R/V Heraclitus' Construction (1974-75)

Economy being the order of the day the group moved into a large three-storey redwood house located near the campus in Berkeley, provided by Bill Dempster's mother, Anna, which solved immediate accommodation problems. The Theatre of All Possibilities Bus provided transport for the crew to the selected site near the Fifth Avenue Marina in Oakland closely adjacent to the site where Jack London had built his ship, the Snark. In order to raise money to make ends meet, it was decided to set up a café - The Junkman's Palace - a site for which was located on the intersection of Telegraph Avenue and Alcatraz. The café became a popular local eatery, known for its wholesome food and good atmosphere, and met a good deal of the project's operating costs between August '74 and March '75. Ship-building began in earnest with the construction of a scaffolding frame, the materials of which were recycled from an old house about to be demolished. Nails from the house were also recycled and building construction moved quickly forward with the laying of a frame of half-inch steel rebar to which wire netting was then attached.

R/V Heraclitus' Construction (1974-75)

The R/V Heraclitus was built only by dint of the efforts of rotating crews working seven-day weeks with up to fourteen hours of co-ordinated effort each day. The intense supervision of measurements by Bill Dempster and the quality control and production co-ordination by Margaret Augustine saw the ship launched and ready for open water within an amazing nine-month period of gestation. The first crew who sailed from San Francisco bound for Panama City on the 13th March, 1975, were high on the adrenaline rush of nine months of constant creative activity. That they sailed out into a force eight hurricane gave them, immediately, the chance to learn the first of many lessons that the sea has to teach - that of wariness in a dangerous universe!

The ship was designed from the outset to provide a safe and stable platform for its intended role as a research vessel. Amongst the stipulated design parameters, Safety was always the first priority, followed by Economy, Comfort and, lastly, Speed. It is no small tribute to those original designers that, in over a quarter of a century of operating on the world's rivers and oceans, the ship has maintained an excellent safety record.

The R/V Heraclitus then moved about 100 miles down river to the village of Pevas, where Dr. Schultes had earlier taken the Research Vessel Alpha Helix years before, the last laboratory-equipped expedition vessel to have worked in the Peruvian Amazon. Dr. Schultes and his team had been unable to complete their work at that time, and he consequently provided contacts with local shamans to the crew so that they might continue the work he had begun. After passing various subtle tests of the shamans, intended to ascertain whether or not the crew was genuinely interested in the rainforest and the knowledge that the indigenous peoples possessed, they established contact with the crew and research began in earnest. Various shamans led collecting crews on forays into the surrounding rainforest, pointing out a wide variety of medicinal plants for collection. Finally, the collecting crew was taken on a small-boat expedition up a tiny tributary riverto the remote village of Brillo Nuevo where they participated in an all night ritual festival.

Following the release, in 1987, of two captive bottlenose dolphins in Savannah Georgia, the R/V Heraclitus passed through the Panama Canal before making its way southwards along the Pacific coast-line of South America. Aboard was a young but highly-motivated crew, aged between 16 and 28, for several members of which it was their first time at sea. Besides intensive training of the Heraclitus crew in all matters relating to navigation, diving and the ship's systems, this first part of the voyage was also used to train visiting members of the Biosphere 2 project, who were given extended expedition training and experienced, at first hand, the complexities of small group dynamics. This valuable know-how was to stand the 'biospherians' in good stead during their pioneering two-year experiment inside Biosphere 2, the world's first ever, closed, biospheric system.

By the time the ship arrived at the Southern tip of the continent and began to negotiate the notoriously difficult Chilean Inland Waterways, the rigorous training of the previous months began to pay dividends as the rotating watches were required to be on constant alert, needing high levels of attention and co-ordinated concentration to manoeuvre the ship safely through these narrow passages. With the ship properly outfitted against extreme conditions of cold and fully provisioned with enough food, water and emergency rations to last the fifteen-man crew for a full two month voyage, R/V Heraclitus slipped out of port on New Year's Day, 1998, passing Cape Horn on a ten-day crossing of Drake's Passage to the Antarctic continent.

Here the scientific part of the expedition, consisting of population studies of the Southern humpback whale, began in earnest. These studies comprised the taking of skin samples, by following the whales in outboard inflatables and firing small darts just behind the whale's dorsal fin from a cross-bow. The skin samples thus taken were stored in the ship's freezer for eventual genetic sampling at the National Cancer Research Institute on the R/V Heraclitus' return to San Juan, Puerto Rico. The data gathered on this expedition proved conclusively, for the first time, that there was indeed intermingling of the Pacific and Atlantic humpback whale populations. Other high-lights of the six-week sojourn included diving off ice-bergs using special dry-suits that allowed divers to explore to depths of 100 feet for dives lasting between 20 and 30 minutes in literally freezing waters.

After spending several days near the US scientific research base of Palmer Station the R/V Heraclitus put to sea only to hear over the radio later that a large Argentinian supply vessel had run aground and sank in an area where only days before they had been criss-crossing the bay following feeding whales. This disaster underlined both the difficulty of navigating these southern waters and the fragility of the ice regions, since the diesel-spill resulting from this sinking caused major ecological damage to the entire Palmer Bay area.

The return journey took the ship to the Falkland Islands and up along the Atlantic coast to Fortaleza, Brazil. The Captain of the expedition recalls the Antarctic voyage as having the ecstatic quality of a sustained waking dream, in which every moment had a special feeling because of the cool clear air and the intense quality of the light.

The Biosphere 2 project in Arizona was one of the most advanced scientific experiments of the late Twentieth Century. Simply put, the project aimed to create a completely sealed ecological system containing several of the major tropical biomes found on Earth. (The Earth biosphere, Biosphere 1, was the only biosphere known to man until the creation of Biosphere 2.) An engineering marvel in its own right, the 3.5 hectare footprint facility was the most tightly-sealed structure ever built. Inside, sealed off from contact with the outside world, were housed a rain-forest, a coral reef, a savannah, a marsh, a desert, a human habitat and an intensive agricultural and farm area, that was to provide food for the eight human occupants of the first two-year experiment. Biosphere 2 was a laboratory for the study of global ecology and was designed to last for one hundred years with rotating human 'crews.' The aim was to study the complex processes of self-organisation in the biosphere and to pioneer new systems for air, water and waste-water recycling and sustainable agricultural systems.

In 1990 the R/V Heraclitus had already visited Florida to collect fresh-water and salt-water specimens that eventually found their way into the wetland areas of Biosphere 2. With 'closure' of Biosphere 2 scheduled for September, 1991, the R/V Heraclitus joined the Smithsonian Institution's research vessel the R/V Marsys Resolute in the Bahamas to collect reef rock and algae for the ocean system.

The R/V Heraclitus next continued on to Akumal, (Yucatan peninsula of Mexico,) where crew, working closely with local divers collected hundreds of healthy coral specimens. These specimens were placed in large plastic containers and floated to the surface using floatation bags. The submerged corals were carefully and swiftly transferred to the shore where a convoy of lorries, with special systems to maintain temperature, nutrient level and salinity, was waiting to receive them. There followed a three-day drive as the coral reef community was transported from Akumal over the US border and on to the Biosphere 2 complex in Arizona. No sooner had the corals arrived, than they were transplanted to the man-made ocean system and safely placed on the artificial reef, an analogue of the Akumal reef. In an interesting aside, the Mexican Government had allowed the removal of corals from their national waters only on condition that they remained part of Mexico wherever they should be placed.

During the two year enclosure of "Mission One" (1991-1993) these coral specimens - though living high above sea-level, in a different atmosphere and light regime, flourished to such an extent that 87 new coral colonies were formed - a remarkable feat in itself, but one of great significance given the rapid loss of coral reef ecosystems around the world over the last decade.

The coral reef of Biosphere 2 became one of the most scientifically studied reefs in history because, for the first time, the interactions between the atmosphere and the coral reef could be precisely measured and monitored. In conjunction with scientists working at NASA Ames, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Boston University and the College of Charleston, new remote sensing protocols were developed using digital video cameras along selected transect lines to map the changes in health and vitality of the reef over time. These same methods are now being applied by R/V Heraclitus divers, working with the same scientific team as worked together on the Biosphere 2 reef, to use satellite imagery to map the health and vitality of coral reefs around the globe.

Indian Ocean and South East Asia Expedition (1995 -2000)

One important discovery to emerge from the first two-year experiment in Biosphere 2 (September 1991 to September 1993) came from close observations of the man-made coral reef system. The eight biospherians discovered that the health of the coral reef system gave them rapid and accurate information about the health of the Biosphere 2 facility considered as a totality. In fact the reef's condition fluxed very rapidly, even over short periods of time, in response to changes in atmosphere, temperature and bio-geochemical cycles. The coral reef thus proved to be a rapid feedback loop, that alerted the managers and scientists monitoring the facility to the health of the total system. Changes also occurred in the other biomes, but more slowly and over much longer time periods.

The critical importance of the ocean's coral reefs as a key indicator of the total system health of the Earth's biosphere, is one obvious corollary of these observations. The Planetary Coral Reef Foundation (PCRF) was therefore founded, in 1991, to extend this novel understanding of the role of the oceans' reefs to our world and to educate peoples around the globe about the critical importance of preserving the health of coral reefs and safeguarding them against a wide range of threats. PCRF was established almost at the same time as it began to become apparent to a handful of scientists that coral reef systems around the world were undergoing rapid changes, and that environmental factors of all kinds were acting to destroy even the oldest and most established of reefs. A short list of factors contributing to the global demise of the reefs includes: pollution, dynamite fishing, sedimentation, over-fishing and bleaching, possibly caused by global warming.

The R/V Heraclitus supports ongoing global coral reef studies by providing a base-line coral reef research programme that involves the mapping and monitoring of coral reefs at selected sites around the world. As well as conducting health and vitality studies on each selected reef, Heraclitus divers and scientists take core samples from large reef heads, that when returned to laboratories in the United States provide critical data about the reefs and also about atmospheric conditions and past climates. These ongoing scientific research programmes operate alongside a larger PCRF project to participate in the pioneering efforts to design a space-based sensor that when launched into orbit will map and monitor coral reefs worldwide, providing critical data about the reefs in real time.