The Titanic and Beyond: Lessons From the Deep Ocean

     On the eve of the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, three hundred  people crowded into a school auditorium in Portland, Maine to learn from the exploration of this century-old ship resting on the seafloor.   The human stories were quietly told in the images shown by deep-sea explorer, David Gallo:  coffee cups and teapots half-buried in sediment, a single shoe and a bowler hat being slowly reclaimed by the sea.   The book unfinished, the telegram never sent and the suitcase unopened – fragments of the many lives which ended on that fateful night.

Dr. David Gallo of WHOI. Photo courtesy of

Elisabeth Caren (NY Times, 14 Feb 2011).

     And if a picture could tell a thousand words, Dr. Gallo could tell a thousand more.

     Gallo spun a tale of ocean life so amazing you thought it was the first time you had heard of animals living in utter blackness and around ocean vents so hot that surface life would be boiled alive.  Chemical seeps so toxic that we would classify them as hazardous waste – yet colonies of life survive and thrive around them. He showed us creatures virtually disappear in seconds before our eyes – all by camouflaging themselves into the rocks and the corals of the seafloor around them.   This former shoe salesman turned scientist could - as they say back where Gallo grew up – talk a dog off a meat wagon, and leave him begging for more.
 

Gallo, a native son of the Finger Lakes, discovered things beneath the sea that we terrestrial types cannot begin to imagine: undersea lakes made up of a dense, salty brine that is as different to the ocean currents flowing over them as freshwater lakes are to the air currents blowing above them.  These unfathomable underwater lakes have shores lined with mussel beds so vast that if Molly Malone could have harvested them – she would have lived like a queen in Dublin's fair city - singing cockles and mussels alive, alive ho.

Dr. Gallo took his audience from the depths of the ocean bed to her peaks - mountain ranges so high and so long they’d make the stark, towering Himalayas look like the worn, gentle Catskills.  He took us out to space and had us look at our planet from a distance, as the men of Apollo first saw it four decades ago - the first time we became aware that indeed, planet Earth should have been called planet Ocean. 

Then, Gallo reminded us of the connection. One he never thought about out as he played on the shores of Owasco Lake in Auburn, New York.   One we forget every day as we call the lawn guy, pour our coffee in the sink, jump in the car and watch another plastic bag blow down the street.  Nearly everything we do on land: ends up in the ocean, affects the ocean or changes it - forever.   Dr. Gallo ended with a quote as simple and profound as his lecture:

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

~ Marcel Proust

Susan Ryan is the President of the Gulf of Maine Marine Education Association, a co-sponsor of this event. Susan served as the Gulf of Maine Outreach Liaison for the Census of Marine Life from 2003-2010. She lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine with her husband, two children and one betta fish.

The public lecture by Dr. Gallo, “The Titanic and Beyond: Lessons from the Deep Ocean” was presented at Waynflete School in Portland, Maine on March 29, 2011.  Dr. Gallo is the Director of Special Projects of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.  The Titanic, built in 1911, struck an iceberg the evening of April 14^th, and sunk early on April 15, 1912. The ship was discovered by Dr. Robert Ballard of WHOI and crew on Sep. 1, 1985.