Good follow up on the Gulf Coast underwater exploration



from the March 14, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0314/p13s01-stgn.html
High-tech undersea search for the first Americans

Ocean archeologist Robert Ballard is searching the floor of the Gulf
of Mexico, via remote control.

By Moises Velasquez-Manoff | Correspondent of The Christian Science
Monitor

MYSTIC, CONN.
Inside a darkened room, oceanographer Robert Ballard stares at an
array of flat-screen monitors. The monitor to his left shows a crew of
scientists aboard the submarine support vessel Carolyn Chouest in the
Gulf of Mexico. On a monitor to his right, a roomful of Rhode Island
high school students are intently focused on something unseen. And
directly ahead, a large plasma TV plays live footage of what's holding
everyone's attention: the ocean floor some 115 miles off the Texas
coast.

The picture is transmitted by Argus, an unmanned submersible 1,800
miles away from the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut. In fact, Dr.
Ballard is presiding over the first undersea expedition conducted
entirely by remote control. "It's the first time I've had enough
confidence in the technology to step ashore," he says.

The subject of his search, as well as its location, are as precedent-
setting as the means he's using to conduct it.

Enabled by technological advances such as satellite uplinks and the
next generation of Internet, the expedition is a step toward Ballard's
vision of a world experienced via "telepresence" - not in person, but
via remotely operated cameras and sensors. It's cheaper, requiring
less manpower than typical science expeditions. It also has profound
implications for any kind of undersea exploration, especially for the
nascent field of ocean archaeology.

Today, Ballard and his team are seeking submerged evidence of the
first Americans. Any proof of past human habitation in this area of
former coastline could sink a long-dominant - and many say hopelessly
eroded - hypothesis about who the first Americans were, how they got
here, and when they arrived.

"It's a great story in human history," says Kevin McBride, a professor
of anthropology at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, who is
involved in the project. "And as usual, it's a more complicated story
than people think."

With the help of the US Navy's only research submarine, NR-1,
Ballard's team is mapping the area to determine where early Americans
might have lived when the Gulf's underwater hills sat at shoreline. At
the height of the last ice age, sea levels were nearly 400 feet lower
than they are today. The team's voyage began March 4, along a series
of rises called the Flower Garden Banks. Scientists think the area,
now filled with colorful sponges and abundant sea life, was a thriving
coastal estuary 19,000 years ago - and prime real estate for human
habitation.

Dwellers on an ancient coast

An abundant amount of salt left from an even earlier time when a
closed-off Gulf of Mexico completely evaporated would have provided an
invaluable resource for preserving meat. Salt licks also would have
attracted grazing animals and potential game. Inhabitants would have
also found the coastal estuary full of easily harvestable shellfish,
and if they ate shellfish, they probably left behind large piles of
discarded shells that scientists can radiocarbon date. Because of the
continental shelf's gradual incline in the area, rising seas would
have quickly inundated the land, increasing the chances that artifacts
were preserved.

This is Ballard's high-tech quest: proof of human habitation in the
Gulf. That might refute the classic hypothesis that the first humans
in the Americas were Siberian hunters, who followed herds over the
Bering land bridge some 11,500 years ago. The hunters, the theory
goes, passed into the interior of the continent via an ice-free
corridor on the east side of the Canadian Rockies. Archaeologists call
them the Clovis culture, after a distinctive spear point found near
Clovis, N.M., in the 1930s.

But in the past 20 years, archaeologists have excavated many sites
with radiocarbon dates older than the Clovis culture. Tools and
shelters at Monte Verde in Chile are 12,500 years old. Stone flakes
and fire pits found at the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania
date to 14,000 years ago - before the corridor to the interior would
have been open. This observation gave birth to an alternate
hypothesis: Perhaps the first Americans skirted the glaciers in boats.

An ice-free corridor inland

Bolstering this possibility, scientists now think that a sliver of
coast between the great Cordilleran glacier on the Canadian Rockies
and the Pacific Ocean remained clear during the Ice Age.

In 1997, Daryl Fedje of the Canadian Parks service pulled up a stone
tool from the seafloor 170 feet down. The tool could have fallen
there, but the seafloor itself, which was dotted with tree stumps and
littered with pine cones, was clear evidence of an inhabitable ice age
forest along the coast. Early seafarers could have occasionally pulled
up to land during their migration.

But nothing has complicated the picture more than genetic evidence.
Studies of native American groups indicate that up to five waves of
people arrived at different times. Four of them - A, B, C, and D - are
related to populations in Asia. Several of these groups share genetic
markers with people in modern-day Indonesia, Australia, and the
Pacific Islands - places scientists think were settled by seafaring
people.

Further confusing the picture, this fifth group, called "X," also
shares genetic markers with European populations. Although
controversial, this evidence lends credence to another, stranger
possibility: Stone Age Europeans sailed west and made landfall in what
was, even then, a land of immigrants.

New methods produce new data

"Sometimes methodology explodes and theory plays catch-up," says James
Adovasio, executive director of the Mercyhurst Archaeological
Institute at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., and the archaeologist
who excavated Meadowcroft. "We're living at a time when the
methodological techniques are exploding, and as they generate new,
higher-resolution data, we have to reformulate how we think about
stuff."

At stake in any undersea archaeological find is more than just the
timing and chronology of the peopling of the Americas, says Professor
Adovasio. Evidence of a seafaring culture in the Americas before the
Clovis culture would overturn longstanding notions of our Stone Age
forebears. Rather than a society of fur-clad, spear-wielding hunters
stabbing mammoths, the first Americans may have been coastal dwellers,
he says, a difference with great implications for everything from the
division of labor in their society to the tools they used.

"Let us suppose that they find offshore campsites that are 16,000
years old," says Adovasio. "It would put yet another nail into the
Clovis sarcophagus."

'Telepresence' may let scientists - and tourists - be everywhere at
once

In 1979, Robert Ballard found the first "black smokers," undersea
vents spewing black sulfides near the Galapagos Islands. In 1985, he
cemented his fame with the discovery of the Titanic in the north
Atlantic.

Now, Dr. Ballard wants to change - and enhance - how everyone from
scientists to schoolchildren explores the planet. Using a combination
of remotely operated vehicles and cameras, he sees a future where
"electronic travel" lets anyone look in on Earth's hard-to-reach
corners with minimal cost and effort.

"It's not critical that your gall bladder gets to the Serengeti," he
says. But "your spirit has no mass; you can move your spirit around
cheaply."

On expeditions, remotely operated vehicles will scour the seafloor
thousands of miles away 24/7. Individuals on rotating shifts will
monitor the images. Only when something interesting comes into view
will an on-call scientist assume command.

For the layperson, remotely operated cameras left behind will provide
live video of everything from African plains to ocean canyons. Not
only will this "telepresence" give the average student real-time
access to the planet's mysteries, it will also lessen humanity's
impact on the natural wonders we so eagerly wish to view.

None of this would be possible were it not for the emerging Internet2
protocol, says Ballard. Enabled by a nationwide network of fiber-optic
cables, the I-2 is up to 10,000 times faster than the average
broadband connection - 10 gigabits per second - and allows for the
live transmission of high-definition video.

In 2002, Ballard installed his first remotely operated camera in
California's Monterey Bay. Children at his Institute for Exploration
at the Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, Conn., could control an underwater
vehicle 3,000 miles away. Remote cameras are slated for the Channel
Islands off California, Hawaii and in the Florida Keys.

On the Flower Garden Banks expedition to the Gulf of Mexico (see main
story), the public could tune in to one of the four live broadcasts
online daily and submit questions in real time.



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