Seven-Tenths Read Online Free PDF Page B

says. ‘When I first started in oceanography – and this is only about ten or fifteen years ago – you could still go where you liked to do your scientific cruises, just as they did in the last century. Nobody ever objected if a British survey vessel chose to do some sounding or coring 40 miles offshore. Nowadays if we want to do fieldwork inside somebody’s EEZ we have to apply to the Foreign Office, can you believe, to get permission on our behalf and like as not we’ll have to agree to take appropriate foreign observers on board. It’s a ridiculous hoo-ha.
    ‘It’s all about wealth, of course. Round here there are some huge fields of nodules that are potentially rich pickings. It’s up to us to locate them precisely. But here, for example,’ he points to a chart taped to the bulkhead, ‘south-east of where we are now, that’s the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone, famously rich in nodules. As you can see, it’s in the middle of the Pacific. It doesn’t fall into anybody’s EEZ. Yet in the early eighties President Reagan declared it to be an area in which the US would regulate all mineral mining licences. Incredible, when you stop to think about it. It’s not even US territory. Reagan’s argument was that there was a sort of power vacuum there and that someone had to supervise things otherwise there’d be all kinds of skulduggery. Pure altruism, you aren’t thinking. So the whole thing has now been pretty much carved up by about four consortiums. No skulduggery there, naturally. Now, the question we’re asking is, supposing somebody starts mining manganese nodules in an area like that and you come along wanting to do your bit of oceanography? Neither they nor you have an obvious legal claim. It’s international waters. But I somehow can’t see a deep sea mining outfit sitting idly by while a fully equipped research vessel heaves-to a mile away to do some close investigating of the field.’
    One afternoon I spend time in the dark room where Roger is making prints of the laser printer films of GLORIA scans. It is drudgery but needs constant vigilance. The contrast between the high technology outside in the lab and the low in the dark room ismarked indeed. The ancient printer is suspended on a wooden tray by four cords from the ceiling. The scale of the prints changes fractionally all the time and focusing is critical. The reason is the fundamental cartographer’s problem of how to represent a curved surface on a flat one. On the variant of the Mercator’s projection the Survey is using the latitude lines grow further apart the further north one goes. At the levels of accuracy required, the Farnella ’s slightest northward drift can make a difference.
    ‘It’s not for fun, all this,’ reminds Roger’s voice in the darkness. ‘It’s about potential megabucks. We’re likely to find nodules hereabouts. If so, somebody else will come along on a sampling trip to see what the quality’s like and they’ll want to be able to arrive at the precise point and drop a sonar buoy. And they’ll be doing it from our GLORIA scans. I know it’s a bore, fiddling about with the focus and scale and stuff, but I do quite like that it’s a tangible effect of ordinary physics. … Hey, you know the Forth Bridge? Well, its two towers are absolutely plumb vertical, but their tops are a centimetre further apart than their bases. Curvature of the Earth. I love that, don’t you?’
    The enthusiasm of his voice in this stuffy cubicle full of the reek of developer and fixer is contagious and banishes the monotony of the task. He is apologetic in case his recently completed doctoral thesis sounds dull. ‘Actually, it’s on acoustics and sedimentation. … Basically, why is it that GLORIA’s signal comes back at all, rather than simply scattering away all over the seabed?’ While still young, Roger is a veteran of field trips all over the world, from Tahiti to Alaska. One of the surprises of modern oceanography has