From the Lower Depths

After World War II, the people of Denmark, cooped up by the Nazi occupation for four years, felt an urge to explore the world, even if only vicariously. A Danish Expedition Fund was set up, but it had no funds. Then Oceanographer Anton F. Bruun had a bright idea. He persuaded the government to waive import taxes on scarce luxury goods sent to the Expedition Fund by overseas Danes. A hint to overseas Danes was enough. Back came a flood of canned pineapple, coconuts, cigarettes, honey. The gifts sold for $600,000 and paid for equipping the Galathea, an oceanographic research ship.

Last week the Galathea, bossed by Bruun, put into San Francisco after 18 months at sea. Her scientists had explored the least known places still left on earth: the "deeps" in the bottoms of the oceans.

Other expeditions had sounded the deeps and found that the deepest one, the Philippine Trench off the east coast of Mindanao, lies more than six miles beneath the surface of the sea. But no one had brought up samples from the deeps. Many scientists thought that their dark, cold water could support no life.

Blind Seafood. The Galathea dragged the deepest deeps, using a tapering, one-piece steel cable 36,000 feet long. Up from the depths came mussels, worms, sea cucumbers and crustaceans. All were small, blind, and dead when they reached the surface, but they were proof that life can colonize even the hostile deeps.

Not all finds from the depths were dead when they reached the Galathea. In charge of Dr. Claude E. ZoBell of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at La Jolla, Calif. were strong steel cylinders specially designed to take samples of bottom ooze and bring them to the surface without change of pressure. Up to the Galathea in these pressurized elevators came bottom-living bacteria, which Dr. ZoBell plans to culture and study in special, pressurized test tubes.

Deep Life-Chain. What supports life six miles below the sunlight? Dr. Bruun thinks he has at least a preliminary answer. Down from the surface water, he says, drops a nourishing rain of dead and dying creatures that grew in the life-giving sunlight. They are eaten over & over by hungry, blind creatures below. But always something remains: excrement of excrement and tough organic matter that only bacteria would appreciate.

When this worked-over refuse finally settles on the bottom, the humble bacteria accept it gladly, and a new chain of life begins. The bacteria are eaten by larger creatures, and these by still larger ones. The mollusks and worms are preyed on by small, fierce crustaceans, the lions and tigers of the bottom depths.

The Galathea took, in all, about 16,000 specimens ranging from bottom ooze to a young sea elephant, captured on Campbell Island near New Zealand. This specimen has been named Sir Anton after Dr. Bruun. He eats ten pounds of fish a day, lives in the officers' bathroom, and has just recovered from bronchitis.

One much-desired specimen eluded the Galathea. In 1930, while on the research ship Dana, Dr. Bruun caught a larval eel six feet long, which is now at a Copenhagen museum. The larvae of ordinary eels are fragile, transparent things three to four inches long, but when they grow up they reach four feet. Dr. Bruun's larva by analogy should grow up into a monster more than 100 feet long.

For 22 years Dr. Bruun, like Captain Ahab pursuing Moby Dick, has been on the trail of such a monster eel. He thinks that the Galathea did not search in the right places. The deeps are too poor in food to support large creatures. On some future expedition he hopes to comb the more promising waters of the continental slopes, and perhaps latch on to a grown-up eel as big as the legendary sea serpent.

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