Crushing, not drowningshinayne | 24. Oktober 12
The Ship was cheer'd, the Harbour clear'd—
Merrily did we drop
Below the Kirk, below the Hill,
Below the Light-house top.
Jules Verne would have been proud.
We are now closer to the center of the earth than any human ever was, and yet we feel like astronauts in space. But our void has no stars, and it is not void. About as much the opposite as we can find on our planet, with our current technology. The waters of the ocean want to get to us, with nearly a thousand bar of pressure. The force behind that will is staggering, all the more so for being invisible, quiet, and dark.
The structure of our new home under the sea is made of the strongest alloys we know and it is designed in the form of a hemisphere, distributing the forces bearing down on it evenly. It has no windows and our means of looking outside are the cameras and the lights we have anchored to the ocean floor around us. On our screens we can see that the darkness is struggling against the shine of our most powerful lamps, trying to smother them to keep the secrets of the deep, secrets we have yet to find.
We know more about the surface of the moon than about the land we are in now and we thought that the things we would find must be wonderous, simply because they are secret. But some secrets are just darkness and dust, murky waters and slimy things that have no word for light. We observe them from our shell and try to learn their ways that could not be more foreign to us if they lived on the moon.
Staring for hours at the blackness, our minds conjure up images into the emptiness. It is a common effect, we are told, akin to the stars one sees when snowblind, or the ringing one hears in absolute silence. The blackness itself seems to move and shift and swirl around us, seems to observe us in turn and we imagine it resenting our presence, our warmth and our lights, as we resent its inhospitable malice.
Water is the enemy. Water is heavy, cold and corrosive. Water hides what we want to find and water hides us. Incidentally, water is our most precious commodity. If we were to lose our drinking water, we would be dead within a week. There is no supply-train, no backup.
We came down in our shell, and we will go up again the same way, there is no other option.
When the first tremors came, we all gathered around our seismograph and held our breath. The peak was unmistakable. We knew then that the earth had betrayed us to the water. The tremors that followed shook our shell, and the fissures that appeared below it strained the metal casing to the point were we could hear it buckle and bend. We expected our ears to pop when the pressure started changing, but if they did we did not feel it above the pain of our lungs being torn. The fist of the water pounded onto our shell once, hard, crushing the twisted metal into our twisted bodies, flattening us against the ground.
We never felt the water against our skin.
Merrily did we drop
Below the Kirk, below the Hill,
Below the Light-house top.
Jules Verne would have been proud.
We are now closer to the center of the earth than any human ever was, and yet we feel like astronauts in space. But our void has no stars, and it is not void. About as much the opposite as we can find on our planet, with our current technology. The waters of the ocean want to get to us, with nearly a thousand bar of pressure. The force behind that will is staggering, all the more so for being invisible, quiet, and dark.
The structure of our new home under the sea is made of the strongest alloys we know and it is designed in the form of a hemisphere, distributing the forces bearing down on it evenly. It has no windows and our means of looking outside are the cameras and the lights we have anchored to the ocean floor around us. On our screens we can see that the darkness is struggling against the shine of our most powerful lamps, trying to smother them to keep the secrets of the deep, secrets we have yet to find.
We know more about the surface of the moon than about the land we are in now and we thought that the things we would find must be wonderous, simply because they are secret. But some secrets are just darkness and dust, murky waters and slimy things that have no word for light. We observe them from our shell and try to learn their ways that could not be more foreign to us if they lived on the moon.
Staring for hours at the blackness, our minds conjure up images into the emptiness. It is a common effect, we are told, akin to the stars one sees when snowblind, or the ringing one hears in absolute silence. The blackness itself seems to move and shift and swirl around us, seems to observe us in turn and we imagine it resenting our presence, our warmth and our lights, as we resent its inhospitable malice.
Water is the enemy. Water is heavy, cold and corrosive. Water hides what we want to find and water hides us. Incidentally, water is our most precious commodity. If we were to lose our drinking water, we would be dead within a week. There is no supply-train, no backup.
We came down in our shell, and we will go up again the same way, there is no other option.
When the first tremors came, we all gathered around our seismograph and held our breath. The peak was unmistakable. We knew then that the earth had betrayed us to the water. The tremors that followed shook our shell, and the fissures that appeared below it strained the metal casing to the point were we could hear it buckle and bend. We expected our ears to pop when the pressure started changing, but if they did we did not feel it above the pain of our lungs being torn. The fist of the water pounded onto our shell once, hard, crushing the twisted metal into our twisted bodies, flattening us against the ground.
We never felt the water against our skin.