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Jeniffer speaks with Susan Casey, adventurer and author, via Warwick’s to talk about her experiences studying, observing and interacting with the mysterious deep ocean.
Since 2005, Susan has been writing about subjects such as giant waves and those who chase them and the creatures that live in the depths beneath them in an approachable and captivating way.
In this episode she discusses not only her experience in this largely alien world, and the life that inhabits it, but also the implications of exploring it.
This is a must listen for anyone who is curious, in search of wonder, and wanting to learn more about the profound importance of this largely unexplored part of our world.
Susan is the author of The Devil’s Teeth, Voices in the Ocean, The Wave, and others. Her latest book is The Underworld: Journeys To The Depths Of The Ocean.
Susan’s website: https://susancasey.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/susanlcasey/
Creators & Guests
Host
What is The Premise?
Here on The Premise Jeniffer and Chad Thompson talk to storytellers of all types. From authors to musicians, poets, screenwriters, and comedians we get down to the tiny grain of sand that becomes a pearl—getting to the story behind the storyteller.
>> Jeniffer: This is going to be an extraordinary conversation for
me, and I'm going to be honest with you,
I'm a little nervous about getting it wrong because I learned
so many amazing things in this
stunning, work. It is one of the most beautiful books
I've ever readdeveloped. Susan writes
with, you know, like, some books are lyrical
and poetic. This book is
musical. It's written with
so much love and emotion that I just absolutely
fell in love with the deep. Learned so much
about it. So thank you for being here,
and thank you for your extraordinary
ability to make something so unknown,
tangible, bringing it to us.
>> Susan: thank you so much, Jennifer, and thank you so much for coming.
I'm really looking forward to speaking about this.
I always think of anything I'm writing about
as, like, I'm at.
I'm a curious person who goes out and finds cool
things. And then I feel like a ten year old kid in a
treehouse and just wanting to call
other curious people into the treehouse
to say, look. Look at this. I mean, look what this
is. Can you believe we didn't know about this?
>> Jeniffer: It's a total call to the curious. And
it's such a cast of characters in this book who are
all drawn by the same thing. This curiosity
to the deep, this thing we don't understand.
Speaking of ten years old, so you
grew up in Toronto, nowhere near the deep,
as it were, and you didn't even start
swimming until you were ten. Is that true?
>> Susan: That's true. by the time I was 14,
I was at the. I was competing at the national
championships. So it was a question of just
diving in. And, I mean, I was always completely obsessed
with water. And we, had a summer place
on a lake. Canada's full of lakes. And
north, of Toronto, there are these lakes that are very dark.
The water's very dark. And I would just sit for
hours and hours and hours on the dock and hope to see a.
But I was at the same time fascinated and
terrified of them. so I think my
swimming career was a little bit late in getting started because
it was just a question of. I was scared.
>> Jeniffer: Speaking of fear, on page four, which
I should have marked it in advance, I think I want you
to read it. There's
this piece where you talk about
astonishment,
the emotions, starting here. Do you want
to read that for us? Starting with, the
inaccessible way. Yeah.
>> Susan: So before I read this, before I read this, let me just
sort of connect what I just said about these lakes.
Because obviously, growing up in Canada, I didn't
have access to the ocean. and yet these
lakes, whenever I would see a fish, and there are some quite big
lake fish in Canada. I mean, there were fish with.
Does anybody know a musky, if there's anybody from the
east? there were muskies. And every so often I would
see something big and it would just kind of come up from
below. And it occurred to me really early
on that there was like this parallel universe
beneath the surface and we couldn't see it because these
waters were, they're not like some clear
waters, they're like very dark and you can't see the bottom.
And I just remember thinking anything
could come up from there. And that was
so compounded later in my life when I ended up at
the Farallon Islands writing about the resident great white sharks
there. the farallones, was that on
massive steroids. So here was this very
dark, inscrutable water and a great white shark would
pop up or a blue whale or some
kind of, creature I'd never seen before.
And that's when I really started thinking this is
a massive environment. Massive. I
mean, we think of the Earth as being a very large place.
And it is often said that 70% of the
planet is covered by ocean. But what gives
you a better sense of just how immense
the deep ocean is, is if you think of Earth as a three dimensional
living space, a biosphere, 2%
of that is land. Everything we see, everywhere we
live, all of that 2%,
98% is salt water, is
ocean. And 95% of
that 98% are waters below
600ft, which is water that
scientists define as the deep ocean. So
the fact that we don't know, we cross
the surface, we see a little bit in the sunlight
zone, small fraction of the ocean, the ceiling
of a room, right, a giant room.
I just always could never look at any body of water
from Canada to the farallones to
beginning to work on this book and not wonder, like, what's
down there. And, at this very moment,
it's exciting because we are really the first people to ever
have the technologies and the ability to find out.
Jules Verne had to make it up.
>> Jeniffer: And it's really only recent, totally recent.
>> Susan: We are like, if I had written this book, two years
earlier, it would have been obsolete almost
immediately. Because while I was reporting it in the
beginning, there was. We can talk about this
more specifically, but there was, a vehicle, invented that could
go to full ocean depth safely,
repeatedly, with a passenger, a
pilot and a scientist, or a pilot and a journalist in
my case. And that changed everything.
>> Jeniffer: And what year was that?
>> Susan: That was 2019.
>> Jeniffer: Incredible.
>> Susan: Yeah. So now I'll read this because I think I wanted to
give it a little bit of context.
>> Jeniffer: Okay. Thank you.
>> Susan: Yeah.
But the.
>> Jeniffer: You're welcome to start from.
>> Susan: I'm just looking to see if, But the inaccessibility of
the deep, I thought, made it even more
alluring. Others wanted to visit
Paris. Bora Bora, the Serengeti.
I wanted to go into the ocean's abyss.
The idea of an unknown aquatic
realm ever present below us, but
invisible, unless we look for it. An
underworld within our world
had always worked a sort of spell on me, an
alchemical mix of wonder and fear.
It may seem as if those emotions would cancel each other
out, but the opposite is true. When you add
them together, you get the sublime, which
transcends both the
passion caused by the great and sublime. In
nature is astonishment,
wrote the 18th century philosopher Edmund
Burke. And astonishment is the
state of the soul in which all its motions are
suspended with some degree of horror.
But, he added, it was a sort of delightful
horror. The abyss might be
terrifying, but you wouldn't notice because you'd be too
busy gaping in awe.
>> Jeniffer: Yeah.
>> Susan: At least that's how I imagined it. And I wanted to see
if I was right.
>> Jeniffer: Isn't that beautiful? I read that a couple of times.
I was like, oh, my God, this is. You just have
this ability to pull us in.
But let's go back to the beginning, as you did in this
book not too long ago. We knew
nothing of the deep. We had no ability to go that
deepen. And people were starting to. So
you bring us back to the history and the first
pioneers, Aristotle being. I
learned quite a bit. Aristotle, pliny the
elder. And, you know, people were afraid of the ocean,
these monsters. And so take us back to the research
you did to kind of give us a grounding in what we're
discovering here.
>> Susan: Yeah. So I have the
sense, I think it's a. I think it's a pretty good
bet that as long as there have been humans
gazing out over the ocean and maybe not being
able to see any other land, just as far as the eye
can perceive a horizon,
and thinking, what is it? What's down there?
Where does it go? How deep is it? And it's
amazing how long that went on, with all kinds
of wacky theories and beliefs. So
I did try to trace it back early, I
believe. Aristotle is often called the first marine
biologist because he did a lot of studying
of marine, creatures in a lagoon. And
he did it in a kind of empirical way and
learned a lot of things that he was the first
person that we know of to,
for example, identify whales as mammals,
all kinds of things like that. He was doing science
back then.
>> Jeniffer: Pretty good science, really?
>> Susan: Well, yeah. I mean, yes, absolutely. There was a
lot of, like, pliny the elder was talking
about myth and lore and
superstition and all kinds of things. But
Aristotle was, like, looking, finding things, taking them
apart, looking how they worked, making
observations that turned out to be, in a lot of cases,
extremely accurate. But I believe that
there have probably been humans that
are not in the western canon, or
culture in ancient Oceania.
certainly in, like, in Polynesia and
Melanesia, there are oceanic peoples that were
probably wondering about this
and parsing it as best they could,
way before Aristotle. That's my
personal guess.
>> Jeniffer: How could they not?
>> Susan: How could they not? And these are ocean people,
right. But, there
was, for a long time, the
idea of what was in the deep ocean was pretty simple to
wrap up in a single word, which was monsters.
>> Jeniffer: Monsters, yeah.
>> Susan: So when you think of the old maps, and maybe they even have
some, replicas of them in this library, when they
didn't know what was going
on in any patch of remote ocean, they would just put, here be
dragons, or here be monsters. But in 15,
38, there was a map printed that was created
by a catholic priest and historian from
Sweden named Olus Magnus. It's called
the Cartomarina. And if you've seen
drawings, these drawings of what they perceived as sea
monsters, you've probably seen the
Cartamarina. It's very famous. And so
I flew to Sweden to see an original copy of it. There
are only two that we know of, and it's really big.
It's like
23.
often when we see it, it's colorized.
But the original was not colorized, and the
colorized version kind of destroys it. The
real version in this huge, massive wall,
it looks like he drew it with a pin. I mean, he worked on it for, like,
35 years. And Olus's, job
was to travel around northern Europe and Scandinavia,
collecting for the church. And he had a
notebook and he had a sketchbook, and he talked to
people. And, if you can imagine
a 16th century medieval farmer
from Norway who's walking along
comes upon a stranded sperm whale,
you know, a 50 foot long animal with seven
inch teeth and an eye the size of a
hubcap. And, you know, what is it?
There's no context, of course, it's a monster. So
Olav's, Magnus really took a lot of trouble
to sort of categorize these monsters and he gave them all
names. And, so in his map, once you
get offshore, the north Atlantic is just
kind of frothing with sea monsters. so for me
it was a good place to start because along with being a
cartography of Scandinavia, which was kind of
an unknown part of the world at that time, it
was a beginning of a cartography of
perceptions about how humans considered the deep
ocean. That's where it began.
And then the enlightenment came along
and there were some instruments and there was a more
rational way of, determining science,
but that was really perplexing for the ocean,
and particularly the deep ocean, because
we weren't that far along with the instruments.
their sort of method was to take a weight, put it on a
line, on a spool, and
then let it go down to the seafloor and
just kind of sense when it hit the bottom and
then wind it back up and the winding it back up.
M the length of a man's arm is the measurement of
a fathom. So that's how they would determine, okay,
it's how many fathoms deep,
pretty, rudimentary. But
there were some incredible naturalists around
the 17th, and 18th and 19th
centuries, 18th, and 19th in particular.
And they started, sort of supposing
that probably there was nothing
down there.
>> Jeniffer: Yeah, the ozoic theory.
>> Susan: That's right. And it lasted for, they called it the
ozoic theory without life. And that theory lasted
for a really long time. Like,
it wasn't really completely dispelled till
1876. And even though
there were some people who were dropping weighted
nets to very, you know, to like, depths way
the ozoic theory basically said that anything below
about 2000ft, there was nothing there. And there were
people dropping trawl nets down to 12,000,
14,000ft. And the oceans
deepest, regions are, you know, can
be as almost as much as 36,000ft
deep, and coming up with all kinds of animals.
But some, some people hypothesized, some
scientists hypothesized that the seafloor was probably sealed in
ice, there was probably nothing there. And,
probably because we couldn't live down there and there's this
crushing pressure. And they knew that because if they dropped any sort
of, item with a cavity and it would come back
imploded,
some scientists felt that it was probably, the pressure
was so intense that nothing could sink. All the way
down, like, nothing was heavy enough to make it to the
bottom. So everything that went down,
ships, dead animals, humans
that fell off of ships were all kind of lost in space,
floating through the mid waters. And
all of this was dispelled,
like, 150 years ago.
>> Jeniffer: Right?
>> Susan: Yeah.
>> Jeniffer: Which is incredible.
>> Susan: It's incredible.
>> Jeniffer: And the cast of characters who did that.
Bibi, can you talk to us about him and his exploit?
>> Susan: So, let me just back up to
run into bb. there was a. The first deepsea
expedition happened from 1873 to
1876 and it was a british expedition
called the HMS Challenger that was, Queen
Victoria funded it, a warship that was kitted
out with science labs and they went around the world for three and a half
years, improved without a doubt that there
was life, really splendid life, all
the way to the bottom. And now we know that
there's even a thriving biosphere miles
beneath the seafloor, but
enough to dispel the zoic theory.
And so this was, they brought
back all these data and scientists from around the world.
About 70 different deep sea scientists and various
other disciplines spent 20 more
years writing a 50 volume set of here's everything we
know about the deep ocean. And it was
extraordinary. And one of the things that had puzzled them
was that a lot of the fish would come up,
glowing. They would have these sort of
circular, glowing, and they saw
bioluminescence sometimes on the surface of the water.
But they didn't know how any of these fish functioned
because when you bring a deep sea creature up to the surface, it really
just kind of looks like a deflated balloon. You can't
tell much about it, but they were puzzled by a lot of these
stranger looking creatures. So
now we're at the beginning of the 20th century
and, in 1930, the
man that Jennifer was talking about, William,
Beebe, he decided that he would be the first
man to go into the deep ocean. And by the
deep ocean, what he really meant was the twilight
zone, which is the uppermost layer of the deep
ocean and it goes from 600ft down to about
3300ft. and I call it the
Manhattan of the deep because
far from there being nothing living down there,
there are more creatures in the twilight zone than in all the other
regions of the ocean combined. And there are three
much bigger realms below the
twilight zone. But the twilight zone is just this happening
place with quadrillions, literally
quadrillions of animals in it.
And 80% of them are bioluminescent.
So that's the manhattan of the deep. Like, it's just this
blinking, flashing, throbbing,
like every eater be
eaten. night club of a place.
And Bebe was the
first man to see it. and he was a bit of a
celebrity in the 1930s. He was one of
the curators, at the Bronx zoo, which was brand
new. And he'd gone all over the world, to
collect exotic animals for the zoo,
and was very, very interested in the ocean
and was kind of a swashbuckling guy and a bit of a
celebrity around New York City. And also a
very, like, probably the most popular natural history writer of
his era. so somebody at one point,
Britain's Prince George just gave him an island in Bermuda
and gave him a ship, as one does,
and he be decided that he
was going to explore a two mile cube
of ocean in its entirety,
survey it, like find out everything that lived from
top to bottom. So he started trawling with nets, and
he very quickly realized that all the creatures came up
mangled beyond recognition. So he determined that
he wanted to go. He wanted to go. And,
this was of course, reported in the New York Times because he
was such a celebrity. Like BB is going to be the first man
to explore the abyss. And,
there was another man who was an engineering student in New
York named Otis Barton, who read this in the paper
and was very disappointed because he wanted to be
the first man to go into the abyss. But here's the famous
William Beebe. But Otis Barton had one thing that Bebe
didn't have, and that was a big trust fund.
And also Beebe, I think he was a scientist
and kind of a showman, and Barton was an engineer
and, could write checks. So,
he went to engage a naval architect and they created this
craft they called the bathysphere. And if you see
this bathysphere, you just cannot believe that two six
foot something men crawled into this.
It's just a steel ball with 5ft in
diameter. It has a hatch that's about six
inches wide that they had to squeeze themselves through.
It has three very, small
viewports, but they only ever used
two of them because the only material that they
had for a viewport was, fused
quartz or a very strong glass. And when
they, Barton ordered like five of them,
and when they pressure tested them, they knew enough
to know that they should pressure test them, but they didn't even pressure test them very
hard, and three of them immediately cracked.
So they had two. The only two that survived the pressure
test went on to the viewports, and the third
one was plugged with a metal cover. And the idea.
The thing is, the idea of a viewport blowing
out, which would, of course, never happen now, is
so terrifying because nobody knew exactly what would
happen. And this was a very, heavy
object, and it was going over the side of a ship on a
long cable. So, basically, a, two thirds of a mile long
steel cable, which also was very heavy.
If anything happened on either end of that
cable, they were on
a straight shot to the bottom, and that's where they
would remain. And they also. This is the part that
also cracks me up, is they had telephone wires running
in through this cable, and they're using
bottled oxygen to breathe. and, like,
if the sparks from the telephone
wires in an oxygen.
I mean, just. It's just like this when you read about BB. But
they did 30 dives. They did 30 dives. In a couple of
the dives, they sent the bathroom down, and they. And one of the
windows did blow out, but nobody was in it. And on one
occasion, the winch got tanked. They couldn't pull it up,
but nobody was in it, and they fixed things. So
I always kind of think of it as like a spin of
life's roulette wheel for Phoebe. But when they got
down to the twilight zone, he just. He just went
berserk. He was a really beautiful writer.
and he just saw these crazy,
beautiful, glowing, twinkling,
sinuous, gelatinous creatures.
And so the telephone line was for him to,
in this stream of consciousness riff, call up
everything he was seeing to this. He had, like, this bevy of very
attractive female
transcriptionists, and they all lived on
this island in Bermuda. So that was William
Beebe. but it left an astonishing record
of what lived in the twilight zone.
>> Jeniffer: When did you know you needed to write this book?
>> Susan: I wanted to write this book when I went to the Farallons and
saw that there was this massive party
in the ocean,
that you could not see. But
I also knew that I didn't
know enough and that it was the way
that I approach a book is I immerse myself.
And because I'm writing about the ocean, it's literal
immersion. And I couldn't get.
I couldn't crack that one way mirror, so
I went off. But I just started thinking about it all the time
and really amassing
information. And I'm very thankful that it
was my fourth book because it took
absolutely everything that I learned about the
ocean in order to be able to access
the immensity of this, not only the different there's
four different layers of the deep ocean. There's the twilight
zone that I just mentioned, the midnight zone,
which is, 1000 meters to 3000 meters. So
3300ft to about 10,000ft.
And then the abyssal zone, which is 3000 meters
to 6000 meters. So 10,000 to
20,000ft, give or take. And then
that's the abyss of the abyss is the largest ecosystem
on earth. Below that is, the hadal
zone, which is from 6000 meters to 11,000
meters. And that's named after Hades, the God of the
underworld. And the Hadal zone
accounts for 45% of the depth of the
ocean. But it only occurs in
trenches where tectonic plates
collide and one plate is subducting.
So the Mariana trench is one that people are
familiar with, but there are about 37 hadle
trenches. So there are these
extreme vertical environments. Like the Mariana trench
is 44 miles wide and, 1500
miles long. And, so it's just,
you know, it's a very steep
trench. and in each of those environments there
are biological sciences, geological sciences,
biogeochemical sciences. And I wanted to understand the whole.
And it's just a lot to bite off. I could not have done this as a
second book or even a third.
>> Jeniffer: Book or maybe anyone
else. I feel like you were the person to write this book.
>> Susan: I definitely was, obsessed.
I mean, I do think that books require a
certain degree of obsession because of
just the sheer volume of research
and particularly, of course, in nonfiction, and
in sort of a science adventure
travel, like. Yeah. in pursuit of a
story, I will go anywhere, do anything, read anything, go to any
trouble, as you.
>> Jeniffer: Will find out when you read this book. How long did it take you to
do the research?
>> Susan: Seven years.
>> Jeniffer: Okay. Which is really not bad.
>> Susan: And my other books have all taken five years and
Covid was thrown in there, so. Yeah.
Yeah. And it really helps to find amazing.
I always do look for really great characters,
particularly scientists or others who are
working and, studying in this environment,
sometimes interacting with it for other reasons who
are amazing guides.
>> Jeniffer: Yeah.
>> Susan: Yeah.
>> Jeniffer: Well, let's start with Kirby. Yeah, he was
an amazing guide who led you to your next
guide. And it sort of happened that way where one person
would open a door to another. So kind of bring us through
that.
>> Susan: So you're mentioning Terry Kirby.
I was living on Maui, and I had heard
through the grapevine that the University of Hawaii had
two 2000 meters manned
subs. They were called the Pisces.
And, the chief pilot was a man named Terry
Kirby. And we had mutual friends. So I went
over to Oahu to talk to him, saw the subs
and was just immediately like
taken by the sheer volume,
and the extraordinary content of the
stories that he could tell. And so the Pisces
could go to, could take, a pilot and two scientists
to 2000 meters, which is really pretty
good. there aren't that many subs that can go
very deep. There are only about
five, subs that can go below 4000 meters.
There were six before the titan imploded. But the titan
is a very extreme outlier. you can't even
really call it a submersible. It's more like
somebody's hobby that
tragically killed people. But, these subs are very,
very, very much a feat of engineering. They have their own
ships, they have their own crews of engineers.
they're serious, serious business. So having access to two
2000 meters subs and they weren't
at the time, accessible to dive because
their mother ship was, being
refitted. But one thing about submersibles
that's different than submarines is they need a mother ship.
They have to be, launched and recovered. And
when they're below the surface, they carry weight
that makes them negatively buoyant. And they go down
and then they drop some weights. The weights are usually steel
bars. Looks like phone books
or steel, pellets. But in any case, steel that
biodegrades against the background or the ocean.
and then they become neutral and they cruise around
for as long as the batteries will allow with thrusters,
their propellers. And then when it's time to go
up, they drop their major weight and
they're positively buoyant and they are recovered at the
surface of. I started to learn about
submersibles. I had started to learn
with Terry as my guide and a couple of his other
pilots. And they had been working in the Pacific.
And, the pacific is kind of my. It's
my muse. And there are hundreds of
thousands of submarine volcanoes.
75% of all volcanism on earth is
in the deep ocean. And Terry had been diving on
active volcanoes all over the place. And these
are not only geologically fascinating, but
like, biologically and microbially.
And, so I would just sit there and
listen, rap to his stories. And of course, they'd explored
all the world war two shipwrecks too, around Oahu,
when there are a lot of them. and he had found a
lot of them. So it was just story time.
but at one point it didn't
look like the Pisces were going to go back in the water anytime soon.
And I had already agreed to write
the book. My publisher was excited about it, and I was
still not sure, how am I going to get to dive in a submersible?
You just can't buy a ticket to do it. But then,
so we're talking 2017.
I heard that this company was going to build a 4000
meters sub. And I called them up.
They were called Oceangate. And
I said, they didn't have it, the sub, but they were like, we're
going to take people to the Titanic and we're not only going to build a
4000 meters sub, we're going to build a 6000 meters sub and
we're revolutionizing this. And I said, well, that sounds
really interesting. And then I went back to, this could be my
ticket to get. I don't want to go to the Titanic, but I want to
go to 4000 meters. So I get back to Hawaii and I
said to Terry, hey, I think I might dive in
this. This ocean gate sub. And Terry just
stopped in his tracks and said, and this is in
2017. You must never,
ever set foot in that sub.
because Stockton Rush had come out to the University of Hawaii with his
big plans and run them past
various people and wanted the university to get involved.
And it was from the start, like, just a
tragedy waiting to happen.
So I started a file, hoped I would never
have to use it. Ended up writing about it for Vanity
Fair in 2026.
>> Jeniffer: Wow. Yeah. Now, that wasn't in the book. You didn't?
>> Susan: No, because the book was published by the time this happened.
>> Jeniffer: Yeah.
>> Susan: The sub, tragically was lost
in basically what happened to the sub was what absolutely
everybody told him. What happened to the sub.
>> Jeniffer: Yeah. Yeah.
>> Susan: And so Terry and various. Various other characters in the
book, at numerous stops along the way of my
reporting, would say, like,
nobody really thought he was actually gonna do it.
>> Jeniffer: Right.
>> Susan: Yeah. And we prayed he would, but he did.
And, m. Yeah. So, yeah, the book came out
in. Well, the incident happened in
July. The book came out two weeks later, but
it was printed in May. Yeah. So that's also
why I wrote about it for Vanity Fair.
>> Jeniffer: There's a lot of things I want to ask you. And I realized we're coming up,
we're going to run out of time.
>> Susan: And that's the problem with the deep ocean.
>> Jeniffer: There's so much to talk about and read.
let's start with how much the ocean gives to us, because I think that's such
an important message in this book is that it's our life
force, and I don't think people are aware of that to the
extent. so talk to us a little bit about how much we
need our oceans.
>> Susan: Well, yes, I mean, think about, what I said
at the beginning is 95% of the
biosphere, right? Like, we know we live
on an ocean planet, but we live also on a deep ocean
planet. And the deep ocean, you know, I'll
speak about that. Just specifically right now, is the motherboard of
the planet. Of course, it's 95.
It runs the climate, it's the engine that runs the climate. It
is responsible. We knew, up until
very recently, we believed that 50% of the
oxygen. We knew that 50% of the
oxygen we breathe is created by phytoplankton and
plankton at the surface respiring in
photosynthesis. So the ocean is responsible for the fact that we
can be here breathing oxygen. But now, just
recently, they've discovered that there is also what they call
dark oxygen. There are,
metallic, elements on the bottom of the ocean
that act, emit small voltage
and split water molecules into hydrogen and
oxygen. So we're also, there's
oxygen being created at the bottom of the ocean,
and that's just kind of a sense of how much we don't know.
But every system that sustains us and keeps us
alive, I guess, you know,
obviously there are other elements like
the sun and the atmosphere, which keeps us from burning up,
but the ocean has
created the conditions for life to be habitable on
earth. It's where the carbon cycle is, it's where the
nitrogen cycle mostly is. It's
where 80% of the microbial biomass
of earth is. And I don't know how much you
guys know about microbes, but the more I learn about them, the more
I just am completely clear that
microbes run everything.
And so the ocean is this microbial,
repository, it is
the, as I said, the sediments themselves are
alive. And, it's this data bank of
genomic creativity that the earth has basically
archived in these living sediments. So
there really isn't much that
the ocean doesn't do for us all these services.
It is absorbing, about 90% of our excess
heat right now. We would be in real trouble if it
stopped. But we don't know where that tipping point
is. it absorbs about 30% of our excess
carbon dioxide. And the reason for that is pretty
wild. It's very complicated and
I'll simplify, but all those quadrillions of
tiny animals in the twilight zone. Every night
they swim up to the, hundreds of feet to the
surface and eat phytoplankton.
That has been. It's carbon because it's
been nourished by the sun. And then they swim back down
that same night. And when you're a fish this big, that's a long
journey. And excrete that, or
they're eaten by another animal, and that is then excreted.
And in that way, they are
cycling in a biological carbon pump carbon
out of the atmosphere and sequestering it in the sea floor.
And these tiny creatures sequester the
equivalent of America's total annual emissions.
>> Jeniffer: Wow.
>> Susan: and it's the largest animal migration on earth. and
it happens every day. It's a vertical one.
Yeah.
>> Jeniffer: Covid-19 part of the vaccination
came from the deep.
>> Susan: Yeah. So
from an enzyme in a hydrothermal vent.
And so hydrothermal vents are, in the
same way that when the plates collide, they subduct and they
create these trenches. And that subducting
plate is also where we get our major tsunamis.
When the plates are battling and one
slips, that's any earthquake over
eight has come from a subduction zone. And a lot of
them, if they're vertical, will cause a big tsunami like
the Tokyo one or the indonesian one.
but on the other side of the plate, the plates are
pulling apart and they're moving in both
directions, more or less at about the speed that your
fingernails grow. And, so when they pull
apart, magma comes up from the mantle and creates new
seafloor. And in the beginning, by the
way, kind of major thing, we only discovered it in, like,
1977. people were like, well, then
the earth is getting a little bit bigger every year. Well,
no, because on the other side of the plate, it's getting
subducting. Yeah. So it's in perfect equilibrium.
But on the new part, on the magma
comes up, there are hydrothermal vents. And the hydrothermal
vents, basically, gush out a mix of
microbes and minerals and elements from the
mantle. And, again in the seventies,
we discovered that life had a
completely new trick up its sleeve. Didn't need
the sunlight, didn't need photosynthesis. There were
animals all over the deep ocean
surviving instead on energy sources and
minerals, and microbes that were coming from
below. So just like I said, with oxygen, we've got this
top down source and a bottom up source. Same
with life. And I believe it's
probably the same with everything. In the ocean. But, yeah,
so the, these incredible
creatures, they call it
chemosynthesis, as opposed to
photosynthesis.
>> Jeniffer: Ah.
I mean, there's possibilities for cures for
cancer and many diseases, and there's so much that we
don't know about the deep. And yet
on the horizon, we're looking at the looming possibility
of deep sea mining. Can you talk a little bit about that? And how
extraordinarily
what a catastrophe that would be for our
planet?
>> Susan: Yeah. Well, one of the reasons why there is so much
potential, in these sediments is because these
microbes, the ocean for as many microbes as there are. And
I think the word that I came up with after asking your end
was nonillions, which is like ten to the
37th or something like that. there's
even exponentially more viruses, and
they're ancient. And so these microbes
have all these different metabolisms and these
different, strategies for dealing with
these being attacked by viruses.
I mean, on scales that we can barely, we can't even really
imagine. And, these are very novel
ways to approach things and that. And we are this,
they call it bio prospecting. And it's a very, very,
very young science. And we're learning that
there's this deep biosphere that goes even beneath the
seafloor. So the
seafloor that, let's just say 15,000ft, because
that is the abyssal zone. the hadal zone
will go deeper, but most of the earth is covered
by waters in the abyssal
zone. And when those waters hit the
seabed, they form something called the abyssal plain.
And it's very huge. It covers
54% of the earth. There are massive
geological features in there as well, like, giant mountain
ranges, all kinds of things you said, like.
>> Jeniffer: Mount Everest turned upside down in some cases.
>> Susan: Oh, dwarfed and everything. It's
just. Once again, I think it's really hard for us to wrap our heads around how
big it is. It's so immense. but
so, on the abyssal plain, there
are these metallic orbs that form,
and they're pretty widespread. And I wish I had a
picture. There's pictures in the book. they
look like little tiny cannonballs, but
they're not just metal. They're composed
of manganese, copper, cobalt and nickel. But
they aren't like lumps of metal. They're more like corals
or trees, because they're formed
by microbes, and microorganisms live inside
them. we don't know how microorganisms
form them we're kind of curious about that. They
accrete these metals from the seawater at the rate
of about like a 10th of a
millimeter every million years. So these things are
completely ancient. And they then
host an entire ecosystem on top of them. Because
they're on this sediment plain. So they're a hard
surface. So animals live all over them. Some of the oldest
lived and most interesting animals on earth
live attached to these nodules. So
since the seventies, this is the largest metal deposit
on earth. but it's in a realm that's very hard to get
to. And now we know enough about the
science of it to say it's kind of the womb of the earth.
It's one of the most stable environments. The water
is exceptionally clear. One scientist told
me the only more stable environment is inside a
cave. the abyssal zone. You can't call it
completely pristine because we have plastic and
nanoplastics. But we haven't been
down there monkeying around. But deep sea
mining is something that has been a glimmer
in the corporate eye for
decades. And It is not happening
yet on any kind of industrial scale. But
it's kind of on the verge of happening
now. And it's probably more complicated
than I want to get into about why. But let's
just put it this way. There are companies in some countries. But the
companies are the really bad actors. And they're hooked up
with Some of the small South Pacific nations that
are really desperate. Like in particular this nation called
Nauru which is 8 sq mi.
And These companies can't mine the seafloor without
the sponsorship of a country that has
signed the treaty of the law of the sea. And
with Nauru's help, this one company called the
metals company has forced this
issue forward to the point where the entire world
has gotten involved. And it's just a
battle. And what they plan to do
is Destroy a 2
million square mile area between Mexico
and Hawaii called the clearing Clifford zone. And it
would be like clear cutting a forest but taking the top
20ft of topsoil too. They would take all
of the nodules, all of the living sediments
beneath them. and this is really
not. This is dredging technology. It's going
to cause a giant
cloud that will kill every animal. Because
the water is so clear. They've never evolved to dealing with
any particulate. They will then shoot everything up
a three mile pipe. And it's animal and mineral,
right. Because it's everything that lives on the nodules. There's no
plants in the deep ocean because there's no
photosynthesis. So animals, minerals up
the pipe, they would then separate
out the nodules and then blast everything
else, down and release it in
a continuous fog at
1200 meters, which is the area of the twilight zone
and midnight zone, where all of the animals
communicate, hunt, mate, do
everything with bioluminescence. So
it's the like, of all the things that we do
that I don't like in the ocean, this just
dwarfs. But here's the good news, and
I really think it is good news. I think it's too
insane, even for us. This is the biggest carbon
sink scientists have banded together to say, look, we
need at least 30 years more
study because we don't know what we're even destroying.
And it's not going to grow back. When they're
gone, they're gone, the microbial services
that are happening. But the greatest thing that
happened recently to prevent it from happening was that they realized
that these nodules were actually the ones that are splitting the
water molecules. So these nodules are creating oxygen.
>> Jeniffer: Yeah.
>> Susan: oxygen. Oxygen, yeah.
And so that's a real stick in the
spoke of these companies that want to rip them up.
But it's just also their idea is
that we need nickel and cobalt for ev
batteries and for a greener future.
Let's destroy this last. I mean, the thing that's
keeping us alive. but now the battery
chemistries are moving away from cobalt and nickel, so there really is
no reason to do it.
>> Jeniffer: So there's hope.
>> Susan: I actually think this is a battle that we will win, and I think
it's a pass fail test for humanity, and I feel
very optimistic that we won't do it.
>> Jeniffer: Nice. Yeah, I'm glad to hear it. So, yeah, I
want you to tell everyone about your deep
experience before we run out of time.
>> Susan: Okay.
>> Jeniffer: well, and I wish we could talk about Victor. He's my
favorite.
>> Susan: Well, I will. Victor,
I wanted to get into a submersible, and I, got
in nonfiction. You set out to write about a
subject, a story, and then you go out
reporting, and so there's a certain amount of
serendipity involved, and, like, who do
you meet? What do they tell you? What do you
find when you really look? And so
I will come right out and say, I think there's an element of luck
involved. And this book, I got
extremely lucky because as I was
kind of sulking after being
told I couldn't dive with ocean gate, I couldn't figure out
anybody else. I could dive with the Pisces right over the water.
And I heard about an expedition that was
going around the world to go to all the deepest
places in every Hadel trench. And
I immediately started asking around,
found some people that I knew through my. This is why I say
it really took me all the books
to be able to write this one and got an introduction
to the people that were doing this expedition. And it was
all, at
the auspices of a man named Victor Vescovo, who
is a very interesting character from
Texas. And Victor is a guy who's made quite
a bit of money, although he's not a billionaire.
we kind of invite billionaires to spend their billions
on ocean research because the government doesn't do it. It
gives like a dollar to ocean research for
every, every
dollar, for ocean research, NASA gets
150. So there are a number of very wealthy
individuals who have
sponsored, science expeditions and have their own ships and have
their own subs and have their own robots. And it's,
as far as I'm concerned, all the better. More the
merrier. Victor wanted,
to go to the deepest spots in the ocean
because nobody had ever been to them. And
he, had been to the top of every mountain range, and
he had skied to the north and south pole, and he was looking around for something to
do. And he, is a very smart
guy. He's almost like a
Vulcan, kind of, but with like,
he's not your average texan. He's got a long, blonde
ponytail, and he's kind of like, looks like a raptor. And
he's almost Asperger's because he's so
smart. And, he found the best
company to build this sub.
>> Jeniffer: One of my favorite things, he says, is for relaxation. He
studies military history. History. I was like,
okay.
>> Susan: Speaks seven languages, including Arabic. It was in
naval intelligence, doing, I forget what.
It was like some crazy thing where they locked him
in a room in Pearl harbor,
like, trying to analyze stuff for 20 years. and
he, ah, found this company in Florida
called Triton submarines. And I always refer
to them as the apple of submersible design. There aren't that many
submersible companies, but Triton is just
magnificent. And so he caught the right,
and nobody thought there could be a fullish in depth passenger
submersible. It had been tried before James Cameron tried
it in 2012, and his submersible
basically started to disintegrate on the bottom of the
Mariana trench. he won't tell you that, but I'll tell you
that. And I know people that were on the
expedition and he. Eleven, of his twelve thrusters
failed. He couldn't go anywhere. There were cracks in it. It
never dived again. Victor wanted one where he could take
a scientist, and it
could dive repeatedly, safely,
to the greatest depths that nobody had ever been
to. And the great thing about Victor was
that he brought all the top hatel
scientists along and bankrolled it all. Although
Victor's not a billionaire, like he actually had some,
as wealthy as he is, incurred quite a bit of personal
risk. and it was an expedition called
the five deeps. and so I actually
just kind of got invited onto the five deeps.
>> Jeniffer: Awesome.
>> Susan: And it's just a massive stroke of
luck. And also to be able to meet the top scientists
in the hadel zone. And also I love
scientists because they're so passionate
about what they study. These scientists had dedicated
their lives to studying this realm that they had never
seen. And Victor started taking them down
and every dive was just this massive
revelation. And so once
that expedition was over, he decided to keep
going. And so there was another expedition called
Pacific ring of fire. And I got
onto that one. And then at some point, I
asked Victor very nervously,
do you think I could maybe dive with you sometime?
He knew I was writing a book and he turned to me and
said, sure, let's go to the Mariana
trench.
And I won't do any spoilers,
so I got to do, As far as I know, I'm the only journalist
that got to do this because Victor then couldn't really
afford to keep the sub in the ship and sold it to,
It has a very happy ending because it was sold to a man named
Gabe Newell, who was, I think, number,
three at Microsoft at one point. And Gabe is
obsessed with the ocean and hired all the Heidel scientists
and basically gave them the sub and the ship. So
now that that sub and ship just goes around the world doing
science funded by a billionaire, it's pretty awesome.
And sometimes people get really edgy when I mention this
because like, there is a Google, Eric Schmidt has the ship,
Ray Dalio has a ship. And people think this is really awful,
but it just. The ocean needs,
they have these resources and let's
get them for the ocean. We need this.
>> Jeniffer: One, hundred percent.
>> Susan: And to dive that deep is just
extraordinary. The best way
I can say it is. It's
like meeting the earth for the first time
and it's awe
and the ocean. One of the
things I love most about it is that it
requires humility. A real, true
humility, because you really understand
life from a different perspective. and
I come back with as many details as I
can so that I can share them with readers, and we can all
revel in this experience. But I will also say that
if you ever have a chance to dive, first of all,
make sure you're in a sphere. Has to be a sphere. That is the only
shape that. That can withstand the pressures and distribute
them equally.
>> Jeniffer: Tell us about the egg.
>> Susan: The egg. well, one of the. They sent an egg down. An
egg survived the Mariana trench.
>> Jeniffer: Outside. Not inside the sphere.
>> Susan: Outside the sphere. Think of it. It's like if you take a sphere and you
crush it, it just becomes stronger. If you step on a coke can, you
know what happens? The sphere is the shape. And, all
of these subs go through like a much
a, very expensive, very rigorous testing
that's akin to the FAA, but much more
involved, more like NASA, probably.
again, the only sub to have ever
skipped that step was the Titan. And that's
why the realm of Manson
Mercibles has 100% safety record.
Outside of that tragedy. the
only sub that would go to full ocean depth was Victor's sub
until 2023, when the
chinese government created a three man sub.
so there's only two of those in the world. and it
just. It just can't fail to
change everything. Like, emotionally,
psychologically, spiritually. It feels very
serene, but also, it's very serious. You know,
it's very serious. You can feel the gravitas of
it, but it's serene.
Yeah.
>> Jeniffer: And you can feel it so well in the
book, reading your words, it's such a beautiful experience. I
hope everyone will read this book.
Let's open up to questions. Does anyone have any
questions for Susan?
Oh, hi there.
>> Speaker C: I'm sort of curious about how
much money it takes to launch a
rocket up into space. What is the
comparison of the cost to create
these submersible?
>> Jeniffer: Good question.
>> Susan: Yeah. Victor's, submersible,
they all need a mothership, so that adds the cost.
And, Victor's sub was, I think it cost about
$80 million. And then there's the operations.
Like, for every hour they dive, they need about two and a
half hours, 3 hours of maintenance. And, you know, the environment
is just unlike space. It's incredibly
the, pressure. I mean, at the bottom of the Mariana trench, the pressure
is, 20,000 pounds per square
inch. Which one person,
told me is the equivalent of 307 seven
s fully fueled, stacked on top of
it. So that is not an issue that you're going to have
in space. And you need the same kind of a controlled
life support system because every. So, like a lot of the
times people will say to me, well, how do you decompress? Do you need a
decompression stop on the way up? And it's like, no,
that sphere has got to be unbreachable. That
one is four inches of titanium. In
a perfect sphere, it has to be perfect.
and I mean, the trouble that they go to, to build this,
it's just such a feat of engineering. And to give you a
sense of how, I mean, between
2012, when James Cameron became the
third man in history to go down to the bottom of the
Mariana trench, and, sorry, between
1960, when two men for the first
time, one from the navy, one who was
a swiss physicist, went to the Mariana
Trench in, a craft called a bathyscaph,
between then and 2012, when James Cameron
went, that was three people. During that same
time, something like 250
people went to the international Space Station. So it's
a really. The engineering
costs and problems caused by the
saltwater itself and the pressure,
I, think, make it more expensive over the. I
mean, there are three Mars rovers
and two full ocean depth submersibles.
>> Jeniffer: Yeah. And it's like almost all privately funded,
which is just insane to me.
>> Susan: Yeah. The government doesn't fund any manned. Well, no, that's
not true. the national science. There's one, sub
that I dived in fairly recently called the Alvin. It's the US
Navy's research sub.
>> Jeniffer: That's the one on the COVID Yeah.
>> Susan: And, that's it, though. And scientists wait a really long time
for that sub. It's the only sub that we have that does
research. the other tools that they have are
really capable too, like Rov's.
They're really useful for certain things. They can take
amazing. they have fiber optic cables, so you can
get amazing. You can send them into places that are too dangerous,
perhaps, where, you know,
in a place where you might not be able to get a
sub, a sub might get trapped or something.
There are autonomous vehicles. we are just. We're
living through a golden age of finding out what's down
there and science has everything to do with it.
Yeah.
>> Speaker C: My concern would be how did
China, come get involved in
this? Because that's my concern would
be what their reasoning or
desire is to do this and it wouldn't be
just empirical research.
>> Susan: You're quite right. They're all about mining.
you know, it's a little bit like
enervating to know that the US,
does not have any full ocean depth assets.
China does now. And one time when Victor
dived into, one certain area of the
mariana, Victor ended up diving 15 times into
the Mariana trench, into the challenger deep, which is the
deepest spot, and took down twelve
different people, including the first female,
scientists. And, one thing that they found when
they were down there, because nobody had been there,
was a whole bunch of fiber optic cable.
and keep in mind, he was in Navy
intelligence for 20 years, and he believes that
the chinese government is using some of their full ocean
depth assets to put listening devices at
depth that nobody else can, find
them. And that they knew that the sub was
coming and would be traversing the trench. And so they
cut the instruments and left the cables. Leaving
cables as entanglements is one of the most
dangerous. Subs
don't implode. Except for the titan, subs do not
implode, but they get entangled in cables
sometimes. so that was kind of crazy.
And, china has something like ten,
ocean research vessels, and they
also have two subs. One goes to
6500 meters with three people, and the other one
goes to, I think, 4000 meters. So we have one
6500 meters sub, they have
111 thousand meter sub, one 6500
meters sub, and one 4000 meters or 5000 meters
sub. And, they have ten. They also have,
like, a whole chain of ocean
universities. They are playing the
long game and investigating the deep ocean
in a way that America is absolutely not
doing. And, I hope that
changes.
>> Speaker C: I'm hoping that even if the government isn't, our
government isn't willing to fund that. They're being
apprised of that and have the
understanding of what the potential could be if
they don't m put that on
their, wish list or to do list that they
need to. I mean, space travel is fine,
but.
>> Susan: This is where we live, right?
>> Jeniffer: Exactly.
>> Susan: Oh, man. yeah, no, I
don't want to.
>> Speaker C: Be or be behind China on
anything related to our survivability here on
earth.
>> Susan: Right. And, you know, if
something happened, one of the reasons we have the
Alvin is because a submer,
two. Let me see if I get this right.
two us planes, a B 52 bomber and an
aerial refueling plane, ah,
collided over the Mediterranean and a
hydrogen bomb fell into the Mediterranean at a depth
that we, and I think this happened in like the
fifties. Don't quote me, but it's around that era.
and there was no vehicle
of any kind that could get this out
and you couldn't just leave it lying around there. so
they created the Alvin. so we do have this
one sub and we have some pretty good rov's
but the French have a 6500 meters sub, the
Japanese have a 6500 meters sub. The only
subs for the Heidel zone are Victor sub, which
is now privately owned for scientists
and hasn't got the ability to
do the heavy duty science work like,
installing instruments or recovering instruments. It's more
of an observation and has a manipulator on for taking
samples of sediment and fauna. But like
some of these subs, like the Alvin have,
it's like going down with a portable, like,
garage.
and the chinese sub is so big it
travels with its own crew of 80
technicians.
>> Jeniffer: It's crazy.
>> Susan: It's got a bathroom in it and believe me, they
don't have bathrooms. And So
yeah, if anything happens
below 6500 meters, any of
our assets, anything like that, we have no ability to get
it. Not even an rov. We
don't. But Woods Hole is working on this and they may have some
Rov's soon, but it's an astonishing
gap in security, I think. And especially when
you consider that all of our information runs
through seafloor cables and there
are hundreds and hundreds of seafloor cables and
those are incredibly easy to access if you can go
down there and do it right. Yeah. So
that's a very interesting point. Yeah.
Thank you.
>> Jeniffer: And with that, I think this gentleman. Can I
get one more question? Yes, sir.
>> Susan: It just seems hard to believe the navy with all of our submarine
force are not studying all this and have
no motivation to do that.
>> Jeniffer: It seems incredible.
>> Susan: Well, they have woods hole and they have scripts
and yet it's the vehicles and, you know, a
submarine. we don't know exactly what depths the subs
go to, but let's just say it's.
Russia had a sub that could go down to 20,000ft. It was called
the loric and Russia had some very
strange subs and the Lashark was like a pearl necklace.
So sphere, sphere, sphere, sphere with tunnels between
them and something happened to it. I think it
caught on fire and they all died. And of course it was
completely secret. It could be that the US has
some vehicles like that, but I think I
would know about them. Actually. I have
some pretty good contacts, and it's confirm or
deny kind of thing. But,
the submarines can't go very deep. They really can't.
Like, I would say 600.
It's not a submarine thing. It's something else.
>> Jeniffer: Yeah.
>> Susan: Yeah.
>> Speaker C: Well, I would just add on there, I'm retired from the
Navy. But my feeling would be is it's not that the
Navy's not interested. It's also an matter of
funding.
>> Susan: Yeah.
>> Speaker C: And if you can't get that point across,
because that's the first. I'm so glad I came,
because I have no understanding of this at
all. And this is serious and
feels very serious.
>> Susan: Yeah, totally agree.
>> Jeniffer: It is very serious.
>> Susan: It's 95% of the planet.
Victor is a great emissary for this. You
know, he's still, I
guarantee you there are people in the Navy that have, he's
debriefed. Yeah.
>> Jeniffer: Well, please buy a book. Get it signed by
Susan. She's gonna be in the back.
>> Susan: And.
>> Jeniffer: Thank you. Oh, she's gonna be signing up here.
>> Susan: Yeah. Oh, shoot.
>> Jeniffer: All right. Can people get up here?
>> Susan: Thank you so much for coming.
>> Jeniffer: Okay. Yeah. Thank you.
>> Susan: Thank you. Jennifer.