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In Our Time
The Mariana Trench
00:58:04
Misha Glenny and guests discuss the exploration of the world's deepest ocean trench.
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- [00:00]
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- [00:46]
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- [01:19]
Melvyn Bragg
This is in our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time Archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode Description Wherever you're listening, I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In 1875 in the Western Pacific, the crew of HMS Challenger discovered the Mariana Trench, which turned out to be deeper than Everest is high by some two kilometres. Now, trenches like Mariana form when one tectonic plate slips under another and heads downwards towards the earth's mantle, and there are around 50 of them globally now. Some people used to think that it was too dark and deep for life to exist there. Others imagined monsters lurking at the bottom of the ocean. The truth has proved to be more intriguing than either of those. With me to discuss the Mariana Trench are three people who were all veterans of this kind of environment. Alan Jamieson, Director of the Deep Sea Research center at the University of Western Australia John Copley, professor of Ocean Exploration and Science Communication at the University of Southampton and Heather Stewart, Director of Kelpie Geoscience and Associate professor at the University of Western Australia. Heather, I'd like To come to you first, can you just describe the Mariana Trench to us? How big is it, where is it and if we could see it, what would it look like?
- [03:00]
Heather Stewart
Yeah, fantastic. The Mariana Trench is what's called a subduction trench. And what it looks like is this long curved deep within the western Pacific. And that's formed as you introduced through a process of plate tectonics. So we have denser oceanic lithosphere. So the Pacific Plate, that plate encompasses the entire Pacific Ocean and that is being thrust and pooled underneath the adjoining continental plates. So this process of plate tectonics by which these oceanic plates are getting taken down into the mantle and recycled, that downward flexure causes these ultra deep parts of our world, most famously the Mariana Trench and the other trenches that surround the Pacific, the so called Pacific Ring of Fire. And that's how these ultra deep places are formed. And the maximum depth of the mariana trench is 10,925 meters. And that's about 98 times the height of St. Paul's Cathedral, which is just. It's a really hard number to sort of visualize in your head when you start to think about these sort of deep water environments.
- [04:12]
Melvyn Bragg
And how long is it exactly?
- [04:13]
Heather Stewart
It's about 2,550 kilometers long. And it sort of arcs around the Mariana Isles in the western Pacific there.
- [04:23]
Melvyn Bragg
Now, you're all experienced divers in these terrains. Heather, what's it like to go down a trench?
- [04:31]
Heather Stewart
It's absolutely incredible. I mean, all three of us around the table here have been in submersibles. But from my personal point of view, there's the moment when you're sitting on the sea surface and you get the clear to dive call. And that color change as you start to fall through the, the water column. And the change from the sort of clear waters on the sea surface through the brightest shades of blue, down to absolute pitch blackness. But then of course, all of that, you're sitting in silence. And that is so humbling as well as very, very exciting because of course, after a few hours, you start to come to the seafloor in these sort of deep subduction trenches. And I've been lucky enough to dive to the bottom of the Tonga Trench. But that moment when you turn on the lights of the submersible and you start to see the sea floor coming up underneath you is absolutely fantastic. And as a geologist, knowing that you're the first person to set eyes on this seascape, if you will, but also starting to look and your brain is already starting to process what you're seeing out of the viewports and trying to put that into some sort of geological context. You know, are we landing on sort of soft sediment, sea floor, or are we coming down on rocks? What type of rocks are there? Are there any structure in those rocks? Are we seeing fish faults, you know, what life is encrusting and are being associated with that habitat down there. So you're constantly taking this information in and trying to form a sort of hypothesis and that you're testing during the submersible dive itself. But, I mean, it's absolutely. You know, the very first dive I did, the pilot sort of joked that, you know, he had to turn up the oxygen because I was getting very excited, so I was using up more oxygen in the environment inside the sub. But. But it's truly being there and sort of seeing it yourself is something that can't be replicated through other means.
- [06:20]
Melvyn Bragg
Fascinating. And, Alan, I believe that you have gone amongst our guests the furthest down the Mariana Trench. Can you tell us about that experience?
- [06:31]
Alan Jamieson
Yeah, it was a good few years ago now, but it was a mistake. It wasn't really supposed to happen.
- [06:39]
Melvyn Bragg
How can you go down the Mariana Trench by mistake?
- [06:42]
Heather Stewart
I woke up one morning.
- [06:43]
Alan Jamieson
It wasn't planned. We went there to do. I think it was four or five dives on the deepest place on Earth. And it was like. I think the first one was the third time it's ever been done. And no one thought we'd ever do it. They figured that we'd probably get one in, maybe two before the sub breaks or we run out of time or there's weather or whatever. And for some reason, we just did one every two days for a week. And we got all. We ticked all the boxes because some of the dives are to do with the classification of the sub. Some of them because the owner wants to do it at the time. Other ones were to do with the manufacturer. And we did four. Nobody expected us to do that. And so interesting. The guy called Dom Walsh, who was the guy who did the first dive ever in 1960, he was with us and he came in one day and said, there's another one. It's time for another one. Do you want to do it? I was like, yeah, sure, yeah. And he said, well, where do you want to dive? And I said, well, I don't really want to dive. Challenge of deep, because we've just done it four times and there's actually nothing much there.
- [07:35]
Melvyn Bragg
That's the deepest bit of the Marianne spot.
- [07:36]
Alan Jamieson
Challenge Deep. Yeah. Yeah. We've done it 22 times now. So I was right, there isn't much there. But I said, I want to go next door. There's a place next door called Serenity, which is like 10,700. And there was reasons to believe it would be slightly more interesting. So. Yeah. And before, not next morning, we were down at 10,700 and something meters and we found these big sulphur mounds and all sorts of interesting stuff. It was brilliant. So it wasn't planned, it wasn't really supposed to happen.
- [07:59]
Melvyn Bragg
What are the challenges for the submersibles themselves? I mean, because they must be operating under immense pressure and yet they've got to sustain an environment in which humans can live or exist for four or five hours or whatever.
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Alan Jamieson
Yeah, there's two parts to it. So we've gone down to environments which are, pressure wise, are about 1 ton per square centimeter, if not a bit more. So the engineering for that is actually relatively easy because it's linear. So you just make things thicker, thicker. We use titanium inside the sphere and we use all sorts of materials that can get us back to the surface and so on. But the other problem we have is not just the pressure at depth, is actually the distance from the surface. So communication with the surface is very difficult for all sorts of safety reasons. We have protocols in place where we have to contact the surface every 15 minutes, every half hour has to be a voice one. So we have an underwater telephone where we can talk to the surface. That's the biggest problem, is trying to punch an acoustic signal through seven miles of water and then trying to listen for them coming back. And we've kind of nailed it now. But some of the other problems we have is tracking is quite often. Well, up until recently there hasn't been any products on the market that we can use to track where the sub is. So for the last five, six, seven years, we've been doing it with no tracking at all. So we've got very rudimentary tracking, but not like you would in shallow water. So there's a certain degree of challenges to do with just being very, very far away from the ship as well as the pressure at the bottom.
- [09:18]
Melvyn Bragg
How does the sound travel back and forth between the ship and the submersible?
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Alan Jamieson
We have a thing called an underwater modem and it's an old Australian military device that we push a button and say hello, and then you release the button and it scrambles into the acoustic. Signal goes up and you can kind of tell it's weird. It scrambles into Acoustic stingle. But you can tell who's talking. It's really bizarre. You can almost hear the accent in it and it's. And then they hear it and then they talk back. And you have a little. We've got text messages now as well, which is quite nice.
- [09:45]
Melvyn Bragg
John. These depths are often called hadal zones. What does that. What does that mean? What is a hadal zone?
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John Copley
It's from the Greek for Hades. So the idea is this is the greatest depths of the ocean. So this is. There are these popular schemes for dividing the ocean up into different depth zones and giving them names, but environmentally, ecologically, most of them don't make sense. The hadal zone is one that in a way does make sense. If we just say, well, that's ocean trenches. Ocean trenches tend to start at about 6,000 meters. But that said, there are some environments in the deep ocean that aren't ocean trench, which are at more than 6,000 meters, which is where these zones kind of breakdown. But in a way, you can think of it as a shorthand for being ocean trenches.
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Melvyn Bragg
Right. That's nice and simple. How was it discovered? The Mariana Trench in particular.
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John Copley
So you mentioned in your introduction, HMS Challenger. So this is a global voyage of discovery in the early 1870s. And it has two main goals. One is scientific, to map the ocean floor, understand its undulations and the extent of life in the deep ocean. And also a strategic goal as well, and that's to scout the routes for submarine telegraph cables, which are such a huge technological revolution of that time. I mean, I think right up there with the invention of the printing press and the impact they had on the world.
- [11:03]
Melvyn Bragg
Yeah. So we had telegraph cables across the Atlantic in the 1860s. Presumably the Pacific was even more challenging.
- [11:10]
John Copley
Exactly. And people wanted to wire up the British Empire. So one of the goals of HMS Challenger and the reason it got funded was this strategic goal. Anyway. 23rd of March 1875, HMS Challenger has been. It's in the Pacific and it has been pushed off course by baffling winds as they record in their log. And they decide to make a depth measurement where they've ended up. So they lower a weighted line and they record a depth of 4,475 fathoms, which is 8,184 meters, I think. So that was the deepest place that they measured on their voyage. It's not actually the deepest point in the ocean and it's not even the deepest place that had been measured at that time. So where they made that measurement, they were actually about 25 kilometres from what we now recognise as the deepest part of the Mariana Trench, the Challenger deep, and about 2,700 metres short of that. And it wasn't then thought to be the deepest part of the world's oceans, because a year earlier a ship called the USS Tuscarora, which was also scouting submarine telegraph cable routes in the Pacific for the United states, had measured 8,513 meters, much further north in the Pacific, in what we now recognize as the Kurile Kamchatka Trench. So HMS Challenger found this deep depression literally by accident, near the Mariana Islands, and there were no other depth measurements in that area for another 24 years. So they found a deep spot, they didn't know it was part of a trench. It wasn't called the Mariana Trench at all at that time, and it wasn't even the deepest known point at that time. So if we jump forward a little bit, 1894, HMS Penguin measures just over 9,100 metres in the southwest Pacific in what we now recognise as the Kermadec Trench. So that then becomes the deepest known place on Earth, but not for very long. 1899, a ship called USS Nero, again scouting submarine cable routes near the Philippines, measures 9,636 metres. That becomes the deepest known place on Earth, what we now recognise as the Philippine Trench. And that stayed as what people thought was the deepest place on Earth until 1951. And these were individual depth measurements and people didn't realise they were part of these trenches and these features that Heather's described that came also, though at the end of the 19th century. So there was a map published of the depths of the world's oceans by a cartographer called Alexander Supan. And he showed that some of these places where there'd been these big depth measurements were trench like features, not actually the Mariana one on his map, but he identified the Aleutian Trench. And he also proposed that these things should be named after the geographic features that they're near to, so that people don't get confused.
- [14:00]
Melvyn Bragg
So that's why Mariana turns out to be Mariana, because it's near the Mariana Islands.
- [14:04]
John Copley
Indeed, and Challenger Deep, which is what it was called before on an earlier map in 1877, that becomes eventually the deepest known bit of the Mariana Trench.
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Melvyn Bragg
Heather, what do we see when we get down to the bottom of the trench on the, on the beds of the trenches in geological terms? Is this like a sort of conveyor belt of rock?
- [14:28]
Heather Stewart
Yes, indeed. And that sort of really large scale, big geological processes frame, then we're looking at a conveyor belt of oceanic plate coming into the trench, being bent and thrust down underneath that overriding plate. So that's where we get that conveyor belt. But in terms of when we're actually looking at the seascape, you know, it can, it can vary quite a lot. So we have what are called hemipelagic and clay rich sediments that drape that seascape, that topography of rock. But once we're actually in the trench, we don't only have that oceanic plate, which are composed of volcanic rocks like basalts and things, we actually have the forearch. So all these rocks and sediments are also getting scraped off onto the overriding plate as it's being subducted in. So we get this melange of sediments and rocks, but we can also see bits of exposed mantle in these trench environments as well. So these are sort of gabbros.
- [15:26]
Melvyn Bragg
What does mantle look like?
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Heather Stewart
It's actually really cool. And we've got some amazing footage of that. And it's these massive dark rocks, but they've got really big major faults and joints in them. So I mean, it's very characteristic and it's got a lovely sheen to them as well. So in terms of what you're looking at out of the viewports and what you're looking back on the video that's recorded, it's a very striking environment. But what's also really cool is that when the process of subduction is happening, it almost starts this catalyst of other things that are happening. So we see mud volcanoes and we see vent systems. You know, there's a. The Shinkai vent system is on that forearc of the Mariana Trench. And it's not like what we might think in terms of black smokers and you know, those amazing documentaries that we see where you've got that sort of pump of black material kind of coming out of the sea floor and those very dark, dark brown, big edifices and stuff. These vent systems in the Mariana, the Shinkai vent system, for example, are made out of carbonate. So they're white, pristine white chimneys that are preserved on the sea floor. And the fluids that are erupting from these systems are being sampled and tested for their chemistry. So we're looking at what minerals are being dissolved by the water that is being taken down by this process of subduction and is percolating through the rock mass and it's dissolving out all of these minerals and then it's reprocessing, precipitating them. And that's when Alan was Talking about the sulfur mounds in the Sirena Deep, you know, the sort of bright yellows, I mean, the colors that you can see on the sea floor can take your breath away. Some of the other footage that we have from the Java trends, for example, I mean, Alan, we've got yellows and blues and all of these chemosynthetic bacteria that are living off the mineral content coming out of these vents and the cracks and fissures on the seafloor.
- [17:19]
Melvyn Bragg
And just explain to us quickly what turbidity currents are.
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Heather Stewart
So turbidity currents, you might like to think about them as underwater waterfalls where we've had something, whether it's through gravity. So it's just, you know, you've got a slope that is being loaded with sediment. Much like whenever you're driving through the highlands and you look, especially after heavy rainfall, you might see the sides of the glen that you're driving through. You know, you can see, see the material is sort of slipping downslope. So we can get the same comparable processes underwater in these trench systems as well. But then of course we've got the more dramatic, perhaps the more sort of well known events that are triggered by earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, for example. But basically these trigger movement of vast quantities of material downslope, huge speeds as well. And it is a really great mechanism for transporting not just sediment from higher slopes down into these trench basins, but also it's transporting food and nutrients for the communities that live down there.
- [18:24]
Melvyn Bragg
Well, let's go on to those communities. And Alan, let me ask you, what kinds of life are we seeing at these depths?
- [18:32]
Alan Jamieson
There's all sorts. So there's, they're kind of, you can kind of categorize all deep sea animals into two different categories. There's those that go down to about 8,000 and there's those that go beyond that. So when you look at things like fish, prawns, urchins, brittle stars, sea stars, squid, octopus, you find all them deeper than 6,000 meters, but they rarely ever go beyond 8. So it's obviously there's a barrier there which is quite difficult. If the species has adapted to high pressure and go beyond that, they go all the way and they don't seem to care about pressure at all. So there you've got things like little tiny hoppers called amphipods. There are things called isopods and polychaetes, which are pill bugs and scale worms, and there's normal looking jellyfish, there's anemones down there. But once this seems, once an animal seems to have evolved to break the 8,000 meter barrier. It almost adopts this complete resilience to pressure. And sometimes their depth range can be 5,000 meters, which is incredible. So at the very, very bottom, there's one animal which I think has become kind of really important to us because we're finding it at the bottom of every single deep trench we go to. You have to be deeper than about 8 and a half to 9,000 meters to see it. And it's just an anemone, it's called a galathianthemum and they live in a little tube and they look like a little white flower, really quite beautiful looking thing. But we can't find them anywhere else except at the very deepest points of the really deepest trenches. So there's, there's that. Everything else tend to be quite small at the deepest points. But when you, as I say, when you get to 8,000, there's quite a lot of large animals still kicking around, which is people find quite surprising. And they don't look weird, if anything kind of goofy.
- [20:01]
Melvyn Bragg
And you, I believe you discovered or named one called the snailfish.
- [20:06]
Alan Jamieson
The snailfish is a known family. We discovered the Mariana snail. We discovered heaps of fish. We just don't name them anymore because it's too difficult. But yeah, we find snailfish all the time. So we named the Mariana one because it was quite prestigious. So for quite a few years it was the deepest fish in the world. Unfortunately it's not anymore. There's one further north off Japan which is slightly deeper. But they're all kind of the same. They all look goofy and weird and they're sort of flaccid looking little things. But they are the deepest in the world. And weirdly, the family of fish, of snailfish are not actually deep sea fish. They're shallow water fish. They've completely taken over. So there's 300 species. You find them at bestuaries and stuff. And snailfish are now a thousand meters deeper than actual proper. Well, I consider proper deep sea fish.
- [20:46]
Heather Stewart
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- [20:53]
Alan Jamieson
No, it's some other company.
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- [21:03]
Alan Jamieson
That would have been helpful yesterday.
- [21:05]
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- [21:48]
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- [22:20]
Melvyn Bragg
John, how do these animals and the anemones and so on, how do they withstand pressure at 10,000 meters below? How does it happen?
- [22:30]
John Copley
Well, the challenge of pressure for animals in the deep sea is really often not what we perhaps imagine it is. So I mean, to illustrate that, I was the last expedition I was on in the Arctic, we took an ordinary uncooked chicken egg and we sent it down to three and a half thousand meters on the outside of one of our deep diving vehicles. That's about the average depth of the world's ocean. And it came back without a crack on it. And that's not because it's somehow stronger than our submersibles. You know, we then cracked it open in the, in the galley to show that it was, it was, it was an ordinary egg. That's because think about that chicken egg. What's it made of? It's made of solid matter for its shell and it's filled with liquid. And those are pretty much incompressible forms of matter. You know, if you imagine dropping a stone into the Mariana Trench, it sinks down into the ocean. It doesn't at some point suddenly implode because there's no gas filled space inside it for it to get squashed down into by the pressure. Similarly with if you Get a syringe of water, you know, stick your thumb over the end, try and push down that plunger, you won't budge it. Compared to a syringe of air, the same kind of thing. So for deep sea animals whose bodies are made of solid matter in their tissues, liquid body fluids, in a sense, they're not mechanically withstanding pressure, a difference in pressure between their insides and their outsides. In the same way that our deep diving vehicles do. Our vehicles have to maintain, you know, a gas filled space inside them at normal atmospheric pressure, either to keep us alive as occupants or to keep electronics dry if it's an uncrewed vehicle. But it's not like that. For deep sea life there is a challenge, but it's about what happens with molecules in cells, but it's not about mechanically withstanding pressure.
- [24:06]
Melvyn Bragg
Can you just go into that a bit about the molecules in the cells? Because they act in a rather different way than the molecules in our cells do.
- [24:16]
John Copley
So some of the problems with pressure, for example, involve protein molecules folding up into the right three dimensional shape that they need to be to work as enzymes. And you know, we need the enzymes and carrying out all the living processes in cells. And that's a big problem because high pressure traps water molecules on the unfolded protein as it's being kind of put together inside the cell and prevent it from folding up into the right shape to do its job. So that's one challenge of pressure. And so a lot of deep sea animals have these small molecules that we call chaperones that help to pull the water molecules off the unfolded proteins so they fold up into the right shape. Sometimes the animals have a different kind of protein structure. Their protein is made of a different sequence of these little like bead like amino acids, which again helps them form the right structure under pressure. And it's also the cell membranes, the things that enclose the cells. Now that's normally a very fluid bilayer of lipid molecules, fat like molecules under high pressure that can become very rigid and that can stop, you know, messages getting in and out of the cell and so on. So again, a lot of deep sea animals have different composition of lipid molec molecules in their, in their membranes to overcome that.
- [25:27]
Melvyn Bragg
So a fundamentally different evolutionary path from.
- [25:30]
John Copley
From say humans, well, adaptations, adaptations to their environment. Just tweaks, if you like, as to, you know, nature coming up with a solution to these challenges.
- [25:40]
Melvyn Bragg
Heather, back to what we were talking about. You mentioned the landfalls and earthquakes and volcanoes. How stable is that? And does that impact on the the animals living at the, at the bottom or in the trench.
- [25:56]
Heather Stewart
In terms of stability, I mean, it is a very dynamic environment. You know, being part of the, the Ring of Fire, the Pacific Ring of Fire. Of course, you know, we've got volcanic eruptions, we've got volcanics going on, we've got the earthquakes and everything. It is quite what we might call a sort of slippy boundary at the Mariana. So we don't, we see a lot of earthquakes. I mean it is an active subducting margin, but it's not stuck. There are other margins that are sort of become stuck and then we' huge buildup of geological forces that are trying to sort of unstick that margin. That's where we get these huge earthquakes that cause such devastation in places. So in terms of the Mariana and.
- [26:35]
Melvyn Bragg
Those earthquakes trigger tsunamis and things like that.
- [26:38]
Heather Stewart
And they can trigger tsunamis, for example. Yeah. So as I was saying earlier, in terms of keeping the movement of nutrients and sediments from the shallower forearc down into the trench basin, so that's a constant evolving and occurring process. So there it is, constantly changing. And we've got some amazing footage from up and round the corner a little bit, the Japan Trench, where you can see rock failures and the block failures. So sort of going back to the basics of sort of geotechnical elements, we can see that happening not just in this rock mass, but also with this semi consolidated. So the sediments that are a bit stuck together and are starting to behave more like a, a coherent rock than a soft squishy substrate. And we can see those failure planes and mechanisms happening as we traverse in the submersibles and the remotely operated vehicles that we're using.
- [27:32]
Melvyn Bragg
Alan, what happens when you go down there? What do you see? Is it a pristine environment?
- [27:37]
Alan Jamieson
No, sometimes there are places that look very pristine, but I mean, I've probably done about three, probably over 30 dives now and I don't necessarily recall any dive that haven't seen something man made. Probably everyone, maybe, maybe there's one or two that haven't. Some of them are really bad. So I remember doing a 10,000 meter dive on the Philippine Trench, which was the, the spot where the Galathea expedition in the 50s had found a rock. That, which was a Galathan, Galathian one, by the way, the one I was mentioning earlier. So, so we dove on that spot and we filmed them alive and that's great, but we also saw something like 19 plastic bags on the same dive just floating around. You could read the logos off them there was an eco friendly plastic bag came past and you're like, really? Is that how eco friendly is that? You know? And then there are other dives which more serious. So going back to Mariana Trench, diving the Challenger Deep, the whole western side of Challenger Deep, which is where Don and a guy called Picard Dove in 1960, is now a no go zone because that whole area is just covered in discarded fiber optic cable. And so someone in the last 10, 20 years, maybe it's got something to do with listening to the naval base on Guam or maybe it's in guys in the military, I don't know. But people have been doing a lot of experiments at the deepest point. And now we have hours and hours of footage of fiber optic cable either just discarded or actually taut and tight across. And if you're in a self propelled vehicle like a sub, you do not want to be anywhere near fiber optic cable. Very, very dangerous. And it's everywhere now, but it's only on Challenger Deep, it's not anywhere else in the Mariana, and it's not seen anywhere else in any other trench. So there are things like that where that's kind of almost deliberate that someone's been doing something there. But one of the weirdest ones I think was last year we were down, it was 5,000 meters somewhere just on the equator and four days north of Samoa. And we were driving along and doing the usual thing. I was telling the pilot to go and have a look at this, go and have a look at that. And we saw this red thing. I thought that's weird, I wonder what that is. Let's go and have a look. And pulled up alongside it and it was just a packet of Chinese cigarettes just lying there thousands of miles away from anywhere, as if someone had just dropped them out their pocket. And you know, it's, it's bizarre. It's really quite bizarre.
- [29:42]
Heather Stewart
It can really throw you as well when you're sort of going like, because you're so focused on trying to, you know, record as much scientific data and information and the commentary that as you're going along in the sea floor and then well out of the gloom you sort of see, know. And I think, you know, on the Nova Canton trough as well, I'd dive in six and a half thousand meters. And I said to the pilot, I was like, oh God, there's something over there, like that's gonna be. And it was a cardboard box. It's just, you know, you're like, oh, oh sugar. I've just like deviated from the plan. Because I thought that was gonna be something, you know, geologically or ecologically monumental. And it's like, oh, okay, yeah, the.
- [30:19]
Alan Jamieson
Puerto Rico trench was pretty bad. The Puerto Rico had gates and magazines and plates and Coke cans and beer bottles. But I mean, it's sitting in hurricane alley. So I think when these hurricanes, it's not necessarily a story of human folly. When you have tsunamis and hurricanes, a lot of material just goes offshore. And if you happen to be next to a trench, it's going to end up there. And it's quite depressing to see.
- [30:39]
Melvyn Bragg
Although the point you make about fiber optic cables on Challenger Deep seems to me to be quite interesting.
- [30:46]
Alan Jamieson
The coolest thing about Mariana in terms of man made naughtiness is there's an SR71 Blackbird, you know, the old aircraft from the 1960s, a big black, really cool looking thing. One of them crashed. They didn't want the Chinese to get it, so they took it out of Guam out to the Mariana and through off the back. You can see pictures of it online. So somewhere in the Mariana there's a Blackbird, which would be the coolest dive ever.
- [31:09]
Heather Stewart
I beg to differ.
- [31:10]
Alan Jamieson
You know, they haven't released the coordinates for exactly where it is.
- [31:13]
Melvyn Bragg
I bet the Chinese have found it by now.
- [31:16]
Heather Stewart
Just not telling anyone.
- [31:17]
Melvyn Bragg
John, I want to come back to the, to the animals down there. How do they feed? What are they feeding on, apart from human junk?
- [31:26]
John Copley
Most of the time they're feeding on what rains down into the trench. And trenches are interesting because they act a little bit like a funnel in that there's this stuff that has the poetic name marine snow. But basically it is poo of all the animals that are living in the ocean. And it is dead bodies of all things living in the ocean. And this marine snow sinks down, it does get concentrated in the trenches through this sort of funnel effect. And so the bottom of your trench, I mean, it's combination of both a toilet and a mortuary. But that's what things will make a, make a meal of. And they'll make a meal of anything that they can. So oddly enough, some of the animals that live at the bottom of trenches are able to digest things like wood, which a lot of animals in the ocean don't bother with. It's quite hard to kind of crack the molecules in wood to make a meal of it. But if that sinks and nothing has made has eaten it on the way down, that's what you get at the bottom of the trench, then there's a strong driver for any organism that can make a meal of it. Now, there are some places in trenches, though, that are really exciting chemical fueled islands of life that break all the rules. What we call cold seeps. They're, as Heather mentioned, where you've got these plates subducting. You get the sediment being scraped and squeezed on the subducting plate and that squeezes whatever's in that sediment out of it. And so if that's had rotting organic matter in it over, you know, many, many millennia, that's broken down into methane, methane gets pushed out of the seabed. You get these what we call cold seep communities. And that's where life is incredibly abundant. Now, they haven't been in terms of animal colonies in cold seeps in the Marianas, but they have been seen in the Kurile, Kamchatka and the Aleutian trenches, more than 9,000 meters deep, which are the deepest known islands of this chemically powered life which we have on Earth, which are hugely exciting.
- [33:18]
Melvyn Bragg
Alan, from a scientific perspective, the Mariana must be an achievement to go down there. But is it the most interesting scientifically or is it just the feather in your cap of having been deeper than anywhere else?
- [33:32]
Alan Jamieson
It's a bit both. It's not certainly not the more interesting. I think it's most prestigious and it's sometimes when you have something with a prestigious name to it, it does kind of cloud the reputation it's got and stuff. It's all from a purely scientific point. I think we've spent a lot of time going to other trenches. We've done Marianne about six times, but for various different reasons and different boats and different nationalities, whatever, there's been reasons for doing it, but no one trench represents all other trenches. And so it's the deepest one, therefore it's inevitably there. It's not the same as the rest of them because it's deeper than them. The biggest problem in Mariana we've got is that one of the only big trenches in the world that does not lie along a coastline. So all that organic matter that comes into the surface that rains down as food, it's the only one that doesn't have it. The rest of them are somehow attached or associated with a continental landmass. It's also quite low to the equation near the equator. And so there's not a lot of food in the surface there anyway. So it is what we call oligotrophic, which means it's in an area of the ocean that doesn't have a lot of energy. Energy and it doesn't have any Seasonality. And so there's lots of reasons why Mariana doesn't represent anything other than the fact it's super deep. So if the question you're trying to ask is what happens at mega deep depth, I guess it's your one. But if it's, the question is what happens in trenches or what happens across a massive depth range, there are many other places you need to go to as well. The analogy I always use is like, if you're trying to understand high altitude biology or high altitude flora and fauna, how much would Mount Everest tell you about every other mountain in the world? Not very much. It would tell you a little bit about altitude, but it won't tell you anything about a mountain goat and Kilimanjaro.
- [35:03]
John Copley
Right.
- [35:05]
Melvyn Bragg
So do I get John in that case? It's the implication of what Alan's saying that the environment in Mariana is actually very static and constant compared to others.
- [35:18]
John Copley
It depends on what timescale we're talking here. Now, everywhere in the deep ocean is changing as a result of impacts of human activity. So climate change affects all of the ocean, including the deepest depths in the ocean. And it affects it in, in several different ways. I mean, we are getting warming of waters and that is getting deeper and so on. But fundamentally for deep ocean, what's changing is the flow of oxygen that reaches the deepest parts of the ocean. So all the animals that we've been talking about, they're animals, they need oxygen. That oxygen is dissolved in seawater. Where does the oxygen come from? Well, it dissolves from the atmosphere into the ocean in the polar regions, the surface where dense deep currents form and sink, and then they spill out across the ocean basins. So life at somewhere like the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the oxygen that those animals are consuming began its journey into the deep actually in the Antarctic. And it takes several hundred years for it to kind of flow and get there. And that flow is getting weaker as a result of climate change.
- [36:18]
Melvyn Bragg
Yes. Although does that mean that climate change is going to affect them in 300 years time?
- [36:23]
John Copley
Time it does. Yes, indeed. And that change is already on its way from changes that we've made in the atmosphere. So we already know that overall, globally, the deep ocean will end up with about 10% less oxygen than it had in pre industrial times. Now it's very patchy in different bits, will be affected more than some others. But overall, globally, it's on track for 10% less than it had already. It's going to change the distributions of species around the world. Some can tolerate that, some can't their distributions are going to, are going to shift. And that's a change that's already baked in. That's already happened. It's on its way to the deep ocean. It just hasn't reached the deepest places yet.
- [37:01]
Melvyn Bragg
Heather, it strikes me that when you're looking at something like the trenches, it involves a lot of different skills. It involves geologists, it involves engineers, it involves biologists, all sorts of people. How do they work together? Do they understand what the other is doing?
- [37:21]
Heather Stewart
Very much so. I think, I think I can speak on all of us. I think the most rewarding expeditions have been the cross multidisciplinary ones. And each discipline thinks a little bit differently. The engineers to the geologists, to the physical oceanographers to the biogeochemists. And I think that fusion and that sort of spark between the different disciplines and making, hearing about their research questions and their concerns or their technological challenges or what aspects they're trying to overcome, and then you can sort of, oh, well, actually, you know, we, we do it this way or, you know, you can take and learn from each other. But I mean, you know, I've worked, you know, over 20 years now with all these different disciplines and learned so much. And I think in order to undertake successful research, you need to be able to work with, together with everyone in these environments. And it's certainly I've learned a lot in terms of, you know, I'm a geologist, not an engineer, in terms of the, the challenges, in terms of how you build vehicles to put down to these sort of depths and things, you know, working with Alan, for example, as an engineer, you know, it's fascinating and it's allowed me to think better and more strategically and more creatively about how to sort of address geological questions. You know, like how can we get physical samples and cores from these deep areas without using a big drill ship like the Japanese vehicle Chikyu? You know, trying to think a little bit more out of the box. But I think also in terms of the big discoveries, I think if you look back at how those expeditions and how the people on board have worked together, that's helped contribute to some of these big discoveries that are making in the deep sea now as well, it.
- [39:06]
Melvyn Bragg
Struck me in this discussion how remarkable the research into biology has been. John, I've got a question for you. How do you study these animals when presumably if you bring them up to the surface, they're not going to survive, are they?
- [39:25]
John Copley
They don't survive. No. They don't explode. Okay. Because of the pressure thing that we talked about in reverse. Okay, they're not. There's nothing in them to expand as they come up if it's solid tissue and liquid body flu. But we can learn a lot from the specimens that we do get. Of course, we can look at the adaptations they've got. We can. We can look at what molecules are in their cells and so on. These days, though, we're also able to preserve animals actually at the seafloor, which is really useful. So, for example, you can collect a specimen and you can process it in a way that its tissues are preserved in something that allows you to see what genes are actually switched on at the moment that you encounter it, so that, you know, otherwise. We can do that with specimens we bring up, but of course, they'll have gone through a lot of changes on the way up. But actually being able to preserve things in situ is giving us really big insights in what we call genomics and transcriptomics, seeing what genes are actually being switched on in that organism in its environment to understand how it's adapted to the conditions down there.
- [40:28]
Melvyn Bragg
Historically, Alan, people have believed that this is an area of giant monsters and all sorts of mysterious creatures. Do you encounter that sort of attitude today, despite the fact that we now have a much better idea of what's down there and they're not giant monsters?
- [40:48]
Alan Jamieson
Yes, all the time. It's one of the most common questions you get is about. Questions about Megalodon and stuff like that. And, you know, I think when you start looking into the energy in these systems, it could never, ever support a large animal, especially not that kind of size, but even bigger than a. A shoe is quite difficult to maintain at those kind of depths. So it's just all to do with education, I think, in the way in which deep sea is portrayed in the media and things like that. I think we can probably do it a bit more responsibly and stop referring to monsters and creatures and stop making movies about it. And. But then, you know, little snailfish aren't going to make a Hollywood movie.
- [41:22]
John Copley
Right.
- [41:22]
Alan Jamieson
So, you know, they don't even have any teeth.
- [41:25]
Melvyn Bragg
Well, they did make a Disney movie about a clownfish, so maybe, maybe the snailfish could come next. Yeah, who knows? I'm very interested in between deep sea vents and deep sea mining. Is that something that you have to engage with, that debate about whether the minerals should be exploited in this way?
- [41:49]
John Copley
I mean, I work primarily on deep sea vents, which we don't get in subduction trenches. In the same way these black smoker systems and so on. Yes, deep sea, that is one of the environments that's being targeted for a form of deep sea mining. There are others as well. People get very excited these days about the manganese nodules. That's a totally different environment, totally different set of ecological kind of challenges involved there for deep sea vents, the active ones, which have these incredible colonies of species living around them. We don't actually need to do any more research to say that mining active deep sea vents would risk extinction of species. And we've been very clear to that to the international regulators, and I hope when they do draw up some kind of code for this activity in the future, that'll be the top line for this environment, is that active deep sea vents must be protected.
- [42:37]
Melvyn Bragg
And one final question. Is the Mariana Trench less interesting now because it's pretty well known what's down there and it's not as active as the other trenches, or will people still want to go down? Heather?
- [42:55]
Heather Stewart
I think, as Alan hinted at, just because it is the deepest, of course there's still going to be a lot of interest and activity down there. But I mean, for me, you know, the South Sandwich Trench, the Tonga Trench, the Kermadyc Trench are much more interesting from a geological perspective in terms of the activity going on there. We're managing to document sort of volcanic pyroclastic density currents at, you know, and the, the rocks that have been deposited by those features at 8,000 meters wash depth, which has never been done before. So we're starting to look at, at new processes. We're getting little glimpses as to volcanic processes at depth in these environments now that hadn't been noticed before. So there's still a lot to be learned from these environments, but I think certainly sort of widening and working elsewhere and engaging with other researchers as well.
- [43:48]
Alan Jamieson
There's also another way to look at it because the Mariana is massive, right? If the volume of the Mariana is about the same as the volume of the Himalaya, and the size of a submersible might, let's say, is the size of a Land Rover. So if you put a Land Rover on the Himalaya and said, look, how long is it going to take for you to document everything on this thing? It's going to take you a while, right? So you could theoretically spend your entire life just working on that thing. But again, within the, the bookends of it being this is what happens in the Maliana Trench, you can't necessarily make bigger statements about this is what happens in every trench. But it's still Valid. And the Mayan Trench, weirdly is actually five different areas. There are subducting sea match which partitions. So from an animal at Challenger Deep, for example, could not get to the top of Mariana Trench without having to decompress by thousands and thousands of meters. So technically it's five bins of really deep ones. So yeah, there's all sorts of interesting things to do.
- [44:35]
Melvyn Bragg
My thanks to John Copley, Heather Stewart and Alan Jameson. And next week it's the Roman arena and the role of gladiator fights in imperial politics. Thank you for listening.
- [44:48]
Heather Stewart
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guest guests.
- [44:55]
Melvyn Bragg
So tell me, what did we miss out? John?
- [44:59]
John Copley
I, I personally I'm really fascinated in kind of like the inner space race that took people to the bottom Mariana Trench for the first time and the context for that. There were various private individuals who were designing these vehicles and engaged in this work and innovating and, and so on. And then the French Navy wanted to get involved and then they had a bit of a bust up and eventually the US Navy got involved and bought up the technology at a time when they were during the Cold War. This is around about 1960 when they were really flexing their muscles publicly in terms of capability in the ocean. They sent a submarine underneath the North Pole for the first time. They surfaced one at the North Pole. They had the first circumnavigation submerged by nuclear submarine, and they wanted to be the people to get to the deepest point for the first time. So that whole story, I think is.
- [45:48]
Melvyn Bragg
A very interesting mirroring the space story to some extent.
- [45:52]
John Copley
The Russia, the Soviet Union really weren't involved in sending people. I mean, they were sampling deep trenches in the late 1950s and looking at life down there, but they weren't looking at these kinds of demonstrations of capability in the same way.
- [46:07]
Melvyn Bragg
Heather, what did we miss out?
- [46:09]
Heather Stewart
I think the evolution of the Pacific Ocean as a whole is really interesting. So if we go back 200, 300 million years, we had a supercontinent called Pangaea and it was surrounded by a super ocean called Pantalassa. And basically Pacific is the last remnant of that ancient ocean. And that's why it's so much older than the Indian and Atlantic. So they opened at 200 million years ago as the supercontinent Pangea started to break apart. That's when the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean started to open. But what's really cool is that in the northwest Pacific actually just near the Mariana is where they sampled the oldest oceanic crust in 1989. And it was drilled by a big international collaboration called the Ocean Drilling Program. And that was a hundred. It proved rocks that are Jurassic in age 170 million years old. And that is just fantastic. And I love the fact that, that the Pacific Ocean is this old ocean made of old geological rocks, the oldest oceanic rocks that we have on our planet. And that's why the Pacific Ocean technically is contracting as it's getting consumed rather than the Atlantic and Indian that are still opening and widening at the same time.
- [47:31]
Melvyn Bragg
So that's still the breakup of Pangea.
- [47:33]
Heather Stewart
Yes, yeah. And I love that, I love that the geological timescale is still sort of trundling on and it's just this, this conveyor belt of sort of motion. So if we think about plate tectonics and the Earth being made up of these jigsaw pieces all sort of moving relative to each other and some are sliding past one another. That's a strike slip sort of margin, or one's being consumed by another. That's your convergent, that's your subduction areas. And other ones are sort of where we get new crust being formed. And I just love that conveyor belt of evolution.
- [48:03]
John Copley
John, the thing that surprises me as a biologist though, when I hear about this geological history is, is that nevertheless, even though the Pacific is the oldest bit of ocean crust we've got, it's still really, to me, very young, you know, compared to three and a half billion year rocks on land in some places.
- [48:19]
Heather Stewart
Yeah. Well, 4.6 billion year central Canada and even the northwest of Scotland, that's some of the oldest rocks on our planet is 4.3 million billion. Sorry.
- [48:29]
John Copley
But I think it shows how dynamic the ocean is.
- [48:32]
Heather Stewart
Yes.
- [48:32]
John Copley
You know, that's the thing, it's much more dynamic than the land.
- [48:36]
Melvyn Bragg
Yeah, but Alan, anything you feel we missed out?
- [48:40]
Alan Jamieson
I've got a funny story about a party.
- [48:42]
Melvyn Bragg
Go on then.
- [48:43]
Alan Jamieson
So, yeah, so. But the Challenger Deep was not discovered in 1875, it was discovered in 1952. Right. By challenger two. Right. So I read this book once, it was called the Hydrographer's Tale and it's, it's by a guy called Steve Ritchie who ended up Rear Admiral Steve Ritchie. He was the highest ranking hydrographer in the Royal Navy and he had done the soundings for the D Day landings. He ended up on Challenger 2. And he sounded what is now Challenger Deep, the 10th. And I remember talking to my boss. I used to work in Aberdeen for many years. I Said to my boss, like, this guy's just the guy who discovered John's Deep. My boss said, yeah, he lives just up the road. I was like, you're kidding me. So I ended up at his 93rd birthday party and he lived in a town called Colliston and his family had been there for 200 years. And we turned up thinking, there's going to be this frail old man in this cottage.
- [49:24]
Heather Stewart
I really hope there's rum at that Admiral story.
- [49:28]
Alan Jamieson
He was wearing some like African poncho and he's house is all like oil and canvas drawings of some harbour in Borneo somewhere. It was brilliant. Unfortunately he died a couple years later, but it was great to just, you know, it's like I've actually met and went to the birthday party with the guy, discovered something.
- [49:39]
Melvyn Bragg
So hold on, let me get this straight. The Challenger Deep was only really identified by him.
- [49:45]
Alan Jamieson
And it's murky because someone gets a deep sighting which says there's something big there. But then refining just exactly where the deepest point is takes a little time.
- [49:54]
John Copley
So Challenger Jeep is a feature on a map, turns up in 1877. Okay. But it's not, you know, that's before there was a Mariana Trench or whatever. And it's just. And that's one measurement. And they've just drawn a kind of a circle around by the way.
- [50:05]
Melvyn Bragg
Did they have, did the Challenger, the original Challenger, did they have to have rope going down 5km or something?
- [50:12]
Heather Stewart
They did. I wrote it down actually. Hang on, let me. Yeah, it was a phenomenal. I was. They covered 70,000 nautical miles, but they had had 144 miles of Italian hemp for the soundings that they were doing. And quite often they had a bucket on the end of that rope so they could take like a little sample of the, of the sort of sediment that was down there. But I mean imagine have like keeping track of all of that wire.
- [50:40]
John Copley
And it wasn't actually the absolute cutting edge technology at the time. So Lord Kelvin, the absolute polymath genius, 1872, he'd invented a, a wire sounding machine using piano wire to measure the depth. So what they do is they lower a weighted line and they kind of look at the rate at which the line is paying out and when it slows down, they assume the bottom of it is now touching the seabed and it's, you know, in really deep water. In really deep water, yeah. The ocean currents can take it. And so anyway, that's why a lot of the early measurements are way off for things. Lord Kelvin's piano wire machine is much more reliable now. He sent one to the HMS Challenger but they couldn't get it to work properly. It was still a prototype and so they just shelved it and they went with, tried and tested hemp but they.
- [51:25]
Heather Stewart
Still had, was it 12 and a half miles of piano wire with them as well.
- [51:30]
John Copley
And actually that's something that because of the popularity of upright pianos amongst the middle classes of the 19th century led to mass production of piano wire which meant it was available in these huge lengths for ocean sounding.
- [51:44]
Heather Stewart
Yeah.
- [51:44]
Melvyn Bragg
What do we use for ocean sounding today?
- [51:47]
Alan Jamieson
Acoustics sound.
- [51:48]
Heather Stewart
Yeah.
- [51:49]
Melvyn Bragg
But very, very accurate, right?
- [51:52]
Heather Stewart
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, yeah, we know that, you know, Challenger Deep for example is 10,925 meters.
- [51:59]
Alan Jamieson
Plus or minus 6.
- [52:00]
Heather Stewart
Yeah, plus or minus 6. Error margin, you know. And it's, you know that's, that's using sort of a sound to sort of. It goes from the shape ship down to the sea floor, bounces off the seafloor and comes back up. What's interesting, it was the meteor in 1926 used sound to measure water depth for scientific purposes. It had been used by the military pre 1926 but the first use for scientific purposes was actually in the South Atlantic in the South Sandwich Trench. And it was an expedition and they measured. We went back and surveyed it in 2019. Yeah. And we were within one meter of what they recorded in 1926. It was the Germans that had been out on RV meteor and it was just, you know, that way that's just. It was almost 100 years later there is a story. So it's meteor deep.
- [52:54]
Alan Jamieson
In between the ropes and the acoustics there was a thing called bomb sounding which was brilliant. So you stand on the back of the boat, you light a stick of dynamite, you throw it off so it blows up on the surface. And there's a kid in the hut who pushes a stopwatch when the bang goes off and then pushes a stopwatch when he hears the echo.
- [53:08]
Heather Stewart
And then you divide that length of the stock on the. The dynamite coming back.
- [53:14]
Alan Jamieson
Yes. You basically listen to the bang. So you come back, you know, the speed goes around 1500 meters per second. So you divide the time it takes between the bang and the echo by 1500 meters per second. That gives you the, the depth. And so some of the. There's a guy called. Was it Bob Fisher and Kuhlanberg and these guys, they would sort of draw it based on these things. And there's hand drawn one in a Philippine trench. I think we went There. And tell you what, it's not bad. It's not bad. Given they're just lobbing dynamite off the back of the boat. There's a scientific paper with Bob Fischer stood on the back deck with a. Basically a case of TNT just like lighting it off a cigar and just lobbing it into the ocean.
- [53:48]
Heather Stewart
I hate to be writing the risk assessment for that trip.
- [53:51]
John Copley
And then eventually when we get echo sounding after bomb sounding, that was in part because of the time Titanic. So there was a German inventor who after Titanic came up with a way well can we detect, you know, potential collision obstacles using sound looking ahead. And then people said well if we turn that vertically we can use that to measure ocean depth.
- [54:08]
Melvyn Bragg
Got it.
- [54:09]
Alan Jamieson
That's safer.
- [54:10]
Heather Stewart
Yeah, I bet it is. Just a little bit.
- [54:12]
Alan Jamieson
Yeah, yeah.
- [54:13]
Melvyn Bragg
I was also very interested by the way in the, the fact that the fiber optic cables are only at Challenger Deep. And I, I can just imagine the type of the endless covert activity that is going on in places.
- [54:27]
Alan Jamieson
It's not, it's little bit. It's everywhere. Yeah, it really is and you don't want to get tangled up in it. Cuz you have no idea if it's 1,000 meters long or 10,000 meters, but it's everywhere. We don't know if there's something on the end of it. So when you, whenever you're going along there, you've got to keep your eye out and, and as soon as it's seen it's cut the dive just move. We probably, we actually drew a map of it and tried to recommend an area to not take a tethered or an untethered vehicle because it's, it's pretty bad.
- [54:50]
Melvyn Bragg
Why do you want to get rid of the, get rid of the fiber optic cable? Because presumably you can reuse it it if it's.
- [54:58]
Alan Jamieson
Oh, there's lots of different reasons. There's some of.
- [55:00]
Melvyn Bragg
It's obviously I'm not sure who we.
- [55:02]
Alan Jamieson
Think'S doing it, but some of it's.
- [55:03]
Melvyn Bragg
Underwater cable which is.
- [55:04]
Alan Jamieson
Yeah, it's about getting live communication back to the surface. So there's ways in which you can do that by having a surface buoy that gets winched below the surface so no one can see it. So you can if you imagine you had a flotation device with a beacon on it 100 meters under the surface and it's connected all the way to the bottom. Now you can listen to submarines coming out of Guam which is, let's be honest, this is what's got something to do with that. But you don't want someone being able to steal your listening device. So you have a little winch that then comes up for an hour, beams all your information by itself, and then pulls itself back down again.
- [55:31]
Melvyn Bragg
Right.
- [55:32]
Alan Jamieson
And so there are those in the area, we think. But to. To get that technology right and to get stuff down there, fiber optic is the way to go. And the vehicle John talked about, the fiber optic rov, we had that out and it was. It was. It was terrible. We happened to be there when it imploded. The whole thing imploded. It was just very experimental, but it was just a complete disaster. But all that fiber optic is gone now. It's all lying in the bottom of the sea again. So it's, it's, it's.
- [55:59]
Heather Stewart
I think that's what I was hinting at. It's like today, you know, we don't have anything apart from submersibles that go that depth. Technology is moving forward and I think we need to move away from those sort of.
- [56:08]
Melvyn Bragg
Yeah.
- [56:08]
Alan Jamieson
There was two solutions to it. One was super fine fiber optic. The other was super heavy. Japanese went real big heavy stuff. And then the Americans went super thin and both turned out to be the wrong. And then some. Someone's recently did a completely untethered one and that got lost as well. So it's not easy. So we're going somewhere in between. Feels like the right thing to do.
- [56:25]
Heather Stewart
If it was easy, other people would. We wouldn't be doing it as a group.
- [56:29]
Melvyn Bragg
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've come across quite a lot of fiber stuff in terms of drones as well now.
- [56:34]
John Copley
Yes.
- [56:35]
Alan Jamieson
So that's the same stuff that was in the American. It was torpedo wire, so it just. It just falls out. So the faster you go, the better it works. If you stop and try to do anything, it breaks.
- [56:44]
Heather Stewart
Which of course, from a research perspective, we're wanting to stop to pick up the samples of the communities and the rocks and things that are down there. Was it something that occurred to me when you were talking about the life down there? And I think it's one of the funnier things. It's the snailfish eating the amphipods. But of course, amphipods eat soft things that have fallen down and are decaying. So what do the snailfish do to stop the amphipods eating them from the inside out? Out?
- [57:09]
Alan Jamieson
They have an internal jaw, so they have two mouths. They have the big mouth at the front that you suck an animal in. But if they just swallowed it, the animal then just bore itself out, its stomach so it has a second jaw inside its head that when it swallows, it just grinds the animal to make sure it's dead.
- [57:22]
Melvyn Bragg
Oh my God.
- [57:24]
Heather Stewart
What is really from a non biologist sort of, you know, and that's what I was talking about when, you know, you pick up things from lots of different disciplines so that, you know, if you come across something unusual or noteworthy that isn't from your own discipline, you know that it's important. But when I'm looking back at some of the video and watching the snailfish, so you see them sort of suck up the amphipod, but then as it's the second internal jaw is working, they sort of collapse and they have a little food coma on the sea floor as this is working, don't they? You just see them? Yeah, they're just sort of sat sort of, you know, doing a beach, well, what, what my family call a beached whale impression. After you've had too big a meal. They're just all sort of sat on the sea floor going, oh crikey. But really, at least it means I'm not going to get consumed by my dinner from the inside out. You know, it's just funny things like that that keep you going. But I mean, I think as we're sort of exploring more and more of these environments and stuff, you know, that the discoveries that we're making makes it all worthwhile. It makes the sort of trips away from family and friends.
- [58:25]
Melvyn Bragg
But also, the other thing that I failed to ask you about, about which I should have done, was about what the implications of the research are for human health, because that was a fascinating aspect of it in terms of, I think it's to do with the enzymes and the protein folding. Is that right, John?
- [58:42]
John Copley
Well, there are a lot of insights we can get from deep sea animals. I mean, I'm not so familiar with actual trench organisms, but it's something I keep an eye on. And you know, deep sea life can inspire us in two different ways actually for material science. So I was co author and description of a species called the scaly foot snail and it's teaching us how to make better solar panels because it can create tiny crystals of a metal mineral at room temperature. And this is what people want to be able to do for solar panels. And now people have been able to recreate this process in the lab with kind of off the shelf ingredients. I also was involved in describing a species of deep sea shrimp which has got tiny little bristles on it which have inspired a new nano material that's fantastic for Heat and sound insulation. So there's those sorts of things and then there's a lot on the biomedical side, one of the chaperone molecules that you get in a lot of deep sea life in laboratory studies, you know, can help to rescue human proteins that get bent out of shape, which involved in quite a few human diseases.
- [59:44]
Melvyn Bragg
Well, look, thank you all very much. This has been absolutely fascinating. Really appreciate it. Ah, Simon.
- [59:53]
Alan Jamieson
Does anyone want tea or coffee or rum or something? No, I'm alright, thank you.
- [59:57]
Melvyn Bragg
The chances of finding a glass of rum in the BBC are actually less than zero.
- [60:01]
Alan Jamieson
Thank you very much. Thank you.
- [60:03]
Melvyn Bragg
Yeah, brilliant. Thank you.
- [60:04]
Alan Jamieson
Thank you.
- [60:05]
Heather Stewart
In Our Time With Misha Glennie is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production.
- [60:13]
Paul Kenyon
I'm Paul Kenyon and for Radio 4 and the History podcast, this is two Nottingham lads.
- [60:20]
Melvyn Bragg
When the invasion happened, it was completely hell on earth with the sounds.
- [60:23]
Alan Jamieson
The sad thing about war is people lose their empathy and their humanity.
- [60:28]
Paul Kenyon
I want to know how two men from Nottingham ended up on opposite sides in the war in Ukraine and what became of them after a chilling encounter in a prison in Donetsk.
- [60:39]
Alan Jamieson
Out of all the places in the.
- [60:41]
Melvyn Bragg
World where I meet someone from Nottingham.
- [60:42]
Alan Jamieson
It'S in captivity on two sides of the conf conflict.
- [60:46]
Paul Kenyon
It's a story about how and why you pick a side in a war that's not your own. You can listen to two Nottingham Lads first on BBC Sounds.
- [61:02]
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