The Wonder of Under

You may have heard about the crazy theory some people have – that the entire Universe rests on the back of a gigantic turtle. A skeptical interviewer supposedly asked one such believer, “Then what is the turtle standing on – another turtle?” Back came the reply, “You can’t catch me there – It’s turtles all the way down.”

This somehow inspired one of my own epigrams: 

“Just because you have my support
Doesn’t mean I want you on my back.”

Being at the bottom doesn’t usually convey a very positive meaning – although it might also imply that, from there, the only way to go is up. And I suppose it makes a good starting point – although, as every climber knows, after you get to the top there’s nowhere to go but down.

I have actually climbed to the top of the highest mountain in Australia – Mount Kosciuszko (named for a Polish leader). It is 7,300 feet high – only about a quarter the height of Everest, and there is virtually a roadway to the summit –but Australians have to make the most of it, and visitors have to take what they can get.

Considering the popularity of the Guinness Book of World Records, I have always thought that the idea of collecting and publishing local records might be similarly successful. It could be limited to a particular county or urban area – and it would give a peculiar kind of recognition to the person who, for example, might be the tallest, or the fastest runner, in that locality.

But, if we resume our descent to the bottom, the least-known areas on earth are those at the bottom of the sea, the deepest being in the western Pacific Ocean. Only recently have scientists been able to study what forms of life exist at such extreme depths, by sending down devices capable of sending back images and measuring what they find.

The idea of humans travelling beneath the surface of the world’s waters for extended distances now goes back more than two centuries. Its most famous early exponent was the French writer Jules Verne, who, for much of my early life, was my own favorite author. It was he who wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (published in 1870). But for some reason, that book didn’t interest me as much as some others he wrote. In particular, I liked Around the World in Eighty Days, especially because I thought it had a superb ending. In that era, when the whole notion of “Time Zones” had just begun to be thought of, Verne’s hero (an Englishman) bets that he can indeed do that journey in 80 days. Alas! it takes him 81 days, and he arrives back in London sure that he has lost the bet. But it turns out that, since he travelled from West to East, he actually gained a day – so he is still in time!

Another Jules Verne epic which captivated me predicted the first journey From the Earth to the Moon (which was its title) a century before it actually happened. Not only that, but Verne said it would be made by Americans – and correctly predicted that the vehicle would be launched from a site in Florida! But the book ended somewhat sadly, because the craft never reaches the Moon’s surface, but is held by gravity in an apparently endless orbit around the Moon.

That, to me, seemed such a satisfying ending that I was disappointed to learn that there was a sequel, called A Trip Around the Moon – in which Verne brings what was actually a projectile, fired from an enormous gun, back to Earth by having its orbit deflected by an asteroid. The actual touchdown is again prophetic, in that it is an oceanic “splashdown,” and the crew are eventually rescued by a U.S. Navy vessel. 

In terms of “going under,” Jules Verne also wrote another more fanciful, and less scientific, account of a “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” which came out some years before his Lunar voyage. In that story, a group of explorers go downward through the crater of a still-active volcano in Iceland. There they encounter a whole world of prehistoric creatures.

But in actual fact, the core of the Earth is thought to be so hot that approaching it for just a short distance would probably be fatal.

I can only hope that in the face of all this information, you will not, by now, be feeling underwhelmed.