The Gory Details (Gross)

The Gory Details #7 "From the Deep"

"Death at sea...She's hooked." Morticia says of her daughter Wednesday in "The Addams Family," and well she should be. Unimaginably vast and too deep to think about while your sailing them, the oceans have attracted horror writers and film makers from Peter Benchley's masterpiece "Jaws" to the makers of the enjoyably terrible movie "Sharknado." There's more, of course, so much more. This edition will mostly focus on some exotic underwater locales, but I wanted to mention three gory details first.

Just because you've gotten off a sinking ship doesn't mean you are safe. Ships displace a tremendous amount of water and can create a vortex as they sink, capable of pulling you under life preserver and all. Opposite that, a fully submerged ship may continue to burp large quantities of air for some time so a character lost to the deep could unexpectedly pop back to the surface carried out of the ship by a stream of bubbles.

Also, most everyone knows that a diver has to pause on ascent from a deep dive to allow nitrogen to work out of their bloodstream thus avoiding the bends. What is less well known is that a diver in rapid ascent will so imbalance their internal and external pressures that their blood vessels will burst. This can happen anywhere in the body but is fatal as the air coming into the lungs loses pressure. The alveoli rupture in mass and the victim dies painfully from suffocation. Nothing like barfing blood and chunks into your dive mask before you go, I always say.

Finally, ships sink fast. We all have this Errol Flynn image of ships drifting beneath the wave amid a cloud of smoke. Lovely, maybe even right for a wooden frigate, but dead wrong for a metal bodied ship. It's a matter of buoyance. A ship has to displace more water than it weighs in order to float. Once a ship begins to lose air while sinking, it starts losing buoyance. The less buoyance, the faster it sinks. Once the ship is effectively free of air, it is also free of buoyance. Then it's gravity versus resistance. In air, gravity accelerates an object at 9.8 meters per second per second. In the high density of water, the acceleration as well as max speed are lower, but it's not uncommon for a ship to hit the bottom at 30 or 40 miles an hour. Hard on anyone still on board as well as anyone on the sea floor. To see a fun simulation of this, play a little of the submarine game "Cold Waters." Whether it's you getting torpedoed or managing to torpedo someone else, you get a great underwater view of just how fast a ship goes down.

The first of our creepy locals in none other than the Black Sea in Eastern Europe. The black sea has a long and storied history. The Ancient Greeks and Persians sailed its waters and it provided secret passage for Soviet submarines. More interesting to us however, is its unusual hydrology. Do to a lot of complex and unimportant factors, it is almost impossible for water to "churn" in the Black Sea. Water on bottom stays on bottom. This has led to the decay and degradation of the deep sea waters. Below a depth of about 400 feet, the Black Sea becomes sulfuric and almost totally without oxygen. This prevents bacteria from eating organic matter that makes it to the bottom. Underwater rovers have filmed 1500 year old ships lying prow up, mast standing in the gray muck 1000 feet down. It is easy to imagine terrors forgotten in the bronze age being woken by probing divers. There are more modern implications. A Siberian airlines flight was shot down by the Ukraine in 2001. Only a few of the bodies were recovered. What's to be found on the ocean floor?

The second is not a sea but is just as interesting. About a zillion years ago a lake high in the mountains of Antarctica froze over. This wasn't too exciting as Antarctica had been drifting toward the South Pole for millions of years and lots of things were freezing. What made this and a few other lakes like it interesting was that they never froze solid. Protected by warmth from the Earth's mantle and fed water generated by the friction of the ice sheet against the surrounding rocks, Lake Vostok lives on today more than two miles below the surface of the ice.

What may live down there? What an isolated setting for a story. Fresh water seeping through ice sometimes forms chandeliers of ice crystals that tinkle pleasantly if disturbed, or unpleasantly if they signal the approach of the Vostok Monster.

The final gory, or gross detail is how full of sh... waste the seas are. As the human population booms, so does the amount of sewage it creates. Increasingly, the large cities of the world are finding themselves surrounded by vast, undersea wastelands created by their own waste. The media likes to go on about dioxin and mercury and things like that but the Gore Monger knows better. In terms of pure output, humans make nothing so much as their own poo. You'd think this would fertilize the ocean and in small amounts it may well, but when a city the size of Rio decides it's got to go, there's going to be one heck of a mess.

These barren, waste ridden swatches can run for miles down stream from a major city and are as nasty as they seem, fields of gray muck sprinkled here or there with some sickly sea fan or pale fish. This is an extreme environment begging to breed some new plague or to become home to some unknown terror able to colonize such a place.

And you though "Leviathan" was a stinker. Now get out there and write.

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