Exploring the Deep

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Speaker 6 BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Speaker 6 Before you get stuck into this episode of the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast, here's a little reminder that if you're in the UK, the new series is available first on BBC Sounds.

Speaker 6 It's a dawdle to download the BBC Sounds app and subscribe to the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Speaker 6 Once you have, you'll get all those irreverent insights from the brightest scientific minds 28 days before they're available anywhere else, which ironically is a bit of a no-brainer.

Speaker 6 Now, over to Robin and Brian.

Speaker 7 Welcome to the Infinite Monkey Cage. I'm Professor Brian Cox, CBE FRS.

Speaker 1 And I'm Robin Ince, Bagger Gymnastic Award level 4, Can't Do Backward Rolls.

Speaker 1 It will come as no surprise to regular listeners of the show that perhaps the most frequent scientific discussion Brian and I have had over the last 13 years has always been the question, what really is the Loch Ness Monster?

Speaker 1 By most frequent discussion, what I mean is I talk about it a lot and he puts his headphones on and listens to orchestral maneuvers in the dark. Very funny.

Speaker 1 Now, Brian hasn't heard, I genuinely do, I love keeping up with theories about the Loch Ness Monster.

Speaker 1 My favourite recent scientific theory about the Loch Ness Monster is that it's actually the ghost of a dinosaur. That's what you see.

Speaker 7 Ghosts don't exist.

Speaker 7 And anyway, is it not more plausible it'd just be a dinosaur? I mean why does it have to be the ghost of a dinosaur?

Speaker 1 I know there is a problem with the second law of thermodynamics but I think the ghost theory of the Lottlis Monster is probably the strongest one we've had since the idea that it was actually the shadow of a pterodactyl from Inver Gordon.

Speaker 7 The deep water has always been a place of mystery. A place where fevered imaginations even more tortured than robins have long imagined monsters.

Speaker 7 In today's show, we're investigating how the exploration of the deep ocean has changed our understanding of life and the planet as a whole.

Speaker 1 We are joined by a panel who've been chosen because two of them are experts with a great deal of experience, and one of them has hair like a selkie, which is the beautiful being that can transform from seal to human by shedding its skin.

Speaker 5 They are.

Speaker 4 Hello, I'm Diva Amon, and I'm a deep sea biologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Speaker 4 And I think one of the most most remarkable things we've discovered in the deep ocean is the sex life of the anglerfish.

Speaker 8 Hello, I'm John Copley and I'm an associate professor in ocean exploration at the University of Southampton.

Speaker 8 And I think the most remarkable thing we've discovered in the deep ocean is the amazing diversity of environments and habitats it contains. It's just as rich and varied as the world above the waves.

Speaker 9 My name's Tim Minchin, I have no expertise.

Speaker 9 And my favourite thing about the deep ocean is that vampire squid, like the one in Octonauts, its Latin name is is Vampiro Tutus Infernalis, which literally means vampire squid from hell.

Speaker 1 And this is our panel.

Speaker 1 Can I first of all, by the way, just say thank you to Diva for her answer because now we will not be talking about the sex life of the Anglerfish for at least 26 minutes to make sure that everyone keeps listening.

Speaker 5 That could just be

Speaker 5 over the show for quite a while.

Speaker 1 Tim, I know you live near water, don't you? And are you one of those, are you an Australian who loves exploring the ocean? Are you a scuba diver?

Speaker 9 No, I'm not a scuba diver because the Lord didn't bless me with very good ear holes. I snorkel with my kids a bit.
I live on a rocky bay called Gordon's Bay. I live right near there.

Speaker 9 Not very close, Stalkers, just around that area.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 9 I like, we snorkel, you know, there's a couple of big blue gropers who live there and we go looking for them. And

Speaker 9 I swim in the ocean, so I swim from Gordon's Bay to Coogee around the headland, or at least I did until a week ago when someone got munched. And now we're a bit nervous about it.

Speaker 1 Have you? I mean, obviously, Brian's got so much wealth that he can get in a little submarine whenever he wants, really.

Speaker 1 Have you ever been offered that chance? Have you had the chance to go deeper into the ocean?

Speaker 9 To go into a small submarine with Brian Cox.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 9 Submarine is one of the few small spaces that Brian has not invited me into.

Speaker 5 I mean...

Speaker 7 How dare you? None of my spaces are that small.

Speaker 9 I think, like so many people, and I really look forward to hearing from Diva and John about these experiences, I find the idea of submarines utterly terrifying, which is, I guess, absurd because it's just a plane with water on top of it.

Speaker 9 I mean, it's, you know,

Speaker 9 you're just as screwed if your plane doesn't work. But yeah, it scares the crap out of me.

Speaker 7 I just want to pay tribute to the professionalism of Robin's interviewing, where his intro to you, Tim, was, now you live near water, don't you?

Speaker 5 But he does, not everyone lives near water. Let's make this clear.

Speaker 1 Some people live by the seaside, but not everyone lives by the seaside. Just a lot of people.

Speaker 9 I'd say most people live near water, Robin. I'd say that's the same thing.

Speaker 1 There's a difference between

Speaker 7 sapiens or all animals that live near water.

Speaker 1 You're quite right. You are always near water because you yourself are predominantly water.
So I should have said, Tim, you're predominantly made up of water.

Speaker 1 Do you like it or do you wish you were drier?

Speaker 5 That would have been

Speaker 5 pretty stick that question in instead.

Speaker 9 Tim, you're really deep. You could have gone with that.
That's what I would have thought.

Speaker 5 Hey!

Speaker 1 Now you've got it back to radio four level. Thank you, Tim.

Speaker 1 John, one of the things that it's been talked about on this show in the past, and I know it's something which sometimes really infuriates people involved in areas of marine biology and exploration, which is this idea that we know more about the moon than we do about our oceans.

Speaker 1 How true is that?

Speaker 8 Well, it's not really very accurate because it all comes down to what do we mean by no.

Speaker 8 And the source of that often repeated phrase is the fact that yeah, okay, we've got more detailed maps of the solid surface of the moon because it's not covered in an ocean, which blocks radar.

Speaker 8 So, we can't use the same techniques to map the deep ocean floor. We have to use sonar and so on.
And the maps we've got of the deep ocean floor aren't as detailed.

Speaker 8 But is that the same as knowing more about it?

Speaker 8 Because the total amount of rock that's ever been collected and analysed from the moon to understand all of its geology is less than half a tonne, 500 kilograms.

Speaker 8 Whereas, of course, we've been exploring the oceans for centuries, we've been collecting samples and specimens, we've been making measurements, collecting vast volumes of data.

Speaker 8 We actually know far more about the deep ocean than these other places in the solar system in terms of what's going on down there.

Speaker 8 Sure, there's still lots of really exciting things that we're still discovering.

Speaker 8 There's plenty of unknown for us still to explore, but I think what we now know is at least as remarkable as the unknown that remains.

Speaker 8 And we don't get other areas of science where people kind of, you know, lead with how much we don't yet know or understand about something.

Speaker 8 You don't hear astrophysicists saying, oh, you know, the really great thing about astrophysics is we've been doing it for centuries, we still have no idea what 95% of the stuff in the universe actually is.

Speaker 8 They'll tend to lead with, you know, wow, look at gravitational waves and exoplanets and the amazing things we've discovered so far, and then the exciting stuff we have yet to understand.

Speaker 8 And that's also the case with the deep ocean.

Speaker 7 It is a difficult place to explore though, as Tim alluded to, actually. And I know both of you have been down to the ocean floor.
And I wonder, Diva, whether you could give us a sense of that.

Speaker 7 that journey because as Tim said, I think it is widely recognised as being as difficult to go to the deepest parts of the ocean as it is to go into space, if not more difficult.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so it's something that's still quite rare. I mean, obviously, it's increasing.

Speaker 4 There are more submersibles now than they ever have been. But I mean, the experience is like no other, right?

Speaker 4 Anytime you're going into the ocean, especially the deep ocean, it's so poorly explored and it's ever-changing that you just don't really know what you're going to see often.

Speaker 4 And you get in the submersible, you're feeling excited, you're feeling a little bit anxious, you've got a huge to-do list from everybody on the ship who can't go with you because it can only fit two or three people and one of those is usually a pilot.

Speaker 4 And you begin that journey and then you're just on that journey to the deep sea floor. There's just incredible things to see and you're just in what feels like a whole different world.

Speaker 7 Could you give us a sense of the environment? Because it is challenging, right? Very, very high pressure, cold temperatures and very hot temperatures.

Speaker 7 Could you give us a sense of how alien that environment is?

Speaker 4 So exactly as you said, Brian, you know, there's crushing pressures. Temperatures hover just above freezing for most of the deep ocean.
It's of course extremely dark.

Speaker 4 Once you go past about 400 meters, there's no sunlight or very little sunlight.

Speaker 4 But yet it is home, as John alluded to in the beginning, you know, it is home to this just, you know, amazing collection of life.

Speaker 4 And there is so much to see down there and so many, you know, new species, new habitats, new behaviours. Those are things that we're coming across all the time when we're exploring.

Speaker 4 And yeah, it's just a remarkable place.

Speaker 7 John,

Speaker 7 as Robin said or joked,

Speaker 7 I got the chance to go down in Alvin, which is, I think you've been in Alvin as well, haven't you? It's a titanium ball.

Speaker 7 If you could describe that technology, because I did feel as if I was in a spaceship.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I've not actually been in Alvin.

Speaker 8 I've dived in other human-occupied vehicles, but I mean, the deepest one I've been in was a Japanese sub-let's very similar to Alvin, and it is this hollow titanium ball.

Speaker 8 And it's a couple of meters across inside. There are three of you in there for, you know, eight hours plus.

Speaker 8 No sort of comfort facilities and very small acrylic portholes because the whole thing has got to you stay at normal atmospheric pressure.

Speaker 8 We don't run into any of the problems that scuba divers have with decompression.

Speaker 8 But consequently, it has to be incredibly strong to keep us at normal one atmosphere when it's, you know, 5,000 meters, it's 500 atmospheres outside. So a real feat of engineering.

Speaker 8 And of course, all the equipment is crammed inside as well. And you do feel like you're in this little capsule.
And when you arrive on the ocean floor and you start picking your way across it,

Speaker 8 you're in this little pool of light with the lights on the vehicle. And there is this vast darkness just spreading out.
And you become aware of

Speaker 8 you're a very small being at the bottom of a very large ocean.

Speaker 7 And you almost threw that away there, 500 atmospheres pressure. I mean, that's a tremendous, well, it's,

Speaker 7 I was going to say it's a tremendously high pressure, but it is it is quite, it is an incredibly challenging environment.

Speaker 7 And the question is always raised, I think, is raised in my mind, how do things live there on the floor of the ocean five kilometers down?

Speaker 8 So here's the thing about the deep ocean.

Speaker 8 We

Speaker 8 have a challenge of pressure because we need to stay in a one atmosphere environment and we've got gas-filled lungs inside us and so on.

Speaker 8 But actually for the animals that live in the deep ocean, the challenge of pressure is not one of mechanically resisting all that pressure like our deep diving subs have to do. Because

Speaker 8 most of the animals down there, they don't have gas-filled lungs or any gas-filled space inside them. Their bodies are made of solid tissues and body fluids, liquids.

Speaker 8 And those are you know, pretty fundamentally incompressible.

Speaker 8 If you would take a plastic syringe, stick your thumb over the end with air in it, you can easily squash down that air by pushing on the plunger.

Speaker 8 But if you try that with a plastic syringe and you put water in it you will not budge that plunger water is pretty much incompressible fill your plastic syringe with plasticine and again you're not going to budge that thing so the pressure inside the bodies of these animals because they're made of incompressible materials is actually the same as the pressure outside so they don't have to withstand a massive difference of pressure across their body walls or anything like that The challenge for life in the deep ocean is actually really a molecular one, a biochemical one because okay they are exposed inside their bodies they have that high pressure that causes problems for proteins folding up into the right shapes that they need to be to work as enzymes and deep sea animals have little molecules and basically what happens is water gets trapped on on the unfolded protein as it's being put together as a chain

Speaker 8 and deep sea animals have little molecules that we call chaperones which help to pull the water molecules off the unfolded peptide chains, proteins, as they're being built, so that they then fold up magically almost into the right shape to work as enzymes and keep the cells living healthily and so on.

Speaker 8 So, there is a challenge of pressure, but it's actually not the one we tend to think of because it's not, you know, these are not organisms like us.

Speaker 1 Now, Tim, you were mentioning at the beginning about your love the vampire squid, which I know came from very deep research into octonauts, which is one of, we've mentioned it before in this show, it's such a great show for introducing fabulous creatures.

Speaker 1 And this is what, when John starts to explain this idea of forms of life, which feels so counter-instinctual to us.

Speaker 9 I love the see-through stuff. I just really love see-through stuff.

Speaker 9 The glass octopus and crystal jellyfish, and where all you can see is eyes and optical nerves, and maybe a bit of a colon or whatever the digestive tract is. It's so great.

Speaker 9 And it does feel like what is the stat that we

Speaker 9 think we know

Speaker 9 some percentage of 1% of the species down there, right? Is that right, Diva?

Speaker 9 The number of species we don't, we haven't discovered just by modelling in the deep ocean really,

Speaker 9 it sort of means if you can imagine it, it'll be there. I mean, obviously, with limitations, but every time I see a new freaking deep sea creature, I just think, nice, but it's really exciting.

Speaker 9 I still wouldn't go down in a little metal ball to 500 atmospheres to see it. I'll just get someone to go down with the camera and send the photos back up.

Speaker 1 Can you, by the way, write a song, please, called I Got Lost Somewhere Around the Peptide Chain?

Speaker 5 Because I think that was

Speaker 5 the top 10 hit internationally there. A country lament.
Diva, actually,

Speaker 5 a country lament with peptide chain in it is changing Nashville in a way we.

Speaker 1 Diva, can I just go back and then we will return to talking about the evolution of creatures in those environments. But how do you psychologically prepare to go down?

Speaker 1 You know, as John was saying, you know, it's very, very, you know, a close environment. As he said, there's no kind of comfort there.

Speaker 1 Just see if we can persuade Tim that maybe we can put him in a small titanium ball.

Speaker 4 I mean, psychologically, that's the less tough question. I think, you know, you're like, it's something new, it's something exciting.

Speaker 4 You're going down and you're going to see something most likely that no one has seen before. Like, what an incredible thing to be part of.
For me, the tougher thing is, how do you physically prepare?

Speaker 4 And that basically means dehydrating myself for, you know, 18 hours before or whatever to avoid the issue of having to go to the bathroom during the nine hours we're in the submersible.

Speaker 1 Sorry, I'm beginning to realize now that some of the fabulous things that have been observed are actually not real at all.

Speaker 5 They're just seen by dehydrated scientists who are going through a period of insanity.

Speaker 7 Diva, can you Can you describe, as Tim alluded to, you get strange organisms that are really alien to our eyes. Can you describe that process? You drop down from

Speaker 7 the surface, so you see out of the porthole, you see fish, I suppose, that we're all used to.

Speaker 7 And then you start seeing, as Tim said, these translucent organisms, bioluminescent organisms, as you go down. So can you describe that drop down? to four or five kilometres.

Speaker 4 Sure. And I also wanted to touch on something I think Tim was saying as well about the species, the number of species.

Speaker 4 I mean, we think that there are around 700,000 to a million species in the ocean, and two-thirds of those still have not been discovered.

Speaker 4 So, and a lot of those, of course, and the majority of those are in the deep sea. So, really, there is a huge amount still to find down there and understand.

Speaker 4 But, in terms of that journey down, I think, you know, there's one of the best parts of that journey is, of course, you're going down, you're seeing light disappearing, you're seeing colors changing because you're losing the different wavelengths of light.

Speaker 4 And before you know it, you're in the darkness. And then you hit this zone in the ocean between the twilight and the midnight zone.

Speaker 4 And that is really where you begin to see a lot of these translucent or transparent animals. You block out all the light.

Speaker 4 If you can cup your hands around the porthole to block out any of the light that's inside the submersible.

Speaker 4 You then begin to see what can only be described as the most incredible firework display you'll ever see in your entire life.

Speaker 4 There are greens, there are reds, there are blues, there are flashes, there are pulses, there are rhythmic displays.

Speaker 4 I mean, really, there is just this incredible show of animals basically being disturbed and freaking out in some way or trying to attract you and creating their own light.

Speaker 4 And it's just an incredible thing to see.

Speaker 9 The light inside the submersible is like running lights and computers and stuff, or is it like the light that opens when the door opens and you can't?

Speaker 9 are you like did someone did someone left the boot open

Speaker 4 I think you can turn them off inside but yeah there's there'll always be some kind of ambient light behind you and and John do we bioluminescence it's a fascinating

Speaker 7 phenomenon.

Speaker 7 What do we know about why animals have evolved that capability?

Speaker 8 So animals in the deep ocean are using it for a variety of different purposes. In some cases communicating with other members of the same species, maybe to attract a mate, whatever it might be.

Speaker 8 Of course there's all that stuff of attracting prey, you know, the lure of the deep sea anglerfishes and all that kind of thing, or illuminating prey with searchlights when hunting, evading and confusing predators with bioluminescent displays as well.

Speaker 8 And then in this zone that Divas described, this kind of twilight zone, before we get to the full midnight zone, where there's still some very faint downwelling light, a lot of the bioluminescence there is used for camouflage because if you're living in that zone, you cast a shadow.

Speaker 8 There's faint light still coming from above. And a lot of the fishes and squids and so on, they have these incredibly sensitive, upward-looking eyes.

Speaker 8 They're looking for the shadows of something to eat. So it's all about not casting a shadow, breaking up your silhouette.

Speaker 8 And a lot of the animals in this particular zone in the ocean produce light displays on their undersides, which match the light coming down from above, and they kind of just blend into it.

Speaker 7 John, you mentioned the anglerfish. So that really does seem like a natural

Speaker 7 point to

Speaker 7 the audience achieving.

Speaker 5 So fever,

Speaker 7 the sex life of the angler.

Speaker 4 Are you ready for me to lower the tone of the show completely?

Speaker 7 It is possible.

Speaker 4 So, as we've heard already throughout the show, you know,

Speaker 4 the deep ocean is dark and it's just an absolutely massive place. So, it can be quite difficult to find a mate.

Speaker 4 So, instead of sporting a luminescent lure like the female does that John was chatting about earlier, you know, male anglerfish have massive eyes and massive nostrils to help them seek out their ladies.

Speaker 4 And the ladies can actually be up to 60 times larger than the males, right? I'm just going to be dotting nuggets through this, right, that we can pick up after.

Speaker 4 So then when a lucky male does find a female, He becomes so, you know, taken with her incredible scent and her overwhelming charisma and her incredible looks that he just bites her

Speaker 4 and when he bites her it triggers a hormonal reaction that causes his lips to fuse to the side of her body and then his organs begin dissolving right and his circulatory system fuses with hers and eventually he becomes nothing more than a dangling testes on the female side.

Speaker 4 Basically just gives her sperm whenever she needs it, and she gives him everything he needs to stay alive.

Speaker 4 And it basically alleviates the problem of having to find a mate every time the female is ready to reproduce.

Speaker 1 Just put some nice gentle music underneath that.

Speaker 1 I'll tell you what, Tim, we've definitely got the B-side for your peptide chain song. The dangling testicles number, I think, is going to be there.

Speaker 1 But that is, I mean, that's one of the things that always finding fascinating, the speed of change of understanding of the possibility of what can evolve.

Speaker 1 Now, how much in the last 50 years has, again, the different possibilities of life changed our understanding of what life itself is?

Speaker 8 For me, that's why it's really exciting to be a biologist working in deep ocean environments, because you know, it's not just a single environment or habitat, which in the past, I think, we tended to think, oh, yeah, the deep ocean is like one place with a set of conditions and so on.

Speaker 8 No, you know, we've got lots of different environments.

Speaker 8 You know, we've got on the ocean floor, we've got everything from muddy abyssal plains to rocky seamounts to amazing submarine canyons, volcanic rifts, ocean trenches.

Speaker 8 You know, there's this incredible diversity of habitats popping up in the deep ocean. that we're aware of and they have their own adaptations of those conditions and patterns of life.

Speaker 8 So what this means for a biologist is that these are like lots of natural experiments where the conditions are each time set differently in terms of, you know, how that ecosystem gets its energy.

Speaker 8 You know, what's the nature of the environmental conditions, the temperature, the type of the sea floor, all that kind of thing.

Speaker 8 And so it's almost like we're running, or nature is running, lots of experiments and showing us what arises in terms of amazing adaptations, the challenges like Deeve was talking about with the anglerfishes,

Speaker 8 through to the patterns of life in space and time. You know, there are cycles of life in the deep sea in environments that really surprise us and we're still struggling to understand.

Speaker 8 So, what I think is really exciting about the deep ocean is it broadens our perspective of what is possible in terms of life.

Speaker 8 If we only studied systems, you know, above the waves and in shallow water, we just wouldn't have the full range of seeing what nature can do, how life can survive and not just survive, but really thrive in terms of adaptations.

Speaker 8 Diva, I think

Speaker 4 I was going to ask Brian where he dived.

Speaker 7 It was the Baja, California, so just

Speaker 7 off the coast of Mexico.

Speaker 4 Nice.

Speaker 3 Yeah, just nice.

Speaker 7 Yeah, to the vent systems down there. And as you said, the thing I found wonderful was the bioluminescence on the way down.
But it was just the richness of colour.

Speaker 7 The moment you turn those lights on, particularly the yellow mats, which are coming from those bacteria that have a

Speaker 7 well, deposit sulfur. on the floor as part of their metabolism.
I found it stunning. And the tube worms.

Speaker 7 Do we have any understanding of you talked about

Speaker 7 the importance of light down there, even though it's a completely dark environment? So therefore, the organisms generate their own light. Does that tell us something about the way these

Speaker 7 things evolved? I mean, it would seem to me that if you evolved purely in the darkness, in the depths, you wouldn't need eyes, for example.

Speaker 9 This is what I was getting stuck on. I'm like, if you're down below the twilight zone, why would anyone evolve light? Because they wouldn't have evolved eyes? Or why would they evolve eyes?

Speaker 9 Because they wouldn't have evolved light.

Speaker 5 I think God

Speaker 7 putting that hypothesis aside.

Speaker 1 I love it when he does his catchphrase. It's one of my favourite catchphrases.

Speaker 7 John.

Speaker 8 Yeah, so there is still light. There's just no sunlight.

Speaker 8 So bioluminescence is still going on down there for all those reasons other than the camouflage one, so communicating with others members of the same species, there are some other sources of light in the deep ocean, particularly hydrothermal vents, that are not biological and very mysterious.

Speaker 8 So, the vents, they actually glow incredibly faintly. Well, actually, just slightly too faint for the human eye to see, dark adapted.

Speaker 8 They glow, and there's been a lot of debate as to what this light, what's producing this light, it's not biological.

Speaker 8 There are some pretty wacky physical theories to do with minerals precipitating out of of that hot, mineral-rich fluid, or indeed mineral crystals fracturing as they do that.

Speaker 8 So a top tip if you want to explore some of these crazy ways you can make light, if you get yourself a packet of a popular brand of mint

Speaker 8 and you put yourself in a darkened room and you snap one of these popular mints in half, you will see a flash of light and it's something called triboluminescence.

Speaker 8 Now, that it's probably actually the chemical reactions in the hot vent fluid that produce a very faint glow.

Speaker 8 And we get animals down there living at the vents that have light sensing organs that are able to perceive that and use that to find their way around in this kind of maze of mineral spires gushing, scalding, potentially scalding water.

Speaker 5 We do.

Speaker 1 We should make it clear, actually, just because we are the BBC, that there are other brands of mints apart from popular mints.

Speaker 7 You need to know what brand, though, because which mint is it?

Speaker 8 It's one that's renowned for being round.

Speaker 1 It is actually based on the most important part of the experiment is the popularity of the mint. So that will change region by region.

Speaker 1 It's the popularity, not the structure of the mint.

Speaker 8 I haven't actually tried it with other mints. I mean, there's an experiment.
Let's see, you know, do we get triboluminescence across a whole range of supermarket mints?

Speaker 9 Beef mints, chicken mints?

Speaker 7 Popular.

Speaker 7 Popular forms of mint.

Speaker 5 It's late over here.

Speaker 9 I'm tired. I've had COVID.

Speaker 5 Just make me a little bit.

Speaker 1 This is a lovely lovely thing, actually, because, yeah,

Speaker 1 we're recording in the UK in the morning, but for Tim, it's about 11pm now, isn't it? So it's lovely.

Speaker 5 You take those two hypnagogic visions in your head.

Speaker 9 Totally. I'm starting to see God in the hydrothermal vents.

Speaker 1 Well, hydrothermal vents do move in mysterious ways, as we've just discovered. So your analogy is getting stronger and stronger.

Speaker 5 Tim, what to us?

Speaker 7 Light.

Speaker 7 That's not the

Speaker 7 King James version, is it? In the beginning, there was light or something. Yeah.

Speaker 5 no.

Speaker 9 No, there was the word. There was the word first, and then the word was God, and then God said, let there be light, and then there were hydrothermal vents.
And then there were anglerfish

Speaker 9 who liked really big lady anglerfish, and then got sucked into their nasty anglerfish trap and became swinging testicles of nothingness.

Speaker 1 That really is a great Frank Sinatra song.

Speaker 5 That is.

Speaker 1 Diva, we should probably move on because I know we're almost running out of time, which is also to think about as we're exploring the ocean floors as well, that there's a lot of different conversations as well about the human impact of what we're, you know, the possibilities of, for instance, the exploitation of the ocean floors.

Speaker 1 So how do we start to measure, first of all, the human impact so far from looking at the deep ocean?

Speaker 4 So I think that's something that a lot of people really think about. I mean, most people don't really think about the deep sea at all, right?

Speaker 4 But also the fact that it is, yes, it's out of sight, yes, it's out of mind, but actually, it's also under pressure in multiple ways.

Speaker 4 And so, with this increase in technology that's allowing, you know, more people like Brian to go into the deep ocean, we're also seeing an increase in technology that's allowing us to use more of the deep ocean.

Speaker 4 And that is resulting in a lot more impacts. So, often, and John will have similar stories, you know, we will go to a part of the ocean that no one has been before, and we will find evidence of us.

Speaker 4 And that can be a beer bottle, or it can be trawl marks from a fishing net.

Speaker 4 But, you know, it's very rare that we would go out to sea on an expedition and not find some kind of human impact that we can see with our eyes. And those are, of course, like the obvious ones, right?

Speaker 4 Like I just said, pollution and fishing impacts and so on. But then there are all these other impacts that we actually can't really see very easily, like chemical pollution or microplastics.

Speaker 4 And so there's that. But then, of course, there's, for instance, industries pushing into the deep ocean.

Speaker 4 We've got deep water oil and gas exploration that's been happening for a couple of decades now, extraction, I should say. And now we've got new emerging industries potentially on the horizon as well.

Speaker 4 We're beginning to think about getting minerals from the deep sea. And so perhaps in the next few years, there may be deep seabed mining happening.

Speaker 4 And of course, all of these things are going to cause an impact. And that's particularly worrying because the deep sea, for the most part, is a very slow and stable environment.

Speaker 4 And that means that it doesn't really deal well with change and impact.

Speaker 4 And not only does it not deal well with change and impact, but for most of the deep sea, it's still so unexplored and so poorly understood that really we lack that basic amount of information to be able to weigh what the change is against.

Speaker 4 And so we're almost like grappling in the dark with what is happening in the deep sea, even though it is already changing.

Speaker 7 But that suggests that,

Speaker 7 and this is really a question, but it seems to me it suggests that there are two ways of treating the deep sea on the extremes.

Speaker 7 There's like the Antarctic, for example, where we ring-fence it. It's almost like a protected area.

Speaker 7 But also there is the,

Speaker 7 I suppose, the other end of the scale, as you mentioned, it's resource rich. And so therefore, there may be a feeling that we could exploit it perhaps in some kind of sustainable way.

Speaker 7 So how do you see it? Do you see it as something that should be absolutely off limits, at least until we understand a great deal more about the environment?

Speaker 7 Or are there opportunities there for us to begin to mine minerals perhaps in a sustainable and responsible way?

Speaker 4 So I think there's a lot of benefits that we get from the deep ocean, both monetary and also things that don't, right?

Speaker 4 So for instance, the deep sea, which we haven't already touched on, is really important for things like climate regulation and has links to fisheries that feed billions of people, nutrient cycling, it's linked to culture of many different humans around the world.

Speaker 4 And yet, there is still so much that

Speaker 4 we really don't know. And

Speaker 4 so, in terms of that question about balancing exploitation and use with preservation,

Speaker 4 it's a challenging one, obviously, for society. But there are ways to use the deep sea without causing a huge amount of impact.

Speaker 4 So, for instance, we've heard about how incredible deep sea life is so many times during the show.

Speaker 4 And those properties, you know, that uniqueness about deep sea animals, those potentially could be useful to us. They're marine genetic resources.

Speaker 4 And so that's one way in which we can get so much from the deep ocean. Bioinspiration is another one.

Speaker 4 But then when we think about activities like deep-seabed mining, which is potentially going to take place on an enormous scale in our ocean and really could be one of the largest industrial extractions to ever be seen on the planet, there are questions around that, like very grave questions around that.

Speaker 4 And again, because of how long the deep sea and life there takes to recover from these types of activities.

Speaker 1 John, I wondered in terms of the importance of

Speaker 1 education, of knowing, as you said, it is a very, it's a mysterious place to most.

Speaker 1 And I know that I've seen, I forget which environmental talk I saw by someone who once said that the problem is as human beings, we will not fight for things that we do not love.

Speaker 1 So, how do we show people this incredibly intricate and strange world?

Speaker 8 Yes, the thing is, right now, we have an opportunity that we never had before in terms of connecting people with the deep ocean

Speaker 8 for anyone who has an internet connection, at least.

Speaker 8 Because you can, just with a smartphone, you can hook up for free to live feeds from the cameras on deep diving, remotely operated vehicles on expeditions around the world.

Speaker 8 You can tap into camera feeds from cameras watching hydrothermal vents all the time. They send back like 15 minutes every few hours.

Speaker 8 You can listen to whale song from a hydrophone 900 meters deep in Monterey Bay. There are 4,000 floats bobbing about in the ocean monitoring its conditions and health.

Speaker 8 And again, you can just go online and click on the measurements they're making.

Speaker 8 These were all kind of specialist resources that even 10 years ago, only researchers in ocean sciences would have had access to. And now it's there for anyone who wants to dip into it.

Speaker 8 It's like a portal to the heart of the ocean. But we have to make sure that

Speaker 8 that is getting through, that we're connecting to the deep ocean, or rather, we're seeing its connection to us, as Diva said, and that everyone has access to that. And that includes, therefore,

Speaker 8 making sure that everyone has the opportunity to be involved in ocean exploration.

Speaker 1 So, Tim, now we've realized it's important that you get involved in ocean exploration. You've heard the case for it.
Are you now prepared to be put in a titanium ball?

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 9 Stick me in a two-metre diameter sphere for eight hours, dehydrated.

Speaker 5 It sounds awesome.

Speaker 4 So, so, to try and charm you Tim, I did a couple, a couple, maybe a year or two ago, I went down with Will Smith in a Smersible.

Speaker 4 And he anyone would do that. Yeah, exactly.
So, I mean, if he can do it, you definitely can. And he certainly was also shitting himself.

Speaker 5 But,

Speaker 4 you know, by the end of it, he thought it was a lovely experience.

Speaker 1 So, the dehydration worked well, but he had been eating solids. That's what we found out there then.

Speaker 9 Pre-dive Curry.

Speaker 7 Terrible. Before we end I'm going to make one last heroic attempt to bring this back on track.

Speaker 7 You know often when we talk about space exploration or astrophysics or there are big questions that

Speaker 7 and we often ask you know if if there's an answer to one of the big questions that you could receive in your professional life or even discover what would it be. So I wondered,

Speaker 7 start with you, Diva, what are the one or two of the biggest questions left in terms of the animals down there or the environment itself?

Speaker 4 So I mean, I'm going to take this from like a very, very basic angle. And I think, you know, the fact that we've seen far less than 1% of the deep ocean, to me, is still this phenomenal question.

Speaker 4 Just answering that first question of what is down there? Like to think that we can ask that about the majority of our own planet is something I think that really does need unraveling.

Speaker 7 And could there be a big thing? Not wishing to go back to Robin's awful introduction, which in you know, the Loch Ness Monster and all that drivel that he talked about.

Speaker 7 Is it possible that there are large things down there? We tend to think of species as little microbes and interesting little things.

Speaker 7 Is it possible that there are big things down there amongst the unknowns?

Speaker 4 I mean, how big are we talking?

Speaker 7 I don't know. Giant squid, giant squid

Speaker 7 Not dinosaurs, actually. Oh, look, there's monsters.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm interested. I think what Brian's trying to say is, is it possible that there are ghosts down there? Because it does seem, you know, it's below the twilight zone.

Speaker 1 It does seem highly likely.

Speaker 5 Sorry, Robin. That is what you were trying to say, wasn't it?

Speaker 9 But there's goats down there.

Speaker 5 Oh, well, goats as well.

Speaker 1 Spider goats are going to be.

Speaker 9 Goats are amazing and they go anywhere, but there's not going to be goats down there, mate.

Speaker 4 We're joking about this.

Speaker 4 John and I have actually seen pigs down in the deep sea.

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 1 This is where the show was meant to get to. Tell us more about the sea pigs.

Speaker 4 No, it actually wasn't even sea pigs. We mean land pigs.

Speaker 9 I just know this is a lie because you try and stop a pig from drinking for 18 hours and they just won't do it.

Speaker 4 So very quickly,

Speaker 4 we basically, the deep sea is a really food limited environment. So what happens is sometimes you get these really big injections of food in the deep sea.

Speaker 4 So it could be a tree that floats out to sea and sinks, or a whale, for instance, that dies and sinks into the deep ocean.

Speaker 4 And that really is this, you know, prompts us feeding bonanza on the deep sea floor because animals come from far and wide to just gorge on what has arrived.

Speaker 4 So we were in Kingston, Jamaica, getting on a ship to go out to the Cayman Trench to look for the world's deepest hydrothermal vents. And we decided, hey, why don't we just sink some

Speaker 4 animals, dead animals, obviously. And so we went to the butchers in, no, it was Montego Bay.
Went to the butchers in Montego Bay and just ordered some pigs, some whole pigs.

Speaker 4 And we strapped them onto the RV. They were called Petunia and Princess.

Speaker 4 And we left them down on the deep sea floor to see what would come to eat them.

Speaker 1 Always name your dead pigs. That's it even.

Speaker 1 And Tim, I think we're nearly at an album now. Going to the butchers on Montego Bay has...
I can hear that one already.

Speaker 9 Princess and Petunia.

Speaker 5 Terrible. And we only got one of them back, if I remember right.

Speaker 8 We got one of them back, and some very interesting species had colonized the bones and so on.

Speaker 8 And this was picked up a few months later during a Japanese expedition, which was out exploring the same area. But one of them, something made off with it into the darkness.

Speaker 8 So to go back to the question, you know, could there still be big things out there? Yeah, there could be.

Speaker 4 So I was just going to add that, you know, we also sink things like alligators and entire whales, cows.

Speaker 4 I mean, yeah, deep sea scientists, we get bored despite the amazing array of things we have to study in the deep sea, I guess.

Speaker 1 This mixture of your dehydrated hallucinations at the same time as sinking pigs is a kind of aquatic version of a Pink Floyd gig.

Speaker 5 It's a really intriguing experience.

Speaker 9 Sinking Pigs sounds like the band name, Robin.

Speaker 7 That's a good place to end.

Speaker 1 I was going to go to the audience questions because we asked the audience, if you could discover one thing hiding in the deep ocean, what would it be?

Speaker 1 And the first answer we got was from Stephen, who said, it'd be quite nice to discover whatever it is Bono has been looking for without success since the late 1980s.

Speaker 9 That would be lovely for him.

Speaker 1 That is the idea that that song just ends with, found it, and everyone goes,

Speaker 1 you really seem to have destroyed the emotion for that. And you know what is annoying? It's where I left it just before we started recording the Joshua Tree.
That is so annoying.

Speaker 7 How about this one then? This is at my level at the moment, isn't it? Ian Gwynn, an amazing dairy fish, because finned can only get butter.

Speaker 9 I don't feel so bad about my earlier puns.

Speaker 5 I feel quite.

Speaker 7 Gareth.

Speaker 7 Gareth said Tim Minchin in a mermaid costume. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 I think that's actually from a game of Pluto he's been playing.

Speaker 7 If you could have one half of you be a mermaid, which bit would it be, Tim?

Speaker 9 Would I rather?

Speaker 7 Or the bottom bit.

Speaker 9 Would I rather a fishy tail or a fishy top?

Speaker 1 Do you want to have the head of a fish, thus removing your career, but just the ability to walk around bumping into things? Or would you rather be wheeled about but still singing?

Speaker 9 I would like the head of a Petunia the pig and the testicles of an angular fish.

Speaker 1 Someone's drawing that right now at home. I can hear the doodles being made.

Speaker 1 Well, thank you very much to our fantastic panel, Dev Ramon, John Copley, and Tim Minchin.

Speaker 1 And thank you very much to our audience at home as well.

Speaker 1 Now, next week, we're going to find out how you can go on an adventure to discover the incredible underground connective tissue of fungi if your dog falls into a toilet.

Speaker 1 That really is the starting point of next week's show. It involves a dog falling into a toilet.
Then we should make it very, very clear.

Speaker 1 BBC advice again: please do not put your dog down the toilet for the purposes of scientific research because you've heard that. Just relax with a popular mint.
Don't get involved.

Speaker 5 Goodbye. Goodbye.

Speaker 5 Monkey gay, option monkey

Speaker 10 Hello, I'm Stephen Fry and I heartily recommend you listen to the BBC's history podcast, You're Dead to Me, because, well, one, you can join me in learning all about Frederick the Great of Prussia.

Speaker 10 Two, it takes you on a historical grand tour from naughty nuns who became stitching sisters to a globetrotting Maghrebi.

Speaker 5 And three,

Speaker 5 well, it's fun.

Speaker 10 And don't we all need a little bit of that at the moment? You can find it on BBC Sounds, don't you know? So subscribe to You're Dead to Me and have yourself a giggle as you learn. You've earned it.

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