The Deep Seabed (featuring Dr. Andrew Thaler)

00:00:07
Speaker 1: The deep seabed covers over half of the Earth. That's an area that's larger than the Moon and an area that's larger than the surface of Mars. But we know precious little about Earth's depths, and just about every time we go down there we find something amazing and new. But another thing that we've found down there are resources, and some of these resources could be used for things like making batteries for electric cars. So how do we go about balancing the health of a diverse but poorly understood ecosystem against humanity's needs for resources and who gets to make those choices. On today's show, we're bringing doctor Andrew Thayler on to answer these questions and more. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Deep Universe.

00:01:03
Speaker 2: Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist who also likes thinking about aliens and I love living next to the ocean.

00:01:10
Speaker 3: Hello.

00:01:10
Speaker 1: I'm Kelly Wintersmith. I studied parasites and space and yeah, I've got to admit living next to the ocean's probably awesome. I once had an office on the sea and I could see the sun set over the ocean and it was it was pretty epic. I'll score. I'm giving you a point for that.

00:01:27
Speaker 2: And I have to do some accounting here also and give you a point because you know, on the podcast, we're always telling folks right in if we get something wrong.

00:01:35
Speaker 4: Huh.

00:01:35
Speaker 2: And so I got a message yesterday from a listener and they say, quote, I just listened to the cholera episodes where you Daniel criticized Kelly for her pronunciation of Hamburg, and as someone living in Hamburg, I wanted to let you know that Kelly did indeed pronounce Hamburg perfectly.

00:01:51
Speaker 1: Ike said it was Hamburg. All this never happens.

00:01:57
Speaker 2: This is great, I know, points for you, and so Penance in today's episode, I'm not going to complain once about any use of Latin names. Go for it.

00:02:06
Speaker 1: Oh that's amazing, that's amazing. I'll let our guests know, and we're both going to just go crazy like it's Christmas.

00:02:13
Speaker 5: You know.

00:02:13
Speaker 1: But speaking of emails from listeners, I've actually gotten a fair number of emails from listeners asking about my goat, and so can I use this as an opportunity to update.

00:02:26
Speaker 2: Yes, let's have a Goat update. Please let us know how it's going, let us know how it's goating.

00:02:30
Speaker 1: Ah Lol. So Lottie are my goats had her baby. I won't go into loads of details because it was a little intense. I did have to intervene. We had a livestock vet on the phone. But after a little bit of help from me, she had five babies, which is a lot of babies for a Nigerian dwarf, and they are super cute. We've had a lot of fun.

00:02:55
Speaker 2: What did you name them?

00:02:56
Speaker 1: They got named after cookies. So there's five kids on the farm and they decided they wanted to name them after cookies. So we have Snickerdoodle, short Bread, Crinkle chocolate chip, and Newman No which is the organic Oreo brand.

00:03:17
Speaker 2: So wonderful.

00:03:19
Speaker 1: Yes. So anyway, five adorable little goats to take care of. And if you have kids listening, fast forward thirty seconds. The runt of the litter didn't make it. Sometimes that happens. We did everything that we could. We were getting up at one am every night to check on her. But anyway, we still have four healthy goats and we have mourned and moved on. Rest in peace. Crinkle.

00:03:43
Speaker 2: Well, I was telling your goat story to a friend of mine and they asked me a question I didn't know the answer to, which is why does Kelly have goats on her farm?

00:03:51
Speaker 1: Oh? I didn't because just.

00:03:53
Speaker 2: For the sheer pleasure of having goats around, no dairy.

00:03:56
Speaker 1: Were their dairy goats. And we so we you know you have they have to have babies before they start making milk. That's how mammals work. And of course I know you know that, and so in a couple of weeks we will start seeing if she's making enough milk to share with the rest of us. Actually, we hadn't expected she was gonna have so many babies that might make milking Lotty difficult. But often what you do is, once the babies are big enough to go the whole night without milk, you separate mom and the babies so that you can be the first to collect milk in the morning, and then they get milk the rest of the day, and if you need to, you can supplement with bottle feeding and stuff like that. So, yeah, for dairy purposes, so we can make cheese and yogurt and milk.

00:04:41
Speaker 2: Sounds delicious, yes, But.

00:04:43
Speaker 1: From the amazing things that happen on land, we are moving to the amazing things that happen under the sea today.

00:04:49
Speaker 2: Excellent transition.

00:04:50
Speaker 1: Oh thanks, It sort of didn't really flow, but I tried.

00:04:54
Speaker 2: Well, everything that happens on land comes originally from the sea, right, That's what we learned today.

00:04:59
Speaker 1: That's true. Yeah, yes, sea goats.

00:05:04
Speaker 2: But we had the gotist conversation today with somebody who knows all about the deep sea.

00:05:09
Speaker 1: We did, yeh. So I've been dying to talk about the deep sea bed. It's a really fascinating environment to me, and the rules for how to govern it are currently being figured out right now, but it's happening so slowly that some countries are starting to make their own rules. In anyway, it's like over fifty percent of the surface of the Earth, Like, the rules for how we're going to mine it are being hammered out at the moment. But I feel like that's not on a lot of our radar. So I thought it would be really cool to talk about that today, and so I asked the extraordinaries. The deep seabed is about sixty five percent of Earth's surface area. Where do the rules governing resource extraction from the deep sea bed come from? Here's what they had to say.

00:05:46
Speaker 5: It's the law of the Sea treaty.

00:05:49
Speaker 2: I know this one.

00:05:49
Speaker 6: This is the first one in five years that I've known a trun Kelly's book.

00:05:54
Speaker 5: Because the law is there are already laws that they are very very old, and they're very difficult to change.

00:06:00
Speaker 2: How most countries in the world still fall back to the Napoleonic code, you know, if they have no choice. I think, anyhow, as we have.

00:06:08
Speaker 7: Come from Napoleon, I believe countries have exclusive access to a part of the sea that's closer to the coastal line, and they make the rules for that part of the sea. As for international waters, I would say that probably there are no rules.

00:06:25
Speaker 4: I don't exactly know how the deep seabed is governed. I expect that it's a little bit of a wild wild West situation.

00:06:36
Speaker 7: Well I could be wrong, but I thought that there were international treaties governing that. Perhaps it's just a gentleman's agreement.

00:06:42
Speaker 8: A world sort of open wallster agreement. But actually have no idea. It's just a guess.

00:06:48
Speaker 7: Now Noah is on paper a stewart for seabed mining, but I don't know who within is doing it.

00:06:56
Speaker 8: I think they're trying to figure it out.

00:06:58
Speaker 2: Kelly, I think the rules governing these extraction from the deep sea bed comes from international law and UN Charter, okay, thanks.

00:07:05
Speaker 5: By the American oil hegemony.

00:07:08
Speaker 7: Ironically, they come from the remaining thirty five percent.

00:07:11
Speaker 8: I think, like most international rules, somebody probably started drilling or claiming territory. So I'm thinking that UN may have a step in here the referee before it becomes a bigger mess.

00:07:24
Speaker 9: So things like mining are regulated through the International Seabed Authority, which is under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea or unclose of which I don't believe the United States has ratified.

00:07:35
Speaker 7: Yet, probably an outdated and patchwork series of ineffective regulations across many countries.

00:07:41
Speaker 4: If it was a question from Daniel, I would say physics, but since it's from Kelly, I would say octopods.

00:07:47
Speaker 7: I don't know, but I've heard of the United Nations Law of the Sea, so I'm going with that.

00:07:54
Speaker 3: The seabed is regulated by a quasi un voluntary agency called the International Zeabat Authority. But it's a bit toothless, and I saw a documentary read something about it recently that it's a bit controversial and it's not really regulated in the end a little.

00:08:13
Speaker 1: Bit of shade thrown on international law. I get that, I get that the answer is probably Napoleon though right are octopus octopods.

00:08:26
Speaker 2: These are hilarious answers. Thank you everybody who participates. If you want to add your voice to this choir, please write to us two questions at Daniel and Kelly dot org.

00:08:34
Speaker 1: Well, and a'll note, I was excited to see that we have a lot of listeners who actually know a fair bit about this topic. So always fun to learn about the expertise for your listeners. All right, so let's, without any further ado, bring doctor Andrew Thaylor on the show because he is going to blow our minds with facts about the deep sea bed.

00:08:52
Speaker 2: Let's do it.

00:08:53
Speaker 1: Doctor Andrew David Thaylor is a deep sea ecologist and conservation technologist who spent his career understanding how humans you technology to explore, exploit, preserve, and plunder the most remote ecosystems on our planet. He's written extensively about the deep sea mining industry and the exploitation of the deep sea for a variety of outlets including Scientific American, un Dark Vice, Motherboard, and others. He runs Southern Fried Science, one of the most widely read marine science and conservation blogs and has done so for almost eighteen years. And he's the twenty twenty five twenty twenty six MacArthur Public Voices Fellow of the op ED Project on Technology in the Public Interest. Welcome to the show.

00:09:35
Speaker 6: Hello, and thank you for having me. Very excited to be here.

00:09:38
Speaker 2: Kelly, you forgot to mention he is the dubious honor of being the first guest to have both moved out of California and Virginia.

00:09:44
Speaker 1: Oh to Maryland. That's right. Yeah, so he's slighted both of.

00:09:48
Speaker 5: Our favorites state.

00:09:49
Speaker 1: Oh all right, well, so you have got to defend that a little. Why is it the greatest state?

00:09:54
Speaker 6: Maryland is the only state where if you see a pickup truck covered Maryland flags, you know one, you can follow them to the best party you'll ever go to.

00:10:09
Speaker 1: Okay, that's pretty good.

00:10:11
Speaker 2: That's the way you judge state. Got it? All right?

00:10:13
Speaker 1: All right? Start, all right, So let's let's start at the beginning. Tell us about how you got interested in the deep sea. So I know you've been writing Southern Fried Science for eighteen years, so you've been interested in this stuff for a long time, What got you excited about the deep sea in particular?

00:10:30
Speaker 6: So I've been I've always been excited about the ocean. And I started my career actually working at the National Aquarium in Baltimore in the seahorse breeding program, so very different from the deep sea. And in college I learned a lot about hydrothermal events, I learned a lot about deep sea ecosystems, and I really got enamored with just this idea that there are these remote places in this world that are still completely undiscovered.

00:10:55
Speaker 5: Every time we go in the ocean, and every time we go.

00:10:58
Speaker 6: Into the deep sea in particularly, discover something completely new. And the idea that like there's still just this vast, untapped potential for discovery left in this world is just so appealing to me, and it's such a such a poetic thing, and so I decided to commit my career to deep ocean discovery. I started in deep sea fungi. I had this vision of being like the person who would unlock the secrets of fungi in the deep sea. And after several years of study, what we basically determined is that fungi aren't particularly ecologically important in the deep ocean. So that was a bit of I mean, it's the one place in the world where you don't find a ton of fungi, which is weird in its own.

00:11:40
Speaker 1: But yeah, so that was surprising, right.

00:11:42
Speaker 6: That kind of makes sense when you think about it, because evolutionarily, fungi is the only major kingdom that emerged on land first.

00:11:49
Speaker 2: Interesting. So I totally agree with you that the fun bit of science is exploration and discovering the unknown. And it's so exciting. You don't have to like go out into space to discover new stuff and to explore uncharted territories.

00:12:02
Speaker 1: You can do both.

00:12:03
Speaker 2: I love space exploration, and yet I would not get into a spaceship, right, I'm very happy for other people to do that. What's your relationship with exploration personally? Have you been in a submarine? Do you want to be James Cameron?

00:12:16
Speaker 6: So, I haven't done a ton of work in submersibles. I use RVs, which are remotely operated vehicles. I'm a robot guy, yeah, And robots are fantastic for deep ocean work because they have a much longer endurance time. If you go down to the seafloor in the DSV Alvin, which is the US's premiere deep diving submersible, you get maybe six hours of bottom time bottom time?

00:12:39
Speaker 2: Is that a seabed linga bottom time?

00:12:42
Speaker 5: Absolutely? Time on the seafloor, is.

00:12:45
Speaker 2: No other way that could be interpreted, got it? Yeah? All right?

00:12:48
Speaker 6: Well, certainly because you're in a tiny four foot or four meter pressure sphere and there is no privacy whatsoever, so you can't go to the bathroom unless if you have to. You know it that you had to get very personal with a lot of other people or two other people, because it's limited.

00:13:05
Speaker 2: You're going to have your personal bottom time during your official bottom time, got it? Yeah?

00:13:09
Speaker 6: Yeah, well critically for me, and this is important, I think probably for you as well, Daniel.

00:13:13
Speaker 5: Probably less of an.

00:13:14
Speaker 6: Issue for Kelly is you have to shave your beard to go down in the alven because the emergency survival system requires you to have a perfect seal against your mouth, so you cannot have facial hair if you're diving in a submersible. And that is I mean, that's a deal breaker for me. Beyond anything else. That's a deal breaker.

00:13:32
Speaker 1: I'm gonna let it slide that you said, probably less of a problem for Kelly, but that's all right. We'll move on. I don't like to assume, all right, okay, deal breaker.

00:13:45
Speaker 6: So you know there was this wonderful moment I had, so you brought up James Cameron, and James Cameron secretly shows up at deep sea scientific conferences sometimes and just like wanders around and looks at the posters and talks to the grad students and everyone gets completely starstruck, and it's really funny to see. But he gave a talk about his deep Sea Challenger expedition at one of them, and he was talking about the process of building this submersible that was purpose built to do one thing, and that thing was to dive to the bottom of the Marianna Trench like a torpedo, get down as quick as possible so that he could spend time on the seafloor surveying it. And so he describes this process of it's a one person submersible, so he doesn't even have anyone with him, so I guess if he has to go to the bathroom, it's his own problem.

00:14:26
Speaker 5: He talks about this process of.

00:14:27
Speaker 6: Going down and crawling into this submersible and like cramming his body in and piloting it down, and this plunge into the Marianna Trench. I mean, you know, you get goosebumps. Because Cameron is an amazing storyteller. He talks about the experience of getting to the seafloor and seeing the vast plains of mud at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and seeing a couple of little invertebrates swimming by, and all these great things, and then he talks about getting ready to do his ascent, and he like kind of stops the talk for a moment and goes like, and at that moment, I really that I hadn't actually seen the seafloor with my own eyes, and I had to take out a socket wrench and unbolt the monitor so they could slide it out of the way and peer through the tiny portal. He'd been flying off his cameras the entire time, because the cameras are so much better for seeing what's actually out there. They give you a much bigger view. You know, the portholes on something like that. It's like an eight inch porthole, and it's so thick that it basically flattens it into a two dimensional image anyway, And so at that.

00:15:26
Speaker 5: Moment, I'm like I love the story.

00:15:28
Speaker 6: I love the idea of diving the Mariana Trench, but from a scientific standpoint, he was basically piling an rov the entire time.

00:15:35
Speaker 5: Anyway.

00:15:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, plus high risk of death exactly, I'll stay it on the shore.

00:15:40
Speaker 6: The safety issues are there too, Yeah, there are tremendous safety issues with submersibles though. To be said, and even today, of all civilian passenger vehicles, submersibles, deep sea submersibles have the best safety record. You are safer in a submersible than you are in an airplane or in your own car. So you know, the risk is manage that. We all, everyone who works in the deep sea acknowledges that risk never goes away. But they are tremendously safe vehicles for the most part.

00:16:07
Speaker 2: Okay, if you consider a couch to be a passenger vehicle that doesn't go anywhere, isn't that more safe?

00:16:13
Speaker 5: I am.

00:16:14
Speaker 6: I do not have the numbers offhand, but I can pretty much guarantee you that more people are killed on their couches than are killed in a submersible every year.

00:16:20
Speaker 1: If you stay on the couch too long, that's probably not good for your cardiovascular health either.

00:16:24
Speaker 2: That's true.

00:16:25
Speaker 5: Too correct.

00:16:27
Speaker 1: Okay, So let's start by describing the deep sea bed from like a geological or oceanographic standpoint. I always stumble on that word. How deep is it? How much of the Earth's surface does it take up? Like, help us imagine the deep sea bed.

00:16:41
Speaker 6: So when we're talking about the deep abyssal plane, and that is an area of the planet's surface, it's roughly about fifty percent. Wow, So half the surface of the planet is these vast planes of oohs. It's marine sediment. It's not particularly dense sediment, so it's a very kind of light and fluffy. You sink into it, and that stretches across half the surface of the planet. It's broken up by lots of changes in topography, so you get mountains, you get sea mounts, you get weird geologic structures, you get rocks. So it's not completely uniform. We used to think that it was kind of this very, very homogeneous kind of ecosystem, but it's in fact very diverse and changes around quite a bit. And mostly we're talking about an area that's between two thousand and six thousand meters deep, and a large chunk of it is about four thousand meters deep, and then you'll get things like Hatle trenches like the Mariana Trench or the Puerto Rican Trench that go down much much, much deeper. So the Mariana Trench is obviously the deepest point on the Earth, depending on how you measure things, which is always a fun bit of trivia to annoy ocean explorers. And that goes down it's deeper than Mount Everest is high.

00:17:48
Speaker 2: Is it as varied as land features? I mean, do you have places where it's like mountains and valleys and gorgeous views like in California.

00:17:56
Speaker 6: Oh, it's much more varied, more varied. So the largest mountain ranges on the world as mid Atlantic Ridge. If you took away all of all the sea water from the planet and just looked at the naked planet with no water on, it would kind of look like a baseball with like this ridge of stitching that sort of wraps all the way around, going through all of the world's oceans. And that's kind of this global mountain range system where all the tectonic plates are kind of spreading apart and colliding together. You get canyons that are deeper than the Grand Canyon. You get mountains that are taller than terrestrial mountains. So yes, it is as geologically and geographically diverse as land, and in some cases more so.

00:18:33
Speaker 1: Okay, so a lot of sludge, but also a lot of cool geological features. Yes, So as a biologist, I'm excited about what lives there and what do we know about what lives there.

00:18:44
Speaker 6: So I study mostly deep sea hydrothermal events, and they're kind of the odd ball in the deep sea. So the general kind of background pattern of life in the deep sea is very high biodiversity, So you get an enormous abundance of different kinds of species. And I would argue that not only is the deep abyssal plane the most biodiverse ecosystem on the planet, but it's probably more biodiverse than the rest of the world's ecosystems combined. What and well, again, we're talking about half the surface of the planet.

00:19:15
Speaker 1: Okay, but that's not like I don't remember that being in my textbooks.

00:19:19
Speaker 6: It's not you won't find it in a textbook.

00:19:22
Speaker 4: You know.

00:19:22
Speaker 6: We don't like to make big, bold, sweeping claims like that, but I'm I'm gonna defend that one, all right, just because you know, at any taxonomic level. Biodiverse in the ocean outstrips biodiversity on land. You have entire phyla that are present in the deep sea that aren't present on land. I think there's like a single Phila that only exists on land among animals, and it's on a cofferin. So which are you don't know in an on a cofferences. No one knows what non a cofferin is.

00:19:45
Speaker 5: It looks like a weird little caterpillar. It's a velvet worm.

00:19:48
Speaker 6: There's a little weird little caterpillar's you know, a handful of species in the entire phila. But then you get you know, you don't have Nigerians on the surface, and Nideria is a huge, huge group of organisms. Those the jellyfish right, yes, jellyfish sea and enemies. So you do get a tremendous amount of bi And then if you include the deep biosphere, all the microbes that live beneath the surface in kind of these energy rich compartments in the Earth's crust, then you get an amount of bitavers that we can't even calculate yet.

00:20:14
Speaker 2: I guess we don't think about it as often because we are land creatures.

00:20:17
Speaker 5: Exactly.

00:20:18
Speaker 2: But if you think about it from the point of view of life began in the oceans, and their oceans cover most of the planet, and this huge ecological variation there, it makes perfect sense that you would have more diversity in the ocean. Yes.

00:20:32
Speaker 6: Now, in contrast, you have incredibly low biomass, So the deep ocean is a food limited environment. There's not a tremendous amount of energy that comes down from the surface. You know, most life on this planet derives its initial energy from the sun, and so once you get into the deep sea, you don't have any sunlight, so they're kind of defendant on scavenged sources of energy, and so you get a tremendous amount of biodiversity but very little biomass, which means if you're looking around, you don't see very much. You have to really start kind of digging into the sediment and really start kind of doing some sophisticated sampling techniques to really figure out what's going on in terms of biodiversity.

00:21:11
Speaker 2: Can you talk us through the energy flow there?

00:21:13
Speaker 4: Is?

00:21:13
Speaker 2: It all go to the first layer where plankdin gobble up the sunlight and then dot dot dot all the way down to the seafloor. How does that happen?

00:21:20
Speaker 4: Uh?

00:21:21
Speaker 6: Yeah, so apparently we're talking a lot about poop on this one. From submersibles to plankton's.

00:21:26
Speaker 1: That's how we roll.

00:21:28
Speaker 6: You've got energy produced at the surface, mostly from phytoplankton producing sunlight. It sinks down as marine snow. It's often eaten by these intermixing layers.

00:21:39
Speaker 2: Marine snow.

00:21:41
Speaker 6: Marine snow is what we call it because when you're watching it from a submersible or at rov it looks like little little white flakes just gently, gently and consistently falling to the seafloor.

00:21:50
Speaker 2: And those are dead plankton or what.

00:21:52
Speaker 6: It's dead plankton. It's biological waste, it's detritus.

00:21:56
Speaker 2: So I have a dumb question. Sure, planked in when they're alive, they're like swimming to stay up at the top and then they die and like they croak and then they float down.

00:22:04
Speaker 6: Or yeah, some of them are buoyant, but yeah, plankton swim and they drift and then as they die they decompose and they begin to sing.

00:22:12
Speaker 5: You can get bigger things.

00:22:13
Speaker 6: You can get extra large plankton like whales that also tend to die and fall to the bottom of the ocean. Whales are not plankton.

00:22:20
Speaker 5: Whales are whaleser. Just to be clear, I was going.

00:22:25
Speaker 2: To ask you about the plankton spectrum there, all right, So plank them at the top layer gobble the sunlight. Then they die. They drift down as marine snow, and everything else eats that marine snow.

00:22:35
Speaker 6: Uh. For the most part, you get you get large mobile scavengers that'll eat things like a dead whale or a dead fish, or dead marine mammals. You get woodfalls, so you know, if you have a big storm in Louisiana and all those trees get washed out, to see, they end up in the Gulf of Mexico, and that becomes an energy source for the animals in the deep Gulf of Mexico. So you get lots of lots of organic sources of energy that come from land.

00:22:59
Speaker 5: They get washed into the deep sea.

00:23:01
Speaker 6: But generally speaking that's obviously you don't get the same kind of abundance of energy that you would on land. And so it's a food limited environment, with one or two very notable exceptions, one of them being a deep sea hydrothermal vent, so deep c hydrothermal vents, which is where I primarily work. Are one of the few ecosystems that thrive independent of sunlight. So these are systems where you have animals working in concert with microbes to extract energy directly from hydro thermal plumes, which are these superheated plumes of seawater that have come in contact with the Earth's mantle and are now being ejected from the seafloor in like these big submarine geysers, and they are chemical rich. They're full of hydrogen sulfide, and there are microbes and animals that have evolved to take advantage of that hydrogen sulfide and create energy through a process called chemosynthesis as opposed to photosynthesis.

00:23:55
Speaker 2: Whoa crazy relying on chemistry for life? It's scary, we all do, well, that's how fun. But it doesn't have chemistry in the name, so it's less creepy. How do you end up with less biomass but more diversity? It seems to be counterintuitive to me.

00:24:13
Speaker 6: So a lot of that is because of just the sheer amount of space. A very powerful driver of speciation, especially in the deep sea, is isolation by distance, which is just that as individuals of any any group get further and further apart. They tend to drift apart genetically as well, and so you get speciation driven by isolation, and so that is one of the big drivers for that huge amount of biodiversity. It's also it's a very stable environment, so it receives relatively little disturbance. And so when you have stability over large time scales, there's fewer selective pressures, which gives more and different kinds of organisms a chance to thrive and survive. So you do get you do get it driven like that, and then you know there are some weird ecosystems. So hydrothermal vents obviously have huge amounts of selective pressure on them. Hydrothermal vents are actually kind of the opposite of the general deep sea. They have incredibly high biomass, but relatively low biodiversity compared to the background deep abyssle plane.

00:25:14
Speaker 1: And is that just because it's a huge food source and if you can eat it, there'll be a lot of you, but not a lot of organisms are specialized on that food source. And why do you think that trend is different at the hydrothermal events?

00:25:27
Speaker 6: So it's not just that it's a readily available food source that a few species have evolved to take advantage of. It's also a very toxic food source. So if you haven't adapted to survive at a hydrothermal event, I mean, this thing is. It's rich in arsenic, it's full of heavy metals, it's lightly radioactive, it's hot. It's coming out of the vent at flod four to five hundred degrees.

00:25:49
Speaker 2: So it's the Virginia of the deep sea.

00:25:51
Speaker 1: You're saying, Oh, come on, I was gonna say it's the Venus of the deep sea or something, but Virginia. And that was a low blow, man.

00:25:58
Speaker 5: I know, just a point.

00:26:00
Speaker 6: Since we're doing this, I did a climatological assessment.

00:26:05
Speaker 5: Of Mordor, oh at one.

00:26:07
Speaker 6: Point, for fun, and it turns out that the climate of Mortor is about the same as southern California.

00:26:14
Speaker 5: Take that, Daniel, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

00:26:16
Speaker 2: One does not just move to southern California.

00:26:19
Speaker 1: Okay, one must get tenure exactly.

00:26:26
Speaker 2: But I'm fascinated by the fact that there are two different sources of energy here. You have photosynthesis from the top drifting down, and you have chemosynthesis from these vents. Do you have two completely separate energy chains there, or do you have critters that rely on both or they're totally segregated.

00:26:42
Speaker 6: You very rarely get critters that rely on both. They generally are hydrothermal events, are you know, unique is a weird word to use because there's a bunch of hydrothermal events around the ocean, but they're unique ecosystems there. You know, you don't have a lot of overlap between hydrothermal vents nine hundrod thermal events. There are some opportunistic species that kind of hang out at the vent periphery and take advantage of that extra biomass, but they're kind of general deep sea scavengers like squat lobsters that you see in lots of places. But you know, one of the weird things that happens with the habitat forming species at hydrothermal events. So in the specific you get these big deep sea tube worms. Giant tube worms, fastest growing invertebrate in the world. They can grow up to twelve meters long. Wow, they have these bright bright The tube gets up to twelve meters long. The worm itself is kind of not the whole tube. They have these bright red plumes that they stick into the hydrothermal event plume. We for some reason, we called both of those plumes just to confuse everyone. So the tube worms have a plume that they stick into the hydrothermal vent plume, but that's where they extract energy from. They don't have digestive systems anymore. You can find like remnants of their digestive systems, but for the most part, they have a special chamber inside where their stomach would have been, called a vestiment tipherum, and inside that is where they host all the microbes that take the chemical energy and turn it into food for the tube worm. And you see that again and again at different hydrothermal vents. So in the Western Pacific, the vents are dominated by a couple of species of snails and they do the same thing. They've pretty much lost their digestive system. They have a little bit more of a digestive system, but it's not fully functional anymore. And they have a chamber inside their their mantle cavity that they host microbes as well.

00:28:26
Speaker 1: Awesome, Yeah, so this sounds really far away from humans, Like, you know, at pressures that would absolutely kill us. So do you still see signs of humans in these environments, even if we're not going there very often.

00:28:38
Speaker 6: So we find on every single dive we almost always find trash. The bottom of the Mariana Trench, they found a can of spam unopened, so if they had recovered it, it probably would have still been good, or you know, as good as it could be.

00:28:55
Speaker 5: Still no noticeable deviation from standard.

00:29:00
Speaker 6: Okay, you know, we find beer bottles all the time, We find plastic bags, We find a lot of ship waste, so trash that we know comes off of ships, and of course we find microplastics. And one of the things I've been working on over the last couple of years is there's a hydrothermal vent system in the Mid Cayman Spreading Center, so just south of the Cayman Islands, in the Cayman Trench, which is the scene of James Cameron's The Abyss, if we're going to keep coming back to James Cameron, but the deepest hydrothermal events in the world are there, and they're at about six thousand meters depth, and it's a shrimp dominated system, so it's covered in these little these these blind shrimp, So these shrimp ramicaras hib Besides, they don't have eyes anymore. They've lost their eyes, but they have evolved this little eye spot on the back of their carapas that they can detect black body radiation from. So that allows them to see where the hydrothermal plume is and get as close as possible without getting fried. Wow, So these vents are covered in these shrimp. I've got samples of these shrimps and we've been looking at microplastic uptake in shrimp from the world's deepest hydrothermal event.

00:30:04
Speaker 5: So this is man.

00:30:05
Speaker 6: This is an ecosystem that was discovered in twenty twelve, twenty thirteen. It's the deepest hydrothermal event in the world. It's been visited by scientists a handful of times, and it's absolutely loaded with microplastics. I find them in every shrimp we look at. They are the microplastics are getting there before we are all right.

00:30:25
Speaker 1: Well, let's all take a break to go have some zoloft because that's pretty depressing. And when we get back, we'll talk about what kind of resources you can find on the deep seabed. And we're back. We're talking to Andrew Thayler about the deep sea bed. And we've been talking about the amazing biodiversity that you've got down there, but there's other things that people care about that's down there, and those are resources. So what kind of resources do we find in the sludge pile that is the deep sea bed?

00:31:12
Speaker 5: Oh?

00:31:13
Speaker 6: Boy, So the deep sea is fortunately or unfortunately depending on who you talk to, absolutely loaded with mineral resources as well as some other resources that are a little bit more unexpected. So, you know, deep sea mining is a thing that people have been talking about a lot in the last two years, in particular since a presidential executive order came out to kind of supercharge the US push towards deep sea mining. And what they're looking for primarily is what are called polymetallic nodules. So polymetallic nodules are cobblestones that form on the deep sea floor and they form by minerals in seawater accreting around a hard object. So often it'll be something tiny like a diatom test the little glass skeleton of some of those plankton that's to the sea floor. Sometimes it's as big as a shark's tooth. So you can cut into some of these nodules and find a shark tooth in the middle of them. But it takes over the course of five or six million years. These nodules kind of grow as minerals sort of a crete from the surrounding seawater and are deposited onto them, and they just kind of get bigger and bigger and bigger, and they're rich in things like cobalt and nickel, and manganese and a little bit of copper. Some people are talking about getting the copper out of them. It's not a particularly impressive amount of copper. No one's getting excited over the copper, but the nickel and the cobalt in particular because nickel and cobalt, of course there's something we need for electric vehicle batteries, and.

00:32:38
Speaker 2: So these things accrete just because the water is flowing over something. And then what's the chemistry of that? Why does it come out of the water and a crete onto the object.

00:32:46
Speaker 6: So there's metals in the seawater, and it's actually interesting you ask this question. We don't know the full geologic process for how the decretes. There is sort of this combination of pressure and the metals in the seawater that makes them a little easier to come out of solution when they come in contact with these hard structures, So you'll only get them forming in deep waters. You can't like grow a nodule in a coastal bay or a coastal estrae or anything. It has to be in the deep sea. But we actually don't know the full process for how these nodules form.

00:33:14
Speaker 2: And these metals are only present in seawater, right, You can't like do this in the Colorado River or something, because that comes from rainwater which goes through the evaporation process which leaves those metals behind. Is that right, correct?

00:33:25
Speaker 6: But you get I mean you can pan for gold in the Colorado River. So the metal, the metals do occur. That just the deposits are different. And you know, I would depending on where you're looking in the world, those deposits may actually be ancient seabed that are now being eroded away and the metals are washing out.

00:33:41
Speaker 2: And so how common are these things? Are they everywhere on the seabed? Are they totally rare?

00:33:45
Speaker 5: They are?

00:33:46
Speaker 6: Polymetallic nodules are fairly common on the seabed. You find them, particularly in the Pacific because the Pacific is a very old ocean, so it's had a lot of time for these sorts of things to form. You find them a little bit in the Indian Ocean, not so much in the Atlantic. There's a few smaller deposits in the Atlantic, but it's predominantly the Pacific where you get polymetallic nodules.

00:34:05
Speaker 2: Another point for the West coast right there. If we're keeping score.

00:34:08
Speaker 1: We're not.

00:34:12
Speaker 6: You do understand though, when we're talking about the Pacific Ocean, California is the eastern coast.

00:34:18
Speaker 2: Yes, East and West are all relative. This is true. Yeah, we live in our globe.

00:34:26
Speaker 5: So that's just the polymetallic nodules.

00:34:28
Speaker 6: There's two other resources that are being targeted for exploitation.

00:34:31
Speaker 2: Wait, first, I want to understand more about these nodules. Check. Can you just like pick them up? I mean we're talking about mining. Are you digging into the sea floor or can you just like cruise along and gather these things?

00:34:41
Speaker 6: So this is one of the curious things about nodules that we don't have a perfect answer for. But they only occur at the sediment seawater interface, so you don't find them buried, You only find them sitting on top of the sea floor.

00:34:54
Speaker 2: Wow.

00:34:54
Speaker 6: And you can kind of see from how the nodule is structured that they're sort of breaking down at the point where they're in contact with the sediment and then reaccreting above. So they do they stay on top of the sediment. You could just pick them up. You know, these are about the size they're cobblestone size, so they're not particularly large, and most of the proposals for just picking them up involved having a multi ton tracked vehicle with a gigantic vacuum head that pumps up, you know, the top ten centimeters of seafloor while pumping up tons and tons of these nodules to the surface.

00:35:24
Speaker 1: That sounds very disruptive to everything else that's down there.

00:35:29
Speaker 6: It is, And you know, part of the problem with this is that the nodules themselves are habitat. So within a nodule field, you know we talk about the deep abyssal plane is incredibly biodiverse. The nodule fields are two to three times more biodiverse than the surrounding deep abissle plane that doesn't have nodules on it, and you get lots of animals. The animals that thrive in the nodule fields. They're using the nodules as habitat because it's hard structure for them to grow on. So you'll get things like glass sponges and corals that grow on top of the nodules. You get lots of different kinds of worms that kind of preferentially hang out around the nodules. They like to be underneath. Sometimes they're on top of the nodules.

00:36:05
Speaker 2: Just because it's structure, Like they just need something to grab onto.

00:36:08
Speaker 5: It's structure exactly.

00:36:09
Speaker 6: Yeah, Wow, scientists, you just find a species of whiplash squid, new species of squid that hides in the nodules and leaves two of its tentacles just kind of dangling up and just grabs whatever it can as things are wandering through the nodules. Would I think it's great. It's almost like it's a squid that's pretending to be an anglerfish.

00:36:27
Speaker 1: I love it. You said it goes through and it pulls up the top ten centimeters, and so I guess it's just like pulling up ten centimeters and sifting through in. Anything that's hard it sends up, and anything that's not it just kicks out the back.

00:36:40
Speaker 6: Well, it depends on the technology being discussed. There's a couple of different companies. They all have slightly different technologies, but generally speaking, they're gonna pump a slurry of sediment and a polymetallic nodule up to a production support vessel on the surface. Okay, the nodules will be dewatered and the sediment will be removed and then pumped back down and released in either a midwater or a deep sea release plume. So they'll be pumping everything they can up and then pumping.

00:37:07
Speaker 2: It back down dewatered. I love that term. I like to dewater after a shower for example.

00:37:15
Speaker 1: So so anyone who has gone on a dive knows that if you go super deep and then you come back up, you need some time to like depressurize. So it sounds like if you are shooting everything up and then dropping everything back down, anything that lived in the deep sea as it gets shot up is going to like explode, Like anything living will not survive that if it gets up and down right, that would be my guess.

00:37:37
Speaker 6: Yeah, So the general consensus is that in the immediate mining area it's comprehensively destructive. So where the mining tool is passing directly over. Anything that gets caught by that tool is going to be destroyed.

00:37:48
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, so that's one of three other what's the other main categories of resources?

00:37:55
Speaker 6: So the other one is unfortunately also deep sea hydrothermal events. Oh no, so these are you know it's these are these incredibly novel ecosystems on the seafloor. They have an energy source unlike anything else that we really think of. Although once we discovered hydrothermal events, we started finding chemosynthesis everywhere, because once you see it, you can start looking for it. Unfortunately, the same chemical process that supports these incredible ecosystems is also one that is tremendously good at bringing precious metals out of seawater and delivering it into solution. So at hydrothermal vents, the chimneys where we call them chimneys, where the hydrothermal plume is coming out the walls of the chimneys, they can be rich in gold, They can be rich in silver, they can be rich in copper, they can be rich in zinc. Basically any metal that you think of as occurring in a vein, so you think of you get like a vein of copper or.

00:38:48
Speaker 5: A vein of gold.

00:38:49
Speaker 6: Those veins, even on the surface when we're mining in places like Cypress, are ancient hydrothermal vents. So you know, the Cypress was an incredibly important site of copper mining during the Bronze Age. It's kind of, you know, the foundry of civilization, if you will, where the Bronze Age was created, and within the copper mines in Cyprus, they had all these very weird fossils that people kept finding. And the Cypress copper minds are still going today. They're a six thousand year old copper mind that's still productive. In nineteen seventy seven, when we discovered hydrothermal vents, you know, the geologists who were working over in Cyprus looked at the tube worms coming out of the vents and said, wait, these are the same thing.

00:39:30
Speaker 5: So the the mines in.

00:39:32
Speaker 6: Cyprus are part of a structure called the Troi dose ophiolite, which is an ancient chunk of ocean seabed that has been uplifted one hundred million years ago. And those copper minds are all ancient hydro thermal vents. So there are companies now they're like, hey, you know, why wait one hundred million years to get to the gold in the copper? Why don't we just go straight to the source. And so there have been some proposals to mine directly at hydrothermal events that are still in the sea, and you know the sad thing with those, You know, I'm not a fan of any form of deep sea mining. I think a reasonable argument could be made that there's a way to do nodule mining in an environmentally respectable way. I don't think there's any possible way to mine a hydrothermal event without completely destroying the ecosystem around it. And these are I mean, they're tiny ecosystems. If you take the total surface area of every hydrothermal event that we know of on the planet, it's smaller than Manhattan. So it's just a you know, the abyssle plane is half the surface of the planet, and hydrothermal vents are practically nothing when we compare it to that.

00:40:35
Speaker 2: How big is an individual event?

00:40:37
Speaker 6: They can be quite big, they can be several acres. They can also be very small. You'll have vent fields that are only a couple one hundred square meters, and you'll have some that are you know, several kilometers, but they don't get they're not enormous. They're not like these gigantic things that cover entire swaths of the seafloor.

00:40:54
Speaker 5: They're very they're.

00:40:55
Speaker 6: Very discreet, and you can get places where you just get like a single hydrothermal vent plume than nothing else. And then the ecosystem is you know, it could fit on your desk.

00:41:04
Speaker 2: And because they're so separated, that must mean that the ecosystems are quite distinct.

00:41:08
Speaker 5: They're very distinct.

00:41:10
Speaker 6: You can, in fact, if you show me a video of a hydrothermal event, I can pinpoint anywhere in the world that it's from, just based on the animals around it.

00:41:17
Speaker 2: Because deep cg are locating.

00:41:20
Speaker 6: Every hydrothermal vent is functionally its own unique ecosystem, and there's some connectivity between them, but they are very very very unique. I mean, you know, very unique is not a thing that works in the English language, but you know what I mean.

00:41:33
Speaker 9: We're with you.

00:41:34
Speaker 2: And so did that evolve once and then spread somehow between these widely disparate events, or did it evolve many times independently.

00:41:42
Speaker 6: That is a great question. We don't know completely. The evolutionary origins of hydrothermal events are still a bit of a mystery. It's likely chemosynthesis evolve multiple times in multiple different families. Wow, so you have them. You have situations where like these specific rise is dominated by two worms. Mid Atlantic Ridge is dominated by giant swarms of shrimp. Indian Ocean is dominated by the scaly foot gastropod, which is the snail that grows its shell out of iron and has it's a perculum, is covered in iron plates, and it's like it's so rich in iron that when you bring these snails up to the surface they start to rust.

00:42:24
Speaker 1: That's crazy.

00:42:26
Speaker 2: It's like visiting alien worlds. They're all different.

00:42:29
Speaker 6: So astrobiology and deep sea ecology share a lot of affinity and a lot of work that goes into understanding how life could form on other planets gets a lot of its foundational research, particularly from work on hydrothermal events. It is, in all likelihood none of us are ever going to see an alien ecosystem. Hydrothermal vent is the closest thing you'll ever come to it.

00:42:51
Speaker 1: So you should be reading a lot more about these. Daniel Daniel's really into aliens.

00:42:56
Speaker 2: One of my favorite books is a book called The Deep which has this incredible pictures of deep sea organisms and they all look like aliens to me. It's incredible.

00:43:05
Speaker 6: There's a species of isopod called a munopsid, and there's a bunch of very weird species of munopsids out there, and it's one of those deep sea animals. It's it's highly mobile, so you don't see them very often, you don't sample them very often. They live very deeply, so often when we see a munopsid where probably the first person ever seeing that species, and probably no one else will ever.

00:43:28
Speaker 5: See that species again.

00:43:29
Speaker 2: Wow.

00:43:29
Speaker 6: Kind of it's like a rare glimpse into the ocean. I have a video up on YouTube if you want to look it up. I was at the bottom of the Cayman Trough six thousand meters watching the RV feed and thisopsid isopod swims by, and I swear it looks exactly like the alien from the Abyss, which is not a surprise because James Cameron gets a lot of his inspiration from deep sea animals. But it looked like the alien from the Abyss, just like swimming, and it's got like four paddles and it kind of rows through the ocean and you see like the four path going in quick succession. It just swims right past the camera, kind of teasing us, and then swims away. And guaranteed that is a species completely undescribed as probably the only person who have ever seen that particular species, and no one will ever see it again. That's crazy, and I think that's kind of cool. There's still so much in the deep ocean that is just like the potential for discovery is. I mean, we're functionally exactly where we were two hundred years ago when we started exploring the deep ocean, which is we are just getting started.

00:44:27
Speaker 1: Man, all right, let's do our third resource category before our break.

00:44:31
Speaker 6: The third resource is fero manganese crusts. So they form kind of like nodules, but they form on the sides of sea mounts, and so you get these kind of dense cobalt and nickel rich crusts that grow on the sides of sea mounts. And of course the problem with these is that seamounts are also incredibly ecologically important for a number of species.

00:44:50
Speaker 2: What is a sea mount.

00:44:51
Speaker 5: Seamount is a mountain that's underwater.

00:44:53
Speaker 2: Ok So why isn't it sea mountain.

00:44:57
Speaker 5: I don't know. I don't have a good answer for that. It's shorter because.

00:45:01
Speaker 2: You say seamount, I'm thinking of a seahorse. I'm like, somebody's like riding it. But all right, sea mountain.

00:45:08
Speaker 6: So, seamounts tend to support a tremendous amount of both biomass and biodiversity. You get a lot of cold water coral reefs grow on seamounts. So there is off the coast of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.

00:45:21
Speaker 5: And this isn't a seamount.

00:45:22
Speaker 6: It's actually a plateau. But it's a region called the Blake Plateau, and it's this kind of giant elevated geologic feature in the US Atlantic coast, and on the Blake Plateau is the largest cold water coral reef that we have ever discovered. It is larger than the state of Vermont.

00:45:40
Speaker 2: Wow.

00:45:41
Speaker 6: It may very well be the largest contiguous ecosystem in the continental United States.

00:45:45
Speaker 2: Wow.

00:45:46
Speaker 6: It's just massive coral reef field at about eight hundred to one thousand meters depth. We didn't know about it until about five years ago when we first started characterizing it. But in the nineteen seventies, a deep Sea Mining company did a bunch of experimental tests on the Blake Plateau without even knowing this coral reef was there, and dragged all their mining tools right through the middle of the largest coral reef in the deep sea without even knowing us. It took us another fifty years to figure out that the coral reef was there. So this is you know when I say the potential for discovery is enormous, Like I'm not just talking about like tiny little ecosystems that are sort of weird anomalies, but also like gigantic ecosystems that we haven't even begun to characterize yet.

00:46:26
Speaker 2: All right, well, I want to hear more about the unexplored deep sea, but first we got to take another break. All Right, we're back, and we are talking about the deep sea. Whether it's more like Mordor or southern California.

00:46:57
Speaker 5: Those are the same thing, yeah, functionally the same.

00:47:02
Speaker 2: All Right. I was trying to trap you, But tell me more about how little we know about the deep sea. What are the opportunities there for like real surprises, not just in terms of like new weird creatures, but new features or new ecosystems or just like big surprises.

00:47:19
Speaker 5: Yeah, so we have.

00:47:20
Speaker 6: We've observed less than a percent of the seafloor, and actually less than a tenth of a percent of the sea floor has been directly observed.

00:47:28
Speaker 5: And within that just tenth of.

00:47:31
Speaker 6: A tenth of a percent of the seafloor, we found things like hydrothermal events, we found whalefalls, we found methane cold seeps, we found the largest deep water coral reef in the world. So, you know, really, even just within that tiny fraction, we have revised how we understand how life on planet Earth functions several times over, and we really are just getting started when we talk about deep sea exploration. So one of my one of my favorite stories is I have a piece of art on the wall of my office. Unfortunately I'm in the wrong office now or I show you, but it is a painting that was made right after the discovery of deep c hydrothermal events. And in this painting, it's like a profile of a hydrothermal vent going into the sediment, and the artist has drawn these caverns underneath the vent, and the caverns are full of two worms. And the idea was when vents were first discovered was that kind of the two worms on the surface were sort of anomalous and maybe most of the biology was happening underneath the surface, within the crust of the Earth. That theory very quickly fell out of favor. It was sort of this weird kind of og whiz, wouldn't that be neat idea that someone proposed in the late nineteen seventies. And then and then in twenty twenty three, researchers that were on board the DSV Alvin that were sampling hydrothermal vents on the East Pacific Rise decided what if we flip over some rocks, And they flipped over some rocks and they found caverns of two worms underneath the hydrothermal vent. So this is one of the most studied hydrothermal events in the world. And like, you can still make fundamental discoveries about biology on this planet by flipping over a rock, which is the best thing ever, because that's how every biologist gets their start.

00:49:17
Speaker 1: These are our favorite discoveries.

00:49:18
Speaker 2: Yes, So why is it so hard? I mean that sounds like a naive question. I know it's hard to go to the deep sea floor, but like, can't we see it from the ocean, Like, do you need to go there in order to like see what's at the ocean floor?

00:49:31
Speaker 6: Uh? Yeah, So, you know, we can map the seafloor with multibeam sonar, but we can't really tell what's happening down there ecologically unless we go there. And by go there, I usually mean go there with a robot. You can go there in submersibles too. You can do a lot more surveying with a robot than you can with a submersible. And you know, one of the things that bothers me about deep sea mining is that the mining fields, particularly for polymetallic nodule mining, they're so large that if the the mining companies are being honest about their desire for transparency and having you know, active monitoring of the mining prospect with r V assets and everything, within about two or three years of a mining operation getting going, we'll probably double the amount of observations we've made on the seafloor, which says to me, we're going to double the amount of discoveries made on the seafloor.

00:50:20
Speaker 5: And if all those discoveries.

00:50:21
Speaker 6: Are being made within a mining site, like, how do we triage that? How do we decide what requires us to stop and take a step back, and you know, commit to like a hydrothermal event level discovery within a mining field. It's going to be like, well, then you just need to stop because all your environmental impact assessments are now out of date.

00:50:38
Speaker 5: And also we need to.

00:50:39
Speaker 6: Spend thirty to fifty years trying to understand this ecosystem before we could even begin to tell you what's going on there.

00:50:45
Speaker 2: And anything funded by the company is going to have a huge conflict of interest, of course, Oh absolutely, Yeah.

00:50:49
Speaker 1: That seems like a really nice transition to who gets to make these decisions about where the exploitation gets to happen and whatnot. So what are the rules governing the deep sea bed? Where do they come from?

00:51:01
Speaker 6: So there is a treaty called the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea that is functionally the constitution for the ocean, and it defines a lot of how nations get to approach what are effectively resources that exist beyond national jurisdiction, so all the things that fall on this planet and outside of any nation's territory, and that includes things like polymetallic nodules. Most polymetallic nodule fields are in the high seas, hydrothermal vent deposits, cobalt rich feramenganese crust deposits.

00:51:34
Speaker 5: It also includes.

00:51:35
Speaker 6: Things like how you can lay and protect subsea cables. So we have, you know, Transatlantic cables that carry data across the Atlantic Ocean. We have ninety nine percent of all of our digital data is still carried on transoceanic cables, not via satellite.

00:51:51
Speaker 5: So all that.

00:51:52
Speaker 6: Telecom communication infrastructure is controlled by the agreements made in the Law of the Sea. Things like, you know, pulling up all the ones that seem suddenly and very politically depression at the moment, things like freedom of navigation through straits. The rules for that are laid out by the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea. There's another treaty that's just coming into effect now called the High Seas Treaty that oversees how biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction is treated. So now we're starting to talk about marine genetic resources as well as mineral resources.

00:52:28
Speaker 5: But all of those rules.

00:52:29
Speaker 6: Are laid out in the Convention of the Law of Sea, and the Convention of the Law of se creates this agency called the International Sea Bed Authority, which is the UN agency that is tasked with overseeing the exploitation of mineral resources of the high seas as well as the protection of the marine environment.

00:52:45
Speaker 2: And does it have any actual authority and enforcement capabilities. I mean, these things are treaties between sovereign nations, right.

00:52:52
Speaker 6: So here's where things get tricky. In general, Yes, in general, the countries that have signed on to the Convention the Law of Sea and ratified the treaty have been working together to develop a mining code.

00:53:06
Speaker 5: It's been a slow process.

00:53:07
Speaker 6: It's one hundred and seventy member states plus the European Union, so it's an incredibly complex, incredibly detailed negotiation. But for the most part that negotiation has generally been working. Not working quickly, but working. Unfortunately, the United States never ratified the Law of the Sea, so we're not party to the treaty, and we're not party of the Convention, and we don't participate at the International Seat at authority. Previous to that, the US has been treating the Law of the Sea as customary law. We haven't ratified the treaty, but we have been functionally aligning US policy and US international law to the conditions set out by the law of the sea, and that's important for things like you know, Google runs to run cables between their headquarters and Singapore. They need the law of the sea to function in order for those data cables to work. You know, American mariners like to be able to freely travel over the high seas. That depends on the law of the sea working. To some extent, it has continued to work, but the US has decided to basically become a rogue state when it comes to deep sea mining and is going to begin issuing mining permits two companies that want to mine in the high seas. It also is going to begin issuing mining permits to companies that want to mine within US territorial waters. And the US has the second or third largest territorial sea in the world. Also something defined by the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea. But functionally speaking, nation states can let anyone mine in their own waters that they want. It happens fairly rarely. It's politically more difficult to mine in national waters because it's closer to shore, it's closer to inhabited areas. You know, it's much easier to campaign politically against something if it's only functioning in one country rather than you know, functioning across a multinational regime.

00:54:55
Speaker 5: But the US is going to attempt to begin.

00:54:58
Speaker 6: Issuing permits to mine in both us NA waters and in high seas in an area called the Clipper and Clarion Zone, which is sort of like ground zero for the deep sea mining development. Is this region of the Pacific that is just to the east of Hawaii that is fairly rich in polymetallic nodules and where most of the work has been done on understanding the ecosystems there and on developing the technology, and.

00:55:20
Speaker 1: So these resources are supposed to belong to everyone according to like international.

00:55:25
Speaker 5: Law, according to the law the sea.

00:55:28
Speaker 6: The lawless is an incredible document if you just from a like you know, from a policy wonk standpoint, like you rarely get such like a breathlessly hopeful star trek e document, but like I mean.

00:55:42
Speaker 5: It really is.

00:55:43
Speaker 6: It says that that the resources of the high seeds are the common heritage of humankind. They belong to everyone, and the resources, if they are to be exploited, must be exploited for the good of humankind, including future generations. So we have to consider, you know, how mining them today will impact people who maybe need a healthy ocean thirty years from now. You know, it's as far as international treaties go, and considering those negotiated like the height of the Cold War, you know, with Soviet and US sprinksmanship kind of at a fever pitch. Like to have a document like this that got ratified by almost the entire world is really impressive, and it'd be a huge shape if it falls apart, because you know, the US is having a four year lapse in international diplomacy.

00:56:30
Speaker 1: So at this point, have any resources actually been extracted or exploited? What's the difference between extraction and exploitation? I mix those up sometimes.

00:56:40
Speaker 6: Yeah, So the two terms that get thrown around in deep sea mining are exploration, which is not like my kind of exploration, but it's more like prospecting. It's finding the resources, quantifying the resources, doing the groundwork that you need to do to get permits to mine the resources. And exploration includes doing the environmental impact assessments and environmental impact statements and all those kinds of regulatory things that have to happen. And then exploitation is the commercial mining of the resources. So currently the ISA has issued thirty one exploration leases, mostly for polymetallic nodules, but also for hydrothermal events and for feromenganese crusts, and it has issued zero exploitation permits. So only one true deep sea mining exploitation permit has ever been issued, and it was an issued to a company called Nautilus Minerals who wanted to mine a hydrothermal event in Papua New Guinea, and that was issued in twenty eleven. I actually worked on that project. Most of my most of my PhD was done at that mining prospect, trying to understand the environmental impacts of mining this site. The company went bankrupt before it was ever able to mine. Its mining tools, which had built are sitting and resting in Port Moresby and Papua New Guinea. They were never able to build a vessel to support the mining operation. And the project is kind of it's sort of a zombie project and occasionally like there's a company that owns the rights still, although the actual permit expires at the end of this year or at the end of last year, I can't remember which. Every so often someone tries to revive it, but it's not really clear what will happen to it in the future. But that's the only commercial license that's ever been issued, and no commercial ore was ever extracted or sold. So at this moment, we're in a rare point in history where we have this emerging extractive industry that we are have the opportunity to get the environmental rules in place before any extraction happens, and that's for major industries. We've never really had that before. So it's a rare opportunity to try to get it right or say no, we're not going to do this. But like you know, it'd be a real shame if we let this opportunity pass.

00:58:51
Speaker 2: And what is getting it right look like?

00:58:53
Speaker 6: Getting it right looks like finding the grudging consensus among one hundred and seven different countries, all of whom want different things from the industry. So there are some countries that are sponsoring mining companies and they want to profit directly from the mining. There are moratorium countries that don't want to see mining progress and want to see much better environmental rules and are pushing for strong regulations. There are countries that view their main source of income from DeepC mining as this common heritage principle, and they want to make sure that the taxes and the fees and the royalties are sufficient that any mining that happens because they don't have you know, they don't do any mining on their own, but it's the common heritage. So everyone should get a financial payout from this enterprise. And so there are our countries that see that payout as what they want, So they're negotiating very heavily for a strong royalty system. And there are countries that have terrestrial minds. There are countries that have terrestrial cobalt and terrestrial nickel minds that are like, we need to make sure that this industry doesn't disrupt our industry, you know, being protectionist about their own industries and making sure that there are mechanisms in place where if deep sea mining adversely impacts their economies that they get compensated. You can see some of these are mutually conflicting goals, and that's you know the reality of international negotiation when you have this many countries working on it is that like, no one's going to be happy with the final outcome, but if you can find a regudgeon consensus, that's a heck of a lot better.

01:00:25
Speaker 5: Than the alternative.

01:00:26
Speaker 1: So has there not been more exploitation because the rules aren't set yet, or because technology isn't there yet, or both.

01:00:34
Speaker 6: So if you were a mining company, you would say the policy regime is the only thing preventing this industry from maturing. And I've heard that from many many mining.

01:00:44
Speaker 5: Executives over the years. The reality on the.

01:00:47
Speaker 6: Ground is that there is no company today who is ready to mine the deep sea. If all the rules were in place, if all the permits were issued, if the only thing that you were waiting on was a go order, and you gave deep sea mining companies that go ahead to start tomorrow, not one of them would be able to start in the next two years. And in fact, the only company that ever did get the go ahead, it took them another five years to figure out that they were bankrupt before they could even start mining.

01:01:13
Speaker 2: And briefly, what is the biggest technological hurdle for these companies to do it?

01:01:17
Speaker 6: At the risk of sounding a little too much like Herman Melville, the technological barrier preventing deep sea mining is the sea.

01:01:28
Speaker 2: I walked into that one.

01:01:29
Speaker 6: This sea is an enormously difficult environment to work in.

01:01:35
Speaker 5: In a lot of ways.

01:01:36
Speaker 6: It's much much harder to work in the deep sea than it is even to work in space. And you'll push back on it, but I will challenge you this. Would you rather be in space in a full ocean capable submarine or at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in a spaceship.

01:01:49
Speaker 2: I want to be on the couch, yes, option sea couch?

01:01:53
Speaker 4: Yeah.

01:01:53
Speaker 6: Yeah, Well we've established the couch as a higher fatality rate of either of those options.

01:01:57
Speaker 2: But it's more comfortable.

01:02:00
Speaker 1: I don't know. Both of those scare me. I'm claustrophobic.

01:02:04
Speaker 6: So you know, the ocean is a tremendously difficult, logistically complex place to work. We're talking about a deep sea mining operation in the CCZ, the Clipperdon Clarion Zone would be probably the most logistically complex mining operation ever undertaken, operating multiple vessels, multiple robotic assets, and the ocean is just notoriously good at destroying technology. Electronics and saltwater very famously don't get along. And you know, even like the most elite deep sea exploration programs like the Woodsholl the guys out of woods Hole, the folks that if Romer in France. You know, the failure rate on those RVs is very high. The amount of downtime they have is tremendous because the ocean is just such a hard place to work and so destructive to equipment. So, you know, I think even if a mining company was ready to go ahead today, there's a huge learning curve that has to happen as you begin scaling up to commercial production and the realities of you were talking about a robot down to six thousand meters to collect or and pump that or up to the surface. So if you're doing that, that also means you are handling a six thousand meter cable that is running from your ship down to the RV, and then a six thousand meter riser and lift system that is pulling or all the way up. No one's ever done that before. We've had a couple of deep ocean drilling expeditions where they've been able to do things like this, because they're all very short term operations. Just the sheer technical complexity of handling that much cable there there's maybe a handful of ships that currently exist right now that could handle that much cable. And if you know, a mining tool needs power, so you know, you're talking about pumping down jigowatts of electricity to get.

01:03:48
Speaker 5: The mining tool running.

01:03:49
Speaker 6: It's enormously technologically complicated, and you know, we're just right at the beginning of testing the technology. I think one mining company has tried to do a holistic test where they sent down a pro to tight mining tool which was like much smaller than what they proposed to actually use, and use a riser and lift system to pump everything up to the surface and do their midwater plume to release everything. And their original plan was to get something like twenty or thirty thousand tons of war. They only recovered a couple thousand tons of war. The system failed several times. It's just hard. Everything in the ocean is hard. Nothing in the ocean is easy, and there's nothing there's nothing you can do in the ocean that is easier than if you were doing it on land.

01:04:30
Speaker 1: When the mantra for space is space is hard, there's there's a lot of parallels between these two environments.

01:04:36
Speaker 6: Oh absolutely, space is easy, I mean compared to the deep sea space.

01:04:40
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, all right, so I feel like one of these space is hard to get to but easy to be in deep Cea is easy to get to, hard to stay.

01:04:48
Speaker 6: I'd get to the bottom of the Mariana trench right now, I just wouldn't come back.

01:04:52
Speaker 5: Yeah.

01:04:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can drop something and it will get it right. Yeah, that's right, that's right.

01:04:57
Speaker 5: Yeah, you just need a rock.

01:04:58
Speaker 1: Okay. So we've talked about this amazing biodiversity that we don't understand very well, and we've talked about these resources that are important for things like electric vehicles, which maybe this is oversold. I'm going to be interested in your opinion on this, but like you know, I feel like electric vehicles are an important part of how we're trying to drive down our carbon dioxide emissions. And so what should we be doing. Should we be recycling more, should we be using less of these resources, should we be mining them from different environments? What do you think is the solution there?

01:05:31
Speaker 6: So there's a couple of different things happening simultaneously as we are in the midst of what is hopefully a genuine renewable energy transition. It is absolutely true if we wanted to electrify the world's automotive fleets, if we wanted to massively expand our use of renewable energies. We need metals, and those metals have to come from somewhere, and right now, those metals are coming from places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which does not have a great environmental track record, has a pretty terrible human rights abuse record. Right now, it's coming from Indonesia where they are strip mining rainforests for nickel, So there is tremendous amount.

01:06:08
Speaker 5: Of biodiversity loss there.

01:06:10
Speaker 6: And you know, I think there is a compelling case that deep sea mining could be.

01:06:16
Speaker 5: Better than some of these alternatives.

01:06:19
Speaker 6: I think the reality of the situation on the ground is that if we genuinely need these metals, we're going to get them from wherever we're going to get them. And I don't see deep sea mining as something that would actually impact terrestrial mining at all as it scales up. Like looking at the proposals currently on the table, thirty years from now, deep sea mining, if we're allowed to progress with the most optimistic projections today, it might be accounting for three percent of global metal production for these metals. So you know, it's not going to have a significant impact on the very damaging and very destructive mining that is happening on land. If you want to improve mining happening on land, you have to invest in technologies that make mining happening on land better and cleaner, and invest in governance policies that prevent human rights abuses and all those things, all the unfun things that aren't just like, let's build giant robots and drop them in the ocean. You know, it's kind of one of those technocratic solutions where you're like, a, look at all these problems. If we just drop giant robots in the ocean, we won't have any of those problems. But in fact you have the same problems. Plus now you also have giant robots in the ocean.

01:07:22
Speaker 8: Yeah.

01:07:22
Speaker 2: So if I give you a million dollars and you have to invest it in either asteroid mining or deep sea mining, what are you investing in?

01:07:30
Speaker 5: Well, I'm not investing in either of those.

01:07:32
Speaker 1: If you're taking the million in running the cored.

01:07:34
Speaker 2: Options, see, you're buying a really nice couch.

01:07:38
Speaker 6: I think I'm actually federally prohibited from investing in either of those, So.

01:07:43
Speaker 5: We'll leave it at that.

01:07:46
Speaker 6: You know, the other side of that equation is that there are new battery technologies that are in development and solid state batteries have been all over the news this week, in particular as a promising a metal free alternative, and so I think, you know, the reality is you got to look at recycling technologies, so urban recycling some of these metals, we don't need to produce any more of, you know, gold. We can have a circular economy for gold right now. We don't need to mine another ounce.

01:08:12
Speaker 5: Of gold out of the earth.

01:08:13
Speaker 6: We could stop and there's enough gold in circulation to meet all of our technical demands. Gold, unfortunately, is also a precious metal and is used as a luxury signifier. And so like there's other reasons people are mining gold, but there's no you know, there's no industrial justification for mining gold at this point. Copper is getting there. We could be much more aggressive about recycling copper, nickel and cobalt. That one's a little bit trickier. Nickel and cobalt recycling is also fairly intensive because they tend to be alloyed. But we can begin, you know, the recycling process for those metals. One of the things that kind of came out of left field is that, like the projections for metal recycling are below where we thought they'd be. Because electric vehicle batteries last longer than we thought. You know, if you look at the first generation of electric vehicles, there are all these predicts. It's like, oh, you're gonna have to swap your your Toyota hybrid battery out every five years, and that just never turned out to be the case.

01:09:06
Speaker 1: Nice.

01:09:07
Speaker 6: So yeah, part of it is that a lot of those metals we were predicting we'd have through the recycling market are still driving around in cars right now. We can be better about how and when we use I mean, really, the answer is don't consume as much.

01:09:19
Speaker 5: Let's stop buying stuff.

01:09:22
Speaker 6: I mean dramatically, like you can't spend your way out of these crises. Part of it is changing lifestyles and investing in walkable communities and investing in evs that aren't cars. You know, an e bike can replace eighty percent of a lot of people's automotive needs while consuming a fraction of the metals available. Looking at other technology like plug in electric hybrids are a great kind of middle ground for you know, you get a smaller battery that uses less metals, but you're still electric. You know, eighty to ninety percent of the time if you're being diligent about charging it, and so you have a significant reduction in both gas consumption and metal demands. So there's a lot of options out there that aren't just like drop a robot in the ocean or don't. And it really is going to take a variety of solutions on a variety of fronts to get to the real answer. And you know, deep c mining. My suspicion is that the industry itself will never be a particularly large industry, but there's gonna end up being some like we're gonna get to some like niche metals that are going to be hard to find in other places where they don't have like existing minds that you had to fix or solve. So things like some of the most advanced solar panels need tellurium, and there's not a ton of tellurium mines in the world. There's one seamount that happens to be particularly rich in tellurium, and I worry that people and it's in the UK's territorial waters, so I worry that people will be looking to that to get the tellurium out of that one seamount. The High Arctic has nodule fields and crust fields that are rich in scandium. And we don't use scandium for a lot, but we use it for ultra lightweight aircraft frames. So if we start electric flying airplanes, maybe we're going to start needing more scandium. I don't know, So I think those niche cases was like very particular metal demands are probably a much more likely and more promising approach than like this wholesale let's just get tons of cobalt all right.

01:11:15
Speaker 1: Time for your alien question, Daniel.

01:11:17
Speaker 2: Yes, so we sent you on an alien planet. James Cameron has funded this mission, and you're landing, and my question to you is where do you want to explore first to find the greatest alien diversity? Do you expect it to be in alien oceans or on alien land Ooh?

01:11:36
Speaker 6: I mean I'd be looking for where the energy is coming from. You know, if we're talking somewhere like Venus, you'd be looking in the atmosphere. It's pretty energy rich. If we're getting you know, out to the gas giants and landing on some moons, I'd be looking for you know, I think the best bet for life is places that have energy and stability, which tend to not come in the same spot, so I wouldn't look for something that's like tremendously volatile.

01:12:05
Speaker 7: You know.

01:12:06
Speaker 6: One of the predictions for where life on Earth started is that what are called sirpent Nite hosted hydrothermal vents and sir pent Knite host events are different than the regular hydrothermal events where you've got a tremendous amount of tectonic activity. What you've got with sirpent Nite vents is it's a trunk of ultramafic seafloor rock that's off axis, so it's not sitting on like fault lines. But there's a chemical reaction that happens when seawater contacts like olivine and a couple other minerals that produces heat, so you get an exothermic reaction. It produces these low level diffuse flow hydrothermal vent plumes that are they're warm, they're eighty ninety degrees, but they're not these magnificent black smokers that you're used to seeing.

01:12:49
Speaker 2: You know.

01:12:49
Speaker 5: I say you're used to see because if we're going.

01:12:51
Speaker 6: To stare the black smokers every day, but it's a slightly colder event. But they're also very stable, so they persist for thousands of years, and so you've got an energy source that's not somewhere that's getting frequently disturbed. You've got all the chemicals you need for life, and you've got like that chance for everything to mix and mingle. So I would be looking in oceans where we can find energy that is not particularly volatile energy.

01:13:18
Speaker 1: Fascinating, excellent answer.

01:13:20
Speaker 6: Also, I kind of would just be looking everywhere. I sort of expect life to be cosmopolitan once we have the ability to look, you know, microbes for the most part. But I expect once we can actually start getting to other worlds, we'll just find it everywhere.

01:13:32
Speaker 1: Daniel Hope, so he's really into aliens, all.

01:13:34
Speaker 6: Right, now, you do know, you do know the one big deep sea deep space connection right.

01:13:40
Speaker 2: The waters under Jovian Moons.

01:13:43
Speaker 6: No, I'm talking about Point Nemo. So Point and Emo is a spot in the Pacific Ocean that is geographically the furthest from any inhabited land mass. And in the nineteen seventies the US and the Soviet Union got together and said, hey, we've got all this stuff in space that's going to start coming down. We should pick a target for it. And so most of the major space assets, including all the merrors and eventually the International Space Station when it comes down, are dropped on Point Nemo.

01:14:17
Speaker 2: Wow.

01:14:18
Speaker 6: So it is the deep sea graveyard for outer space.

01:14:21
Speaker 1: Oh man, I want to operate a subversible through Point Nemo. That's amazing.

01:14:27
Speaker 6: It would be really cool to do a huge I mean, you'd never find anything. There's such tiny targets in such a big ocean, and mostly they break up notably.

01:14:35
Speaker 5: I think.

01:14:35
Speaker 6: I think the US once missed Point Nemo and accidentally dropped the old one of the old sky Labs over Australia instead, and they got.

01:14:43
Speaker 1: A fine for that, actually a fine for littering. I think they never paid.

01:14:46
Speaker 2: Sorry Australia.

01:14:47
Speaker 1: It was a little part, I think, not a big one. All right. That was amazing. It was so great having you on the show. Thank you so much and have a good one.

01:14:57
Speaker 6: Thank you so much. This has been a delight.

01:15:05
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01:15:13
Speaker 1: Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman.

01:15:18
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01:15:27
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01:15:34
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01:15:45
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