Talk to Abyssal Detective Bill Ryan
During a career that began at Columbia University in the early 1960s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatorymarine geologist William BF Ryan Countless mysteries of the deep sea have been delved into. Early on, he pioneered sonar equipment that allowed scientists to see previously undiscovered small but important features of the seabed. On dozens of research cruises, he explored undersea plains, canyons and volcanoes, and came up with some bold and sometimes controversial ideas.his book Noah’s flood, proving that the biblical flood is based on real events.He has also searched for shipwrecks, including Titanic. Among his many honors, he was recently elected to the Accademia Nazional dei Lincei in Italy, which counts Galileo Galilei as one of its original members.
I recently talked to Ryan about the ocean, his life and his thoughts.
What drew you to marine geology?
Just before I graduated from college in 1961, based on my experience in electronics and physics, I got a job at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. During my five-month expedition across the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, I took with me a recent publication, ocean floor go through [Lamont-Doherty scientists] Bruce Heezen, Marie Tharp and Maurice Ewing for my introduction to marine geology.
Seasickness bothers me, but I can dissipate in the excitement of standing every day and my fascination with the graphic recorder that shows the depth of the seabed through echo sounding. Our arrival at the edge of the Gulf Stream was announced by a string of thermistors towed behind the boat, reaching 500 feet below the surface. They showed us that the Gulf Stream is not a uniformly warm river, but has complex characteristics, suggesting that it may be more like a vortex, similar to where people drop flies for trout, just much larger .
As the continent rose, I watched a recording of the radio signal from the sonobuoy I helped build, while it heard a TNT blast from the stern of the boat. The sound waves indicated that the sediment was nearly 10,000 feet thick. The accumulation of sediment must take a long time.
A few days later, we reached the abyssal plain. I was surprised by the flatness.in the whole process [about 50 nautical miles], the depth has only increased by a seek or two. The sediment here is about 3,000 feet thick. Further on, presumably the protrusions of the bedrock begin to appear. Then more and more until we reach the end of the abyssal plain, to the rugged flank of the mid-ocean ridge. The sediment thickness is now only a few hundred feet thick.
The plan for the expedition was for us to stop in a valley placed along the top of the mid-ocean ridge on Tharp’s map. The mission there is to measure the heat flowing upwards from the Earth’s interior. But the instruments we sent to the bottom kept bending and tearing. Decided to send the next camera. Upon returning, I was asked to take it into the small darkroom on the boat, unload and process 50 feet of 35mm film. I found an enlarger and started printing. What catches the eye are corrugated pillows and tubes of volcanic lava. No sediment. I made more and more photos, illuminating the narrow path the camera traversed in 20 minutes just a few feet from the seabed. Late that night, I laid out on my lab table a mosaic that I had made by cutting and pasting continuous enlargements.
What impresses me is that the seafloor age is zero at the axis of the mid-Sap Ridge. As we move away from the edge of North America, the reduction in sediment thickness means that the bedrock of the Atlantic seafloor is also getting younger and younger, with the newest seafloor at the center of the ocean. Its birth is captured on film. For budding geologists, it’s evidence of ocean impermanence.
Earlier, you argued that millions of years ago, the Mediterranean Sea dried up and turned into a desert. Then it became the sea again due to the influx of Atlantic water from the Strait of Gibraltar. Was this considered crazy at the time?
After finishing my Ph.D. In 1969, I was invited with European scientists to plan a deep-sea drilling to sample the thick sediment carpet of the Mediterranean. To my surprise, at the age of 30, I was selected as co-chief scientist with Kenneth Hsu of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
At our first drilling site, we encountered thick layers of gravel 500 feet below the seabed and 7,000 feet below the surface. The drill string was stuck and took 6 hours to unravel. Gravel-filled buckets were brought into the ship’s laboratory. I sifted through the debris all night and found that most of it was the kind of shiny gypsum crystals that had settled on the evaporating salt flats. Also, shells of mollusks that once lived in freshwater lakes.
As we neared the end of our expedition, we found the kind of salt we could walk in Death Valley. But here, it’s more than 10,000 feet below the surface. Ken was the first to ask, “Do you think the Mediterranean has ever dried up?” Under the microscope, we stumbled upon cracks in the silt layer sandwiched between the salt layers, with all the characteristics of cracks that appear in mud that dries up after a heavy rain.Articles we publish in journals nature Created the initial incredible vortex. Although our hypothesis is widely accepted today, there are still voices to criticize.
Later, you came up with a The situation in the Black Sea is similar. It was once a freshwater lake separated from the Mediterranean Sea by a natural dam that spanned the narrow Bosphorus that is now Turkey. The dam burst and the Mediterranean flooded in. The people who lived there at the time handed down the story and translated it into the biblical flood.
The evidence is quite different from the Mediterranean. Working with Russian colleagues on their research vessel, we recovered the shells of freshwater clams and mussels that once lived on ancient coastlines far from what is now the Black Sea coast. These past shorelines now lie beneath younger sediments, more than 300 feet above the surface of today’s Black Sea. The shells were located directly below the seawater specimens, and this transition occurred in more than 20 locations. This can only be explained by the sudden introduction of salt water from the Bosphorus. At that time the sea level of the Mediterranean Sea was much higher than the lakes below, which meant that sea water would arrive in flood form.
The carbon 14 date we found in the first saltwater clam was 7,550 years ago. When my co-conspirator Walter Pittman asked, “Is anyone there?” we knew right away that we were going to have to turn to archaeology. T. Douglass Price has just published an article in which he writes: “The explosion of expansion across Europe reflects the colonization resulting from the expansion of agricultural Dating to figure it out.” His date was the same as ours. The anthropologist Joachim Berg then used DNA from the bones of Europe’s first farmers to deduce that they arrived suddenly about 7,500 years ago and spread from Anatolia to France within a few centuries.
In the 1980s, you made a deal to find the wreck of a shipwreck Titanic. You’re close – but no cigar! That’s Robert Ballard. Do you have any regrets?
On my way to explore the Galapagos Islands, I was delayed at JFK.i bought one New York Times And read that Texas oilman Jack Green is planning to find TitanicWith nothing to do, I wrote him a postcard advising him to contact Fred Spies of Scripps Institution of Oceanography. A month later, I went back to the office to find a flood of phone messages from Green. Scripps was already working on other things, so he asked if I could assemble the necessary equipment and lead the expedition.
A contract was signed with Columbia, and we set out in mid-July 1980 with a brand new digital side-looking sonar, deep-sea stills and cameras, six miles of steel streamers and a massive winch and crane. On August 7, 1980, at 10:20 pm, sonar imaged the hull as we now know it Titanic, leaning over to rest on the seabed at a depth of 12,400 feet. However, its apparent length is less than three-quarters the length of the Titanic. The discrepancy raised questions for Mr Green and his documentary crew. In addition, the target was 14 nautical miles from the distress location telegraphed before the sinking. After more than ten days of investigation around the distressed location, no other possible candidate targets were found.
On follow-up expeditions the following year, we spent all of our time in distress areas, to no avail. On the final day, we dragged the camera to the target on August 7 and collided with the large blade that some believed to be a boat screw. As the camera sled climbed the object, the video recorded a loud clanking sound, as if scraping steel.
In 1985, Bob Ballard of Woods Hole and Jean-Louis Michel of the French National Institute for Marine Sciences tried it. With no targets found around the distress location, they used the last days of a two-month effort to visit the outlying targets Green and Columbia had given them.they arrived from Titanic. A trail of coal led them to the severed bow section of the hull, covered in rust.
I have no regrets – Columbia found the wreck site. Without that precise location, subsequent searchers would never have ventured 14 miles from the distressed location.Then, without distraction Titanicthe same instruments we use continue to make numerous scientific discoveries in submarine canyons, mid-ocean ridges, volcanic seamounts, and huge debris flows on continental margins.
Human-induced climate change is warming the oceans and disrupting water chemistry. We are dumping pollutants and plastics. Fisheries are collapsing. Does this upset you?
Very.
What other unsolved mysteries are there about the ocean?
Its ability to store more heat, growing acidity, and changing cycles.
Most recently, you helped invent a series of applications that give the public easy access to a wide variety of imagery and data about the ocean floor. Why did you invent these?
When the long cables were hauling our instruments and cameras close to the seabed, we would call the officer on the bridge and tell him or her what speed we needed or which direction to change. That means inexperienced students and technicians, wearing flip flops and sometimes a scruffy exterior, are talking to professionals about navigating their boats. This worries me a lot. So I decided to write a piece of software called MapMaker that would display our real-time data on a video screen at the helm, so officers could make those decisions themselves and avoid collisions with other ships. After all, we’re blind in the ship’s lab.
Some software was integrated into now widely used seafloor mapping systems. My Lamont colleague Bill Haxby went on to create an application called GeoMapApp to display newly drawn seafloor maps on the Internet. Columbia’s Earth Observer and Polar Explorer apps, available for iPhone and iPad, show the world’s ocean floor and its changing climate to the general public. With a phone, you can literally own the world.
If you were to pursue another career, what would you choose?
Not even a dream!
What are you doing?
I went back to the Mediterranean. I just submitted a manuscript about its huge salt deposits. This summer, I was also invited to write a review for the 50th anniversary of the Mediterranean drought hypothesis.
