Author: Majoki

In my line of work, I hear it all the time, “Why do we have better maps of the surface of the moon and Mars than our own ocean floors?” To most folks it sounds like a reasonable question, but to a hydrographic surveyor it can be triggering.

A few weeks ago when I was asked that very question by a reporter interviewing me, I said, “If you really want to understand why, let me take you to the top of the Empire State Building, blindfold you, tie your hands behind your back, and then send you out to map what’s beneath you.”

The reporter said that’d be absurd. I agreed. But it’s a fair analogy for how we map the ocean deeps. Not by seeing or feeling, but by listening. You have to hear your way around them. Sound not sight is what allows us to map those staggering depths. And, though much improved in recent years, sonar mapping technology still involves the methodical criss-crossing of the world’s five oceans in specially outfitted ships.

Which means it is a slow, expensive, and often risky undertaking. It also means that creatures like the Ziphius (aka Cuvier’s beaked whale) went unconfirmed for ages. Not undocumented, just unconfirmed and monstrously exaggerated by crusty seafarers.

The same with Buss. An island in the North Atlantic sighted in 1578 by the crew of a busse, a Viking longship, and ostensibly so named. Nearly a hundred years later the island became known as the Sunken Land of Buss after it could no longer be found where it had been charted and was assumed to have disappeared beneath the waves. Nothing too sinister about that. To old salts, phantom islands were nothing new and land masses sank and rose all the time without any undue Atlantis hype.

But the Sunken Land of Buss turned out to be quite hype-worthy because that missing land mass turned up dramatically in the Tonga Trench. I was part of a crew surveying the ten thousand meters depths of the Horizon Deep when our mapping sonar went, for lack of a better term, batshit.

The depth readings began fluctuating crazily. We thought it must be a malfunction. Maybe even unprecedented volcanic or tectonic activity. Until we double checked the instrumentation and found everything working properly meaning that something massive at the near bottomless Horizon Deep was on the move. And then suddenly rising towards us.

This unbelievable anomaly should have sent undersea researchers like us into nerdvana, but we’d all knew the ancient lore of sea monsters: Leviathan, Scylla, Charybdis, Kraken. So, when something the size of lower Manhattan begins surfacing rapidly toward your relatively puny ship, you tend to flip out.

Luckily, panic is no match for viral media fame, and most of the crew had their phones out, waiting to video whatever was rising out of the deeps and threatening to send us there. I was no different. I shot video as the thing breached the surface a hundred meters from our ship. A mighty eruption of froth and foam that totally obscured the thing–for a moment.

Then we were rocked by a devastating wave.

Not an ocean wave caused by the thing’s surfacing, but an electromagnetic one that instantly knocked out all electronic equipment on board. All devices, including our phones, were fried. There’d be no viral video sensations of what we’d seen. No record of any kind, but our unbelieving eyes.

The ocean deeps hold many mysteries, but the Sunken Land of Buss has moved to the top of my list. I now believe that the island when discovered was named not only for the Viking busse that first sailed by its shores, but by the very shape and topology of the island which I now suspect looked much like an enormous longship.

How could I possibly know that? When the thing from the Tonga Trench rose out of the depths and fried our electronics, we may not have any recorded proof, but I know what I saw: an enormous, gleaming vessel, reminiscent of a Viking longship taking to the heavens and vanishing in a sun-flare instant.

So, next time you’re on a beach admiring the horizon where sky and sea meet, consider how we’ve only dipped our toes in the surf when it comes to grokking the vast alien depths of the ocean and space. It’ll make your head swim.