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The 7th Celebrate the Sea Festival Philippines
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Emory Kristof A special presentation by the discoverer of the Titanic and deep sea vents. Don’t miss special treat.
Into the Depths Around the world, millions of scuba divers fin their way through clear ocean waters, exploring coral reefs in the Caribbean, swimming through shipwrecks near Pacific islands, or playing with seals among kelp forests off California. They descend to depths of up to 100-plus feet, thinking they're seeing a broad spectrum of the undersea world. Emory Kristof could tell them otherwise, however, as he relishes exploring the cold, dark, and mysterious depths below that, where most of our planet resides. As a photographer for National Geographic magazine, Kristof has traveled the world, covering mostly scientific, high-tech, and underwater subjects. He has found a niche by combining photography and deep diving with a knack for developing the technical equipment necessary in such an unexplored realm of extreme conditions. "It has made for an interesting life. I enjoy getting up every day because I never know what strange things will be out there to work on," he reports. The 59-year-old native of Washington, D.C. explains what planted the seed for his profession: "It was initially seeing Jacques Cousteau's 'Silent World.' That came out in the mid-1950s when I was a teenager. It impressed on me that someday I wanted to scuba dive." As for the other piece of the puzzle: "In my final year of high school, I really discovered photography and started to work at it for the high school yearbook. I found out I really liked it." He went to the University of Maryland as a writing major, but he found the school needed photographic help with the school paper, yearbook, and humor magazine. He also shot photos for newspapers in Washington and Baltimore. "I managed to work my way through school doing that." While at Maryland, Kristof became a certified scuba diver in 1962 through American Water Sports in Washington. They had helped him shoot underwater photos for the school's campus viewer magazine, known as The Old Line. He recalls, "That's what got me started on it. When I was hired at the Geographic, I saw the opportunity to do underwater photography." Kristof started working for National Geographic as a photographic intern in 1963 and became a staff photographer in 1964. Although the magazine hired him mostly for his people photos, they were also doing stories that required someone to work with newfangled gadgets like motorized cameras and radio controls. He says, "I showed a talent for it, so I got into that line of work, and then I got the diving end of it." This not only had Kristof doing underwater photography but also other camera work with an engineering bent. He mounted cameras on wing tips and tails of airplanes to photograph a story on airports around the world and another on sailplanes. As the energy crisis and oil shortage came about in the early 1970s, he focused on energy storage infrastructure, including the building of the Prudhoe Bay Field on the north slope of Alaska.
Trading
Wetsuits for Submarines Why give up the comfort of water you can swim in comfortably for the deeper variety? "I found I could make a contribution by moving what we knew about lighting in shallow water to deep water projects," Kristof explains. "Scientists making pictures in deep water were not doing as good a job of it as we were doing in shallow water at the Geographic." He started by applying lighting techniques and wide angle lenses. "It kind of went from there. Television and electronic imaging was changing and getting better, so I was getting to apply things like the first use of charged couple devices. Deep water represents about 70 percent of the planet, so it gave me a lot of room to roam around in. I like the challenge of it." Along the way, Kristof has pioneered the use of robot cameras and remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs) and pushed the National Geographic Society to invest in these and underwater lighting. "My job is to give the Geographic a mixture of stories on significant deep water biology and shipwrecks using the tools we have purchased or developed in our electronic and machine shops," he states. Besides the technical angle, Kristof takes a broad environmental view of his work. "The oceans are used as a dumping grounds for so many things. The first thing people should be aware of is that oceans are the lungs of the planet. Most of the oxygen on the planet, about 60 percent of it, comes out of the oceans, out of the phytoplankton. So if anything ever upsets that balance, we're really in deep trouble." He thinks we don't study oceans as much as we should. "There's only two unexplored areas left to man. One is straight up, and the other is down in the oceans." This has spurred Kristof to come up with a host of technical innovations in his mission. "If somebody comes up with a problem on how to do something, they can dump it in my lap. I get calls on how to make pictures where nobody has ever done it before," he says. One relatively simple technique involves lowering cameras on ropes into the water column up to two miles deep, allowing for deep-water operations with small boats.
In a first, Kristof found ways to use HMI lighting, a ballasted type commonly used for making movies and TV shows on land (the German acronym HMI signifies mercury -- periodic symbol Hg -- metallisized, and iodized salts). "It's about ten times more light for the amount of power you put in than a quartz light. This is important if you're trying to run lights off batteries or run them deep," he says. They also use colors of light, such as red, that normally get filtered out by the depth. From a public standpoint, Kristof's greatest accomplishment may have come when he teamed with noted Underwater explorer Robert Ballard at Woods Hole in 1985 to find the sunken Titanic 2.5 miles down and make the first photos of it. The effort actually began in the 1970s, when Kristof created preliminary designs of the electronic camera system for the ARGO vehicle, which found the Titanic. For photographing, he sketched a block diagram for a vehicle that would use strobes and low-light-level black-and-white wide-angle cameras. In 1991, Kristof organized a Soviet-Canadian expedition to shoot three-dimensional stills and video footage of the Titanic for an IMAX production. The project used two Russian submersibles equipped with nearly 10,000 watts of high-intensity HMI lights mounted on arms to get them away from the cameras. "This was the most powerful set of lights ever set up to work in the deep ocean." Kristof recalls. "I see those pictures everywhere. They're probably the most popular ones we ever made." Some footage made it into the famous movie, The Titanic. In August 1998, Kristof's pictures of the Titanic appeared in the National Geographic article "Tragedy in Three Dimension."
Favors
Creatures A prime example came in discovering new life forms swirling around hydrothermal vents in the volcanic hot springs of the Galapagos Rift. The Geographic crew worked out a design for a timer-controlled camera baited to attract marine life and taken to 8,500 feet on ALVIN. This ranked as the biological find of the century in the oceans, Kristof says. "They show a whole new ecosystem we didn't know about. The bacteria that makes that go represents over 50 percent of the entire biomass on the planet. Up till 1977, we didn't know anything about it." On a later trip in 1979, they attempted to do the first television show in deep water, but existing TV tube cameras were too big. Kristof worked with RCA to get the first solid-state TV camera out of the company's lab and into the field on ALVIN. The result was the Emmy-winning show Dive to the Edge of Creation. As a result of his work with the Titanic, Kristof was able to apply spinoff techniques in quest of another biological find. "I felt one of the great undone things in the ocean was to try and systematically bait deep sea creatures into a darkened, quiet submersible," he relates. With noted shark specialist Eugenie Clark, he ventured to Bermuda in 1986 to try an experiment for doing this. It took only 17 minutes sitting on the bottom for the first little-known six-gill shark to come to the bait at 600 meters. They brought in a scuba diver for coverage of the animals in shallower water and one of the Society's ROVs to fill in the depths between scuba range and the submersibles. "These first vertical looks at animals through thousands of meters of the water column, I think, represent my most significant, original work." The eight-meter Pacific sleeper shark they lured in at 1,300 meters stands as the largest animal ever seen in the deep through a submarine port hole. "This raises a whole slew of questions about the food chain that, as we go deeper, nobody knows much about." In 2000, Kristof led a project to make the first color images of the interior of the sunken battleship Arizona in Pearl Harbor, and these ran in a June 2001 Geographic story. The hulks lies rusting away in 150 feet of water, within the realm of scuba diving, but half a million gallons of oil remain in it. The National Park Service is trying to figure out what to do with it to preserve the ship. Regular ROVs were too large to penetrate, so Kristof worked with a company in Pennsylvania that makes smaller ROVs and laid out a plan for penetration. With visibility in the water only 10 feet, the crew couldn't get clear photos from any distance. They contacted a company in Canada about using a technique for scanning with a TV camera held by a diver and assembling many small images into a larger one, in the process modifying the company's software. Kristof says, "It allowed people to see the area on the bow section where the explosion had taken place and had sunk the Arizona at the beginning of World War II. That was a first-time photograph." As Kristof ventures further into deep-water photography, he finds himself doing little scuba diving anymore, instead staying topside using ROVs or going on submersibles. "I'm the diver that does it deepest without getting wet," as he puts it. Actually, he says this suits him just fine because he has a bad knee that will someday require replacement. "I'll leave the scuba diving to younger folks coming up." With this, he has extended an invitation for other divers to follow his lead and continue photographing the deep unknown.
THE HEART OF THE SEA - On, or near, the equator there are three deep basins surrounded by the islands that make up Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. The shallow waters surrounding the Banda, Celebes, and Sulu Seas contain more different species of marine animal life than any other place on earth. As you travel away from this area there are still many marine animals, but the number of species drops off as the distance increases. This is indeed the center of shallow water marine speciation for all the world’s oceans, and its existence raises a lot interesting questions: Why is species diversity so high in this region? What is happening in the unexplored deep water? The Celebes and Sulu Seas have water as deep as 16,700 feet, and their basins have very high sills. They are so isolated from the world’s oceans that they have never been exposed to, or mixed with, the cold Antarctic bottom water which chills the deep water in all the oceans of the planet. As a result, the water of the Celebes and Sulu Seas is relatively warm, even at great depths. During past Ice Ages, when the level of the oceans dropped as much 400 feet, the Celebes and the Sulu Seas were even more isolated. Because of their locations near the equator, and lack of Antarctic water, they have the warmest water left on the planet. A Miocene like relic, they could be thought of as incubators or perhaps the ancient heart of the ocean. In September and October 2007 the Inner Space Speciation Project will be conducting the first top-to-bottom exploration of the Celebes Sea in cooperation with the Philippine government. Using one of their 175 foot oceanographic vessels, an American 10,000 foot capable ROV fitted out with HDTV and biological collection equipment, baited deep sea cameras, scuba diving, and deep sea trawls, this joint expedition will spend two weeks probing the depths to see what lives there.
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