March 27, 2018 • 42 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.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
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 return trip was
made in forty three minutes, an average of one foot
(00:23):
every two seconds. Twice during the ascent I was aware
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 very real living creatures.
(00:44):
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 justment of
the blood which makes it possible for them to dive
a mile or more and come up without getting the bends.
(01:06):
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 except as
a large living creature. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your
(01:33):
Mind from How Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to
stuff to blow your mind. My name is 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
(01:55):
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 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
(02:17):
admire the sort of directness and clarity of his writing.
I was looking at a report of his from his
underwater expeditions that he 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
(02:38):
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 creatures 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.
(02:59):
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 bathosphere. The bathosphere which
is a Greek for deep sphere, which was the which
this was these basically the submersible deep ball, the deep
ball that that he used on the just groundbreaking trips
(03:20):
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
hundred and sixteen meters or so, and uh An armored
dive suits were only good for about five twenty five
ft or a hundred sixty But the Bathosphere reached an
(03:41):
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 and his collaborator Otis Barton,
who together did many dives in the steel Ball, going
(04:01):
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 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
(04:22):
blow your mind. I've been working on a lot lately,
A lot, yeah, a lot, like and part of that
is due to I do have a side project I've
been working on here at work that does concern deep
sea themes. Also, I've recently finished reading Peter watts novel Starfish,
which is a wonderful sort of cyberpunk sci fi novel
(04:43):
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 Ocean at the American Museum of
Natural History in New York City, which is running March twelfth,
(05:04):
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 they're interesting, Like
(05:27):
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 they're they're extremely
(05:48):
vital and uh. And when you start keying in on
individual plankton specimens, there is this rich diversity. Uh, it's
on 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
(06:08):
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 documentaries showing us footage of what
(06:28):
happens under the sea. And because you've seen that footage,
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,
(06:51):
and we don't know about the deep oceans. Yeah, and
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,
(07:15):
And indeed, Jacques Custo 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
(07:35):
for 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 Jacque Custo himself, but I saw
countless cartoon and puppet French accent, you know, underwater explorer
type characters that were I don't mean like they were
(07:56):
attacking Jacques Custo, were making fun of him, but I
don't know. He seemed like a very parodiable character in
American culture, right. And of course today we have James Cameron,
who who's whose contribution to deep see exploration is a
is is real. Um. But but but as as far
as William Beebe goes in the bathisphere, like, this is
(08:18):
a story that I feel isn't as celebrated in pop culture.
It's it's it's certainly remembered in the in the history
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
(08:40):
was in reading Starfish, in which Peter Watts makes several
mentions of BB 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 draping like a nearly two hour episode right in
(09:02):
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 and we're only scratching the
surface on it. Well, maybe the best understand Baby'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
(09:23):
deeper parts of the ocean was like before the Bathmosphere 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
(09:45):
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 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 back then,
(10:08):
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 possible that you would have giant
(10:28):
sea creatures. And in fact, we saw giant sea creatures
in the forms of of spouting whales and various carcasses
that 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
(10:49):
have said they saw 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 it 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,
(11:09):
which Robert this is 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 Kona Skusa or the King's Mirror,
which is a thirteenth century Old Norse educational text. So
it's got it's written in the form of a dialogue,
(11:32):
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 definite about it, inasmuch as
(11:54):
it is rarely seen by men, for it almost never
approaches the shore or appears where fisher and 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 more like an island
(12:15):
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 immense and needs so much food.
(12:37):
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 about as wide as a sound or fiord,
(13:00):
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 of a real world organism that actually employs
(13:24):
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 we have here is
like this creature has eaten so much sea life and
(13:44):
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 dar one name. We're living after you know,
submarines going down and looking at, well, what kind of
sea life is there? Really, we still don't know a
(14:06):
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
makes in his book is that like in the ancient world,
(14:27):
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, ce cucumber,
I guess the cea cucumber two, but the see hamburger.
But basically, when you start looking at all these fabulous beasts,
and I think we alluded to this a little bit
(14:48):
in our Aquatic Humanoids episode episodes, Uh, you find all
these various just ridiculous like sea dogs, etcetera. 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
idea that that whatever diversity we have on the surface,
(15:10):
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
take a quick break and then we'll jump right back in.
Thank thank you, thank you. All right, we're back now.
(15:33):
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 fourth century BC. In his Biology or
This History of of Animal Life, Aristotle got a lot wrong, like,
(15:56):
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. 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.
(16:20):
Aristotle occasionally says things that sound dumb to us, but
was not dumb. Yeah, yeah, I feel like we've touched
on this before on other topics. Uh. From our advantage point,
it's easy to to say Oh, yeah, you really screwed
that after Aristotle. But really, given what he had to
work with, his his understanding of the natural world was amazing. Yeah,
(16:40):
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 have said, you know, it
really looks from some of his statements like Aristotle performed dissections,
So we must have had some access to specimens. And
(17:02):
it's not so easy to always get specimens in the
ancient world, Like how how do you collect them? Do
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 and writers of the ancient
world who are very much going on second, third, and
fourth hand accounts of what was going on elsewhere in
(17:22):
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 secondhand.
You know that you heard a story from somebody who
heard a story who also was not really beneath the
(17:42):
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 deep sea, like the research methods
(18:02):
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 to call the Ebisu method. So
(18:24):
Ebisu is the Japanese luck god, 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. Because Gilgamesh, of course,
(18:47):
is the protagonist of the four thousand year old Mesopotamian
work known as the Epic of Gilgamesh. And if you'll
recall and 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 if
(19:08):
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 idea is Gilgamesh,
(19:32):
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 and withstand
(19:52):
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,
I wonder what this is. Yeah, but we still see
(20:14):
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 uh nessy, it's
probably a dinosaur. Yea monster. I mean, I'm torn because
(20:36):
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
(20:58):
accidental ebisome 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 that 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,
(21:19):
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 at Um 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
(21:41):
who fish 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
(22:03):
with a facility 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
(22:25):
a kid, you 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 at the bottom. But this comes
(22:48):
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 all experiment within the bathtub.
I feel I've observed I've observed my my son doing
this as well, but he has not reached the conclusion, Hey,
(23:08):
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 it clear who invented this technique,
(23:30):
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 kind of great undersea adventurer
(23:51):
and pioneer of the school of Gilgamesh. Robert, had you
ever come across the the Alexander the Grade as deep
sea explorer before? I don't believe ev 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. Maybe some versions of
(24:14):
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 Tier in Lebanon,
he had divers swimming underwater to either remove or to
put in place boom defenses. And a boom defenses something
(24:35):
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. Oh 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 puts a big
chain across the water and this prevents the ships from
(24:58):
getting past. And this is an act tool technique. So
in some versions of the story, I think Alexander is
trying to get rid of boom defenses and somebody'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 by Richard F. Marks,
Alexander wants to go underwater, either to help with this
(25:20):
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 between two ships, with
Alexander and a couple of his secretaries inside the box.
(25:44):
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 specieas of demon, having the head of a ferocious
beast attached to a human body. Some of them carried axes,
(26:06):
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 feel that Alexander deserved to be
(26:27):
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 there are other funny versions of this.
There's a totally different version of Alexander as Gilgamesh that
(26:49):
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 in 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 entrusts his loyal mistress to
(27:12):
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 do great things and go
(27:35):
places the northern 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, you can look at that's
(27:56):
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 at least they do look
(28:16):
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 example of what life
(28:42):
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 in to build that I
have to base it on what do I believe exists
(29:04):
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 bell technology and go down there
(29:24):
and that that is what eventually 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 people wanted to salvage shipwrecks and
(29:46):
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 going to
take a quick break, and when we come back, we're
gonna discuss the the pre bb world of deep sea
(30:06):
exploration just a little bit more. Thank thank you, thank you.
All right, 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 Abi zoom 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 eb zoom method
(30:28):
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 of Man. He was reportedly a
(30:49):
very likable dude. 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 Mediator Rainy and see, 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 along the bottom of the
(31:11):
ocean from behind the ship. And then when you drag
it along and scoop some stuff up, then you 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, what have you found
(31:32):
that way? Oh? They are we always call them sand fleas,
but they're not actual sand fleas. They're little iceopods. 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 were able to scoop underneath them,
(31:53):
they can't dig away from you. I see. And most
of them are really small, but you can find something
that are the size of a real look 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,
(32:14):
and the beach was just covered 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 are more accurately sand fleas,
and for whatever reason, and I've 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 like, oh, yeah,
(32:36):
we call those sand fleas. So but again they're they're
more technically a variety of iopod. 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
(32:59):
moved deeper and deeper into deeper waters, the dredge came
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
(33:19):
a zoic hypothesis, and this specifically said that below three
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.
(33:41):
So I'm going to quote from an eighteen sixty three
text book by the Scottish geologist David Page, in which
Page is 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 at
vast depths. Therefore, it is generally supposed that vegetable and
(34:04):
animal life as known to us could not possibly exist,
And though some 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
(34:26):
extreme elevations of the land are barren and lifeless solitudes.
All right. So 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
(34:48):
can see where that that idea could had a certain
amount of truthiness to it. Uh. Now, certainly we know
that that that that the sunlit poor of the ocean,
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
(35:11):
the sunlight, and then the creatures that consume those organisms
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 someone want to take advantage of that exactly?
(35:34):
And then you you also have to begin to say, well,
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
(35:57):
many dredging experiments had already at a time of Forbes
caught life forms from depths of below three hundred 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
(36:19):
assist 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 hundred and fifty fathoms, he discovered all kinds
of invertebrate organisms that Forbes had missed, and I'm not
(36:42):
sure 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 to the place. Yeah,
your bucket isn't big enough, or you're not handling the
(37:03):
bucket properly, and run into all sorts of problems. Now,
Thompson would also go on to head up one of
the most important ocean a graphic 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
(37:25):
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
(37:46):
imposed by the fact that they were using what we
what I've been calling the eb 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
(38:08):
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, in and pressure.
And so maybe a better analogy is like imagining an
alien satellite studying us by scooping us up in a
(38:29):
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
(38:49):
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
(39:12):
red sea cucumber. So there are these limitations to the
epissue 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?
(39:34):
Would a true Gilgamesh method arise? Ah, well, Joe, a
true Gilgamesh will arise, but he's gonna have to wait
till next episode. 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 B.
B Correct. But yeah, before we close out today, I
just want to try to imagine what it's like to
(39:54):
be in an oceanographer or marine biologists mindset before we
get to the bath sphere. 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
(40:15):
limited to these methods of dragging buckets along or trawling
with nets, or trying to scoop stuff up from the
from the sea floor. What what is that like to have,
like not have access 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
(40:36):
do come on online, which I alluded to earlier, you
you don't have the ability to really get into the depths.
There are depths of the ocean that are just beyond
your ability to venture into. Yeah, and 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
(40:59):
you're going to be saying ampling in the ebissome method, right,
And but then how do you explore it yourself without
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
(41:21):
have evolved only to thrive within a very slim portion
of our own environment. Uh. So hey, we're gonna we
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,
and in many cases the deep ocean, then you can
find them there. You also find blog post links out
(41:41):
to our various social media accounts as well. Huge thanks
as always to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams and
Tory Harrison. If 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
(42:10):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot com. The Bigges
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 return trip was
made in forty three minutes, an average of one foot
(00:23):
every two seconds. Twice during the ascent I was aware
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 very real living creatures.
(00:44):
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 justment of
the blood which makes it possible for them to dive
a mile or more and come up without getting the bends.
(01:06):
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 except as
a large living creature. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your
(01:33):
Mind from How Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to
stuff to blow your mind. My name is 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
(01:55):
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 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
(02:17):
admire the sort of directness and clarity of his writing.
I was looking at a report of his from his
underwater expeditions that he 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
(02:38):
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 creatures 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.
(02:59):
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 bathosphere. The bathosphere which
is a Greek for deep sphere, which was the which
this was these basically the submersible deep ball, the deep
ball that that he used on the just groundbreaking trips
(03:20):
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
hundred and sixteen meters or so, and uh An armored
dive suits were only good for about five twenty five
ft or a hundred sixty But the Bathosphere reached an
(03:41):
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 and his collaborator Otis Barton,
who together did many dives in the steel Ball, going
(04:01):
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 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
(04:22):
blow your mind. I've been working on a lot lately,
A lot, yeah, a lot, like and part of that
is due to I do have a side project I've
been working on here at work that does concern deep
sea themes. Also, I've recently finished reading Peter watts novel Starfish,
which is a wonderful sort of cyberpunk sci fi novel
(04:43):
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 Ocean at the American Museum of
Natural History in New York City, which is running March twelfth,
(05:04):
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 they're interesting, Like
(05:27):
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 they're they're extremely
(05:48):
vital and uh. And when you start keying in on
individual plankton specimens, there is this rich diversity. Uh, it's
on 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
(06:08):
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 documentaries showing us footage of what
(06:28):
happens under the sea. And because you've seen that footage,
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,
(06:51):
and we don't know about the deep oceans. Yeah, and
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,
(07:15):
And indeed, Jacques Custo 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
(07:35):
for 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 Jacque Custo himself, but I saw
countless cartoon and puppet French accent, you know, underwater explorer
type characters that were I don't mean like they were
(07:56):
attacking Jacques Custo, were making fun of him, but I
don't know. He seemed like a very parodiable character in
American culture, right. And of course today we have James Cameron,
who who's whose contribution to deep see exploration is a
is is real. Um. But but but as as far
as William Beebe goes in the bathisphere, like, this is
(08:18):
a story that I feel isn't as celebrated in pop culture.
It's it's it's certainly remembered in the in the history
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
(08:40):
was in reading Starfish, in which Peter Watts makes several
mentions of BB 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 draping like a nearly two hour episode right in
(09:02):
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 and we're only scratching the
surface on it. Well, maybe the best understand Baby'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
(09:23):
deeper parts of the ocean was like before the Bathmosphere 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
(09:45):
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 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 back then,
(10:08):
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 possible that you would have giant
(10:28):
sea creatures. And in fact, we saw giant sea creatures
in the forms of of spouting whales and various carcasses
that 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
(10:49):
have said they saw 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 it 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,
(11:09):
which Robert this is 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 Kona Skusa or the King's Mirror,
which is a thirteenth century Old Norse educational text. So
it's got it's written in the form of a dialogue,
(11:32):
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 definite about it, inasmuch as
(11:54):
it is rarely seen by men, for it almost never
approaches the shore or appears where fisher and 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 more like an island
(12:15):
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 immense and needs so much food.
(12:37):
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 about as wide as a sound or fiord,
(13:00):
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 of a real world organism that actually employs
(13:24):
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 we have here is
like this creature has eaten so much sea life and
(13:44):
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 dar one name. We're living after you know,
submarines going down and looking at, well, what kind of
sea life is there? Really, we still don't know a
(14:06):
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
makes in his book is that like in the ancient world,
(14:27):
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, ce cucumber,
I guess the cea cucumber two, but the see hamburger.
But basically, when you start looking at all these fabulous beasts,
and I think we alluded to this a little bit
(14:48):
in our Aquatic Humanoids episode episodes, Uh, you find all
these various just ridiculous like sea dogs, etcetera. 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
idea that that whatever diversity we have on the surface,
(15:10):
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
take a quick break and then we'll jump right back in.
Thank thank you, thank you. All right, we're back now.
(15:33):
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 fourth century BC. In his Biology or
This History of of Animal Life, Aristotle got a lot wrong, like,
(15:56):
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. 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.
(16:20):
Aristotle occasionally says things that sound dumb to us, but
was not dumb. Yeah, yeah, I feel like we've touched
on this before on other topics. Uh. From our advantage point,
it's easy to to say Oh, yeah, you really screwed
that after Aristotle. But really, given what he had to
work with, his his understanding of the natural world was amazing. Yeah,
(16:40):
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 have said, you know, it
really looks from some of his statements like Aristotle performed dissections,
So we must have had some access to specimens. And
(17:02):
it's not so easy to always get specimens in the
ancient world, Like how how do you collect them? Do
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 and writers of the ancient
world who are very much going on second, third, and
fourth hand accounts of what was going on elsewhere in
(17:22):
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 secondhand.
You know that you heard a story from somebody who
heard a story who also was not really beneath the
(17:42):
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 deep sea, like the research methods
(18:02):
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 to call the Ebisu method. So
(18:24):
Ebisu is the Japanese luck god, 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. Because Gilgamesh, of course,
(18:47):
is the protagonist of the four thousand year old Mesopotamian
work known as the Epic of Gilgamesh. And if you'll
recall and 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 if
(19:08):
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 idea is Gilgamesh,
(19:32):
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 and withstand
(19:52):
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,
I wonder what this is. Yeah, but we still see
(20:14):
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 uh nessy, it's
probably a dinosaur. Yea monster. I mean, I'm torn because
(20:36):
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
(20:58):
accidental ebisome 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 that 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,
(21:19):
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 at Um 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
(21:41):
who fish 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
(22:03):
with a facility 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
(22:25):
a kid, you 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 at the bottom. But this comes
(22:48):
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 all experiment within the bathtub.
I feel I've observed I've observed my my son doing
this as well, but he has not reached the conclusion, Hey,
(23:08):
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 it clear who invented this technique,
(23:30):
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 kind of great undersea adventurer
(23:51):
and pioneer of the school of Gilgamesh. Robert, had you
ever come across the the Alexander the Grade as deep
sea explorer before? I don't believe ev 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. Maybe some versions of
(24:14):
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 Tier in Lebanon,
he had divers swimming underwater to either remove or to
put in place boom defenses. And a boom defenses something
(24:35):
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. Oh 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 puts a big
chain across the water and this prevents the ships from
(24:58):
getting past. And this is an act tool technique. So
in some versions of the story, I think Alexander is
trying to get rid of boom defenses and somebody'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 by Richard F. Marks,
Alexander wants to go underwater, either to help with this
(25:20):
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 between two ships, with
Alexander and a couple of his secretaries inside the box.
(25:44):
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 specieas of demon, having the head of a ferocious
beast attached to a human body. Some of them carried axes,
(26:06):
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 feel that Alexander deserved to be
(26:27):
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 there are other funny versions of this.
There's a totally different version of Alexander as Gilgamesh that
(26:49):
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 in 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 entrusts his loyal mistress to
(27:12):
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 do great things and go
(27:35):
places the northern 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, you can look at that's
(27:56):
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 at least they do look
(28:16):
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 example of what life
(28:42):
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 in to build that I
have to base it on what do I believe exists
(29:04):
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 bell technology and go down there
(29:24):
and that that is what eventually 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 people wanted to salvage shipwrecks and
(29:46):
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 going to
take a quick break, and when we come back, we're
gonna discuss the the pre bb world of deep sea
(30:06):
exploration just a little bit more. Thank thank you, thank you.
All right, 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 Abi zoom 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 eb zoom method
(30:28):
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 of Man. He was reportedly a
(30:49):
very likable dude. 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 Mediator Rainy and see, 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 along the bottom of the
(31:11):
ocean from behind the ship. And then when you drag
it along and scoop some stuff up, then you 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, what have you found
(31:32):
that way? Oh? They are we always call them sand fleas,
but they're not actual sand fleas. They're little iceopods. 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 were able to scoop underneath them,
(31:53):
they can't dig away from you. I see. And most
of them are really small, but you can find something
that are the size of a real look 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,
(32:14):
and the beach was just covered 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 are more accurately sand fleas,
and for whatever reason, and I've 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 like, oh, yeah,
(32:36):
we call those sand fleas. So but again they're they're
more technically a variety of iopod. 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
(32:59):
moved deeper and deeper into deeper waters, the dredge came
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
(33:19):
a zoic hypothesis, and this specifically said that below three
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.
(33:41):
So I'm going to quote from an eighteen sixty three
text book by the Scottish geologist David Page, in which
Page is 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 at
vast depths. Therefore, it is generally supposed that vegetable and
(34:04):
animal life as known to us could not possibly exist,
And though some 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
(34:26):
extreme elevations of the land are barren and lifeless solitudes.
All right. So 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
(34:48):
can see where that that idea could had a certain
amount of truthiness to it. Uh. Now, certainly we know
that that that that the sunlit poor of the ocean,
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
(35:11):
the sunlight, and then the creatures that consume those organisms
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 someone want to take advantage of that exactly?
(35:34):
And then you you also have to begin to say, well,
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
(35:57):
many dredging experiments had already at a time of Forbes
caught life forms from depths of below three hundred 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
(36:19):
assist 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 hundred and fifty fathoms, he discovered all kinds
of invertebrate organisms that Forbes had missed, and I'm not
(36:42):
sure 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 to the place. Yeah,
your bucket isn't big enough, or you're not handling the
(37:03):
bucket properly, and run into all sorts of problems. Now,
Thompson would also go on to head up one of
the most important ocean a graphic 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
(37:25):
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
(37:46):
imposed by the fact that they were using what we
what I've been calling the eb 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
(38:08):
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, in and pressure.
And so maybe a better analogy is like imagining an
alien satellite studying us by scooping us up in a
(38:29):
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
(38:49):
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
(39:12):
red sea cucumber. So there are these limitations to the
epissue 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?
(39:34):
Would a true Gilgamesh method arise? Ah, well, Joe, a
true Gilgamesh will arise, but he's gonna have to wait
till next episode. 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 B.
B Correct. But yeah, before we close out today, I
just want to try to imagine what it's like to
(39:54):
be in an oceanographer or marine biologists mindset before we
get to the bath sphere. 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
(40:15):
limited to these methods of dragging buckets along or trawling
with nets, or trying to scoop stuff up from the
from the sea floor. What what is that like to have,
like not have access 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
(40:36):
do come on online, which I alluded to earlier, you
you don't have the ability to really get into the depths.
There are depths of the ocean that are just beyond
your ability to venture into. Yeah, and 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
(40:59):
you're going to be saying ampling in the ebissome method, right,
And but then how do you explore it yourself without
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
(41:21):
have evolved only to thrive within a very slim portion
of our own environment. Uh. So hey, we're gonna we
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,
and in many cases the deep ocean, then you can
find them there. You also find blog post links out
(41:41):
to our various social media accounts as well. Huge thanks
as always to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams and
Tory Harrison. If 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
(42:10):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot com. The Bigges
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.