The Ocean is Dark, But It’s Not Quiet

USS Blueback submarine exhibit
Oregon Museum of Science & Industry (OMSI)
Portland, Oregon
Saturday, September 12, 2026 | 10:40 am

I didn’t tour the USS Blueback during my visit to OMSI. But I did stop at the exhibit beside it, where a large cutaway diagram offered a look inside the submarine without actually stepping aboard.

The diagram revealed just how much had been packed into the narrow hull: torpedo room, control room, sonar room, crew quarters, mess, diesel engines and other spaces arranged from bow to stern. Nearby displays explained some of the science that allowed the submarine to operate underwater.

One panel put it particularly well:

“The ocean is dark, but it’s not quiet.”

The Blueback had no windows. Instead, hydrophones allowed its crew to listen for other ships and submarines using passive sonar.

Another display demonstrated how submarines manipulate buoyancy, taking water into ballast tanks to dive and forcing it back out with compressed air to rise.

The Blueback was diesel-electric. Underwater, it traveled using battery power, eventually needing access to air so its diesel engines could recharge the batteries. One panel described this rather wonderfully as “The Blueback held its breath.”

But the part that caught my attention most wasn’t entirely about the submarine.

Wrapped around a nearby column was a small exploration of the largely unseen ocean world surrounding it.

There were illustrations of giant Pacific octopuses, sperm whales, barreleyes, fanfin anglerfish and giant squid. Dolphins provided a natural comparison to sonar through echolocation. A bathysphere represented another way humans had attempted to descend into a place where pressure, darkness and distance quickly make exploration difficult.

It immediately reminded me of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, an old Walt Disney television program called Monsters of the Deep that I remember seeing on the Disney Channel in the 1990s, and even Disneyland’s old Submarine Voyage, which I rode during childhood visits to Anaheim. Submarines and strange creatures of the deep apparently still trigger the same fascination.

That may have been my favorite thing about this little corner of OMSI. The USS Blueback is an impressive artifact on its own, but the exhibit uses it to open onto something much larger.

We have built machines capable of taking us beneath the surface. We have sonar to listen through the darkness. Scientists have found giant squid and other animals that can seem stranger than creatures once imagined in fiction.

Standing there, it was easy to understand why the deep ocean has inspired so many stories.

And still, much of that world remains beyond our view.

Maybe that was what I liked most about the exhibit. For all the science explaining how submarines dive and how animals survive at extraordinary depths, it didn’t make the ocean seem less mysterious.

It made me want to know what else is down there.