January 12, 2019 • 44 mins
In 1930, American naturalist William Beebe began his descent in a spherical, unpowered submarine known as a Bathysphere -- and in doing so visited a world previously unseen by human beings. In this two-part Stuff to Blow Your Mind exploration, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick discuss humanity’s prior understanding of the deep ocean and Beebe’s astounding reports from the world a half mile down. (Originally published March 27, 2018)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
The Vault hangs open. Time to venture into the Black Void.
That's right, venturing down into the void for this one.
This is an episode. Now this technically this episode in
the next Vault episode came out in March and March
twenty nine, two eighteen. Some of you might be saying,
(00:27):
whoa hold on, that's not even a year ago, even
though it is from last year. Well, the reason we
were rerunning these is because these are deep sea episodes.
These are underwater episodes. And uh, I have a a
fiction podcast project that's launching on the thirty feet here.
Everyone here is so excited. Yeah, yeah, we're all super excited.
It's titled Transgenesis. And so it seemed appropriate to feature
(00:50):
some stuff to Blow your mind Vault episodes that dealt
with the deep ocean. And this episode, of course, concerns
the real history of deep sea exploration, which is a
more difficult proposition than you might imagine. In this age
of deep sea submersibles and James Cameron and all that,
the early deep sea explorers were We're going into some
(01:11):
some hairy stuff. Yeah, this is this is a weird odyssey,
uh that we explore with the bathosphere. Uh. So join
us for this vault Vault episode and the next vault episode.
And if you wanted to get a taste of Transgenesis
before it comes out, head on over to Transgenesis Dot Show.
We hope you enjoyed this vault episode of stuff to
(01:31):
blow your mind. On the Earth at night in moonlight,
I can always imagine the yellow of sunshine, the scarlet
of invisible blossoms. But here, when the searchlight was off,
yellow and orange and red were unthinkable. The blue, which
filled all space admitted no thought of other colors. The
(01:52):
return trip was made in forty three minutes, an average
of one foot every two seconds. Twice during the ascent
I was ware of one or more indefinite large bodies
moving about at a distance. On the way down. I
had accredited them to an over excited imagination, but after
having the experience repeated on several deep dives, I am
sure that I did see shadowy shapes of large and
(02:15):
very real living creatures. What they were I can only
guess and live in hopes of seeing them closer on
some future descent. What this great creature was I cannot say.
A first and most reasonable guests would be a small
whale or blackfish. We know that whales have a special
chemical adjustment of the blood which makes it possible for
(02:35):
them to dive a mile or more and come up
without getting the bends. So this paltry depth of two thousand,
four hundred and fifty feet would be nothing for any
similarly equipped cetacean. Or less likely, it may have been
a whale shark, which is known to reach a length
of forty feet. Whatever it was, it appeared and vanished
so unexpectedly and showed so dimly that it was quite unidentifiable,
(02:56):
except as a large living creature. Welcome to stuff to
blow your mind from. How stuff weren't dot Com? Hey,
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is
(03:17):
Robert Lamb, and I'm jere McCormick. And Robert, what were
those readings from? Uh? Those were the words of William
Beebe in his biography half Mile Down, Half Mile Down.
William Beebe was an American naturalist who lived from eighteen
seventy seven to nineteen sixty two, and he was a
fabulous writer, he was. Yes, we were talking about this
(03:37):
a little bit before we went on area we have
we have I guess two major areas to look to
his biography Half Mile Down, which was certainly aimed at
more of a general public audience, but even in his
writings to a scientific audience, I admire the sort of
directness and clarity of his writing. I was looking at
a report of his from his underwater expeditions that he
(03:58):
delivered in proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in
the nineteen thirties, and it's wonderfully written for a scientific paper. Yeah,
I was. I was reading so many of these accounts
whilst listening to some ambient electronic music, and it really
I was getting chill bumps at times when he's talking
about descending into the dark and seeing these various bioluminescent
(04:20):
creatures uh come into his line of vision, creatures that
had had never been seen before, and in some cases
as well discussed creatures that have not been seen or
captured since. Now that is spooky. So, Robert, tell me,
what does the main thing about William BB's career we're
gonna be focusing on today. Well, we're gonna be talking
about the Bathisphere, the bathisphere, which is Greek for deep sphere,
(04:44):
which was the which this was these basically the submersible
deep ball, the deep ball that that he used on
the just groundbreaking trips into the deep. Because prior to this, uh,
this was in the nineteen thirties. Prior to this, subs
could only get down about three hundred and eighty three
feet or a hundred and sixteen meters or so, and
(05:06):
uh and armored dive suits were only good for about
five twenty five ft or a hundred and sixty But
the Bathosphere reached an astonishing three thousand and twenty eight
feet or nine two points. That record was set in
nineteen thirty four, and it remained the record till nineteen
forty nine. And that record was set by William Beebe
(05:28):
and his collaborator Otis Barton, who together did many dives
in the steel ball, going deep into the depths off
Bermuda and in starting in nineteen thirty. So we'll tell
the story of the Bathosphere more as we go on,
but I guess first we should talk about why why
are we doing the Bathosphere today? How did this come up? Well,
I mean on one hand, it's it's a perfect topic
(05:48):
because it deals with the ocean and the deep mysteries
of the ocean, which we come back around to again
and again on stuff to blow your mind. I've been
working on a lot lately, A lot, Yeah, a lot.
And part of that is due to I do have
a side project I've been working on here at work
that does concern uh, deep sea themes. Also, I've recently
finished reading Peter watts novel Starfish, which is a wonderful
(06:13):
sort of cyberpunk sci fi novel from several years back
that takes takes place in the deep ocean. Peter Watts
the author of blind Side, Yes, but he wrote Starfish
many years before. Correct. Yeah, this was his first big splash.
You could say, uh and then uh and then also Joe,
you and I recently attended the exhibit Unseen Oceans at
the American Museum of Natural History in New York City,
(06:36):
which is running March twelfth, two thousand eighteen, through January six,
two thousand and nineteen. This was a really cool special exhibit.
I really liked it, and it got into a thing
that's really hard to explain in a in an interesting way,
but it did it. It got into the character of plankton,
like making you feel that like plankton has personality. There
are different types of plankton, and those types matter and
(06:59):
their interesting, Like there are even these tiny zeno moreph
some plankton. Yes, it's easy to I feel like we
we often have this sort of science biology textbook approach
to plankton where they are a little more than a
little side note at the beginning, and it's just like,
these are these are small creatures. Don't worry about them.
Larger or more interesting creatures eat them. But of course
(07:19):
they're they're extremely vital and uh. And when you start
keying in on individual plankton specimens, there is this rich diversity. Uh,
it's on par with anything you would find in other
regions of the animal kingdom. I mean, in a very
real way. They're sort of the ground floor of the
entire biosphere. And so you do find not only just
(07:41):
sort of interesting but also forgettable preycare creatures. You find
fascinating predators and parasites. But another great thing about this
exhibit is that it tells the story of people who
have tried to illuminate the depths of the ocean. I mean,
we we see Nature documentary is showing us footage of
what happens under the sea. And because you've seen that footage,
(08:05):
now you might have this sense like, Okay, we finally
figured out what the oceans are, like, we know what's
down there. It's you know, it's it's finally conquered territory.
And in many ways it is, it has been and
still remains the most mysterious thing about planet Earth. It
is not conquered territory. There's so much we haven't seen
and we don't know about the deep oceans. Yeah, and
(08:28):
and you know that one of the interesting things, one
of the one of the reasons we're talking about William
Beebe here today is that when you think about pioneers
in deep sea exploration, unless this is a topic that
you've read extensively about before or whatnot, and some of
the key names that come to mind are probably Jacques Cousteau, right,
(08:48):
And indeed, Jacques Cousteau did a lot uh in the
area of exploring our season, popularizing our understanding of the seas.
He's one of those figures that I think many people
of our generation actually know more directly from parody of him.
Than they know from him himself. Well maybe for for
(09:09):
today's like younger generations, but but he had a long
running television series narrated by Rod Serling. Oh yeah, well,
I just mean that, I know, I grew up not
really knowing anything about Jacques Cousto himself. But I saw
a countless cartoon and puppet French accent, you know, underwater
explorer type characters that were I don't mean like they
(09:29):
were attacking Jacques Custo, were making fun of him, But
I don't know, he seemed like a very parodyable character
in American culture, right. And of course today we have
James Cameron, who who's whose contribution to deeps exploration is
a is is real? Yeah. Um but but but as
as far as William Beebe goes in the bathosphere, like,
(09:51):
this is a story that I feel isn't as celebrated
in pop culture. It's it's it's certainly remembered in in
his story of marine biology and our exploration of the seas.
I mean, it's not it's not something that's forgotten. Before
we did this exhibit, I knew pretty much nothing about this. Yeah. Yeah,
but I think where I started really discovering it was
(10:13):
was in reading Starfish, in which Peter Watts makes several
mentions of PB and his contributions and his sightings, not
just a quick note. This is going to be a
two parter. We started recording it and we were just
going way too long. So we went ahead and made
the decision let's cut it into UH and UH and
spread it out over the course of a week instead
of dropping like a nearly two hour episode right in
(10:35):
your lap. Well, I mean there's a lot of deep
sea out there, right, that's right. I can't blame us
for talking forever on that. Yeah, and we're only scratching
the surface on it. Well, maybe the best understand Bob's contributions.
It helps to turn our eyes to the past and
to look at what humanities knowledge of the deepest parts
of the ocean, or even not the deepest, even the
(10:56):
deeper parts of the ocean was like before the Bathosphere expedition,
and so what we knew and what the process of
exploring the deep sea was like. So Robert, will you
come along with me to the age of sea monsters? Yes, yes,
here they'd be dragons. So, given how little we know
about the deep ocean, just think about how mysterious the
(11:18):
depths were before just about a hundred years ago, or
in even earlier times when less was known about biology
in general, that you could extrapolate to the deep ocean,
when stories of sea monsters the size of whole islands
rising out of the out of the deep was really
not out of the realm of possibility. That's something I'd
like to emphasize. It was not just fanciful to imagine.
(11:40):
Back then, you had no reason necessarily to doubt stories
of sea monsters, right, yeah, I mean because ultimately, what
did we know of the of the depths or even
the greater expanses of the sea. We did not know
about whole continents out there, so uh, it would seem
entirely poss well, you would have giant sea creatures, and
(12:02):
in fact, we saw giants sea creatures in the forms
of of spouting whales and various carcassus occasionally drift up
to shore exactly right. So, most of the time in
human history was a time when people could not look
beneath the ocean. They didn't they didn't really have any
idea other than what sailors might have said they saw
(12:23):
coming up to the surface. Every now and then. But
that was just a peak, that was just what came
up to the surface. I mean, what's deep down there?
Who the heck knows. So one example of the kinds
of beliefs that used to be so plausible about the
creatures that lived in the deep. I want to reference
a passage that's quoted in Chet van Deuser's book Sea
Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps, which Robert, this is
(12:43):
a book you loaned me and it's fantastic. Oh yeah,
this is what. This is a wonderful book, wonderful content,
and there's so many rich illustrations from these old maps. Yeah,
they're they're wonderful. Now. Originally this quote is from the
Knuskusa or the King's Mirror, which is a thirteen injury
old Norse educational text. So it's got it's written in
(13:03):
the form of a dialogue, and it's got characters talking
to each other about things in the world, and we
come to this passage talking about marine life. So here
it is quote there is a fish not yet mentioned,
which it is scarcely advisable to speak about on account
of its size, which to most men will seem incredible.
There are moreover, but very few who can tell anything
(13:25):
definite about it, inasmuch as it is rarely seen by men,
for it almost never approaches the shore or appears where
fishermen can see it. And I doubt that this sort
of fish is very plentiful in the sea. In our
language it is usually called the kraken. I can say
nothing definite as to its length in els, for on
those occasions when men have seen it, it has appeared
(13:47):
more like an island than a fish. Nor have I
heard that one has ever been caught or found dead.
It seems likely that there are but two in all
the ocean, and that these beget no offspring, for I
believe it is always the same ones that appear. Nor
would it be well for other fishes if they were
as numerous as other whales, seeing that they are so
(14:07):
immense and needs so much food. It is said that
when these fishes want something to eat, they are in
the habit of giving forth a violent belch, which brings
up so much food, that all sorts of fish in
the neighborhood, both large and small, will rush up in
hopes of getting nourishment and good fair. Meanwhile, the monster
keeps its mouth open, and inasmuch as its opening is
(14:30):
about as wide as a sound or fiord, the fishes
cannot help crowding in great numbers. But as soon as
its mouth and belly are full, the monster closes its
mouth and thus catches and shuts in all the fishes
that just previously had rushed in eagerly to seek food.
Oh wow, that is a fabulous description. Yeah, and that's
an amazing hunting strategy. Yeah, I offhand, I can't think
(14:53):
of a real world organism that actually employs something like that. Well,
there's sort of, um, there are versions in much smaller scales. Now,
obviously you've got like the snapping turtle with the fake
worm lure in its mouth and it will wait for
the fish to sneak in to get the food and
then clamp shut. But those artificial lures, right, But what
(15:14):
we have here is like this creature has eaten so
much sea life and then it vomits that sea life up,
which brings in greater populations of sea life, which it
then it just then just sucks all of that down. Yeah.
But I want to emphasize again, this sounds ridiculous to us,
but we're living after Darwin. We know a lot more.
We're living after Darwin, and we're living after you know,
(15:35):
submarines going down and looking at well, what kind of
sea life is there? Really, we still don't know a
whole lot, but we know enough that this doesn't seem plausible.
But if you were armed with only what an educated
Norwegian courtier knew about deep sea life in the thirteenth century,
how would you argue against these accounts? Indeed? And uh,
you know this is there's another point that chet VanDuzer
(15:57):
makes in his book is that like in the ancient world,
it was it was often assumed that anything that existed
on the surface likely had a counterpart beneath the waves
and the mirror world. And I mean the names stick
with us, the sea lion, the sea cow, sea cucumber,
I guess the sea cucumber two but to see Hamburger.
But basically, when you start looking at all these fabulous beasts,
(16:20):
and I think we alluded to this a little bit
in our Aquatic Humanoids episode episodes, Uh, you find all
these various just ridiculous sea dogs, et cetera. Literally the
idea that whatever we have here there must be a
counterpart beneath the waves, and I mean to a certain extent,
there's there's a bit of truth in that, just the
(16:40):
idea that that whatever diversity we have on the surface,
that diversity must be represented beneath the waves. But of course,
in reality it's even it's even greater than that. The
vast majority of the planet's biodiversity is in the ocean. Well, yeah,
there's just so much ocean and there are so many
ecological niches to fill within it. All right, we're gonna
(17:00):
take a quick break and then we'll jump right back in.
Thank Thank alright, we're back now. Of course, as we've
said that, over time, there has been this steady increasing
catalog of some knowledge about undersea life. There's still a
lot we don't know, but we know a lot more
than we used to. And one of the earliest major
explorations of marine biology was that of Aristotle in the
(17:22):
fourth century BC. In his Biology or This History of
of Animal Life, Aristotle got a lot wrong, like, for example,
he said the octopus is a stupid creature, for it
will approach a man's hand if it be lowered in
the water. Now, on the other hand, Aristotle, for his time,
if you consider his limitations, got an astonishing amount. Right.
(17:44):
For example, he correctly determined that whales and dolphins were
not fish, and he made lots of other extremely astute classifications. So,
uh filed this away under Aristotle occasionally says things that
sound dumb to us, but was not dumb. Yeah. Yeah,
I feel like we've hashedne this before on other topics. Uh.
From our advantage point, it's easy to to say, ah,
(18:05):
you really screwed that up Aristotle. But really, given what
he had to work with, his his understanding of the
natural world was amazing. Yeah, I just mean think about
Aristotle's the research methods available to him now. A lot
of what he did he probably he probably got a
lot of information by like talking to fisher folk and
stuff like that. But he also I think some people
(18:28):
have said, you know, it really looks from some of
his statements like Aristotle performed dissections, so he must have
had some access to specimens. And it's not so easy
to always get specimens in the ancient world, Like how
how do you collect them? You just like throw some
nets and hope you get some good stuff. Yeah, especially
this is especially important considering that you have other historians
(18:49):
and writers of the ancient world who were very much
going on second, third, and fourth hand accounts of what
was going on elsewhere in the world. And and and
that's where we see some of these more ridiculous notions
of of even terrestrial monsters and creatures. Totally, it's like
it's through a glass darkly on in like four ways, right,
So you're getting it second hand. You know that you
(19:11):
heard a story from somebody who heard a story who
also was not really beneath the waves when he or
she saw this thing, but just saw something poke up
from the surface. I mean, there's so many levels of
removed from the actual biological reality that it's not hard
to understand where these myths about sea monsters come from.
So to explore the idea of ways of understanding the
(19:34):
deep sea, like the research methods available to us before
recent times, and like the invention of modern technology like
sonar and other stuff. Uh, there were I want to
say they were basically two broad methods for studying the
deepest parts of the ocean, and for a little mythological flare.
I want I want to give them some mythological names
to help us keep them organized. So one I want
(19:56):
to call the Ebisu method, So Ebisu is the Japanese
luck odd, often depicted as a jolly fisherman with a
bright red bream on his line. He's always got a
fishing pole. So the Ebissue method is to use some
kind of method to pull creatures up from the deep
to the surface so you can study them go fishing basically, okay.
And the other one I want to call the Gilgamesh method,
(20:19):
because Gilgamesh, of course, is the protagonist of the four
thousand year old Mesopotamian work known as the Epic of Gilgamesh.
And if you'll recall from the Epic of Gilgamesh and
the second half of the story Gilgamesh, he gets obsessed
with finding the secret of eternal life. And in Tablet eleven,
he receives a tip that there is a plant at
the bottom of the ocean covered in prickling thorns, which
(20:42):
if you pull it up from the ocean old grant
you eternal life. And so, to read from the Andrew
George translation quote, heavy stones he tied to his feet,
and they pulled him down to the ocean below. He
took the plant and pulled it up and lifted it.
The heavy stones he cut loose from his feet and
the sea cast him up on its shore. So the
(21:04):
idea is Gilgamesh, he weighs himself down, he goes to
the very bottom of the ocean, he cuts up this plant,
and then he cuts himself loose. So the Gilgamesh method,
I'm going to say, is to dive as deep as
you can into the dark world and see what you
can see. But of course you also have to be
able to come back and report what you've seen. Right,
Not not all of us are Gilgamesh. Right, it seemed
like he could hold his breath for a long time
(21:25):
and withstand some crushing compression. They probably didn't necessarily understand
at the time, But so people have been accidentally practicing
versions of the Ebisome method for thousands of years. Right.
So of course the easiest thing is that sometimes dead
organisms from the deep sea will wash up on the
shore in various states of decomposition, and people could look
at that and say, oh, I wonder what this is.
(21:47):
But we still see this all the time. I feel
like only a few months will go go go by
before there's another, uh weird dead thing that's washed upon
the beach, and various websites will will start speculating as
to what it was, and generally they'll say, Oh, it's
probably unsty, it's probably a dinosaur. I mean, I'm torn
(22:10):
because I I love a good beach monster and I
hate the Daily Mail, and the latter is the best
place to go for the former you you will always get.
The beach monster is interpreted in various ways. But I mean,
beach monster is a wild grotesque and often classified as
monsters that don't really exist. Can show us some things
about the deep ocean. Uh. The other thing would be
(22:32):
accidental ebisume method practicing just through fishing. People are throwing
nets in order to catch some fish to eat, but
they pull up something interesting by accident. Now, whether you're
practicing the this method on purpose or by accident, there
are definitely limits to what you can learn through it,
and will explore some of those limits in a bit.
One surprising thing to learn is that, according to some reports,
(22:53):
ancient people's actually did practice versions of the Gilgamesh method
as well. So, going back to Aristotle in his three
sixty BC work Problem Atam or the Problems, Aristotle actually
gives the earliest description I'm aware of of deep diving technology.
And so this is going to be a version of
the diving bell. And he's talking about divers who fish
(23:16):
for sponges on the sea floor, and he discusses all
kinds of weird practices these divers used to make the
deep more tolerable, and these include fastening sponges around their ears,
or cutting slits in their own ears and nostrils. And
in this section, Aristotle writes that quote. In order that
these fissures of sponges may be supplied with a facility
(23:37):
of respiration, a kettle is let down to them, not
filled with water, but with air, which constantly assists the
submerged demand. It is forcibly kept upright in its descent
in order that it may be sent down at an
equal level all around, to prevent the air from escaping
and the water from entering. Now, if you never like
played this game in the bath as a kid, you
(23:59):
can make a simple diving bell just by taking a
cup or a bowl or something and turning it upside
down and then pressing it straight down into the water
and not letting it wobble. And what it'll do is
it will keep a bubble of air trapped underneath the cup.
And you could if you were a tiny diver, swim
up in there or stay in there and breathe down
(24:20):
at the bottom. But this comes with a lot of risks,
right like if it gets tipped over slightly, the air
can escape and uh, and of course you're still going
to be dealing with all kinds of weird pressure problems. Yeah,
this is this is one of those things that we
we all experiment with in the bathtub. I feel I've
observed I've observed my my son doing this as well,
(24:40):
but he has not reached the conclusion, hey, why don't
we take one of these to the ocean. But I
can I can imagine that this idea has been around
as long as we've had bowls, essentially as long as
we've had even just coconut husks or something to that effect. Yeah,
it's hard to know for sure because Aristotle doesn't make
(25:01):
it clear who invented this technique, and he doesn't make
it clear how long it's been around or how common
it was. He just mentions that some divers can do this,
So we don't know where it comes from or how
far it was taken in the ancient world. But here
is a really weird connection. I came across. According to
medieval legend, Aristotle's student Alexander the Great was his own
(25:24):
kind of great undersea adventurer and pioneer of the school
of Gilgamesh. Robert, had you ever come across the Alexander
the Great as deep sea explorer before? I don't believe
I had, though the William Beebe makes reference to it
in his book Half Mile Down. Yeah. Uh. So. There
are a lot of versions of this legend, and and
to be very clear, these are pretty much definitely false.
(25:46):
Maybe some versions of them are inspired by something that
roughly happened, but but as told, they're definitely false. So
the oldest version I think is the one about how
while Alexander the Great was laying siege to the city
of Tear in Lebanon, he had divers swimming underwater to
either remove or to put in place boom defenses. And
(26:07):
a boom defenses something you would put in in a
harbor or a channel, that's like a huge chain or
object that you would place underwater to prevent the passage
of ships. It recalls something Terry and Lanister does in
the Battle of Blackwater Bay. Remember that I don't remember that.
I remember all the fire obviously, but I don't remember
the use of chains too. Yeah, in the book, he
(26:27):
puts a big chain across the water and this prevents
the ships from getting past, And this is an actual technique.
So in some versions of the story, I think Alexander
is trying to get rid of boom defenses, and some
of he's trying to put them in place. But in
any case, he's got divers working for him. And in
one version of the story, written by a seventh century
Arab historian and quoted in the History of Underwater Exploration
(26:49):
by Richard F. Marks, Alexander wants to go underwater, either
to help with this task or to see how it's
coming along. So he has his workmen build him a
huge wooden box with glass windows that are sealed with
resin and wax to keep the water out. And then
the room at this box is weighed down with iron
and lead and stone and then lowered into the water
(27:12):
between two ships, with Alexander and a couple of his
secretaries inside the box. And then from inside this sealed
room they can look out the glass windows and see
what's happening deep underwater in the ocean quote. Thanks to
the transparency of the glass and the limpidity of the water.
Alexander and his two companions were able to see the
marine monsters and a species of demon having the head
(27:35):
of a ferocious beast attached to a human body. Some
of them carried axes, others saws, and still others hammers,
so they looked like workman. Alexander and his two secretaries
drew careful pictures of these monsters. Then they pulled the line,
and at this signal, the men on the ships drew
up the case. The king stepped out and was carried
back to Alexandria. Well, you know, hearing that, I I
(27:58):
feel that Alexander deserved to be frightened a little bit,
since he was really kind of micromanaging on all this.
He really should have learned to delegate a bit more. Well,
what I like about the story is that it does
imply some kind of scientific observation. It's just observation of
demons instead of real wildlife. But there's actually there are
other funny versions of this. There's a totally different version
(28:21):
of Alexander as Gilgamesh that I came across in this
illustrated manuscript. It's an early fifteenth century German manuscript telling
a story of how Alexander goes down to the bottom
of the ocean and a diving bell and he trusts
so this would be not a not an encased room
with glass windows, but like a regular diving bell. So
a bell upturned in the water that's got an air
bubble in it. And he goes down and uh. He
(28:43):
entrusts his loyal mistress to watch over the chain that
can pull the bell back up to the surface. And unfortunately,
while she's watching the chain, her lover gets her to
run off with him and abandoned Alexander and throw the
chain into the sea. Not good for alex I like
the theme of this though, because it basically it portrays
Alexander the Great is indeed a great individual who can
(29:07):
do great things and go places that no other man
can go. But in doing so, there's a there there's
there's an inherent weakness. Well, use this technology, it's not
just like magic super strength. He can swim to the
bottom of the ocean. He builds a technological marvel to
get him down there, but in doing so he neglects
his mistress. Right, Yeah, and I've got an illustration here, Robert.
(29:29):
You can look at that's got alex down in this
in this bubble. He's looking very unhappy. He's got a
big mustache, and he appears to be frowning and scowling
at the surface where his mistress and her lover are
cavorting in this ship. And then meanwhile in the background
there are these gigantic fish swimming by that I guess
he's not even noticing because he's angry. Yeah, and but
(29:49):
at least they do look like real fish and not
visions from hell. I believe the example that the William
Beebe draws on is the idea that uh that that
Alexander the Great uh observes a fish that is so
large that it takes days for it to pass him by.
So another equally outrageous uh or perhaps just uh exaggerated
(30:14):
example of what life might be underwater. And that's the
feeling I'm getting from all of these accounts. It sounds
like less an example of, Hey, somebody went underwater and
they saw this, but more of almost like a science
fictional scenario. What would it be like if I could
go underwater and see the things that are down there?
And then to build that I have to base it
(30:36):
on what do I believe exist under the water? Well,
I would say much in the same way that the
science fiction of space encouraged people to become real astronauts
and want to explore. I think maybe some of this
ancient and medieval science fiction about the underwater realms may
have inspired people to want to actually build real diving
(30:56):
bell technology and go down there, and that that is
what have been really happened. Genuine scientific interest in the
ocean depths and the real use of diving technologies like
the diving bell showed up again in more recent decades,
specifically starting around the sixteenth century. You you start to
see people messing with diving bells. How deep can we go? Uh?
Some of this was just for purely commercial reasons, like
(31:18):
people wanted to salvage shipwrecks and get rich and all that,
but also there was a genuine spirit about of exploration
about the deep ocean, to get down there and see
what you could see. But of course, as we mentioned,
diving bells have a lot of limitations. All right, on
that note, we're gonna take a quick break and when
we come back, we're gonna discuss the the pre bb
(31:38):
world of deep sea exploration. Just a little bit more.
Thank you. Thank alright, we're back. So we've talked about
ancient investigation into the nature of the deep sea, both
real and mythological, in the form of the Ebisum method
like fishing, pulling things up and seeing what they're like,
and the Gilgamesh method diving down and seeing what you
can see yourself. And in the nineteenth century, the Ebba
(32:01):
zoom method, by way of the biological dredge, was very
popular for naturalists, zoologists, socianographers, all these people trying to
understand what existed in the hidden deep. And one practitioner
of this method, the biological dredge, was the British naturalist
Edward Forbes. Now Forbes was a naturalist from the Isle
(32:22):
of Man. He was reportedly a very likable dude. People
people took a shine to him. But in in eighteen
forty one, Edward Forbes was on a journey aboard a
surveying ship called the h MS Beacon in the Mediterranean
Sea and during this voyage they would dredge the water.
So what you have to imagine there is like a
bag or a bucket type contraption that you would drag
(32:44):
along the bottom of the ocean from behind a ship,
and then when you drag it along and scoop some
stuff up, then you'd pull it back up and see
what you caught. All right. I have conducted the very
same sort of investigation in the surf with my son.
Just drag a bucket, get a bunch of sand, and
then you dump it out and see what you manage
to catch. And sometimes you do find an interesting organism. Yeah,
(33:06):
what have you found that way? Oh? They are we
always call them sand fleas, but they're not actual sand fleas.
They're little isopods. I can't remember this specific species name offhand,
but depending on the sort of on the Florida beach
you go to, you can find a number of these.
Aren't they the jumping ones? They don't jump. They burrow
really quickly, so basically, if you if you are able
to scoop underneath them, they can't dig away from you. Oh,
(33:30):
I see. And then most of them are really small,
but you can find something that are the size of
really like the size of your thumb. They're pretty fun.
That's cool, though, I thought you were referring to things
I have actually seen that. I don't know if their
fleas or what I should look up what these organisms are.
One time we were up on the northwest coast, I believe,
a beach in Oregon, and the beach was just covered
(33:51):
in what appeared to be jumping fleas. There these little
like white, pale fleas that would jump all over you.
It was kind of horrible. Yeah, and I think I
believe those more accurately sand fleas. And for whatever reason,
and I have talked to other it wasn't just my family,
I've talked to other people, and I've asked him, well,
what did you call these things when you were a
kid going to the beach, and the like, Oh, yeah,
we call those sand fleas. So but again they're they're
(34:13):
more technically a variety of issopod. Well, Forbes was playing
this game, the Drag the Bucket game at much much
deeper than just in the surf and catching much more
than just sand fleas. So Forbes noticed though, as you
play this game, as you you go through the Mediterranean
Sea on the beacon dredging the bottom that as you
move deeper and deeper into deeper waters, the dredge came
(34:37):
up with fewer types of organisms. So you can see
where the reasoning probably went from there right, the lower
down you go, the less life there is. So extrapolating
from his observations, in eighteen forty three, Forbes proposed what
came to be known as the abyssess theory or the
a zoic hypothesis. And this specifically said that below three
(34:58):
hundred fathoms, which is about five hundred and fifty meters
or eighteen hundred feet, the oceans were completely dead. Now
this makes a certain kind of sense, right, Like a
lot of false hypotheses, it has this sense of truthiness,
It feels right, and other contemporary scientists backed Forbes up.
So I'm going to quote from an eighteen sixty three
text book by the Scottish geologist David Page, in which
(35:21):
pages discussing the powerful compression effects of vast amounts of water.
So he explains that at four thousand fathoms, the pressure
of the ocean would be about seven hundred and fifty atmospheres,
and he considers that just intolerable. Quote at vast depths. Therefore,
it is generally supposed that vegetable and animal life has
known to us could not possibly exist, And though some
(35:43):
recent soundings of the North Seas at the depth of
one thousand, two hundred and sixty fathoms would seem to
oppose this opinion. Yet the paucity and uncertainty of these
trials leave the question still in doubt, and we may,
in the meantime adhere to the general belief that the
extreme depressions of the ocean, like the extreme elevations of
the land, are barren and lifeless solitudes. All right, So
(36:06):
in this case, he's drawing upon just the idea that
the water pressure would be too great for life as
we know it to exist. I mean truthie, right, Like,
if you're under seven fifty atmospheres, couldn't possibly be a
thing to survive? That? Right? Okay, yeah, I can I
can see where that that idea could had a certain
(36:27):
amount of truthiness to it. Uh. Now, certainly we know
that that that that the sunlit portions of the ocean,
that that's where most of the life is. That is
where that's where you encounter all of the plankton, the
creatures that feed upon the plankton, uh, creatures that depend
upon the sunlight, and then the creatures that consume those organisms.
(36:50):
That is going to be found in the upper ocean.
But another thing they could have reasoned, is I wonder
what happens to all those organisms in the sunlit area
when they die? And then if they're gonna if they're
gonna be packing some good chemical energy with them after
they die, wouldn't something want to take advantage of that exactly?
And then you you also have to begin to say, well,
(37:11):
if everything is, if all the life is up here
in the sunlit ocean, then isn't the dark ocean? Isn't
that a great place to say, go hide out? Is
it a great place just maybe set up as your
main base of operations? Right? So, really, this hypothesis should
have been a nonstarter. Forbes was completely wrong, uh, since
(37:31):
many dredging experiments had already at the time of Forbes
caught life forms from depths of below three fathoms. Page
alludes to this. Nevertheless, it was supported by some for
several decades, but later biologists and oceanographers eventually just beat
this zombie down like that. It didn't survive all that
much longer. And one of the many researchers to assist
(37:54):
in knocking down the zombie a zoic hypothesis was the
Scottish naturalist Charles Wyville. Thompson, and in an eighteen seventy
three report called The Depths of the Sea, Thompson published
the results of his own dredging expeditions in the seas
north of Scotland. So, while dredging to a depth of
six d and fifty fathoms, he discovered all kinds of
invertebrate organisms that Forbes had missed. And I'm not sure
(38:17):
of the reason, but one thing I've read that may
or may not be true is that later investigators had
better dredging equipment than Forbes, which was less likely to
spill the things it caught on the way back up
to the surface. You can imagine this would be a problem.
You're like trying to pull up the stuff you caught,
and it's just like going all over the place. Yeah,
your bucket isn't big enough for You're not handling the
(38:37):
bucket properly and run into all sorts of problems. Now.
Thompson would also go on to head up one of
the most important oceanographic research expeditions of all time about
the deep sea, which was the Challenger Expedition beginning in
eighteen seventy two, which did a lot of stuff. It's
circumnavigated the globe on a ship called the HMS Challenger,
and it collected an absolute wealth of scientific observation, much
(38:59):
of which is still relevant today. They catalog more than
four thousand new species. They did soundings in the ocean
all over the world and came up with the general
shape of Earth's ocean basins. And they discovered ocean features
like the mid Atlantic Ridge and the Challenger Deep, which
is of course named for the expedition. But still as
wonderful as all this knowledge was, there were still limits
(39:20):
imposed by the fact that they were using what we
what I've been calling the EBB zoom method. They're they're
pulling stuff up from the bottom. Like imagine trying to
study the Amazon rainforest by flying over it in an
airplane and dragging a bucket along the forest floor behind you,
and then reeling it up and seeing what you've got
in the bucket. Like, you see some problems already, but
(39:42):
also a factor in the differences in the conditions of
the deep ocean and the surface where we want to
study the things we pull up from the bottom, that
that's a problem too, Right, You've got massive changes in light,
in temperature, which is a big one and in pressure,
and so maybe a better analogy is like imagining an
alien adallite studying us by scooping us up in a
(40:03):
net and then pulling us up into outer space to
have a look. Right. Sometimes organisms dredged up from the
deep ocean can be kept alive if you keep them refrigerated,
but other times they're just going to be killed or
even reduced to google in the process of removing them
from their natural environment. One interesting fact is that many
deep secret creatures are actually able to withstand lower pressure
(40:24):
on the surface, and others are not. For example, I
found a blog post by a marine biologist named Dr
Craig McClain who wrote, quote, I've tried to collect a
particularly gelatinous red sea cucumber several times. Each time at
the surface. When I pulled a collection canister off the
r o V, the canister is filled with thick red
kool aid, which I presume is the remains of the
(40:46):
red sea cucumber. So there are these limitations to the
ebissue method. If you want to keep pulling stuff up
from the bottom to study it at the top, you're
always going to have a sort of cap on what
sorts of scientific progress you're able to make. So would
there ever be a better way to study the deep
other than these incredibly dangerous and limited power diving bells?
(41:08):
What a true Gilgamesh method arise? Ah, well, Joe, a
true Gilgamesh will arise, But he's gonna have to wait
till next episode because I think we're out of time
here today. So that is going to be the next
episode where we primarily discussed the bathosphere and the work
of William bb correct. But yeah, before we close out today,
I just want to try to imagine what it's like
to be in an oceanographer or a marine biologists mindset
(41:32):
before we get to the bathosphere. Leaving off at the
end of everything we've discussed today, right, so, you you've
been stuck on the surface of the water. You just
can't really dive down and see what's beneath the ocean yourself,
or at least not very well, and so you're you're
limited to these methods of dragging buckets along or trawling
with nets, or trying to scoop stuff up from the
(41:55):
from the sea floor. What what is that like to have,
like not have a cess to all of this life
that you want to study and and always performing these
kind of like random samplings is the only way to
get at it. Yeah. And then even as these various
technologies do come on online, which I alluded to earlier,
you you don't have the ability to really get into
(42:16):
the depths. There are depths of the ocean that are
just beyond your ability to venture into. Yeah, and you can't.
You can't explore and see it the way it's supposed
to be, right, or I mean supposed to be the
way it naturally is. To study, you must destroy if
you're going to be sampling in the ebissue method, right,
and but then how do you explore it yourself without
(42:39):
destroying yourself? Essentially? And that that is where the bathmosphere
comes in next time on Stuff to Blow your Mind,
It's almost like nature doesn't want us to explore the
deep sea. Yeah, it's almost like it's a warning or
it's almost like we're we're fragile flesh creatures that have
have evolved only to thrive within a very slim portion
of our own environment. Uh. So hey, we're gonna we
(43:02):
are going to leave you now. Uh. If you want
to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
Dot com, many of which have involved the ocean, in
many cases the deep ocean. Then you can find them there.
You also find blog post links out to our various
social media accounts as well. Huge thanks as always to
our excellent audio producers Alex Williams and Tory Harrison. If
(43:23):
you would like to get in touch with us to
let us know feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for a future episode, or just
to say hi, you can email us at blow the
Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on
(43:45):
this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff
works dot com a bit peas three twenty four twin
four propo
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
The Vault hangs open. Time to venture into the Black Void.
That's right, venturing down into the void for this one.
This is an episode. Now this technically this episode in
the next Vault episode came out in March and March
twenty nine, two eighteen. Some of you might be saying,
(00:27):
whoa hold on, that's not even a year ago, even
though it is from last year. Well, the reason we
were rerunning these is because these are deep sea episodes.
These are underwater episodes. And uh, I have a a
fiction podcast project that's launching on the thirty feet here.
Everyone here is so excited. Yeah, yeah, we're all super excited.
It's titled Transgenesis. And so it seemed appropriate to feature
(00:50):
some stuff to Blow your mind Vault episodes that dealt
with the deep ocean. And this episode, of course, concerns
the real history of deep sea exploration, which is a
more difficult proposition than you might imagine. In this age
of deep sea submersibles and James Cameron and all that,
the early deep sea explorers were We're going into some
(01:11):
some hairy stuff. Yeah, this is this is a weird odyssey,
uh that we explore with the bathosphere. Uh. So join
us for this vault Vault episode and the next vault episode.
And if you wanted to get a taste of Transgenesis
before it comes out, head on over to Transgenesis Dot Show.
We hope you enjoyed this vault episode of stuff to
(01:31):
blow your mind. On the Earth at night in moonlight,
I can always imagine the yellow of sunshine, the scarlet
of invisible blossoms. But here, when the searchlight was off,
yellow and orange and red were unthinkable. The blue, which
filled all space admitted no thought of other colors. The
(01:52):
return trip was made in forty three minutes, an average
of one foot every two seconds. Twice during the ascent
I was ware of one or more indefinite large bodies
moving about at a distance. On the way down. I
had accredited them to an over excited imagination, but after
having the experience repeated on several deep dives, I am
sure that I did see shadowy shapes of large and
(02:15):
very real living creatures. What they were I can only
guess and live in hopes of seeing them closer on
some future descent. What this great creature was I cannot say.
A first and most reasonable guests would be a small
whale or blackfish. We know that whales have a special
chemical adjustment of the blood which makes it possible for
(02:35):
them to dive a mile or more and come up
without getting the bends. So this paltry depth of two thousand,
four hundred and fifty feet would be nothing for any
similarly equipped cetacean. Or less likely, it may have been
a whale shark, which is known to reach a length
of forty feet. Whatever it was, it appeared and vanished
so unexpectedly and showed so dimly that it was quite unidentifiable,
(02:56):
except as a large living creature. Welcome to stuff to
blow your mind from. How stuff weren't dot Com? Hey,
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is
(03:17):
Robert Lamb, and I'm jere McCormick. And Robert, what were
those readings from? Uh? Those were the words of William
Beebe in his biography half Mile Down, Half Mile Down.
William Beebe was an American naturalist who lived from eighteen
seventy seven to nineteen sixty two, and he was a
fabulous writer, he was. Yes, we were talking about this
(03:37):
a little bit before we went on area we have
we have I guess two major areas to look to
his biography Half Mile Down, which was certainly aimed at
more of a general public audience, but even in his
writings to a scientific audience, I admire the sort of
directness and clarity of his writing. I was looking at
a report of his from his underwater expeditions that he
(03:58):
delivered in proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in
the nineteen thirties, and it's wonderfully written for a scientific paper. Yeah,
I was. I was reading so many of these accounts
whilst listening to some ambient electronic music, and it really
I was getting chill bumps at times when he's talking
about descending into the dark and seeing these various bioluminescent
(04:20):
creatures uh come into his line of vision, creatures that
had had never been seen before, and in some cases
as well discussed creatures that have not been seen or
captured since. Now that is spooky. So, Robert, tell me,
what does the main thing about William BB's career we're
gonna be focusing on today. Well, we're gonna be talking
about the Bathisphere, the bathisphere, which is Greek for deep sphere,
(04:44):
which was the which this was these basically the submersible
deep ball, the deep ball that that he used on
the just groundbreaking trips into the deep. Because prior to this, uh,
this was in the nineteen thirties. Prior to this, subs
could only get down about three hundred and eighty three
feet or a hundred and sixteen meters or so, and
(05:06):
uh and armored dive suits were only good for about
five twenty five ft or a hundred and sixty But
the Bathosphere reached an astonishing three thousand and twenty eight
feet or nine two points. That record was set in
nineteen thirty four, and it remained the record till nineteen
forty nine. And that record was set by William Beebe
(05:28):
and his collaborator Otis Barton, who together did many dives
in the steel ball, going deep into the depths off
Bermuda and in starting in nineteen thirty. So we'll tell
the story of the Bathosphere more as we go on,
but I guess first we should talk about why why
are we doing the Bathosphere today? How did this come up? Well,
I mean on one hand, it's it's a perfect topic
(05:48):
because it deals with the ocean and the deep mysteries
of the ocean, which we come back around to again
and again on stuff to blow your mind. I've been
working on a lot lately, A lot, Yeah, a lot.
And part of that is due to I do have
a side project I've been working on here at work
that does concern uh, deep sea themes. Also, I've recently
finished reading Peter watts novel Starfish, which is a wonderful
(06:13):
sort of cyberpunk sci fi novel from several years back
that takes takes place in the deep ocean. Peter Watts
the author of blind Side, Yes, but he wrote Starfish
many years before. Correct. Yeah, this was his first big splash.
You could say, uh and then uh and then also Joe,
you and I recently attended the exhibit Unseen Oceans at
the American Museum of Natural History in New York City,
(06:36):
which is running March twelfth, two thousand eighteen, through January six,
two thousand and nineteen. This was a really cool special exhibit.
I really liked it, and it got into a thing
that's really hard to explain in a in an interesting way,
but it did it. It got into the character of plankton,
like making you feel that like plankton has personality. There
are different types of plankton, and those types matter and
(06:59):
their interesting, Like there are even these tiny zeno moreph
some plankton. Yes, it's easy to I feel like we
we often have this sort of science biology textbook approach
to plankton where they are a little more than a
little side note at the beginning, and it's just like,
these are these are small creatures. Don't worry about them.
Larger or more interesting creatures eat them. But of course
(07:19):
they're they're extremely vital and uh. And when you start
keying in on individual plankton specimens, there is this rich diversity. Uh,
it's on par with anything you would find in other
regions of the animal kingdom. I mean, in a very
real way. They're sort of the ground floor of the
entire biosphere. And so you do find not only just
(07:41):
sort of interesting but also forgettable preycare creatures. You find
fascinating predators and parasites. But another great thing about this
exhibit is that it tells the story of people who
have tried to illuminate the depths of the ocean. I mean,
we we see Nature documentary is showing us footage of
what happens under the sea. And because you've seen that footage,
(08:05):
now you might have this sense like, Okay, we finally
figured out what the oceans are, like, we know what's
down there. It's you know, it's it's finally conquered territory.
And in many ways it is, it has been and
still remains the most mysterious thing about planet Earth. It
is not conquered territory. There's so much we haven't seen
and we don't know about the deep oceans. Yeah, and
(08:28):
and you know that one of the interesting things, one
of the one of the reasons we're talking about William
Beebe here today is that when you think about pioneers
in deep sea exploration, unless this is a topic that
you've read extensively about before or whatnot, and some of
the key names that come to mind are probably Jacques Cousteau, right,
(08:48):
And indeed, Jacques Cousteau did a lot uh in the
area of exploring our season, popularizing our understanding of the seas.
He's one of those figures that I think many people
of our generation actually know more directly from parody of him.
Than they know from him himself. Well maybe for for
(09:09):
today's like younger generations, but but he had a long
running television series narrated by Rod Serling. Oh yeah, well,
I just mean that, I know, I grew up not
really knowing anything about Jacques Cousto himself. But I saw
a countless cartoon and puppet French accent, you know, underwater
explorer type characters that were I don't mean like they
(09:29):
were attacking Jacques Custo, were making fun of him, But
I don't know, he seemed like a very parodyable character
in American culture, right. And of course today we have
James Cameron, who who's whose contribution to deeps exploration is
a is is real? Yeah. Um but but but as
as far as William Beebe goes in the bathosphere, like,
(09:51):
this is a story that I feel isn't as celebrated
in pop culture. It's it's it's certainly remembered in in
his story of marine biology and our exploration of the seas.
I mean, it's not it's not something that's forgotten. Before
we did this exhibit, I knew pretty much nothing about this. Yeah. Yeah,
but I think where I started really discovering it was
(10:13):
was in reading Starfish, in which Peter Watts makes several
mentions of PB and his contributions and his sightings, not
just a quick note. This is going to be a
two parter. We started recording it and we were just
going way too long. So we went ahead and made
the decision let's cut it into UH and UH and
spread it out over the course of a week instead
of dropping like a nearly two hour episode right in
(10:35):
your lap. Well, I mean there's a lot of deep
sea out there, right, that's right. I can't blame us
for talking forever on that. Yeah, and we're only scratching
the surface on it. Well, maybe the best understand Bob's contributions.
It helps to turn our eyes to the past and
to look at what humanities knowledge of the deepest parts
of the ocean, or even not the deepest, even the
(10:56):
deeper parts of the ocean was like before the Bathosphere expedition,
and so what we knew and what the process of
exploring the deep sea was like. So Robert, will you
come along with me to the age of sea monsters? Yes, yes,
here they'd be dragons. So, given how little we know
about the deep ocean, just think about how mysterious the
(11:18):
depths were before just about a hundred years ago, or
in even earlier times when less was known about biology
in general, that you could extrapolate to the deep ocean,
when stories of sea monsters the size of whole islands
rising out of the out of the deep was really
not out of the realm of possibility. That's something I'd
like to emphasize. It was not just fanciful to imagine.
(11:40):
Back then, you had no reason necessarily to doubt stories
of sea monsters, right, yeah, I mean because ultimately, what
did we know of the of the depths or even
the greater expanses of the sea. We did not know
about whole continents out there, so uh, it would seem
entirely poss well, you would have giant sea creatures, and
(12:02):
in fact, we saw giants sea creatures in the forms
of of spouting whales and various carcassus occasionally drift up
to shore exactly right. So, most of the time in
human history was a time when people could not look
beneath the ocean. They didn't they didn't really have any
idea other than what sailors might have said they saw
(12:23):
coming up to the surface. Every now and then. But
that was just a peak, that was just what came
up to the surface. I mean, what's deep down there?
Who the heck knows. So one example of the kinds
of beliefs that used to be so plausible about the
creatures that lived in the deep. I want to reference
a passage that's quoted in Chet van Deuser's book Sea
Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps, which Robert, this is
(12:43):
a book you loaned me and it's fantastic. Oh yeah,
this is what. This is a wonderful book, wonderful content,
and there's so many rich illustrations from these old maps. Yeah,
they're they're wonderful. Now. Originally this quote is from the
Knuskusa or the King's Mirror, which is a thirteen injury
old Norse educational text. So it's got it's written in
(13:03):
the form of a dialogue, and it's got characters talking
to each other about things in the world, and we
come to this passage talking about marine life. So here
it is quote there is a fish not yet mentioned,
which it is scarcely advisable to speak about on account
of its size, which to most men will seem incredible.
There are moreover, but very few who can tell anything
(13:25):
definite about it, inasmuch as it is rarely seen by men,
for it almost never approaches the shore or appears where
fishermen can see it. And I doubt that this sort
of fish is very plentiful in the sea. In our
language it is usually called the kraken. I can say
nothing definite as to its length in els, for on
those occasions when men have seen it, it has appeared
(13:47):
more like an island than a fish. Nor have I
heard that one has ever been caught or found dead.
It seems likely that there are but two in all
the ocean, and that these beget no offspring, for I
believe it is always the same ones that appear. Nor
would it be well for other fishes if they were
as numerous as other whales, seeing that they are so
(14:07):
immense and needs so much food. It is said that
when these fishes want something to eat, they are in
the habit of giving forth a violent belch, which brings
up so much food, that all sorts of fish in
the neighborhood, both large and small, will rush up in
hopes of getting nourishment and good fair. Meanwhile, the monster
keeps its mouth open, and inasmuch as its opening is
(14:30):
about as wide as a sound or fiord, the fishes
cannot help crowding in great numbers. But as soon as
its mouth and belly are full, the monster closes its
mouth and thus catches and shuts in all the fishes
that just previously had rushed in eagerly to seek food.
Oh wow, that is a fabulous description. Yeah, and that's
an amazing hunting strategy. Yeah, I offhand, I can't think
(14:53):
of a real world organism that actually employs something like that. Well,
there's sort of, um, there are versions in much smaller scales. Now,
obviously you've got like the snapping turtle with the fake
worm lure in its mouth and it will wait for
the fish to sneak in to get the food and
then clamp shut. But those artificial lures, right, But what
(15:14):
we have here is like this creature has eaten so
much sea life and then it vomits that sea life up,
which brings in greater populations of sea life, which it
then it just then just sucks all of that down. Yeah.
But I want to emphasize again, this sounds ridiculous to us,
but we're living after Darwin. We know a lot more.
We're living after Darwin, and we're living after you know,
(15:35):
submarines going down and looking at well, what kind of
sea life is there? Really, we still don't know a
whole lot, but we know enough that this doesn't seem plausible.
But if you were armed with only what an educated
Norwegian courtier knew about deep sea life in the thirteenth century,
how would you argue against these accounts? Indeed? And uh,
you know this is there's another point that chet VanDuzer
(15:57):
makes in his book is that like in the ancient world,
it was it was often assumed that anything that existed
on the surface likely had a counterpart beneath the waves
and the mirror world. And I mean the names stick
with us, the sea lion, the sea cow, sea cucumber,
I guess the sea cucumber two but to see Hamburger.
But basically, when you start looking at all these fabulous beasts,
(16:20):
and I think we alluded to this a little bit
in our Aquatic Humanoids episode episodes, Uh, you find all
these various just ridiculous sea dogs, et cetera. Literally the
idea that whatever we have here there must be a
counterpart beneath the waves, and I mean to a certain extent,
there's there's a bit of truth in that, just the
(16:40):
idea that that whatever diversity we have on the surface,
that diversity must be represented beneath the waves. But of course,
in reality it's even it's even greater than that. The
vast majority of the planet's biodiversity is in the ocean. Well, yeah,
there's just so much ocean and there are so many
ecological niches to fill within it. All right, we're gonna
(17:00):
take a quick break and then we'll jump right back in.
Thank Thank alright, we're back now. Of course, as we've
said that, over time, there has been this steady increasing
catalog of some knowledge about undersea life. There's still a
lot we don't know, but we know a lot more
than we used to. And one of the earliest major
explorations of marine biology was that of Aristotle in the
(17:22):
fourth century BC. In his Biology or This History of
of Animal Life, Aristotle got a lot wrong, like, for example,
he said the octopus is a stupid creature, for it
will approach a man's hand if it be lowered in
the water. Now, on the other hand, Aristotle, for his time,
if you consider his limitations, got an astonishing amount. Right.
(17:44):
For example, he correctly determined that whales and dolphins were
not fish, and he made lots of other extremely astute classifications. So,
uh filed this away under Aristotle occasionally says things that
sound dumb to us, but was not dumb. Yeah. Yeah,
I feel like we've hashedne this before on other topics. Uh.
From our advantage point, it's easy to to say, ah,
(18:05):
you really screwed that up Aristotle. But really, given what
he had to work with, his his understanding of the
natural world was amazing. Yeah, I just mean think about
Aristotle's the research methods available to him now. A lot
of what he did he probably he probably got a
lot of information by like talking to fisher folk and
stuff like that. But he also I think some people
(18:28):
have said, you know, it really looks from some of
his statements like Aristotle performed dissections, so he must have
had some access to specimens. And it's not so easy
to always get specimens in the ancient world, Like how
how do you collect them? You just like throw some
nets and hope you get some good stuff. Yeah, especially
this is especially important considering that you have other historians
(18:49):
and writers of the ancient world who were very much
going on second, third, and fourth hand accounts of what
was going on elsewhere in the world. And and and
that's where we see some of these more ridiculous notions
of of even terrestrial monsters and creatures. Totally, it's like
it's through a glass darkly on in like four ways, right,
So you're getting it second hand. You know that you
(19:11):
heard a story from somebody who heard a story who
also was not really beneath the waves when he or
she saw this thing, but just saw something poke up
from the surface. I mean, there's so many levels of
removed from the actual biological reality that it's not hard
to understand where these myths about sea monsters come from.
So to explore the idea of ways of understanding the
(19:34):
deep sea, like the research methods available to us before
recent times, and like the invention of modern technology like
sonar and other stuff. Uh, there were I want to
say they were basically two broad methods for studying the
deepest parts of the ocean, and for a little mythological flare.
I want I want to give them some mythological names
to help us keep them organized. So one I want
(19:56):
to call the Ebisu method, So Ebisu is the Japanese
luck odd, often depicted as a jolly fisherman with a
bright red bream on his line. He's always got a
fishing pole. So the Ebissue method is to use some
kind of method to pull creatures up from the deep
to the surface so you can study them go fishing basically, okay.
And the other one I want to call the Gilgamesh method,
(20:19):
because Gilgamesh, of course, is the protagonist of the four
thousand year old Mesopotamian work known as the Epic of Gilgamesh.
And if you'll recall from the Epic of Gilgamesh and
the second half of the story Gilgamesh, he gets obsessed
with finding the secret of eternal life. And in Tablet eleven,
he receives a tip that there is a plant at
the bottom of the ocean covered in prickling thorns, which
(20:42):
if you pull it up from the ocean old grant
you eternal life. And so, to read from the Andrew
George translation quote, heavy stones he tied to his feet,
and they pulled him down to the ocean below. He
took the plant and pulled it up and lifted it.
The heavy stones he cut loose from his feet and
the sea cast him up on its shore. So the
(21:04):
idea is Gilgamesh, he weighs himself down, he goes to
the very bottom of the ocean, he cuts up this plant,
and then he cuts himself loose. So the Gilgamesh method,
I'm going to say, is to dive as deep as
you can into the dark world and see what you
can see. But of course you also have to be
able to come back and report what you've seen. Right,
Not not all of us are Gilgamesh. Right, it seemed
like he could hold his breath for a long time
(21:25):
and withstand some crushing compression. They probably didn't necessarily understand
at the time, But so people have been accidentally practicing
versions of the Ebisome method for thousands of years. Right.
So of course the easiest thing is that sometimes dead
organisms from the deep sea will wash up on the
shore in various states of decomposition, and people could look
at that and say, oh, I wonder what this is.
(21:47):
But we still see this all the time. I feel
like only a few months will go go go by
before there's another, uh weird dead thing that's washed upon
the beach, and various websites will will start speculating as
to what it was, and generally they'll say, Oh, it's
probably unsty, it's probably a dinosaur. I mean, I'm torn
(22:10):
because I I love a good beach monster and I
hate the Daily Mail, and the latter is the best
place to go for the former you you will always get.
The beach monster is interpreted in various ways. But I mean,
beach monster is a wild grotesque and often classified as
monsters that don't really exist. Can show us some things
about the deep ocean. Uh. The other thing would be
(22:32):
accidental ebisume method practicing just through fishing. People are throwing
nets in order to catch some fish to eat, but
they pull up something interesting by accident. Now, whether you're
practicing the this method on purpose or by accident, there
are definitely limits to what you can learn through it,
and will explore some of those limits in a bit.
One surprising thing to learn is that, according to some reports,
(22:53):
ancient people's actually did practice versions of the Gilgamesh method
as well. So, going back to Aristotle in his three
sixty BC work Problem Atam or the Problems, Aristotle actually
gives the earliest description I'm aware of of deep diving technology.
And so this is going to be a version of
the diving bell. And he's talking about divers who fish
(23:16):
for sponges on the sea floor, and he discusses all
kinds of weird practices these divers used to make the
deep more tolerable, and these include fastening sponges around their ears,
or cutting slits in their own ears and nostrils. And
in this section, Aristotle writes that quote. In order that
these fissures of sponges may be supplied with a facility
(23:37):
of respiration, a kettle is let down to them, not
filled with water, but with air, which constantly assists the
submerged demand. It is forcibly kept upright in its descent
in order that it may be sent down at an
equal level all around, to prevent the air from escaping
and the water from entering. Now, if you never like
played this game in the bath as a kid, you
(23:59):
can make a simple diving bell just by taking a
cup or a bowl or something and turning it upside
down and then pressing it straight down into the water
and not letting it wobble. And what it'll do is
it will keep a bubble of air trapped underneath the cup.
And you could if you were a tiny diver, swim
up in there or stay in there and breathe down
(24:20):
at the bottom. But this comes with a lot of risks,
right like if it gets tipped over slightly, the air
can escape and uh, and of course you're still going
to be dealing with all kinds of weird pressure problems. Yeah,
this is this is one of those things that we
we all experiment with in the bathtub. I feel I've
observed I've observed my my son doing this as well,
(24:40):
but he has not reached the conclusion, hey, why don't
we take one of these to the ocean. But I
can I can imagine that this idea has been around
as long as we've had bowls, essentially as long as
we've had even just coconut husks or something to that effect. Yeah,
it's hard to know for sure because Aristotle doesn't make
(25:01):
it clear who invented this technique, and he doesn't make
it clear how long it's been around or how common
it was. He just mentions that some divers can do this,
So we don't know where it comes from or how
far it was taken in the ancient world. But here
is a really weird connection. I came across. According to
medieval legend, Aristotle's student Alexander the Great was his own
(25:24):
kind of great undersea adventurer and pioneer of the school
of Gilgamesh. Robert, had you ever come across the Alexander
the Great as deep sea explorer before? I don't believe
I had, though the William Beebe makes reference to it
in his book Half Mile Down. Yeah. Uh. So. There
are a lot of versions of this legend, and and
to be very clear, these are pretty much definitely false.
(25:46):
Maybe some versions of them are inspired by something that
roughly happened, but but as told, they're definitely false. So
the oldest version I think is the one about how
while Alexander the Great was laying siege to the city
of Tear in Lebanon, he had divers swimming underwater to
either remove or to put in place boom defenses. And
(26:07):
a boom defenses something you would put in in a
harbor or a channel, that's like a huge chain or
object that you would place underwater to prevent the passage
of ships. It recalls something Terry and Lanister does in
the Battle of Blackwater Bay. Remember that I don't remember that.
I remember all the fire obviously, but I don't remember
the use of chains too. Yeah, in the book, he
(26:27):
puts a big chain across the water and this prevents
the ships from getting past, And this is an actual technique.
So in some versions of the story, I think Alexander
is trying to get rid of boom defenses, and some
of he's trying to put them in place. But in
any case, he's got divers working for him. And in
one version of the story, written by a seventh century
Arab historian and quoted in the History of Underwater Exploration
(26:49):
by Richard F. Marks, Alexander wants to go underwater, either
to help with this task or to see how it's
coming along. So he has his workmen build him a
huge wooden box with glass windows that are sealed with
resin and wax to keep the water out. And then
the room at this box is weighed down with iron
and lead and stone and then lowered into the water
(27:12):
between two ships, with Alexander and a couple of his
secretaries inside the box. And then from inside this sealed
room they can look out the glass windows and see
what's happening deep underwater in the ocean quote. Thanks to
the transparency of the glass and the limpidity of the water.
Alexander and his two companions were able to see the
marine monsters and a species of demon having the head
(27:35):
of a ferocious beast attached to a human body. Some
of them carried axes, others saws, and still others hammers,
so they looked like workman. Alexander and his two secretaries
drew careful pictures of these monsters. Then they pulled the line,
and at this signal, the men on the ships drew
up the case. The king stepped out and was carried
back to Alexandria. Well, you know, hearing that, I I
(27:58):
feel that Alexander deserved to be frightened a little bit,
since he was really kind of micromanaging on all this.
He really should have learned to delegate a bit more. Well,
what I like about the story is that it does
imply some kind of scientific observation. It's just observation of
demons instead of real wildlife. But there's actually there are
other funny versions of this. There's a totally different version
(28:21):
of Alexander as Gilgamesh that I came across in this
illustrated manuscript. It's an early fifteenth century German manuscript telling
a story of how Alexander goes down to the bottom
of the ocean and a diving bell and he trusts
so this would be not a not an encased room
with glass windows, but like a regular diving bell. So
a bell upturned in the water that's got an air
bubble in it. And he goes down and uh. He
(28:43):
entrusts his loyal mistress to watch over the chain that
can pull the bell back up to the surface. And unfortunately,
while she's watching the chain, her lover gets her to
run off with him and abandoned Alexander and throw the
chain into the sea. Not good for alex I like
the theme of this though, because it basically it portrays
Alexander the Great is indeed a great individual who can
(29:07):
do great things and go places that no other man
can go. But in doing so, there's a there there's
there's an inherent weakness. Well, use this technology, it's not
just like magic super strength. He can swim to the
bottom of the ocean. He builds a technological marvel to
get him down there, but in doing so he neglects
his mistress. Right, Yeah, and I've got an illustration here, Robert.
(29:29):
You can look at that's got alex down in this
in this bubble. He's looking very unhappy. He's got a
big mustache, and he appears to be frowning and scowling
at the surface where his mistress and her lover are
cavorting in this ship. And then meanwhile in the background
there are these gigantic fish swimming by that I guess
he's not even noticing because he's angry. Yeah, and but
(29:49):
at least they do look like real fish and not
visions from hell. I believe the example that the William
Beebe draws on is the idea that uh that that
Alexander the Great uh observes a fish that is so
large that it takes days for it to pass him by.
So another equally outrageous uh or perhaps just uh exaggerated
(30:14):
example of what life might be underwater. And that's the
feeling I'm getting from all of these accounts. It sounds
like less an example of, Hey, somebody went underwater and
they saw this, but more of almost like a science
fictional scenario. What would it be like if I could
go underwater and see the things that are down there?
And then to build that I have to base it
(30:36):
on what do I believe exist under the water? Well,
I would say much in the same way that the
science fiction of space encouraged people to become real astronauts
and want to explore. I think maybe some of this
ancient and medieval science fiction about the underwater realms may
have inspired people to want to actually build real diving
(30:56):
bell technology and go down there, and that that is
what have been really happened. Genuine scientific interest in the
ocean depths and the real use of diving technologies like
the diving bell showed up again in more recent decades,
specifically starting around the sixteenth century. You you start to
see people messing with diving bells. How deep can we go? Uh?
Some of this was just for purely commercial reasons, like
(31:18):
people wanted to salvage shipwrecks and get rich and all that,
but also there was a genuine spirit about of exploration
about the deep ocean, to get down there and see
what you could see. But of course, as we mentioned,
diving bells have a lot of limitations. All right, on
that note, we're gonna take a quick break and when
we come back, we're gonna discuss the the pre bb
(31:38):
world of deep sea exploration. Just a little bit more.
Thank you. Thank alright, we're back. So we've talked about
ancient investigation into the nature of the deep sea, both
real and mythological, in the form of the Ebisum method
like fishing, pulling things up and seeing what they're like,
and the Gilgamesh method diving down and seeing what you
can see yourself. And in the nineteenth century, the Ebba
(32:01):
zoom method, by way of the biological dredge, was very
popular for naturalists, zoologists, socianographers, all these people trying to
understand what existed in the hidden deep. And one practitioner
of this method, the biological dredge, was the British naturalist
Edward Forbes. Now Forbes was a naturalist from the Isle
(32:22):
of Man. He was reportedly a very likable dude. People
people took a shine to him. But in in eighteen
forty one, Edward Forbes was on a journey aboard a
surveying ship called the h MS Beacon in the Mediterranean
Sea and during this voyage they would dredge the water.
So what you have to imagine there is like a
bag or a bucket type contraption that you would drag
(32:44):
along the bottom of the ocean from behind a ship,
and then when you drag it along and scoop some
stuff up, then you'd pull it back up and see
what you caught. All right. I have conducted the very
same sort of investigation in the surf with my son.
Just drag a bucket, get a bunch of sand, and
then you dump it out and see what you manage
to catch. And sometimes you do find an interesting organism. Yeah,
(33:06):
what have you found that way? Oh? They are we
always call them sand fleas, but they're not actual sand fleas.
They're little isopods. I can't remember this specific species name offhand,
but depending on the sort of on the Florida beach
you go to, you can find a number of these.
Aren't they the jumping ones? They don't jump. They burrow
really quickly, so basically, if you if you are able
to scoop underneath them, they can't dig away from you. Oh,
(33:30):
I see. And then most of them are really small,
but you can find something that are the size of
really like the size of your thumb. They're pretty fun.
That's cool, though, I thought you were referring to things
I have actually seen that. I don't know if their
fleas or what I should look up what these organisms are.
One time we were up on the northwest coast, I believe,
a beach in Oregon, and the beach was just covered
(33:51):
in what appeared to be jumping fleas. There these little
like white, pale fleas that would jump all over you.
It was kind of horrible. Yeah, and I think I
believe those more accurately sand fleas. And for whatever reason,
and I have talked to other it wasn't just my family,
I've talked to other people, and I've asked him, well,
what did you call these things when you were a
kid going to the beach, and the like, Oh, yeah,
we call those sand fleas. So but again they're they're
(34:13):
more technically a variety of issopod. Well, Forbes was playing
this game, the Drag the Bucket game at much much
deeper than just in the surf and catching much more
than just sand fleas. So Forbes noticed though, as you
play this game, as you you go through the Mediterranean
Sea on the beacon dredging the bottom that as you
move deeper and deeper into deeper waters, the dredge came
(34:37):
up with fewer types of organisms. So you can see
where the reasoning probably went from there right, the lower
down you go, the less life there is. So extrapolating
from his observations, in eighteen forty three, Forbes proposed what
came to be known as the abyssess theory or the
a zoic hypothesis. And this specifically said that below three
(34:58):
hundred fathoms, which is about five hundred and fifty meters
or eighteen hundred feet, the oceans were completely dead. Now
this makes a certain kind of sense, right, Like a
lot of false hypotheses, it has this sense of truthiness,
It feels right, and other contemporary scientists backed Forbes up.
So I'm going to quote from an eighteen sixty three
text book by the Scottish geologist David Page, in which
(35:21):
pages discussing the powerful compression effects of vast amounts of water.
So he explains that at four thousand fathoms, the pressure
of the ocean would be about seven hundred and fifty atmospheres,
and he considers that just intolerable. Quote at vast depths. Therefore,
it is generally supposed that vegetable and animal life has
known to us could not possibly exist, And though some
(35:43):
recent soundings of the North Seas at the depth of
one thousand, two hundred and sixty fathoms would seem to
oppose this opinion. Yet the paucity and uncertainty of these
trials leave the question still in doubt, and we may,
in the meantime adhere to the general belief that the
extreme depressions of the ocean, like the extreme elevations of
the land, are barren and lifeless solitudes. All right, So
(36:06):
in this case, he's drawing upon just the idea that
the water pressure would be too great for life as
we know it to exist. I mean truthie, right, Like,
if you're under seven fifty atmospheres, couldn't possibly be a
thing to survive? That? Right? Okay, yeah, I can I
can see where that that idea could had a certain
(36:27):
amount of truthiness to it. Uh. Now, certainly we know
that that that that the sunlit portions of the ocean,
that that's where most of the life is. That is
where that's where you encounter all of the plankton, the
creatures that feed upon the plankton, uh, creatures that depend
upon the sunlight, and then the creatures that consume those organisms.
(36:50):
That is going to be found in the upper ocean.
But another thing they could have reasoned, is I wonder
what happens to all those organisms in the sunlit area
when they die? And then if they're gonna if they're
gonna be packing some good chemical energy with them after
they die, wouldn't something want to take advantage of that exactly?
And then you you also have to begin to say, well,
(37:11):
if everything is, if all the life is up here
in the sunlit ocean, then isn't the dark ocean? Isn't
that a great place to say, go hide out? Is
it a great place just maybe set up as your
main base of operations? Right? So, really, this hypothesis should
have been a nonstarter. Forbes was completely wrong, uh, since
(37:31):
many dredging experiments had already at the time of Forbes
caught life forms from depths of below three fathoms. Page
alludes to this. Nevertheless, it was supported by some for
several decades, but later biologists and oceanographers eventually just beat
this zombie down like that. It didn't survive all that
much longer. And one of the many researchers to assist
(37:54):
in knocking down the zombie a zoic hypothesis was the
Scottish naturalist Charles Wyville. Thompson, and in an eighteen seventy
three report called The Depths of the Sea, Thompson published
the results of his own dredging expeditions in the seas
north of Scotland. So, while dredging to a depth of
six d and fifty fathoms, he discovered all kinds of
invertebrate organisms that Forbes had missed. And I'm not sure
(38:17):
of the reason, but one thing I've read that may
or may not be true is that later investigators had
better dredging equipment than Forbes, which was less likely to
spill the things it caught on the way back up
to the surface. You can imagine this would be a problem.
You're like trying to pull up the stuff you caught,
and it's just like going all over the place. Yeah,
your bucket isn't big enough for You're not handling the
(38:37):
bucket properly and run into all sorts of problems. Now.
Thompson would also go on to head up one of
the most important oceanographic research expeditions of all time about
the deep sea, which was the Challenger Expedition beginning in
eighteen seventy two, which did a lot of stuff. It's
circumnavigated the globe on a ship called the HMS Challenger,
and it collected an absolute wealth of scientific observation, much
(38:59):
of which is still relevant today. They catalog more than
four thousand new species. They did soundings in the ocean
all over the world and came up with the general
shape of Earth's ocean basins. And they discovered ocean features
like the mid Atlantic Ridge and the Challenger Deep, which
is of course named for the expedition. But still as
wonderful as all this knowledge was, there were still limits
(39:20):
imposed by the fact that they were using what we
what I've been calling the EBB zoom method. They're they're
pulling stuff up from the bottom. Like imagine trying to
study the Amazon rainforest by flying over it in an
airplane and dragging a bucket along the forest floor behind you,
and then reeling it up and seeing what you've got
in the bucket. Like, you see some problems already, but
(39:42):
also a factor in the differences in the conditions of
the deep ocean and the surface where we want to
study the things we pull up from the bottom, that
that's a problem too, Right, You've got massive changes in light,
in temperature, which is a big one and in pressure,
and so maybe a better analogy is like imagining an
alien adallite studying us by scooping us up in a
(40:03):
net and then pulling us up into outer space to
have a look. Right. Sometimes organisms dredged up from the
deep ocean can be kept alive if you keep them refrigerated,
but other times they're just going to be killed or
even reduced to google in the process of removing them
from their natural environment. One interesting fact is that many
deep secret creatures are actually able to withstand lower pressure
(40:24):
on the surface, and others are not. For example, I
found a blog post by a marine biologist named Dr
Craig McClain who wrote, quote, I've tried to collect a
particularly gelatinous red sea cucumber several times. Each time at
the surface. When I pulled a collection canister off the
r o V, the canister is filled with thick red
kool aid, which I presume is the remains of the
(40:46):
red sea cucumber. So there are these limitations to the
ebissue method. If you want to keep pulling stuff up
from the bottom to study it at the top, you're
always going to have a sort of cap on what
sorts of scientific progress you're able to make. So would
there ever be a better way to study the deep
other than these incredibly dangerous and limited power diving bells?
(41:08):
What a true Gilgamesh method arise? Ah, well, Joe, a
true Gilgamesh will arise, But he's gonna have to wait
till next episode because I think we're out of time
here today. So that is going to be the next
episode where we primarily discussed the bathosphere and the work
of William bb correct. But yeah, before we close out today,
I just want to try to imagine what it's like
to be in an oceanographer or a marine biologists mindset
(41:32):
before we get to the bathosphere. Leaving off at the
end of everything we've discussed today, right, so, you you've
been stuck on the surface of the water. You just
can't really dive down and see what's beneath the ocean yourself,
or at least not very well, and so you're you're
limited to these methods of dragging buckets along or trawling
with nets, or trying to scoop stuff up from the
(41:55):
from the sea floor. What what is that like to have,
like not have a cess to all of this life
that you want to study and and always performing these
kind of like random samplings is the only way to
get at it. Yeah. And then even as these various
technologies do come on online, which I alluded to earlier,
you you don't have the ability to really get into
(42:16):
the depths. There are depths of the ocean that are
just beyond your ability to venture into. Yeah, and you can't.
You can't explore and see it the way it's supposed
to be, right, or I mean supposed to be the
way it naturally is. To study, you must destroy if
you're going to be sampling in the ebissue method, right,
and but then how do you explore it yourself without
(42:39):
destroying yourself? Essentially? And that that is where the bathmosphere
comes in next time on Stuff to Blow your Mind,
It's almost like nature doesn't want us to explore the
deep sea. Yeah, it's almost like it's a warning or
it's almost like we're we're fragile flesh creatures that have
have evolved only to thrive within a very slim portion
of our own environment. Uh. So hey, we're gonna we
(43:02):
are going to leave you now. Uh. If you want
to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
Dot com, many of which have involved the ocean, in
many cases the deep ocean. Then you can find them there.
You also find blog post links out to our various
social media accounts as well. Huge thanks as always to
our excellent audio producers Alex Williams and Tory Harrison. If
(43:23):
you would like to get in touch with us to
let us know feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for a future episode, or just
to say hi, you can email us at blow the
Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on
(43:45):
this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff
works dot com a bit peas three twenty four twin
four propo
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