November 7, 2023 • 22 mins
In today's episode, I speak with Susan Casey, New York Times bestselling author and journalist, whose work focuses primarily on the intersection of human beings and the ocean.
Susan started as a journalist, becoming a national magazine award winner and editor-in-chief of O Magazine, creative director at Outside Magazine, and editor-at-large for Time Magazine.
But it was her books that really caught my attention, especially her latest, The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean, which explores the deepest parts of the oceans through the people who journey there.
The deepest trenches of the ocean fascinate me, as I love the idea of the unknown, especially when it lies in the environment I love the most. So unsurprisingly, a thirst for understanding the unseen parts of our world's oceans often parallels the sense of deeper personal exploration, as it does with Susan.
So we spoke about a recurring dream from childhood that may have started her fascination with water, what drives human beings on the journey of the unknown, And a profound moment she had on her first dive into the depths of the oceans of our world.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Jason Elias (00:08):
Hi and welcome to the Big Deep podcast.
Big Deep is a podcast aboutpeople who have a connection to
the ocean, people for whom thatconnection is so strong it
defines some aspect of theirlife.
Over the course of this serieswe'll talk to all sorts of
people and in each episode we'llexplore the deeper meaning of
(00:29):
that connection.
Today I speak with thebestselling Deep Ocean author,
whose work has taken her to someof the deepest parts of our
world's oceans, and herself.
Hello, this is your host, jasonElias.
Welcome to the Big Deep podcast.
(00:51):
In today's episode I speak withSusan Casey, new York Times
bestselling author andjournalist, whose work focuses
primarily on the intersection ofhuman beings and the ocean.
Susan started as a journalist,becoming a national magazine
award winner and editor-in-chiefof O Magazine, creative
director at Outside Magazine andeditor-at-large for Time
Magazine, but it was her booksthat really caught my attention,
(01:13):
especially her latest, theUnderworld Journeys to the
Depths of the Ocean, whichexplores the deepest parts of
the oceans through the peoplewho journey there.
The deepest trenches of theocean fascinate me, as I love
the idea of the unknown,especially when it lies in the
environment.
I love the most and sounsurprisingly, a thirst for
understanding the unseen partsof our world's oceans often
(01:34):
parallels the sense of deeperpersonal exploration, as it does
with Susan, and so we spokeabout a recurring dream from
childhood that may have startedher fascination with water what
drives human beings on thejourney of the unknown?
And a profound moment she hadon her first dive into the
depths of the oceans of ourworld.
Susan Casey (01:53):
Hi, I'm Susan Casey .
I write books about the ocean.
Jason Elias (01:57):
Yes, you do so.
Susan, can you talk a bit aboutwhen you first remember your
connection to the water?
Susan Casey (02:04):
Well, for me it was lakes.
I grew up outside of Torontoand we had a summer cottage an
hour and a half north of thecity and the water is very dark
and there are large fish inthese lakes and I remember there
were moments when I caughtglimpses of northern pike and a
(02:25):
bigger fish called a muskelungeand I was a little bit scared of
the water but more thananything I wanted to see them,
particularly if I could be, say,standing on the dock and
looking at them in the water.
So I started having thisrecurring dream where I was in a
little boat and I was little,looking down into this really
(02:47):
dark water and there were thesevery large fish just moving
around.
I could see them as silhouettesand when there was a fish it
was like this draw and in fact Iremember being completely
mesmerized and I could not thinkor look at anything else.
Jason Elias (03:09):
It's really interesting how you had these
dreams that directly paralleledwhere your life would lead you
later with your writing.
So you had this sense ofconnection to the water and
again I love that idea of therebeing something.
You didn't understand but stilldrew you onwards.
And so you started as ajournalist, focused a bit more
on outdoor adventure, and thenyou wrote one of your earlier
(03:29):
bestselling books, the Devil'sTeeth, about great whites off
the Feralon Islands.
But I'm curious what finallydrove that initial feeling of
connection to the water intowanting to explore the more
hidden parts of the ocean.
Susan Casey (03:42):
And my first book was about this neighborhood of
great white sharks at this placecalled the Feralon Islands,
which is 27 miles due west ofthe Golden Gate Bridge and I
first saw it on a BBCdocumentary with David
Haddenborough.
And I saw these incrediblybang-like islands and this dark
water and about nine or tenmature great white sharks around
(04:04):
this little tiny research boatwith these two scientists in it,
and it was exact match for theimagery that I'd been seeing in
my dreams.
So I was like I have to get outthere.
Fast forward about a year Iwent to work for Time Inc and I
was an editor at large and theeditor of Time magazine said to
(04:26):
me do you have anything inparticular you wanna write about
?
I was like, yeah, I wanna go tothe Feralon Islands, but there
was nothing written about thisplace.
So I ended up going out theremultiple times.
I spent weeks trying to live ona sailboat just to be able to
hang out with these sharkresearchers who were rewriting
the book on what we knew aboutGreat White Sharks, and it was
(04:49):
there that I really began to seethat there was this parallel
universe beneath the surface andit was so immense On any given
day very large Great WhiteSharks would pop up.
One day I saw 40 blue whaleslunch feeding.
There was one commercial diverand he said that he had come
across a 10 foot tall anchor,like there had been all these
(05:11):
shipwrecks out there.
So it just started to percolatein my mind.
There was a lot going on downthere and what would you see if
you went?
Jason Elias (05:22):
Yeah, I mean that idea of there being something
there in a place that we love,but we don't know exactly what
it is.
I love that idea and for me, asa long time Buddhist, I find
the ocean to be an almost directparallel to my journey of self
discovery during meditation theidea of there being a surface
that most people see and evenenjoy but rarely deeply explore.
(05:44):
Having read the underworld,your book, I sense from you a
more profound connection togoing deep than simply the
adventure of it.
So what is it about the oceanthat intrigues you, that drives
you to see its deepest parts?
Susan Casey (06:01):
Everything about the ocean is behind a veil and
in order to understand it, wehave to be in it.
Every time we go into the ocean, and particularly the deep
ocean, you can drop down in asubmersible almost seven miles
to the sea floor and, with theexception of one or two very
well known sites, you are in aplace that nobody has ever seen
(06:23):
before.
In order to understand theEarth, we have to know her.
She is 98% ocean and 95% deepocean.
80% of the microbial life ofthe planet is in the ocean,
(06:47):
mostly the deep ocean.
So there is something soimportant about having human
eyes and minds and hearts downthere, because when you go down
three or four miles into theocean, you know this planet very
intimately and there's apresence to it.
(07:09):
And it is not space, becauseeverywhere you look there's life
.
It's not a void, it's twinkling, glowing, highly adapted,
beautiful, fascinating life.
(07:31):
Everywhere you look, and to me,every species, down to the
tiniest microbe, is thisabsolutely exquisite part of the
whole, as are we, and nodifferent.
(07:57):
In the world that we live in now, the culture that we have, the
set of beliefs that we operateby, it is very easy for us to
look up and think, okay, we'regoing to rock, rock it into the
sky and everything that's bakedinto our language is we're going
to rise up.
But when you start talkingabout going downward and inward,
(08:20):
in modern Western culture wecelebrate that less.
Because heaven is up there, wethink, so hell must be down
there.
The deepest part of the deepocean is called the hail zone,
so it's literally named afterHades the underworld.
(08:40):
So I wanted to go downwards,because the journey inward it's
a journey into darkness, it's ajourney into the unknown, but
it's also the journey into thelife force of the planet.
(09:01):
And the underworld is, in fact,where the treasures are.
Jason Elias (09:11):
Oh, that's beautiful and I know this isn't
a drive that keeps you at adistance to write about it
intellectually, because you'veactually gone down to some of
the deepest parts of the oceanin deep sea submersibles.
Can you talk a bit about that,and why is it important for
humans to actually go to thosedepths?
Susan Casey (09:29):
My thesis was that the deeper you went, the more
astonishing it became, and Iwanted to see if I was right.
So in the 70s, 80s, there was akind of a golden era of manned
undersea exploration with allthese different kinds of subs,
and largely started to getrobotic in the 90s.
And now there's a renaissancebecause it's becoming clear that
(09:51):
there's a place for all of it,all of these tools.
We need them and there issomething different to be
learned by actually havinghumans that go into the
environment.
Yet it was not going to be easy, because at the bottom of the
Mariana Trench you'll encounter16,000 pounds of pressure per
square inch, so that's likehaving 377 stacked on top of you
(10:12):
.
There are relatively fewmachines that can get you into
the abyssal zone or deeper,which is below 3,000 meters or
10,000 feet, and they weremostly owned by nations or
scientific institutions.
And I really wanted toexperience that maximal
immersion and I got very luckyand was able to make not just
(10:33):
one dive but two dives, and oneof those two dives was into the
abyssal zone.
I wanted to get as close to thephysical truth of this planet
as I could, and that, to me, wasin the ocean.
It is who she is.
One of my neighbors on the NorthShore, maui, who was WS Merwin
the poet, and we became closefriends.
(10:54):
He said you know, our savinggrace is our imagination.
We have to cultivate ourimagination and when thinking
about the deep ocean we are notusing our imaginations If we
don't look as closely as we canat the incredible miracle of
(11:16):
little mystical animals thatnobody's seen before everything.
There is nothing that naturedoes that is not worthy of our
closest scrutiny.
So I figured that it would moveme spiritually.
I figured that I would have adifferent perspective on life
and our place in it.
And I was right, and I hope Ibrought that home in the book
(11:39):
because that is so worth sharing.
Jason Elias (11:43):
I think you did, and there is a part of your book
that actually broke my heart ina way with its beauty, and it
happened on a deep submersibledive off the Bahamas, and I also
know, as you explained in thebook, the dive had a tremendous
impact on you personally.
So can you take us on a journeyof what that dive was like?
Susan Casey (12:05):
So a lot of the book leads up to the dives that
I make.
When you go into the deep oceanyou're sitting in a sphere and
the sphere is really importantbecause it's the only shape that
distributes these immensepressures symmetrically.
So if you crush a very strongsphere, it just gets stronger,
and so most of the really deepsubmersibles the sphere is made
(12:27):
of metal and you just have viewports, but they're the size of
dinner plates.
But if you're going to say,between 1,000 and 6,000 feet,
you can sit inside a spherethat's completely crystalline
plexiglass and it's like sittinginside a bubble.
So you can go into the deepocean.
(12:48):
And the top layer of the deepocean is known as the twilight
zone.
It's also called themesopelagic zone, and there are
more creatures in the twilightzone than there are in the rest
of the entire ocean combined.
There are trillions and evenquadrillions of creatures in the
twilight zone and 80% of themare bioluminescent.
(13:09):
So it's great if you're in acrystalline bubble and not just
looking throughout the viewport.
So my first dive took placeoffshore in the Bahamas.
I was on a ship called theAlusia, which is owned by an
organization called Ocean Actsthat takes a lot of media
companies into the deep ocean.
They do a lot of filming andthese translucent subs are
(13:33):
fantastic for filming becauseyou have a 340 degree view.
You're in a psychedelicaquarium.
So on this day it was myself andtwo pilots in this sphere.
You get creamed off the edge ofthe ship and lifted up and set
(13:54):
in the water, and then a swimmercomes along and unhooks the
lines that are connecting it tothe crane and then the pilot
begins to pump seawater into theballast tanks to make the sub
negatively buoyant and you startto descend and the first thing
(14:17):
you see when you get through theservice water as anybody scuba
dives knows the spectrum dropsaway.
So first you lose red light,then you lose orange, then
yellow, then green, then blueand finally violet.
So when you get to about 200feet, you're really just
(14:37):
starting to look at blue light,and there's something incredibly
narcotic about the pure bluelight.
To me, it was alive, this color.
You sit there and revel in it.
You just don't see this lightanywhere else on earth, and then
you go through an indigotransition and then you go into
(14:59):
the darkness.
However, the blue light isstill there.
It percolates faintly to about3,000 feet, but our eyes can't
see it.
So when we get into the darkregion of the ocean and we were
going to 3,300 feet, which isthe bottom of the twilight zone
you start to see thebioluminescence and you go past
(15:22):
creatures and you jostle themand they light up.
The majority of the world'sknown jellyfish species are
there, all kinds ofmicroorganisms, all the wacky
little fish, some largercreatures.
It's just a cosmopolis, a verycolorful being.
And so we did our dive.
(15:44):
We were diving in tandem withanother sub and we got down to
the seafloor and they turned onthe lights and I don't know what
I expected, but it waslimestone silt, very fine
sediment.
And so when they turned on theLED lights of the sub the blue
(16:09):
light, as I mentioned, is stillthere it lit up like an
aquamarine swimming pool, butpure, brilliant white and the
beauty of it, I mean, I was justin complete euphoria the whole
way.
We started tooling around andwe flew up and down.
(16:33):
It looked like kind of Saharansand dunes, but they were bright
, white.
After a while you have to go up, release our ballast weights
and started to ascend, but notvery quickly.
When we got to about 700 meters,about 2,200 feet, the chief
(16:55):
pilot, who was in my sub said OK, now the two subs are going to
hold and we are going to turnevery light off.
We're even going to put towelsover top of our control panel,
so it's going to be pitch black.
So the two subs are floating incomplete pitch darkness and he
(17:17):
says, ok, I'm going to count tothree, and on three you open
your eyes.
He counted, and on two, bothsubs have flashed their
brightest lights on and off veryquickly.
And on three we opened our eyesand the entire water column lit
(17:41):
up with fireworks.
That very powerful flash setoff every creature as far as we
could see in the water to flashback with its biolubinescence
and, as I mentioned, the vast,vast majority of them can light
(18:03):
themselves up In the deep ocean.
This light is a signal.
Let's communicate,communication its information,
it's their means of hunting,mating, disguising themselves.
There is all these differentstrategies.
When you think of the size ofthe deep ocean, particularly the
(18:27):
twilight zone and the layerbeneath it which is called the
midnight zone, this is the mostcommon form of communication on
Earth, this light signaling.
So here we are, in the middleof this rain of fireworks.
It only lasted for a few seconds, but what was incredible about
(18:47):
it was that you got to see thatyou were in a matrix of life.
The amount of biologicalactivity in the water made it so
incredibly viscerally clearthat this is not space, this is
(19:15):
absolutely a soup of life, andnot only that we're greeting
each other.
So we then freaked out.
And then we went up a couplehundred meters and did it again
and screamed and swooned andreveled.
(19:37):
And then we went up anotherhundred meters and did it again.
We made a signal and they signalback.
They were greeting us, we weregreeting them.
It was a communion and it wasso magnificent.
And so when we got closer tothe surface and the blues
(20:05):
started to come back, I startedfeeling very grief-stricken and
I did not know whether I wouldever have this chance again, and
I equated it to falling in loveand then never seeing the
person again.
I felt like I had finallygotten to the place that felt
(20:30):
like home to me, and now I wasnever going to see it again, and
I really grappled with thatemotion for quite some time.
I think that it was a means ofgoing to the place that I had
(20:53):
always dreamed of going, thisaquatic realm that I knew
existed, but it seemed dreamliketo me because I couldn't access
it, and it made those creaturespersonal to me and I got to
(21:20):
meet them.
Jason Elias (21:34):
Finally, we end every interview and every
episode with a single open-endedquestion.
We ask everyone we talk to whatdoes the ocean mean to you?
Susan Casey (21:45):
It's life and love and it's the most beautiful
reminder of that.
Jason Elias (21:53):
Thanks for listening to the Big Deep
podcast.
Stay tuned as we work on thenext season of Big Deep with
even more incredible stories ofpeople whose lives have been
transformed by our world'soceans.
We really appreciate you beingon this journey into the Big
Deep as we explore an ocean ofstories.
If you like what we're doing,please make sure to subscribe
(22:14):
wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, please find us on thesocials where you can like and
comment, because thosesubscribes, likes and comments
really make a difference.
For more content from ourinterviews in our series, photos
of every guest or just to getin touch, please reach out at
our website, bigdeepcom Plus.
If you know someone you thinkwe should talk to, please let us
know at our Big Deep website,as we are always looking to hear
(22:36):
more stories from interestingpeople who are deeply connected
to our world's oceans.
Thanks again for joining us.
Hi and welcome to the Big Deep podcast.
Big Deep is a podcast aboutpeople who have a connection to
the ocean, people for whom thatconnection is so strong it
defines some aspect of theirlife.
Over the course of this serieswe'll talk to all sorts of
people and in each episode we'llexplore the deeper meaning of
(00:29):
that connection.
Today I speak with thebestselling Deep Ocean author,
whose work has taken her to someof the deepest parts of our
world's oceans, and herself.
Hello, this is your host, jasonElias.
Welcome to the Big Deep podcast.
(00:51):
In today's episode I speak withSusan Casey, new York Times
bestselling author andjournalist, whose work focuses
primarily on the intersection ofhuman beings and the ocean.
Susan started as a journalist,becoming a national magazine
award winner and editor-in-chiefof O Magazine, creative
director at Outside Magazine andeditor-at-large for Time
Magazine, but it was her booksthat really caught my attention,
(01:13):
especially her latest, theUnderworld Journeys to the
Depths of the Ocean, whichexplores the deepest parts of
the oceans through the peoplewho journey there.
The deepest trenches of theocean fascinate me, as I love
the idea of the unknown,especially when it lies in the
environment.
I love the most and sounsurprisingly, a thirst for
understanding the unseen partsof our world's oceans often
(01:34):
parallels the sense of deeperpersonal exploration, as it does
with Susan, and so we spokeabout a recurring dream from
childhood that may have startedher fascination with water what
drives human beings on thejourney of the unknown?
And a profound moment she hadon her first dive into the
depths of the oceans of ourworld.
Susan Casey (01:53):
Hi, I'm Susan Casey .
I write books about the ocean.
Jason Elias (01:57):
Yes, you do so.
Susan, can you talk a bit aboutwhen you first remember your
connection to the water?
Susan Casey (02:04):
Well, for me it was lakes.
I grew up outside of Torontoand we had a summer cottage an
hour and a half north of thecity and the water is very dark
and there are large fish inthese lakes and I remember there
were moments when I caughtglimpses of northern pike and a
(02:25):
bigger fish called a muskelungeand I was a little bit scared of
the water but more thananything I wanted to see them,
particularly if I could be, say,standing on the dock and
looking at them in the water.
So I started having thisrecurring dream where I was in a
little boat and I was little,looking down into this really
(02:47):
dark water and there were thesevery large fish just moving
around.
I could see them as silhouettesand when there was a fish it
was like this draw and in fact Iremember being completely
mesmerized and I could not thinkor look at anything else.
Jason Elias (03:09):
It's really interesting how you had these
dreams that directly paralleledwhere your life would lead you
later with your writing.
So you had this sense ofconnection to the water and
again I love that idea of therebeing something.
You didn't understand but stilldrew you onwards.
And so you started as ajournalist, focused a bit more
on outdoor adventure, and thenyou wrote one of your earlier
(03:29):
bestselling books, the Devil'sTeeth, about great whites off
the Feralon Islands.
But I'm curious what finallydrove that initial feeling of
connection to the water intowanting to explore the more
hidden parts of the ocean.
Susan Casey (03:42):
And my first book was about this neighborhood of
great white sharks at this placecalled the Feralon Islands,
which is 27 miles due west ofthe Golden Gate Bridge and I
first saw it on a BBCdocumentary with David
Haddenborough.
And I saw these incrediblybang-like islands and this dark
water and about nine or tenmature great white sharks around
(04:04):
this little tiny research boatwith these two scientists in it,
and it was exact match for theimagery that I'd been seeing in
my dreams.
So I was like I have to get outthere.
Fast forward about a year Iwent to work for Time Inc and I
was an editor at large and theeditor of Time magazine said to
(04:26):
me do you have anything inparticular you wanna write about
?
I was like, yeah, I wanna go tothe Feralon Islands, but there
was nothing written about thisplace.
So I ended up going out theremultiple times.
I spent weeks trying to live ona sailboat just to be able to
hang out with these sharkresearchers who were rewriting
the book on what we knew aboutGreat White Sharks, and it was
(04:49):
there that I really began to seethat there was this parallel
universe beneath the surface andit was so immense On any given
day very large Great WhiteSharks would pop up.
One day I saw 40 blue whaleslunch feeding.
There was one commercial diverand he said that he had come
across a 10 foot tall anchor,like there had been all these
(05:11):
shipwrecks out there.
So it just started to percolatein my mind.
There was a lot going on downthere and what would you see if
you went?
Jason Elias (05:22):
Yeah, I mean that idea of there being something
there in a place that we love,but we don't know exactly what
it is.
I love that idea and for me, asa long time Buddhist, I find
the ocean to be an almost directparallel to my journey of self
discovery during meditation theidea of there being a surface
that most people see and evenenjoy but rarely deeply explore.
(05:44):
Having read the underworld,your book, I sense from you a
more profound connection togoing deep than simply the
adventure of it.
So what is it about the oceanthat intrigues you, that drives
you to see its deepest parts?
Susan Casey (06:01):
Everything about the ocean is behind a veil and
in order to understand it, wehave to be in it.
Every time we go into the ocean, and particularly the deep
ocean, you can drop down in asubmersible almost seven miles
to the sea floor and, with theexception of one or two very
well known sites, you are in aplace that nobody has ever seen
(06:23):
before.
In order to understand theEarth, we have to know her.
She is 98% ocean and 95% deepocean.
80% of the microbial life ofthe planet is in the ocean,
(06:47):
mostly the deep ocean.
So there is something soimportant about having human
eyes and minds and hearts downthere, because when you go down
three or four miles into theocean, you know this planet very
intimately and there's apresence to it.
(07:09):
And it is not space, becauseeverywhere you look there's life
.
It's not a void, it's twinkling, glowing, highly adapted,
beautiful, fascinating life.
(07:31):
Everywhere you look, and to me,every species, down to the
tiniest microbe, is thisabsolutely exquisite part of the
whole, as are we, and nodifferent.
(07:57):
In the world that we live in now, the culture that we have, the
set of beliefs that we operateby, it is very easy for us to
look up and think, okay, we'regoing to rock, rock it into the
sky and everything that's bakedinto our language is we're going
to rise up.
But when you start talkingabout going downward and inward,
(08:20):
in modern Western culture wecelebrate that less.
Because heaven is up there, wethink, so hell must be down
there.
The deepest part of the deepocean is called the hail zone,
so it's literally named afterHades the underworld.
(08:40):
So I wanted to go downwards,because the journey inward it's
a journey into darkness, it's ajourney into the unknown, but
it's also the journey into thelife force of the planet.
(09:01):
And the underworld is, in fact,where the treasures are.
Jason Elias (09:11):
Oh, that's beautiful and I know this isn't
a drive that keeps you at adistance to write about it
intellectually, because you'veactually gone down to some of
the deepest parts of the oceanin deep sea submersibles.
Can you talk a bit about that,and why is it important for
humans to actually go to thosedepths?
Susan Casey (09:29):
My thesis was that the deeper you went, the more
astonishing it became, and Iwanted to see if I was right.
So in the 70s, 80s, there was akind of a golden era of manned
undersea exploration with allthese different kinds of subs,
and largely started to getrobotic in the 90s.
And now there's a renaissancebecause it's becoming clear that
(09:51):
there's a place for all of it,all of these tools.
We need them and there issomething different to be
learned by actually havinghumans that go into the
environment.
Yet it was not going to be easy, because at the bottom of the
Mariana Trench you'll encounter16,000 pounds of pressure per
square inch, so that's likehaving 377 stacked on top of you
(10:12):
.
There are relatively fewmachines that can get you into
the abyssal zone or deeper,which is below 3,000 meters or
10,000 feet, and they weremostly owned by nations or
scientific institutions.
And I really wanted toexperience that maximal
immersion and I got very luckyand was able to make not just
(10:33):
one dive but two dives, and oneof those two dives was into the
abyssal zone.
I wanted to get as close to thephysical truth of this planet
as I could, and that, to me, wasin the ocean.
It is who she is.
One of my neighbors on the NorthShore, maui, who was WS Merwin
the poet, and we became closefriends.
(10:54):
He said you know, our savinggrace is our imagination.
We have to cultivate ourimagination and when thinking
about the deep ocean we are notusing our imaginations If we
don't look as closely as we canat the incredible miracle of
(11:16):
little mystical animals thatnobody's seen before everything.
There is nothing that naturedoes that is not worthy of our
closest scrutiny.
So I figured that it would moveme spiritually.
I figured that I would have adifferent perspective on life
and our place in it.
And I was right, and I hope Ibrought that home in the book
(11:39):
because that is so worth sharing.
Jason Elias (11:43):
I think you did, and there is a part of your book
that actually broke my heart ina way with its beauty, and it
happened on a deep submersibledive off the Bahamas, and I also
know, as you explained in thebook, the dive had a tremendous
impact on you personally.
So can you take us on a journeyof what that dive was like?
Susan Casey (12:05):
So a lot of the book leads up to the dives that
I make.
When you go into the deep oceanyou're sitting in a sphere and
the sphere is really importantbecause it's the only shape that
distributes these immensepressures symmetrically.
So if you crush a very strongsphere, it just gets stronger,
and so most of the really deepsubmersibles the sphere is made
(12:27):
of metal and you just have viewports, but they're the size of
dinner plates.
But if you're going to say,between 1,000 and 6,000 feet,
you can sit inside a spherethat's completely crystalline
plexiglass and it's like sittinginside a bubble.
So you can go into the deepocean.
(12:48):
And the top layer of the deepocean is known as the twilight
zone.
It's also called themesopelagic zone, and there are
more creatures in the twilightzone than there are in the rest
of the entire ocean combined.
There are trillions and evenquadrillions of creatures in the
twilight zone and 80% of themare bioluminescent.
(13:09):
So it's great if you're in acrystalline bubble and not just
looking throughout the viewport.
So my first dive took placeoffshore in the Bahamas.
I was on a ship called theAlusia, which is owned by an
organization called Ocean Actsthat takes a lot of media
companies into the deep ocean.
They do a lot of filming andthese translucent subs are
(13:33):
fantastic for filming becauseyou have a 340 degree view.
You're in a psychedelicaquarium.
So on this day it was myself andtwo pilots in this sphere.
You get creamed off the edge ofthe ship and lifted up and set
(13:54):
in the water, and then a swimmercomes along and unhooks the
lines that are connecting it tothe crane and then the pilot
begins to pump seawater into theballast tanks to make the sub
negatively buoyant and you startto descend and the first thing
(14:17):
you see when you get through theservice water as anybody scuba
dives knows the spectrum dropsaway.
So first you lose red light,then you lose orange, then
yellow, then green, then blueand finally violet.
So when you get to about 200feet, you're really just
(14:37):
starting to look at blue light,and there's something incredibly
narcotic about the pure bluelight.
To me, it was alive, this color.
You sit there and revel in it.
You just don't see this lightanywhere else on earth, and then
you go through an indigotransition and then you go into
(14:59):
the darkness.
However, the blue light isstill there.
It percolates faintly to about3,000 feet, but our eyes can't
see it.
So when we get into the darkregion of the ocean and we were
going to 3,300 feet, which isthe bottom of the twilight zone
you start to see thebioluminescence and you go past
(15:22):
creatures and you jostle themand they light up.
The majority of the world'sknown jellyfish species are
there, all kinds ofmicroorganisms, all the wacky
little fish, some largercreatures.
It's just a cosmopolis, a verycolorful being.
And so we did our dive.
(15:44):
We were diving in tandem withanother sub and we got down to
the seafloor and they turned onthe lights and I don't know what
I expected, but it waslimestone silt, very fine
sediment.
And so when they turned on theLED lights of the sub the blue
(16:09):
light, as I mentioned, is stillthere it lit up like an
aquamarine swimming pool, butpure, brilliant white and the
beauty of it, I mean, I was justin complete euphoria the whole
way.
We started tooling around andwe flew up and down.
(16:33):
It looked like kind of Saharansand dunes, but they were bright
, white.
After a while you have to go up, release our ballast weights
and started to ascend, but notvery quickly.
When we got to about 700 meters,about 2,200 feet, the chief
(16:55):
pilot, who was in my sub said OK, now the two subs are going to
hold and we are going to turnevery light off.
We're even going to put towelsover top of our control panel,
so it's going to be pitch black.
So the two subs are floating incomplete pitch darkness and he
(17:17):
says, ok, I'm going to count tothree, and on three you open
your eyes.
He counted, and on two, bothsubs have flashed their
brightest lights on and off veryquickly.
And on three we opened our eyesand the entire water column lit
(17:41):
up with fireworks.
That very powerful flash setoff every creature as far as we
could see in the water to flashback with its biolubinescence
and, as I mentioned, the vast,vast majority of them can light
(18:03):
themselves up In the deep ocean.
This light is a signal.
Let's communicate,communication its information,
it's their means of hunting,mating, disguising themselves.
There is all these differentstrategies.
When you think of the size ofthe deep ocean, particularly the
(18:27):
twilight zone and the layerbeneath it which is called the
midnight zone, this is the mostcommon form of communication on
Earth, this light signaling.
So here we are, in the middleof this rain of fireworks.
It only lasted for a few seconds, but what was incredible about
(18:47):
it was that you got to see thatyou were in a matrix of life.
The amount of biologicalactivity in the water made it so
incredibly viscerally clearthat this is not space, this is
(19:15):
absolutely a soup of life, andnot only that we're greeting
each other.
So we then freaked out.
And then we went up a couplehundred meters and did it again
and screamed and swooned andreveled.
(19:37):
And then we went up anotherhundred meters and did it again.
We made a signal and they signalback.
They were greeting us, we weregreeting them.
It was a communion and it wasso magnificent.
And so when we got closer tothe surface and the blues
(20:05):
started to come back, I startedfeeling very grief-stricken and
I did not know whether I wouldever have this chance again, and
I equated it to falling in loveand then never seeing the
person again.
I felt like I had finallygotten to the place that felt
(20:30):
like home to me, and now I wasnever going to see it again, and
I really grappled with thatemotion for quite some time.
I think that it was a means ofgoing to the place that I had
(20:53):
always dreamed of going, thisaquatic realm that I knew
existed, but it seemed dreamliketo me because I couldn't access
it, and it made those creaturespersonal to me and I got to
(21:20):
meet them.
Jason Elias (21:34):
Finally, we end every interview and every
episode with a single open-endedquestion.
We ask everyone we talk to whatdoes the ocean mean to you?
Susan Casey (21:45):
It's life and love and it's the most beautiful
reminder of that.
Jason Elias (21:53):
Thanks for listening to the Big Deep
podcast.
Stay tuned as we work on thenext season of Big Deep with
even more incredible stories ofpeople whose lives have been
transformed by our world'soceans.
We really appreciate you beingon this journey into the Big
Deep as we explore an ocean ofstories.
If you like what we're doing,please make sure to subscribe
(22:14):
wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, please find us on thesocials where you can like and
comment, because thosesubscribes, likes and comments
really make a difference.
For more content from ourinterviews in our series, photos
of every guest or just to getin touch, please reach out at
our website, bigdeepcom Plus.
If you know someone you thinkwe should talk to, please let us
know at our Big Deep website,as we are always looking to hear
(22:36):
more stories from interestingpeople who are deeply connected
to our world's oceans.
Thanks again for joining us.
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