, I switched on another valve that would allow helium
to be injected into the breathing mixture for the rest of the
descent. By the time we had descended to 350 feet, our rebreathers
would be supplying us with a gas mixture that would prove fatal
if breathed on the surface. In contrast, the air we breathe
at the surface would cause debilitating narcosis, convulsions,
and death if breathed at 350 feet.
©Michele
Hall |
After switching gas supplies in
our rebreathers and verifying that each member of our deep
team had made the switch, Bob and I accepted the IMAX cameras
from our safety divers. Both cameras were neutrally buoyant,
weighing nothing underwater. But moving such large and massive
systems against even the mildest ocean current could prove
an enormous struggle. Any physical exertion is extremely dangerous
while breathing exotic gases in deep water. Above the surface,
my IMAX Mark II camera system weighed over 300 pounds. Bob’s
camera was smaller, weighing about 150 pounds. Both were fitted
with air tanks and a pressure regulator that allowed compressed
air to be pumped into the housings during descent. Without
the added compressed air, both housings would crush like paper
cups below 200 feet. Next, the safety divers passed Mark Thurlow
and Dave Forsythe large emergency tanks of breathing gas.
Richard, Bob, and I already had emergency tanks clipped off
to our harnesses. The stop at one hundred feet took just over
sixty seconds and soon our team was poised at the edge, ready
to slip over the side and begin a slow freefall that would
take us another two hundred and fifty feet straight down and
to a place not before seen by humans.
I stood on the ledge and looked
down into the clear, dark, blue-black water. I could see no
outcropping, no shelf, no feature extending from the shear
wall that separated us from the abyss below. I hoped the Undersea
Hunter’s depth sounder had not recorded a school of
fish at 350 feet instead of a narrow ledge. I pushed the button
on my underwater microphone and said, “Okay, guys. Let’s
go.” Then I stepped off the ledge and began to fall.
The descent was like skydiving in slow motion.
We fell in formation each concentrating on an array of instruments;
depth, oxygen partial pressure, rebreather function status,
and gas supply. Soon I could see a blue shadow below. We had
found the ledge.
We landed on a level shelf about
thirty feet wide. At the edge of the shelf was a forty-five
degree slope that descended another twenty or thirty feet.
Then the reef wall became shear once again. I knelt on the
bottom and took irregular deep breaths. My hands were shaking.
I had helium jitters. The rapid compression of helium into
nervous tissue often has this disquieting effect. But I knew
that after a couple minutes it would pass. I used this time
to look around. I had landed next to an enormous sea fan,
more than six feet high, that looked pink under my dive light.
At the base of the sea fan there was a large branching growth
of ivory-white lace coral. The lace coral’s color was
not the result of coral bleaching. At this depth there is
not enough light for symbiotic algae to convert sunlight into
energy for corals. Instead, lace corals survive by capturing
plankton with hair-like stinging tentacles they extend into
the current. Neither the gorgonian nor the lace coral was
of a kind I had seen before. Indeed, as I looked around, all
of the corals appeared strange and unfamiliar.
The fish were strange too. In
the twilight of the deep reef I had trouble seeing their shapes
distinctly. When I shinned my light on a fish, I’d spy
a quick dance of color before it streaked for shelter. I recognized
very few of the fish I saw. Could so many of these be undiscovered
species? When my breathing had returned to normal and I had
rechecked all my instruments, I powered up the IMAX camera
and began moving down the slope toward Richard.
Richard already had his hand nets
out and was in hot pursuit of a fish while I was still recovering
from the jitters. He descended following his prey to the reef’s
edge at the bottom of the slope before the fish eluded him
by going over the edge. For a moment he seemed to consider
swimming over the edge to follow. Then, he turned, glanced
at me, and immediately set off after another fish he spotted
next to a huge boulder further up the slope. I checked my
instruments once more. My depth gauge read 365 feet.
Bob Cranston moved to the top
of the boulder to get a shot looking down on our group as
Richard pursued fish. Mark and Dave hovered nearby illuminating
Richard with their lights and ready to take a camera or pass
a bailout tank if something went wrong. Richard Pyle was in
fish nerd heaven. Next to the large boulder he had found an
ichthyologist’s El Dorado. Within minutes he had captured
a half dozen fish, some almost certainly new species. Each
time a fish went into the collection bottle, Richard would
look up, point at another fish swimming nearby, and yell through
his rebreather mouthpiece. It was impossible to understand
what Richard was saying, but it was obvious he was seeing
one exciting new species after another. I positioned myself
next to the boulder, focused the IMAX camera, and prepared
to punch the “run” switch. This was the moment
of truth. At best, I could expose three minutes of film before
the camera magazine was empty. Bob could expose another 90
seconds with his camera. At worst, both Bob’s and my
cameras would jam leaving us with three hours of decompression
before surfacing and another day of film production lost with
nothing to show for it. On more than half of the twenty-one
deep dives we made for Coral Reef Adventure, the high density
of compressed gas within the pressurized IMAX housings caused
one or both of our IMAX cameras to fail.
I punched the “run”
switch and was delighted to hear the camera ramp-up to running
speed. Richard had already selected his next target but waited
until he heard the camera running before moving in with his
net. A brilliant eight-inch long purple and yellow fish hovered
above a small sea fan. It was like nothing I had seen before.
In fact, it was like nothing anyone had ever seen before.
Richard swooped in with his net and missed. But the fish dashed
up away from the reef instead of down. Richard’s second
sweep with the net was successful. He was enormously excited
as he held the captured fish up to show me and the camera.
Through his mouthpiece he was yelling, “It’s new,
it’s new!” Then, as if choreographed by a Hollywood
director, three enormous hammerhead sharks passed overhead,
their pale underbellies easily illuminated by the glow of
Dave’s and Mark’s hand lights. I looked up at
Bob and he gave me a thumb’s-up. Surprisingly, his camera
had run flawlessly as well.
After thirty minutes on the bottom, it took
our team over three hours to ascend. During the ascent we
stopped at prescribed intervals to allow nitrogen and helium
to gradually leave our body tissues following a schedule that
would prevent decompression sickness or “the bends.”
Richard also used this time to relieve pressure from the swim
bladders of his captives with a tiny hypodermic needle. With
luck, many of these prizes would be alive when they reached
the aquariums at the Bishop Museum in Hawaii.
The long three-hour ascent gave
us all an opportunity to review the short time we had spent
in “the twilight zone.” Each of us did our best
to burn what we had seen into memory. At depths below 250
feet, virtually all coral reefs are unexplored. Richard Pyle
believes more than 2,000 species of fish remain to be identified
on the deep reefs of the tropical Pacific. As the health of
the world’s coral reefs decline, he finds himself in
a desperate race to identify as many of these species as possible.
According to Richard, “It’s an even greater tragedy
when an undiscovered species becomes extinct. Not only did
we never know it even existed in the first place, but we never
learn the critical way it contributed to the reef’s
ecosystem.” Recognizing that most of the world’s
remaining coral reefs could be gone within our lifetime, Michele
and I feel a similar urgency to capture the splendor of coral
reefs on film. Contributing to MacGillivray Freeman’s
IMAX film, Coral Reef Adventure, has been a wonderful opportunity
to do that in the highest image resolution possible.
|
Writings
By Howard and Michele