Amazing Disgrace Read Online Free PDF Page B

oceanography they were used to making do with a single converted Hull trawler towing a limited amount of often elderly equipment. This was a golden, never-to-be-repeated opportunity that the Good Fairies of Brussels had sent them, and they had gleefully designed experiments to take maximum advantage of it.
    Some people’s ideas of excitement seem designed expressly to astound the rest of us. My informants assured me that their most ambitious and enterprising scheme was to have all four ships abreast, working in pairs. One of each pair would tow a dozen streamers on the sea’s surface: thin polythene tubes up to four kilometres long with sensors embedded in them at regular intervals. The other ship would be towing a variety of air guns. These were heavy metal cylinders that produced detonations of compressed air at different depths and at various frequencies. The echoes of these sound waves from deep below the seabed would create a 3-D picture of the volcano’s roots. I was told that to appreciate how difficult it was I had to imagine four ships moving slowly abreast with a rigorously maintained distance between each, all towing four kilometres of streamersexactly parallel with one another so as to build up a seismological map with equal accuracy in all three dimensions. Apparently this is hard enough when going in a straight line but still harder when the ships reach the edge of the survey area and need to turn in order to come back and do a swathe in the reverse direction. They said it took these boats nearly thirty kilometres to turn safely and re-group at the end of each leg, which was why everyone in EAGIS was worried about time. Anything that added further delay to the difficulties of maintaining this balletic synchronization day and night might scupper the entire enterprise.
    For a fortnight luck was with them. According to those I interviewed no equipment malfunctioned, nobody goofed, the weather remained calm and blue. The Canaries are on much the same parallel as Kuwait and New Delhi, and even in the Atlantic in November it was hot on deck as the oddly shaped vessels steamed back and forth while the scientists watched the winches with their precious spools of streamers. Below decks they slept in shifts and stared at the banks of monitors in the labs as the streams of data came bouncing back from deep below the earth’s crust. Day after day the familiar bulk of Cumbre Vieja and the island of La Palma shifted from port to starboard as the ships turned and turned again, sailing their grid pattern with the precision of a military manoeuvre. And day after day the volcano’s even bigger undersea bulk slowly took shape on the laboratory plotters like a giant composite X-ray of a rotten tooth. Anyone other than a scientist would have been bored out of his skull.
    On the morning of the fifteenth day an alert Marine Mammal Observer aboard Scomar Seismic spotted a whale dead ahead. Regulations required that each ramform carry two of these MMOs who had the power to bring the survey to a halt in midleg if need be, and to order the immediate silencing of the air guns to avoid damaging the cetaceans’ hearing. Aboard survey vessels MMOs are generally about as popular with the scientists as the lollipop ladies who patrol street crossings outside schoolsare with commuters. Despite the beasts’ fearful halitosis most marine scientists feel a vague benevolence toward whales, just as many drivers do toward children. But the aura that surrounds MMOs and lollipop ladies, compounded of virtuousness and the smug certainty that any jury will find in their favour, can induce in those pushed for time a nearly irresistible urge to accelerate. This particular whale off La Palma brought the survey to a temporary halt. If the wretched animal could have received the blast of the combined ill-will of several hundred EAGIS scientists it would have shrivelled in an instant to the size of a herring. As it was, aborting the leg left incomplete a