Oceans: The Last Great Unexplored Frontier?

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Welcome to series 6 of the Infinite Monkey Cage.

For those who have only just joined us, the story so far.

Episode 6, The Empiricist Strikes Back.

After a ruthless battle, the Earth has been removed from the center of the solar system and been replaced by the Sun.

After a pocket Phil instant on a big tower, it appeared that all objects fall at the same rate in a gravitational field.

Actually, Einstein showed that all objects are simply following geodesics in curved space-time, so really, I would argue that they are all in inertial frames.

Yeah, fair enough.

Meanwhile, people were furious after light was shed on human origins.

Although light behaves in some ways like a particle, in some ways like a wave.

Try explaining diffraction, for example, using a particle framework.

Actually, you can with Feynman's Summer History's approach to quantum theory.

Yes, the life was more of a metaphor, really, there.

At the close of the last episode, something was going on somewhere in Switzerland where there was a tantalising glimpse of a particle that might give us mass.

2.8 sigma isn't a tantalising glimpse, it's a precisely defined confidence level.

Yeah, but yeah, tantalizing glimpse is a little bit more charming, isn't it?

There you go.

Oh, I saw a tantalising glimpse of a lady the other day at the bar.

Oh, my Constance.

Oh, man, your science takes the poetry, doesn't it?

Knowing stuff.

This is the Infinite Monkey Cage.

I'm Brian Cox, and since I was last on air, I've been filming Wonders of Life for BBC Two.

And in doing so, I've discovered that biology is a science.

I'm Robin Ins.

And in the last week, I made a trombonus play jazz to earthworms in memory of Charles Darwin.

And genuinely true.

And they didn't like it.

It was very free jazz, overly free for the earthworm.

And

afterwards, I had an argument with a woman who said, You said Charles Darwin was really nice.

He wasn't.

He was really cruel to his wife.

I said, I don't think he was.

He was like, because he's an amazing man, Charles Darwin, very humanitarian.

And she went, no, he was.

He was really, really cruel to his wife.

I saw a documentary, and often after he'd done one of his recitals, he would, I said, sorry, can I stop you?

After he did one of his recitals,

he said, Are you thinking of Charles Dickens?

She went, you're quite right.

And then I suggested Charles Darwin's A Christmas Carol, and she goes, Here comes the ghost of Christmas Past.

I was expecting that.

Oh, we're still going.

So, this year is the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.

Didn't you know?

It is.

So, we thought we'd start the series by going underwater and looking at absolutely everything that is under the sea except the Titanic.

Yes, we have better maps of Mars than we do of the ocean floor, which means that 80% of the surface of our own planet is, in fact, a great unexplored frontier.

And to help us explore the unexplored, if that is indeed possible, we have a panel of scientists and a comedian.

I've given you your alibi already.

Secret comedian who has not as yet been introduced.

Dr.

Brownlee Merton is a geologist at the National Oceanographic Centre and an expert on deep-sea trenches and volcanoes.

He's the first geologist we've had on the show, as Brian actually used to refuse to have geologists because he said it was just another branch of sculpting and therefore an art.

But then I said there's volcanoes involved, and he went, oh, they're brilliant.

I've flown over one of those in my big helicopter.

We're joined by Professor Lloyd Pett from from the British Antarctic Survey.

He's visited the Antarctic eight times where he's investigated low-temperature giganticism and made the astounding discovery of an almost transparent fish that lives without hemoglobin.

Though some of the New Age group have said that in fact it's not a big

transparent fish that is just typical of scientists who are merely explaining Elizabethan ghost fish.

Our final guest joined us on the first series, a comedian with an inquiring mind, desire to investigate the minutiae of the world, from Google Wax to astrology to corporate America to cribbage.

Please welcome Dave Gorman.

Well, if I could start with an overview.

So, Lloyd, precisely

to the eighth decimal place, how much of the ocean is unexplored?

Up 69.67%,

that sort of level.

The oceans cover about 70% of the planet.

If you think of them as the habitable volume for life, then again, there's two-thirds, three-quarters of the living space on the planet is in the seas and the oceans.

The depths of the deepest oceans are two, three, four times bigger than the highest mountains we've got on land.

And yes, large areas of the deep sea and large areas of the planet's oceans are unexplored.

About 80% of the seabed in the Antarctic, in the southern ocean, has never had humans exploring it.

So there are large areas you don't don't know.

There's a new hydrothermal vent found there last year and completely new species found.

You know why it's unexplored?

Because it's dark and it's wet.

This is a really weird thought, but actually, our planet is one of the darkest planets in the solar system, right?

Because there's no light down there.

This is something I tell my students.

We've got 70% of the planet covered in ocean and you can't see anything.

And you can't, it's easy for Brian with his telescope to look up and go, oh, look,

there's the moon.

There are craters.

It is infinitely big, though, the universe isn't.

But you can see it.

The ocean is finite.

There are photons.

There are photons buzzing around and and and bringing you information.

But but the bottom of the ocean's absolutely dark and it's black and you can't see anything.

And it's i i i the pressure's down there.

Space travels a doddle.

You've only got one atmosphere difference.

It's never been this aggressive before.

It's never used to just be noise.

Well, we should, I'll tell you what, looking at a telescope or whatever you do at CERN, trying trying to think, oh, oh, that's easy.

The sea's just packed with stuff that we can't see.

It's dark and mysterious.

And it stings with all teeth that are very biting.

But you're floating around in a spacecraft made of tinfoil.

You know, we've got Jim Cameron just recently went down to the bottom of the alphabet

trench.

All clean film.

His everyday household appliances are sufficient to explore the universe.

His submarine was like a foot thick of titanium, porcelain.

I mean, he's got to go with that.

The pressure is there will crush into the size of a peanut if it goes wrong.

You say that.

James Cameron says he's been exploring the oceans, and I think, hang on, a lot of his friends are into special effects.

Did he really do that?

Well, that's a good question.

Well, Bramley, at what point did we discover,

I mean, was there a point

with human imagination where we realized just how little we knew, where suddenly people were looking below, they were looking into the sea and going, this is an incredible, a territory which we did not realise was quite so alien.

Well, I mean it's interesting but we've been plying the seas for trade for for thousands of years yeah

it wasn't really until the spice trade that in the 17th century that people started going across to the the Indian Ocean and and and kind of really discovering really the size of the oceans people didn't go out to explore the oceans for ocean's sake they went out there to make money and they went out you know to to trade and and and to take lands we didn't really start exploring i think probably certainly in from a British perspective until the Challenger expedition of I think about 1726 or 1826, sorry.

So then, actually, there was an expedition of about 12 years, which is quite a long time if you're going to see.

12 years in a ship, going across the oceans, systematically looking at the biology in the surface oceans.

Amazingly, they were actually trying to find out how deep the oceans were.

And you know what they did?

They had a boy with a string and a weight.

And they'd

read boy, how many fathoms was that?

And they'd be doing this across the oceans in like three, four, five, six thousand meters of water.

And they also wanted to find out what the bottom of the ocean was.

And so they used to take a lead weight, which was the plum bob, used to stick a lump of tallow, which is kind of like animal fat in the bottom.

Boy, drop it down.

Yeah, that's 3,000 fathoms, sorry, you know, bring it back up.

And there's a little bit of volcanic glass in the bottom, or a little bit of limestone.

Or a shark that really likes tallow.

Yeah.

And then it'd be infinitely deep.

So the exploration didn't really start until

the 17th, 18th century.

I mean, Dave, did you,

like me, you're very much in the non-expert role on this?

Very much, yeah, yeah.

And until the start of the show, did you have any realization of just how unknown this enormous percentage of the planet Earth is?

No, and part of me thinks, well, how do you know how much is unexplored if you haven't explored it yet?

It's sort of, you know, if you haven't gone there, you don't know how deep it is, then you can't possibly put a percentage on how much you have explored.

You need to sort of go there and find out.

I also think it's proof that someone like my dad wasn't in charge, because if my dad was in charge, we wouldn't have been allowed to go to the moon until we'd finished the oceans.

It's like someone saying, I'm going to go to Scotland and clean somebody else's house, and you haven't even done your own kitchen yet.

But actually, Bramley, you alluded to the difficulty.

So, can you spell out just how difficult it is?

Let's say, James Cameron, you mentioned this expedition to the Mariana Trench.

What's that?

About 12 kilometres?

11 kilometres, challenger deep in the Marianas.

So, what are the challenges that you face if you decide to build a submersible to go down there?

First of all, you've got the enormous pressure.

I don't know if anybody's been doing it.

It's hard work, isn't it?

Yeah.

Expectation was huge after Titanic.

How could he follow that?

You've got to know where you are.

But no, you've got this enormous pressure.

And that's really one of the major challenges.

Like I said, in a spacecraft, you fly around basically something which is wrapped in tin foil.

But these submarines, like the one that Cameron built, in fact, I'm almost more of a fan, really, of Jacques Picard and Don Walsh, who actually went down in the Marianas trench

back in 1960, that's right, on the thing called the Batiscaff Trieste.

So they made a pressure case, a bigger sphere out of steel.

It was about four feet in diameter.

Two of them climbed inside.

This thing's like half a foot thick.

That's easy.

You can put yourself into a steel ball and drop yourself over the side of the ship.

You'll go to the bottom.

Trouble is coming back.

So how do you come back?

Ah, that's easy.

You make something which is lighter than water.

You have some kind of flotation.

But the flotation itself is trying to be crushed by the enormous pressure.

So what they did back in 1960, they basically made a balloon because Jacques Picard's father, Auguste, was a stratospheric balloonist.

As it were, we'll make an underwater balloon, which will carry our gondola made of steel, this ball, to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, 11 kilometers, and we'll make it lighter than water because we have this big tank of gasoline, diesel.

Yeah?

Huge.

I mean, this thing's like, cost a fortune these days, you couldn't afford it.

But I mean, it's an absolutely enormous barrel, like 60-foot long, millions of gallons gasoline in this barrel, which doesn't compress enough, so that it still remains lighter than water.

So they had this thing tied to their gondola, and then they had bags of sand, only in this case, hoppers of lead shot, which were controlled electromagnetically.

So this thing would float, waft to the bottom of the ocean, survive the pressure.

And when they got to 11 kilometers, which is 1100 bar of pressure, this enormous amount of pressure.

So that's over a thousand times atmospheric pressure.

It is.

1,100 times atmospheric pressure.

I don't know how it's like having an elephant on stiletto standing on your toe.

I mean, this is.

I haven't done the maths, but it's really.

When they start getting the shoes on, first of all, and they're such a distraction from the maths, then, aren't they?

Why am I imagining the elephant wearing lipstick?

Is everyone else doing that?

I am now.

It's gone to fishnets now.

It's gone to fishnets.

time.

That's disgusting.

That is disgusting.

So these guys had to contend with all these sorts of problems.

And the reason why those particular two characters are my heroes is because they had waited something like seven years to get the chance to dive.

And the weather was bad.

And this is where the human...

dimension comes in.

They had been waiting three weeks in the choppy seas on this boat with their submarine ready to go.

They got the go-ahead, the weather looked fine, this is the big chance, the one chance to go.

They got to 9,000 meters, and one of the windows cracked.

Big boom.

What would you do?

I'd have gone back up.

They said, well, hell with that.

We've been waiting all this time.

If it hasn't gone completely, we'll keep on going.

And they went the remaining

few thousand meters to the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

But that kind of sums up the enormous technical challenge to get into an environment which is 100% alien to anything that a human being can directly experience.

And there have been, what, three expeditions in total?

Is that old?

Is it three?

There's been two manned ones.

There was the original one, 1960, and then there was Jim Cameron, who allegedly just went a few months ago.

He should prove it by coming back up with the bit of window that cracked.

Everyone who goes down should leave something and the next person should bring it back.

Otherwise, I don't believe any of them went.

Prove it.

But I kind of feel sorry a bit for

these guys back in 1960, Don Walsh and Jack Picard, because they're basically engineers, not biologists, not not scientists.

And when they went down there, all the scientists said, you won't find anything, it'll just be a pile of mud and be dark, nothing there at all.

Because in those days, they thought all the nutrients were eaten in the water column on the way down, be nothing to sustain life.

When they went down there, they claimed to have seen a flat fish, but no one believed them.

Is that right, Lloyd?

They claimed to have seen fish and nobody believed them.

No wonder it was flat.

1100 bucks.

I mean, Lloyd, is that one of the things where, you know, for a long time there were the incredible mariners' tales of the bizarre creatures that lived in the sea and you would see them kind of, you know, giant octopus and like.

And then there was a point where they went, well, this is all rubbish.

And then suddenly there was an investigation and people were going, we are finding some really weird stuff out here.

What point was there this...

Well, I suppose discovering life that people believed couldn't exist on the planet Earth.

When was the point of discovering that?

Well, that's a kind of progressive thing because it's one of those where if you go and look somewhere where you've not looked before, you find things that you've not seen before.

So as we went the first time to the deep oceans, we found animals that we didn't know existed.

And yes, there are large squid living in the deep ocean.

There are some mega-mouthed sharks that live in the deep that have mouths big enough to encompass people.

We have some very bizarre animals, rat-tailed fish.

And then, if you go and look in places that are really well out of the way, so in the Antarctic, you find fish that have no red blood cells, they're the only vertebrates on the planet that, if you cut them and drain their blood, you have clear blood, and yet they can still live, and that's because the temperatures are low.

You have some really bizarre animals that you never realized existed.

There are animals like wood lice that are 25, 30 centimetres long in the deep sea.

And yes, you have some bizarre animals.

The more you look, the more you find.

Deep sea hydrothermal vents, you find animals that just don't fit the patterns of life that you think, even biochemically.

And they live in symbiosis and they've got bacteria feeding off hydrogen sulphides.

And yet, if the hydrogen sulfides get into their own body tissues, it kills them.

So they have this really interesting problem that they're closely dependent on the bacteria that are living off something that's inimical to life.

They're sort of like Jordan and the tabloid press.

Very much like Jordan and the tabloid press.

That's right.

Very much.

Which one's the sulfide-dependent bacteria?

So if we rewind a bit, we've got an environment there which is very cold, very dark, no sunlight at all.

We're talking, you know, one, two, three, down to ten kilometres or more.

So how does life exist there?

What is the base of the food chain?

On the surface, we're familiar with photosynthesis being

the thing that drives the ecosystem that we see.

So, what is driving that ecosystem down there?

It depends where you are.

I mean, like with humans, it depends where you are.

Scotland, you eat aggress, down in the south, you eat something else.

If you're in a hydrothermal vent, then you've got organisms that are using hydrogen sulfide from the hydrothermal vent to produce energy and to convert into ATP, and then they make sugars, and they can do the standard biochemical things that all organisms do.

But it's based on using hydrogen sulphide from the vents.

So, this is the energy source is from the inside of the earth?

It is from the inside of the earth, upwelling magma, and it's creating black smokers in the hydrothermal vents.

If you go away from those vents into the sort of large plain areas of the deep sea, then most of those areas depend on organic material that is sedimenting out from the surface.

And there's whole communities that are dependent on different types of organic material.

So, when a whale dies and sinks to the seabed, it then stimulates a whole ecosystem to build up around the carcass.

And when wood sinks to the seabed, there are a whole set of organisms that then depend on the wood sinking to the seabed.

And you've also got a phenomenon called marine snow.

So, if you look on large parts of the deep ocean, in periods of the year in association with when there's productivity in the surface, you then have a big long lag for it to settle out and it it gets eaten by various organisms, turn into feces, and the feces then get broken down by fungi and bacteria.

And you end up with this flocculent rain that comes down and settles on the deep sea, and that produces the material that is needed to support the ecosystems on the deep seabed away from the hydrothermal vents.

And you've got, if you like, an environment that people, even sort of 25 or 30 years ago, had no concept about how patchy and different it was from place to place, and therefore how many species could be living down there because you've got this heterogeneity, these differences from place to place, that allow different types of organisms to come into existence.

Can I say, did you say flocculent rain?

Do you not like flocculent rain?

No, I really like it.

Flocculent rain is just the most beautiful phrase.

Marine snow, raining, flocculent material.

That's definitely going to be a Christmas number one.

You just have to play the piano.

I think it really grows.

I liked it every now and again.

Flocculent rain.

That's a new thing that I've nearly learned.

I couldn't master it as yet, but it's like great.

I understand biodiversity and how everything is interconnected.

And when everyone says, oh, you know, the Siberian tiger might die out.

And I understand the panic and trying to keep these things alive.

But if the species that are living right at the very depths of the ocean were to die, our lives wouldn't be any different.

So who gives the toss?

You've made several assumptions there.

Yes, absolutely.

Yes.

What do we call the Clarkson role of the show?

I'm just,

are we connected to them?

Well, I'm loath to use the word gratuitous in response to what you're saying, but what you're saying is gratuitous.

So...

And it was vocculous.

Vlocula.

Nonsense.

So, if you think about the way the world works...

Well, that's what I was trying, but you've told me off.

And think about how important the oceans are.

The oceans are the...

biggest mechanism for transferring heat around the planet.

Okay?

And that happens because cold water at the pole sinks and drives a conveyor of major ocean currents.

Now,

the reason we are warmer than Canada is because of that system.

The Gulf Stream keeps us several degrees warmer than Canada because of that.

If those organisms down there are to die, it's because those currents have stopped.

And that's what happened the last time organisms died en masse down there was the major ocean currents on the Earth stopped.

We had huge anoxic layers in the deep sea oceans.

There was no Gulf Stream.

It got bloody cold.

I'm not suggesting we kill them,

and I'm not saying we stop the currents.

I'm saying if they died and the currents didn't stop,

if we'd never discovered they were there, it wouldn't change anything.

It's how it feels to me.

I'm kind of thinking, so why bother?

Go to space instead, it's more exciting.

Well, why?

And you only need a bit of tin foil.

Exactly, yeah.

So why?

I'm not a heroin addict.

I am an astronaut.

So,

if you're out in your Tinfor spaceship, all that you've really got to look at are stars.

Maybe if you get close enough to a planet, you can have a look at a planet.

You're going to spend...

You're going to spend.

There are 350 billion large galaxies in the observable universe, each with an average 100 billion stars like ours, on countless planetary systems out there to be explored.

It's not just a few points of light, is it?

It's the rest of

reality other than this little bit.

But the one way, though,

just tell me, how many have you been to?

Personally.

None.

Right.

I haven't.

I've been to the bottom of the Sea of Cortez in a submarine, though.

I've been two kilometres down in Alvin.

I think you're answering the question on my behalf now, because it's far more interesting to go down in Alvin and have a look at the Sea of Cortez than to sit in a tinfall spaceship and look at stars.

Oh, no, hang on.

Just because he's been there, it wasn't because it's more interesting, it was more feasible, isn't it?

I mean,

I've been to Waterloo Train Station, but not the top of Everest.

It wasn't because I thought, you know, Waterloo Train Station is much more interesting.

Because it's nearer to Guildford.

Exactly.

Bramley, I don't know if we can continue this argument, but let's, anyway.

Obviously,

your area of science is pointless and hideous.

It's just a planet, yeah, I know.

One of the things that first excited me about kind of undersea things when I was a kid was seeing that picture of the coelacanth.

You know, the coelacanth found only in the last century, something I never knew this term for Lazarus taxon.

It's part of a living group of things which were believed to have died out and then found again.

So, are we going to have more and more of those chances to see things like that as well?

You know, the hope.

have we had other occasions apart from that?

I know there's a Laotian rat that's well one of my colleagues, I mean, Samu Geologist is one of my colleagues who I work with, one of her secret ambitions I didn't really say this on on radio, but one of her secret

ambitions is it still is now, just to give you the chance of backing out.

She wants to try and find the last vestiges of the trilobite.

So so maybe somewhere in some kind of corner of the ocean floor, there's a hydrothermal vent or something which has maintained the environment

since the Cambrian, where there are still trilobites thriving.

Me, I personally don't think that's likely to be the case, but you never know.

This is to me, I'm always intrigued that human beings, whenever we've achieved things, you know, getting up mountains, that we've that that's been trumpeted enormously.

And yet, for some reason, it seems that people, that same level of fascination of the landscape, if you can call it seascape, that lies underneath, which is you know, the volcanoes and there are incredible mountains, etc.

How do you think, why is it that human beings don't have sometimes that same fascination of knowing what lies underneath?

Why?

I think it's because you can see a mountain and water looks flat.

It's as simple as that.

And land feels like our domain.

That's where we live and that's what we see.

And you see that big mountain, you think, I'd be great to go up there.

And then you look over there at what is water and you think, well, that's flat.

That's fine.

It'd be nice to cross that.

You don't think it'd be nice to go down in it.

It just doesn't, it doesn't, you don't know what's down there.

You empty the Grand Canyon, you want to go to the foot of it.

You fill it with water, you want to sail a boat on it.

There's a sort of, there's a natural, that's just human.

I think that's right.

And also, I think there's a there's a thing with the reason space appears attractive, there's a kind of feeling of to see one day we

one day we might completely screw up this earth.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to move somewhere else and do something and leave this rotten old shell of a place behind?

Well, the water doesn't give you that, because if we screw up the world, we screw up that as well.

So it's like space is the idea of being able to bolt off to another home, and mountains are things you can see, and water just kind of looks nice.

And it's mysterious.

You don't know what's under there, and you're not really that bothered.

And you only need tinfoil to go and look up in the higher beams, as opposed to all this complicated machinery that you need to go and look down deep in the ocean.

We are definitely having one if we ever get Buzz Aldrich.

As usual, we've asked our theatre audience a question that perhaps may well have been too banal for our experts, but we might ask them as well.

And today we asked them: which presumed mythical sea creature do you hope might be discovered and why?

First one I've got from Tim is Michael Fish.

This says, Aquaman

to repair damaged oil rigs and enforce fishing regulations with an iron fist.

Imagine some kind of mythical creature that can finally enforce the fishing regulations.

The new Marvel comic.

I like this one.

Which presumed mythical sea creature do you hope might be discovered and why?

And Adrian just said, Don't be so silly.

Well done, Adrian.

Well done, you're correct.

This one says, Mermaids, cause I bet they taste nice.

That's from Laura.

Actually,

we should send it around a panel because I think it's actually

potentially not a banal question.

The the the question is, I suppose it it presumed mythical or even perhaps extinct.

So what which sea creature would you like to rediscover?

Well, I think I'll go back with the trilobite.

The trilobite?

The trilobite, yeah, because you've got really interesting eyes.

Crystal lenses, isn't it?

Compound crystal lenses.

So you've got a little bit of mineralogy, which is a little bit of geology in with the animal.

Because then it would be geology as well.

Dave, mythical sea creature you'd like to see discovered?

It's a creature that's sort of

sort of sea creature, but it does sort of come out of the water, and that would be the Ursula Andrus.

I'd like to see an ammonite.

A thing with the head of a squid and a big coiled shell that bobs its way through the ocean and catches things with its tentacles.

I'd love to see one of them.

With lipsticking fishnets.

I've now seen a squid trying to put on its fishnets, going, this was a very poor choice.

Tights are difficult enough, but oh man.

Anyway, so that's it for this week.

We've put together a fact sheet which we have catchily called the internet.

So if you'd like to know more about any of the issues we've discussed, well, go on a search engine engine or visit a library or kidnap a sub-mariner.

They are flyers.

Thanks to our guests, Lloyd Peck, Bramley Merton, and Dave Gorman.

Next week, we'll be at the Cheltenham Science Festival discussing the importance and possible dangers posed by science mavericks.

And in order to make our series more efficient and get better value of money for the BBC licence fee payers, we've decided to answer all the R8 letters we're likely to receive in advance.

Here are the following replies to whatever you write: Human action is a contributory factor.

Don't be stupid, it's got to be more than 6,000 years old.

I can bend spoons too, although I never met Michael Jackson.

And what do you expect if you buy a house built on a Native American burial ground?

You've only yourself to blame.

Goodbye.

If you've enjoyed this programme, you might like to try other Radio 4 podcasts, including Start the Week, Lively Discussions chaired by Andrew Marr, and a weekly highlight from Radio 4's evening arts program Front Row.

To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio4.

Suffs!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We the man to be home!

Winner, best score!

We the man to be seen!

Winner best book!

We the man to be quality!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.