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Page 1 of 6 Jonathan Green Adventures 2000 ft
to the bottom of the ocean
With a fizz of compressed gas and an ominous gurgling, the moss-coloured ocean swallows the little yellow submarine. We sink from the surface, the contraption plunging far below boats carrying tourists on the surface – deeper and deeper into the watery blue-blackness of the Caribbean.
I’m jammed into a steel sphere, my legs already cramping in the tight, hot compartment of the submarine. I feel bouts of claustrophobia break over me and then recede. There is a four-inch-thick acrylic viewing dome separating me from the mounting water pressure outside as we slide down alongside a coral wall.
And then the rapid descent. The sun’s rays fight to penetrate this depth as we fall deeper and the darkness begins to enfold us.
It’s like those stories you hear of people dying and going towards the light, except in reverse – we are fading to black. At 200ft, most natural light has gone, leaving a murky, colourless gloom.
‘There, right there,’ says Karl, the submarine’s pilot, turning on powerful spotlights that illuminate a tattered wetsuit and a scuba diver’s algae-encrusted BCD (buoyancy control device).
‘That belonged to a New Yorker called Bugsy who came here to commit suicide. He just sank from the surface and was never seen again. That’s his stuff.’ The nylon straps billow and undulate in the current, a dying man’s valedictory wave. We tumble past, downwards.
A depth gauge on my left reads 500ft, but we still have a long way to go.
This is a mere foreshadowing of the depths we are going to sink to.
Already we are at the deepest I have ever been in my life. I’ve done about 75 scuba dives, some under ice and in zero-visibility water, along with extended spearfishing trips to hunt large fish at the bottom of the ocean.
The deepest I am certified to go is 130ft with my Advanced Diver certification. I may have pushed that to 140ft, and felt reckless doing so. Going any deeper than that means a complicated set of decompression stops on the way up to offload dangerous nitrogen from the body.
Today we’re voyaging to 2,000ft.
This is the world’s last unexplored frontier. It’s where mysterious creatures – never before seen by man – survive without sunlight, unlike everything else on the face of the Earth. Humans have long been obsessed with the ocean; it’s where life first evolved, eventually crawling on to land. Down here in the big blue is the secret of life itself.
To give you some idea of how deep this is, even WWII submarines only dived to a maximum of 600ft. The depth that modern nuclear submarines can reach is highly classified, but military experts estimate that their maximum operational depth is 2,000ft, their ‘crush depth’ not much deeper.
I know how far we are diving today – how dangerous it is, too – and I’m trying not to think about it.
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