Exploring the Deep Sea w/ Helen Scales
EPISODE #44
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Marine biologist Helen Scales shares her insights into the vital role that the ocean plays in sustaining life on earth, the innovative new technologies humans are using to explore the seabed, and how a rich diversity of deep sea creatures might hold the key to new scientific advances.
Helen Scales is a marine biologist, diver, surfer, broadcaster and writer who's spent hundreds of hours underwater watching fish. A familiar voice for the oceans, she's pondered the mysteries of the deep sea with Robin Ince and Brian Cox on BBC Radio 4's The Infinite Monkey Cage and donated an imaginary tank of seahorses to The Museum of Curiosity. She's a regular writer for BBC Focus and BBC Wildlife magazines. Among her radio documentaries she's explored the dream of living underwater and followed the trail of endangered snails around the world and back again.
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Luke Robert Mason: You're listening to the FUTURES Podcast with me, Luke Robert Mason.
On this episode I speak to marine biologist, Helen Scales.
“Understanding that what we do at the very deepest parts of the ocean will have an impact on what happens out here on land and for the lives that we and every other living thing on this planet leads. I think that is the challenge.”
- Helen Scales, excerpt from interview.
Helen shared her insights into the vital role the oceans play in sustaining life on earth, the innovative new technologies humans are using to explore the seabed, and how a rich diversity of deep sea creatures might hold the key to new scientific advances.
One of the most important ecosystems on our planet is one we know least about. Our deep oceans are a mysterious, almost alien environment, completely inhospitable to humans, but utterly integral to our survival. It's often said that more is known about the surface of the moon than our own seas, but increasingly with the development of new robotic tools and technologies, we're learning more and more about the vast array of strange giants and mysterious creatures that make the ocean home.
In her new book, 'The Brilliant Abyss', Helen Scales challenges us to rethink our relationship with this most vital part of our planet, and consider how human activity might be threatening our ability to truly benefit from the wonders of our oceans. So, Helen, why do you find the deep ocean so wildly fascinating?
Helen Scales: Well, I think it has to be something to do with the fact that it is so big. I mean, it's so very, very big - and we can come to try and wrap our heads around that perhaps in a minute - but because it's so vast and because it is so varied. It's not just this big empty space. It's full of life, but life that we just don't even know - I want to say - the half of, but not even the 10th of. If we want to understand life on earth, we have to look to the oceans. It's the biggest living space on the planet. 90% of the available volume in which organisms can occupy is the deep ocean.
When we look there, we just find creatures that live in such ways that it blows our minds. Just simply that they can survive in permanent dark, ridiculously high pressures, and everything else at the deep brings. They just bring this ridiculously varied and wondrous variety of life that I just don't think we get on land as well. So you're right. It is like an alien space, but it's here, it's Earth. It's what we've got on our planet. It's just constantly surprising, I think, once you get down there and start looking.
Mason: In a funny sort of way, the sea has always been seen as this weird obstacle. It's something to overcome. We either fly over it, or we travel over it to get to more land. There seems to be so much of it. Often, and historically, that vast body of water has been seen as frustrating. Can you give us an idea of just how large and deep the sea really is?
Scales: I really like that, where you describe it as being an obstacle. You're absolutely right. I mean, how many of us have sat in an aeroplane and looked out of the window - flown across the Atlantic, say, going to America - and just been like, "Yup, still ocean." Stuck three hours later, "Still ocean." I remember flying over the Pacific. That is the biggest ocean, so that of course is absolutely enormous. Even there, I'm only seeing the surface. That's for starters. The oceans cover seven tenths of the surface of the planet. That in itself is already pretty astonishing. But then you go down. The average depth of the ocean is four kilometers, and it goes much deeper than that.
In the book, actually, one thing I did just to try and visualise in our minds how deep and how big the oceans are was that I asked a physicist friend of mine who knew how to do these calculations. I said, "Okay, well, look. If I take a glass marble, like a normal glass marble that perhaps you would have played in the school playground with in olden times, and if we sailed off to the deepest part of the oceans, and we dropped it over the side of the boat, how long would it take to get down to the bottom?" It would basically pass through all these different layers where we see varying different types of life depending on how much light gets down there. You've got the sunlit zone at the top, which is where sunlight still reaches. I think it takes six or seven minutes to fall through that sunny bit to around 200 metres. It keeps on going into the twilight zone where the sunlight is just running out. There's not enough sun for photosynthesis. It takes about an hour to get through there. It goes into the midnight zone beyond a thousand metres where there's no light at all. Keeps on going, keeps on going, and then to get to the very, very deepest part and down into these ocean trenches - you might've heard of the Mariana Trench which is the deepest of them. There's a whole bunch of trenches that are deeper than 10,000 metres and the Mariana goes down to just shy of 11,000 metres. It would take something like six and a half hours to go from the top to the bottom, which is just bonkers, really.
It's a very, very long way to the bottom of the ocean. Then the volume, I mean, can multiply that up, basically. The area times the depth, and then you've just got a massive, enormous volume of water in the deep.
Mason: Well, that vastness is the thing that makes it so difficult to understand. As I alluded to in the introduction there, it's often said that more is known about the surface of the moon than our deep oceans. But in actual fact, that's an unfair comparison, isn't it?
Scales: I think so, yeah. In a way it's a bit 'oranges and apples'. Or is it 'oranges and pears'? I can't remember what you're not supposed to compare. I guess it comes back to this idea, perhaps, of the water obstructing or getting in the way of us. That's why it's hard to know what's in the sea, because all of the water is in the way. We know more about the surface of the moon, because we can just look at it. Okay, we need a telescope, but even with a simple telescope, you can get a pretty good idea of what the near side of the moon looks like. The other side's a bit harder. Fair enough. But we can't do that with the ocean. We can't simply look at it. We have to find other ways of understanding what's there and discovering even the physical shape of the deep ocean, the deep sea bed. So that, I think, in one way.
But also there's a size factor. You could peel off the surface of the moon and lay it out in the deep ocean, and it would be about 10 times the size. It is so much bigger. The bottom of the sea - the sea bed - is so much bigger than the surface and the moon. Then we've got all the volume of water above it.
For me, actually, the thing that really nails it is the fact that nothing lives on the moon. There's nothing, particularly in my mind as a biologist - oh, I'm going to upset the geologists - but especially interesting about the moon.
Mason: What about the rocks, Helen? The rocks!
Scales: Nothing lives there. As far as we know, nothing has ever lived on the moon, whereas so much lives in the ocean. There's so much more to find. So of course we don't know as much about the deep ocean as we do about the moon. Of course we don't.
Mason: We've established how massive and amorphous the sea is, but also the deep is so critically and massively important to sustaining life here on Earth. What is the relationship between the activity above the waves and beneath the waves?
Scales: So it's this idea of the massive volume of the oceans which is a key to all of this. Combined with the fact that water has a very high heat capacity. I think this is a very key thing in terms of the functioning of our planet, and in terms of keeping it habitable for us creatures out on land, who really prefer it not to be too hot or not too cold.
Because water absorbs heat, it's really distributing heat from the sun around the planet. If it wasn't for the oceans, basically the equator would be getting hotter and hotter and hotter the whole time. The poles would be getting colder and colder. But because we've got this enormous volume of water that's constantly moving around, and we've got these great deep currents, like huge rivers flowing through the deep ocean, it's distributing this heat that's pouring down from the sun. The heat at the equator is basically traveling away from that, helped by the spinning of the planet and various other forces too. Ultimately there's this circulation around the oceans, which is drawing heat away from the equator and distributing it along with nutrients, and along with oxygen. Everything that creatures in the ocean need also comes from that water circulation - the oxygen, the food - and that is the basis of so much of life on Earth as well. We've got this whole life support system going on, simply by the very simple fact of the oceans and the water moving that heat around.
Then we can add on top of that things like carbon. The oceans are an enormous store of carbon dioxide, and that combined with the heat means that if it wasn't for this vast volume of water we have - most of it which is in the deep ocean - we'd already be facing a ridiculously catastrophic version of climate change. Something like 90% of the excess heat that's a result of anthropogenic carbon release and the greenhouse effect has ended up in the deep sea, in the oceans. If we didn't have that, I think it's thought that surface temperatures and models would be something like 30 degrees warmer than they are today. It's just unbearable to think about what the planet would be like without the oceans.
Then I could throw into the mix the idea that actually life probably began in the deep ocean. We don't know for sure, but there are theories that this is where life on Earth began. If ours is the only inhabited planet in the universe - we don't know yet, but if it is - then this is basically how life full stop began. It's a pretty useful and pretty important part of life on Earth that it began in the deep, potentially. The huge volume of the ocean moving around makes everything possible on the rest of the planet, too.
Mason: Well, any British listeners will have seen the Guinness beer ad and would know that that is indeed true, Helen. The idea that the Earth began in the seas and ends in the pubs of England. Would you go as far as saying that the fact the Earth has oceans is what makes it so special as a planet, especially in this solar system?
Scales: I would say so. I'm no space scientist, so I can't definitively talk about what's going on in the rest of the galaxy or anywhere else. But certainly from my perspective, I think the oceans make things considerably more interesting on this planet and potentially on others too. I am really fascinated at the idea that there could be life on other planets, I just know we haven't yet found it. But it is those water containing planets where it's most likely, I think. Those are the places where we're looking to, potentially, for other life forms. That's sort of based on the idea that it would be something similar to the life forms that are formed here on Earth. But why not? It's a good place to start looking.
I guess it's the possibilities of life in water. Certainly, I guess that's what draws me again to the deep ocean on this planet. It sets up a whole set of interesting conditions that living creatures have to adapt to, and the responses to those conditions. The fact that there's not much sunlight, there's not much food, the pressure is incredibly high, it's pretty cold. Life in many parts of the deep isn't exactly dense. I wouldn't say there's always a huge biomass, a sort of abundance of life in a particular place. It can be very diverse, but it isn't always enormously abundant, so finding food and mates and so on can be quite tricky.
But the responses to those restraints, if you like, and the ways that evolution has kind of solved the problems, if you like, of living in the ocean has come up with all these incredible solutions. For me, that's why I think we need to look to the oceans to really understand life on Earth, because it is so big and there's so much diversity from strange jelly creatures that swim through the open dark waters of the midnight zone throwing light bombs at each other, to the fact that sperm whales and other mammals can dive down into these enormous steps and somehow survive down there and go hunting after giant squid. All sorts of things like that just show us more about the possibilities of life, I think, than we're ever going to learn if all we did was look at life out on land.
Mason: Well you might not be a space scientist, but it does feel like you're an expert on aliens. Everything we seem to find underwater looks so alien. What is the weirdest thing about the sorts of life that does live in the deep abyss?
Scales: Oh, there's so much weird stuff. I mean where to start, really? Some of the stuff that I find the most surprising is some things that just seem almost counter-intuitive. I've mentioned that we get a lot of creatures that you might call jellyfish. They're actually a whole bunch of different organisms from different parts of the animal family tree, but we could sort of generically call them the jellyfish, sort of wobbling around in so many different shapes and forms. You've got things like siphonophores, which are these colonial organisms that grow to, as we know, at least 50 meters long. This great big combination of different animals living together.
You might imagine that a jelly based delicate life form is almost the opposite of what you would expect to find under these crushing pressures. By the time we get 4,000 meters down to the abyssal depths of the ocean, we're talking about pressures that are hundreds of times higher than inside a car tyre. It's like having an elephant stepping on every square inch of your body. So why delicate creatures? Surely what we would see would be tough things that can withstand pressure, made out of bricks or something. I don't know. But what we see are what look to be these ephemeral creatures that you could waft your hand past and they would fall apart. To some extent this is true, but it's the response to pressure that we wouldn't necessarily expect. You actually don't want hard parts, and being made of jelly - which is basically gelatin, a very thin solution of the protein collagen - makes a quite cheap way of constructing a body.
Being very efficient is quite important for life in the deep ocean. Because as I've mentioned, there's not much food down there, so you don't want to have bodies that require massive amounts of food to be able to race around and, and keep yourself alive. But if you can just float gently along and not require too much energy, it's actually quite an effective way to be successful in the deep.
We do see not only jellyfish life forms wobbling around, but lots of other organisms kind of go towards that. We see things like fish that are much more kind of jelly based than they would be up in the shallows. They're replacing parts of their anatomy with bags of jelly. That means they can float. They don't sink too quickly. That saves energy, and it's not a very energy-hungry type of tissue to produce.
You also see swimming worms. The ancestors of the worms who would have been crawling along the bottom of the seabed, but some of them got up into the water column and took off. A lot of them have evolved really weird, jelly based bodies as well. I guess part of it is the unexpected, but then actually you look again and think actually, that does kind of make sense - when you see those things living in the deep.
I should also mention one of the big surprises that was discovered in the deep ocean. It was about 40 years ago when hydrothermal vents were first discovered. These are these deep, hot springs you find in cracks, in the seabed at the edges of tectonic plates. Initially it was just geologists who were interested in these things. They went down in a submersible to go look at them and were completely blown away when they found that they were covered in a real oasis of life. They're sometimes called 'black smokers', these big, tall chimneys that form from these mineral rich fluids that come up through the seabed. It took a couple of years to work it out, but what they had found was a completely alternative form of life on Earth. Nothing on land had come anywhere near to this strange ecosystem that lives in the dark, completely cut off from sunlight.
Up until then, it was thought that life on Earth basically needs energy from the sun. That was how biology worked as far as we knew, up until the late seventies. It was energy from the sun that comes down, powers photosynthesis - these plants, and seaweeds, and algaes and things - that can grab CO2 from the air and use the energy from the sun to make carbohydrates and food for everything else. That was it, basically. That was the basis of life on Earth. Then these geologists are like, "But hey, guys. There's life down here. How on earth is this all surviving?" It turns out that there is another way to live and there's another way to get energy. This is this dark alternative to photosynthesis, called chemosynthesis. It's a very similar process of basically fixing carbon dioxide, but doing so with chemical energy rather than energy from the sun. It opened up this whole new view of what life could be, again. It was a complete mind shift in terms of understanding the possibilities of life.
Again, that takes us sort of to imagine what else might be happening elsewhere in the universe. If we already have two very different ways of living here on Earth, maybe those also have happened elsewhere, or maybe there's even other options for providing this source of energy, which underpins living cells and living organisms. You've got to have some source of energy.
I love that about the deep ocean. It's just like, "Hey, did you realise we were hiding down here all this time and no one knew about it?" Now we're still learning so much about these events, and what lives there, and how it's all possible.
Mason: Well, there we go. It's life, Helen, but not as we know it. What can we actually learn from these sorts of extremophiles, that we can apply back to life here on Earth? I'm discovering that we have this multitude of life that lives deep under our seas that doesn't require sunlight. Can we then apply the way in which they live to some of the things that we're developing here on Earth?
Scales: Yeah, I mean that's one of those big things that we're always asked when we're finding out new things about life on Earth. Are these organisms doing something that could be useful for humanity? Are they producing something that we could find interesting? That very much applies to the deep ocean. Partly because it is so big and we're learning so much, and there's so much novelty down in the deep that we all just stumbling across all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff that just hasn't come up elsewhere.
One example is the search for novel chemistry that could be useful in, for example, medicines. I'm sure you're aware of things like the problem of rising antibiotic resistance and the fact that we only have a limited supply of different types of antibiotics. At the moment, we're using them to such an extent that they are creating these resistant strains of some pathogenic bacteria. So we really need more ways of defending ourselves against microbial attack, and the deep ocean is a wonderful place to find those things.
Again, it kind of comes back to this weird set of conditions down there - the high pressure, the lack of food - and it means that not only are the organisms that live there weird and strange, and different from anything on land - but their very chemistry is as well. We're finding big, strange, toxic, powerful molecules amongst things like corals that live down in the deep ocean. You think of corals only living on coral reefs, but actually they live almost all the way to the bottom, down to at least 8,000 meters. They don't have the algae in them that corals in the shallows do, so they're kind of solar powered - the ones that built tropical reefs - but the ones in the deep are hunters and they sift their food from the water. They also produce incredible chemicals, probably for defense. Again, one thing you need to be able to do if you're going to survive in the deep is not get eaten by something else, because it's a lot of hungry mouths to feed.
There's corals and also sponges - these other weird, but simple creatures - producing incredible chemistry. Scientists are going and finding a whole treasure trove of interesting and toxic. We do want toxic chemicals. Ones that are toxic against bacteria and other pathogens, but in very specific ways and new kinds of pathways towards killing. We're already finding molecules that are effective against things like MRSA - one of those superbugs which have proven particularly tricky to treat in hospital situations. It's going to take a while to come through, but we are finding great new inspirations along those lines in the deep ocean.
We're also finding really cool engineering solutions, too, and inspirations of ways that organisms have evolved ways to solve the challenges of living down in the deep. One of my favourites, actually, is the scaly-foot snail. A very stage occupant of hydrothermal vents. They live in the Indian ocean in the vents that are found down there. These are snails that build their shells out of iron. Now, no other organism we know of has an iron-based exoskeleton or internal skeleton. Wolverine? I don't know if you know, that wasn't iron, was it? That was adamantium or some other kind of metal. There are no iron based lifeforms apart from these weird snails. Their foot - the squashy bit of a snail - is covered in what looks like almost a sort of body armour. These hard, scaly plates on their feet.
It turns out that when they were first discovered, people thought that perhaps those scales were protecting them from some kind of form of attack. That would make sense, if you want to try and not be eaten when you're in the deep ocean. But actually, on closer inspection, it turns out that those scales are defending the snails from a poison that comes from within. Some microbes that are providing this energy on the hydrothermal vents - this chemosynthetic energy - it sits bacteria and other microbes that can produce carbohydrates and can produce food from these chemicals. Things like hydrogen sulfide and methane. These snails have these microbes living inside them. It's like a symbiotic relationship. A bit like corals with tiny algae living inside them up in the shallows, these snails have microbes in a big pouch inside them. They have this interior cultured bacteria, which give them their food.
The problem with all of this is that as well as food, these bacteria produce elemental sulphur, which is toxic to snails. It's a by-product of this chemosynthetic process. The solution to all of this is the structure of these weird scales on their feet. They've got these nanoscopic tubes inside them, and we've basically figured out that this acts like millions - or thousands - of tiny exhaust pipes on a car. It draws herself away from the snail's body. Then the sulphur reacts with iron in the water, dissolves in the water, and forms these metal compounds. This is why you end up with a shiny black snail. They're saving themselves from this chemical attack from within, so they can live happily with these microbes inside them that are providing them with food, but without poisoning themselves.
Then, circling back around to why this is useful for us: Apparently - I mean, I'm no engineer - but apparently making nanoparticles of metallic compounds is very useful, but also very difficult and expensive. The only engineering processes at the moment to do that are really hot and very complex, basically. Here is an animal that does it at fairly normal temperatures. These snails live in water that's about 10 degrees, and they've figured out how to do it. It's nanoparticles of metals that are produced on the surface of these snaily feet.
I think we're a long way off that, but it's just this idea that maybe these engineering processes could be inspired to do something completely different and maybe much better by looking at sort of the way that these snails are constructing their shells and they're scaly feet miles down beneath the waves on hydrothermal vents.
Mason: Well it does make you think, what are all these weird chemical producing creatures actually doing down there? It does feel like the deep sea is this massive recycling plant where deep sea creatures just feed off all these remains of dead sea dwellers. Is that their purpose?
Scales: Oh, what is the purpose of life? I mean, that's a big question, surely?
Mason: Well let's start with the purpose of sea life and then we can come on to some bigger questions later.
Scales: I don't think it has a purpose, really. I would say life started, possibly, on hydrothermal vents. That's one strong theory and contender for the beginnings of the origins of the first living cells that could reproduce themselves and make more of themselves and essentially kind of embody this idea of life as we know it. Then it sort of took off from there.
I mean, honestly, I don't know. Even just the idea of, why does life in the ocean go and inhabit every piece of the open water, every corner of the seabed? Every strange and different place has been occupied by life and something has found a way, whether it's a worm that has evolved to eat the bones of dead whales that fall down from the surface and occasionally end up down there. There are organisms that entirely live on dead bones, like the vampire squid, which looks pretty terrifying but sits there in the mid water and just gently collects what we call marine snow. That's these particles of dead stuff that fall down from the surface, which is the main source of food in the deep ocean, aside from these chemosynthetic microbes that are powering things that hydrothermal vents. Pretty much the only other food that's coming in is this dead plankton and their poo raining down from above. It sounds pretty nasty. We call it marine snow, so it sounds better. These vampire squid sit there and they just basically collect snow. They pack them into snowballs and put them into their mouths, and that's where they get their food. Why have they done that? I don't know, they just did. Life just does.
I guess you're sort of asking about the bigger picture of how it all fits together, and I guess that's what is so beautiful and elegant about the deep ocean. Life is extreme and it is a challenge to survive when there's not a huge abundance of food and of energy down there. Evolution has taken life in the deep down those pathways to survive, but in such a way that it's incredibly efficient. Nothing goes to waste, which is why I think you get such specialisms. You get worms that just eat bones, because if you're good at eating bones and you're good at finding bones, then you can survive as a species, so that works.
As long as things work, they will survive. And by work, I mean find your energy, find a mate, make more of yourself and keep going. That's a successful species. I guess there's just this elegance of efficiency in the deep, which I like so much. The organisms have found ways to survive. Whether it's a snail with these microbes growing inside them or other things on vents that have got various other ways of keeping these chemosynthetic creatures happy. Whether it's a vampire squid, gently collecting snow - they've all found their place within these ecosystems so that the whole thing works.
We're still only just starting to understand how those ecosystems work and, and what all those links are. For example, if we look at these jelly creatures that live all the way through the water column, these things that make light. Bioluminescence is this incredibly common thing in the deep ocean, which I also find wonderful. It makes sense in a world where there's no sunlight, that if you can make your own light that's going to give you an advantage for surviving, finding mates, and finding food. So it happens a lot.
But what we didn't know up until fairly recently was just how important those jelly creatures are within the ecosystem. It was generally thought that they were just these bags of jelly that kind of wobble around and they feed perhaps on marine snow, and that's about it. It's not particularly important in terms of the whole ecosystem. But actually when scientists found ways of looking more carefully at that whole food web, they found that these jellyfish and their relatives and various other creatures that look really delicate and kind of flimsy are actually really amazing predators. They will go out and catch fish. They'll go out and catch squid. Actually, a whole bunch of things do eat the jellyfish as well. So they're really integral to this food chain. They're very important for the cycling of energy through the ecosystem of nutrients, to such a point that we just hadn't seen that before.
It actually took a lot of time in the water, simply just looking at these creatures. We now have these amazing technologies as you mentioned at the beginning, like deep diving submersibles with cameras. Because scientists are going and they're taking hours and hours and hours of footage, it means they can build up this picture of what's actually happening in the deep. They catch images of a jellyfish eating a squid, or a squid catching a jellyfish. One way or the other, and round and round it goes. We get this picture building up from this enormous archive of the deep, of just what's happening down there. I guess I love that as well. I love that it's like a glimpse into this hidden world of which we're still just understanding more about how it all fits together and how life can find a way to survive and thrive in this vast challenging realm of the deep ocean.
Mason: It does feel like the sea is this massive biomass waste processing recycling system. It's utterly fascinating that it's able to process that much biomass, because as you said, there's these giant creatures in the sea too. If it wasn't for these tiny jellyfish and all of these weird creatures in the deep ocean being able to eat bone or process blubber, you'd just have a mass graveyard of these huge whales. I've never quite understood that piece. Why and how can such giant creatures also exist under the sea?
Scales: The body size thing is really interesting, actually. There are studies coming out to show that this has happened a lot, many times in the past. There's been this gigantism, whether it's in fish - you've got giant whale sharks and basking sharks at the moment. There was a whole era where there were giant reptiles swimming through the oceans - plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs - sea-monster type things. Dinosaur cousins swimming around at that time a hundred million years ago or so. Giant whales as well - they've taken that body size thing to a real extreme.
I think there's a bit of a trade off really between body size and your ability to gather food, getting down to the energetics of how an organism survives. One of those weird things about some of these big animals - certainly the sharks - is that they eat very tiny food. They aren't big predators. Whale sharks, basking sharks, mega mouth sharks - which are all the big ones - they eat little tiny plankton, and little tiny fish and things. I think that's an energy trade-off between rushing around trying to catch things that are a bit more active and bigger food, versus just sort of ploughing on and kind of mowing the sea, basically. Opening a big wide mouth that just kind of ploughing through it. Same with some of the bigger whales. The blue whale, the biggest animal that has ever evolved, basically swims around with his mouth open eating tiny, tiny things. But as long as you eat enough of them, you can.
I think those sort of filter feeders are genuinely more common in the more shallow seas because there is more plankton and stuff around to eat. I think being a filter feeder deeper down becomes more challenging. It's not impossible. In the deep you get two things happening. You either get some stuff that grows organisms that evolve to be much smaller than they would in the shallows, or you get some that are much bigger. So you get gigantism and you get dwarfism as well. There's two different evolutionary pressures taking you in different energetic ways. Be small so you need less energy, or be big and have big reserves in your body.
There are amazing things like giant isopods. These are relatives of woodlice that you'd find in your garden or under a plant pot in the local park. The ones that roll up into a little ball if they get scared. Their cousins in the oceans are isopods, a type of crustacean and relative of crabs and lobsters. The ones in the deep ocean are massive. They're the size of rugby balls. The reason that they are very big is that they're basically just fat. It's like having a camel's hump. It's where they lay down these energy reserves, these fat reserves, and they can eat just once every four years or so. Certainly that's what we've seen in aquariums where some of these have been taken up and kept in captivity. They've been completely not interested in food for like four years in a row. They're offered food and they're like, "Nope, I'm good. I'm still eating my fat reserves, thank you very much." That's how they survive. So they're scavenging on things like carcases coming down from above and they've evolved in a way in which they only need one dead whale every four years and they're good, or one dead fish and other things, too.
I guess there's this divergence of strategies in the deep ocean. Being big does sometimes work, and being small sometimes works as well.
Mason: It's that diversity that means the sea has survived so many things. It's been resilient almost to many global extinctions. I just wonder, what can we learn from a system like that when it comes to being able to survive these extreme events that plague a planet?
Scales: That's a really good point, actually. That's something that, again, I'm really fascinated in, and it's the history of life in the oceans. As you say, it's been through these cataclysmic changes at least five times in the geological past, and then possibly now the sixth mass extinction being underway with humanity now.
Let's take the most extreme one, which was at the end of the Permian era, 252 million years ago. It's been dubbed 'the Great Dying'. It was, we think, probably triggered by massive volcanic activity. There was this enormous pulse of carbon into the atmosphere, which led to this incredible cascade of impacts that were felt on land, but catastrophically in the oceans, 96% of life in the oceans was killed off at that point. It was almost back to nothing, but it wasn't. Maybe that is a lesson.
I'm not quite sure how it transfers to what we're doing to the planet now, because things are different now, but at least I think we can see that the oceans do have an extraordinary resilience as a whole in terms of the life that occupies it. Even if you pretty much almost wipe it clean, it will come back and things will re-evolve. It's been these big mass extinctions through the pacing of life in the oceans that we see these big changeovers. We see the dominance of one group of animals being kind of wiped clean, and then another one steps up.
We've seen the changes between times when, for example, sharks were very abundant. They were very dominant parts of ocean ecosystems. Then there were mass extinctions that hit them pretty hard, making way for the bony fish - the ones that are these days, how incredibly diverse and kind of the Kings. The emperors of the ocean really are bony fish at the moment. Everything apart from those bendy boned sharks. The bony fish are the ones that are incredibly diverse right now. That probably was because of this previous wiping out of the sharks that were occupying those ecosystems and playing a really dominant role before. It's an integral part of the way the oceans have been structured over hundreds of millions of years. I do find that fascinating.
I'm kind of sad in a way, because I would love to know what it would be like to swim alongside a Dunklesteus - these ridiculously big, scary, monster fish things that lived in the Devonian era with these huge bony heads. They've all gone, but they were one of the earliest forms of fish that we had. I'd love to see one of those swimming around, but you know, that's all for the past. And Ichthyosaurs - wouldn't it just be amazing to be able to see what they were like? Obviously we've got amazing things to see and experience in the oceans today, but it does bend my brain a bit to think about what used to be there and what's gone, and what's what the oceans used to be like in different areas gone by.
Mason: I'm not sure, Helen, if you would survive a swim with one of those. They sound slightly dangerous. They sound like these monsters, The sea has always been associated with monsters, demons, deities. Have some of these stories come from the fact that we had very limited understanding of the sea in the early days?
Scales: Oh yes. I think almost certainly. Yes. The oceans in general and especially the deepest bits that only recently we've been able to look at. We're still only just scratching the surface. That's not the right analogy, but we're only just starting to learn what's in the deep. But yeah, absolutely. I think it's the out of sight, out of mind stuff that just really fires people's imaginations. What better place to stash the worst and the greatest and the most terrifying monsters than down in the deep ocean? It can hide everything we imagine and up they can pop. Then you've got your homesick sailors who might catch glimpses of a tentacle here, or a tail fluke there, and come back with great stories to remind us that, yes, these things must be absolutely real, but I just caught a glimpse and down it went into the depths.
It's a perfect place for cultivating the monsters of our imagination. I love that, actually. I do love this sort of breeding ground for extraordinary beasts that people have come up with, basically forever. I know for as long as there've been storytellers, people have been wondering what there is out of sight. I love that there's still that possibility for more. Even with all the technologies we have and the view that we now have on our entire planet, including to the very deepest depths, we're still being amazed by what we're finding. I don't think we're going to run out anytime soon of monsters to keep discovering. Real ones.
Mason: Some of those early sailors, they were very drunk on rum. So I guess any old tentacle can come up with a good story. But someone who can't be drunk on rum when they're out at sea are our scientific researchers such as yourself. You now, today, have a multitude of new tools and new technologies to explore the ocean. It's almost like there's a new golden age of sea exploration, and that's largely being driven by autonomous underwater vehicles and new submarines. So, Helen, what is your experience of some of these tools and technologies and how have they helped you understand more about our oceans?
Scales: I absolutely agree that we are in this extraordinary phase of research in the deep ocean. It's come out really in the last decade or so with tools that allow us to see into the deep and transport ourselves remotely into the deep. It's tools that have come from things that the oil and gas industry and offshore drilling has produced. Like these remote operated vehicles - ROVs - which are basically deep diving robots with great cameras and manipulator arms that you can send down and have this real-time view. That offers a really powerful insight into what's down in the deep.
I've been on research boats and had the experience of being this sort of remote explorer, if you like. We aren't all going down there ourselves. There are some submersibles that take people. Those are fantastic, but it's a bit like going into space. There's only a tiny number of astronauts who actually get to go into space, but loads more space scientists who are studying this place from afar. I'd say the exact same thing applies to the deep ocean. Most of us stay on the ship and just sort of imagine that in the thousands of meters beneath our feet, there's this robot roaming around. It's seeing for us and it's being our eyes and our arms, allowing us not only just to look - I think one thing that really is exciting about deep ocean science is it's not just about exploration and just looking and going, "Oh, here's something new we haven't seen before." - but it's actually taking science down there and doing experiments and working out those connections in food webs, figuring out how all of this works and why it all matters. It's these sorts of technologies.
I think increasingly it's going to be automated. We're going to increasingly see untethered devices. We already have a really fantastic array of little submersibles and different devices that you set free into the ocean. They will do everything from measuring the temperature. We've got these incredible fleets of autonomous sampling devices, which are keeping an eye on the ocean's temperature all the way down through the depths, which is vital for our monitoring of climate change and how heat is being sucked down into the oceans and what's happening there. So the monitoring of our oceans and of what's happening geologically and biologically down there - we're just going to get more and more, and a more intricate view of what's down there through all of these incredible new tech devices. Sonar devices, which are letting us see what we couldn't see before.
There's still more to come. I'm still very excited about the future of deep sea technology. If I had my time again as a researcher, I know I'd definitely go and study deep sea robotics. I don't know if I'd be any good at it. I'm not sure I'm really good at engineering. I'm just a biologist who likes to study soft spotty things. But that's such an exciting area of research and development, figuring out what the future eyes and tools will be in the deep ocean, and combining that with things like genetic tools.
I mean, wouldn't it be fab? I think it'd be so fabulous if we could combine things. We can now take samples of seawater and sift out fragments of DNA and work out what species were recently swimming in that part of the ocean. I kind of imagine there could be this incredible automated sub that would swim around on its own. You'd program it to perhaps go off and spend a year or so roaming around the ocean. It would then come back or perhaps intermittently transmit its data back to you. It's already been sampling the DNA and then sequencing it onboard and figuring out what species, and then it just sends you a message and says, "Oh, I saw three giant squid. I saw this thing that we've never seen before." I just think there's a lot we're gonna be able to do, to really push these technologies to understand what's in the ocean and how, how all of this works. That, I think, is just so exciting.
Mason: Surely some of those future robots - they're going to be designed and based on some of the biological life that we actually find in the deep. If that life is so good at surviving in these extreme conditions, then surely we should use them to help us design biological robots to help us explore the deep?
Scales: Oh yes, definitely. I think there's a few ideas already being tried out in that way. Some of them coming back to this idea of a kind of a jelly based life form, which are so efficient and so effective down in the deep ocean. That soft robotics aspect could become really interesting down in the deep ocean.
I think some people have already started trying to make robotic snail fish, which are these fish - the deepest dwelling fish - that live down in these trenches, including the Mariana trench. There's the Mariana snail fish, which pretty much pushes up against the theoretical limit of how deep a fish can get, about 8,000 meters. They've got these sort of weird squishy bodies. The way they swim is very efficient as well. Again, what we want to do is develop very low energy, very efficient ways of putting devices in the ocean - battery powered and so on. It means they can go for a long time.
Yeah, I think that could work. And who knows what else? Yeah, exactly. The sort of the inspirations from life in the deep to help us actually study that life. There's something very wonderfully circular about that, isn't there?
Mason: Do you think there's actually a limit of human exploration of the abyss? With space, there's always the question of how far can we go, but with the sea, I mean, how deep do you think we could get?
Scales: We've got to the bottom already. That's happened.
Mason: Oh. Job done.
Scales: We've got to the deepest bits. We can go anywhere. We can go anywhere. I guess the question is, will we go everywhere? How long until that happens? It's one of those things where it's hard to actually know what the truth is about the percentage of the ocean that we've explored. You hear people say things like, "Oh, only 10% of the ocean has been explored." or whatever it might be - 5%, 10%, 20%. I guess it depends partly on what kind of resolution you're talking about. We've got a map of the entire sea floor, but it's pretty crude compared to the maps we've got of things like the moon, for example.
I don't know if we really do know for sure how much of the ocean has been explored. It's obviously small compared to the entire volume, but will we ever see all of it? Well, I mean, I don't think so. I don't know. I mean, we're certainly going to have to start spending an awful lot more money on deep sea research if we're going to get anywhere close to getting an eyeball on even of what's down there. We've got an awful long way to go still, which in my mind, is fine. I like the idea of still having more to discover. I think that's good.
Mason: Well, despite all the stuff that we're discovering, do you think that because of the historical ways we've traditionally understood the sea, these tautologies have emerged, and do you think they still impact the way we think about the sea? I mean, I still thought that the sea was only 550 meters deep as its deepest point.
Scales: So I don't know. I think we are changing our views of the planet through our understanding of the deep ocean. Obviously, I think humanity is always going to be rooted to the Earth, to the land. We are air breathing land mammals after all. No matter how much we kid ourselves, we need an enormous amount of life support if we're ever going to go beyond that surface skin of the ocean. So we're only ever going to be visitors down into this enormous space. I think maybe that's the hard part with being an Earth dweller. The more we understand about how connected everything is from the very deepest parts of the ocean, to the atmosphere to land - it is all connected - but seeing those connections is a challenge and understanding that what we do at the very deepest parts of the ocean will have an impact on what happens out here on land and for the lives that we and every other living thing on this planet leads. I think that is the challenge. I don't know when or how we can push that and change that view. We can come up with the facts and tell people that we're finding these better understandings of how all these systems are connected through flows of heat and carbon and oxygen and nutrients and everything else. Will we really take that to heart and feel that we are just these kind of global citizens all in this big melting pot, all in this together? I don't know. I don't know what that will take for lots of people to really feel part of the deep ocean, instead of, as we do, mostly see it as being this alien space, separated from us out on land. I don't know what it will take, apart from lots more discoveries and talking about it, and sharing and thinking about what's down there.
Mason: We might not think of ourselves in a melting pot, but we are certainly on a melting Earth. You've made the sea sound so wild and wonderful, but the problem with human beings is they always find a way to exploit these things. What do you think of the deepest and greatest threats to the sea right now?
Scales: So, I mean, overall, we have got some really big issues to think about when it comes to the ocean and climate changes. I think the longest term threat that we are going to have to figure out for all of life on Earth, all the way to the bottom of the deepest oceans - this is going to be the big thing we've got to figure out. Most uniquely as well, at the moment on the planet, oceans suffer from the exploitation of wild resources. Fishing. We reap vast quantities of living creatures from the ocean in ways that we really don't do on land, even though it's mostly domesticated consumption that we carry out. That has its own impact as well. That's all part of the picture. But in terms of wild harvesting, the oceans really do take the brunt of this level of exploitation.
Then there are new threats. I mean, we've got pollution in the oceans too, and there is a sort of an amplification of pollution because it all ends up in the ocean. It all ends up in the deep - plastics, chemical pollution - you know, it's sort of where most chemicals pool, in the oceans.
Again, that's somewhat a shared fate with land ecosystems and life on land, but possibly quite a bit worse in the oceans, because it all up down there. I would also say, I think the history of exploring the ocean specifically - especially the deeper parts of the oceans, has always gone hand in hand with this idea of exploitation.
Fishing is one side of that, but there's new threats on the horizon too, which is deep sea mining. It hasn't hasn't happened yet, but it's getting very close and there's a lot of talk about it at the moment. Right now, there's some exploration going on in the Pacific to look into this even more. We could see some mines open in the next few years. The idea of this is that there are not only great biological riches in the deep sea, but there are great mineral riches. This is true. There are great resources of metals and across the abyssal plains. There are metals within black smokers of hydrothermal vents and on the top of possibly millions of underwater volcanoes and mountains. We have sea mounts scattered all through the deep ocean. Certainly hundreds of thousands of them, possibly millions, depending on just how big they are or how big you think they need to be. They're also covered in metal-rich rocks. There are companies that are pretty keen to get their hands on those.
Again, it comes back a bit to the circular idea of what's going on on this planet. Some of the arguments being made for mining these things are to find metals to make the kinds of devices we need to get ourselves out of the climate change crisis.
Mason: Yeah. It seems ironic.
Scales: It is, but it's also a simplistic argument that's being made. It's based on the premise that we're going to get ourselves out of this trouble and convert our economies to wonderful low carbon, zero carbon green economies, using the kinds of technologies that are currently available including things like electric car batteries, which are based on technologies that were developed first to make handheld camcorders back in the eighties.
It isn't really necessarily asking the question of how those technologies could change and adapt to become more efficient and better. Same thing with solar panels, same thing with wind turbines. They do need a large amount of metals. There's no doubt that if we go down those roads, we're going to give up fossil fuels and adopt a big metal habit. We're going to need a lot of metals.
But the question is, which metals? Where do they come from? I think some of the arguments towards the need for mining things like cobalt from the deep ocean and nickel are overly simplified. You've got to choose between greening the economies or looking after the deep ocean. Frankly, the green stuff wins. That's too simplistic and there's a lot of other factors in play. There's no doubt we're going to need to change the way we produce energy, the way we move ourselves around the planet. But equally I strongly believe in the ability of humans to come up with incredible new solutions, to the problems that we face and give the right money and the right to resources, to those smart people who can figure things out. I don't think we need to limit ourselves in terms of the sorts of technologies that will get us out of the big problem of climate change. I certainly don't think the solution lies in the deep ocean.
Mason: We'd better hope that a metal-rich asteroid just comes close enough before we start mining.
Scales: It's another option.
Mason: Well, it's one or the other, by the sounds of it. Until I investigated your work and realised just how politically fraught this idea of deep sea mining is. As you said, yes, we haven't done it yet, but there's massive commercial and state ties that make it a very appealing thing to do, and were done in the name of actually protecting the sea. It seems almost slightly corrupt.
Scales: Yeah. Interesting that you would say that. Yeah. A big part of the question is, is it really a better option, or are we just causing yet more troubles that we don't really understand on this planet? I think it also comes back to this idea of the deep ocean being so out of sight and out of mind. It's very easy to say, "Oh, well, there's not much down there. The impact of this are going to be far less than compared to mining on land." There's no doubt that yeah, land based mining is dreadful and there are all sorts of environmental and human costs to that. Those absolutely need to be addressed, and they need to be cleaned up, and we need to do that better. But I don't see that pushing into a whole new frontier on this planet - the deep ocean - is going to solve that problem. Certainly not, the both are going to continue alongside one another. The point is that scientists do not know yet what the full impacts of deep sea mining will be, which is why there have been increasing calls - for not only conservation and environmental NGOs, but also governments and other public groups - basically saying we need to pause and we need to understand those impacts better before pushing into that new frontier. It's continuing the story of humanity's age-old ambition to use up the resources that they've got on planet Earth, and then look for the next one and push into new frontiers.
The deep ocean really is the final frontier we have. It really is the last vast space that we have not yet fully occupied as humanity. Sure, we could just repeat the same old story, do the same old thing, push into that resource, exploit it and use it and take it, and then that's done. Or, we could say, "Well, how about we do it differently this time?" Maybe we could learn from past mistakes and say, "Hmm." We have an opportunity to stop and not rush into this. Let's really understand the full picture of what this would cause to life on Earth, to the health of the ocean, to the health of the planet before deciding that this is the better option to take, simply because there are some companies who think it's exciting. They do, and they're making it look very exciting. Producing images of what these mining machines might look like. Don't they look futuristic and wonderful and not at all like big, dirty mining machines that we see on land?
It's all very well and good until we really understand the full impact of what this could have. Because it's going to be so out of sight, that's going to be difficult. It's a tricky situation we're in, and I think it's going to unfold and get even more heated in the coming time as we learn more about what exactly those companies have in mind, what they're setting up, what their ambitions are and, and what the scientists are saying.
My hope is that the scientists will get to say their piece and will get to take the time they need to really get to grips with this question of where do we get our resources from for these machines and everything else we need to build, before big decisions are made to say, "Yeah, it's fine. Go ahead. Do the mining." It would just show that we have moved on and we have evolved as a species if we could say, "Maybe, maybe there's a different way to do this, and we could give that a try before we just repeat the same old story of exploiting before we fully understand what the consequences are."
Mason: The problem is that while we debate the ethics of deep sea mining, we still have a major problem today, and that's one of plastics. Now, surely plastics are changing the chemical makeup of the ocean? We see so much press and attention put towards the impact of plastic waste in the sea. Is that a solvable problem? Is that something that humans are going to have to technologically solve or are we already seeing creatures starting to evolve with the ability to deal with processing plastics?
Scales: So, I mean, it's certainly a problem we need to solve in terms of the input of more plastics. I think that, certainly, it shouldn't be rocket science. It shouldn't be out of reach in terms of the sorts of products that are produced. Again, surely we can find material scientists who've got solutions to creating different types of packaging and so on. The really insidious types of plastics that we're throwing away can come to an end and we can find alternatives, so we can cut off that supply of new plastics. I think that can be done with the will and with the money and the incentives to make that change. I think we can do that. Technologically, that's not too difficult. I really don't think it should be.
Obviously there's an awful lot of plastic already in the oceans. The big question that is yet to be answered is just how much impact that plastic is having on ecosystems. Obviously it's not great and we are seeing impacts - from the level of organisms of whole animals down to cells and even into genetic level impacts and interfering with cellular function. That is worrying. I think we do need to understand more about the impact, especially if very tiny bits of micro-plastics and these very small particles are getting inside of living organisms. That is a worry.
How much life could adapt to that? Well, we are certainly seeing some microbes that are able to even use plastic as a substrate for energy production. I don't know if there's a solution like engineering creatures that we could then set free and they'd go and munch their way through the plastics in the oceans. It's possible. I think before we do that, we'd really have to understand what the impacts would be. It could end up unleashing a bigger problem than we had in the first place.
But yeah, there could be solutions out there. Again, I think maybe some really smart thinking could be put into that. But you know, to be honest, I think there's not much chance that we're going to be able to go around and clean up the bottom of the sea with the plastics it already has. There's just too much. I don't think that's necessarily going to be where we should be focusing our efforts. I think we almost just have to accept that.
I think the focus really needs to be on not making any more plastic and stopping the problem from that end of things. If we can come up with a really good solution for cleaning up the oceans, maybe, but at the moment, I don't see how we yet have that technology. Maybe someone will come up with a great way of doing it and we'll be able to do that, but I think it's turning off the tap of plastics into the sea which is what must happen as soon as possible.
Mason: I've always been interested - especially on this podcast, and with the more folks we interview - about the relationship between thinking about space and thinking about the deep oceans. It's almost as if the more excitement and attention space gets, the less attention we put on the seas and the oceans. Is that partly because humans can live in space, whereas we can't necessarily live underwater? Do you think it will ever result in that? There's been science fiction narratives where the future of humanity lives in these pods under the sea. Does that in any way, shape or form appeal to you, Helen?
Scales: Living in the ocean? I'd certainly go there on my holidays. I mean, yeah, I'd go there, definitely. I'd love to go and see what it'd be like to spend more time in the ocean. As much as I'm a sea person, I'd still miss breathing air and being out, feeling the sun on my skin.
But I mean we could occupy the oceans just as much as we could space and there are more plans afoot to do that. One of Jacques Cousteau's offspring - I think his grandson Fabienne - at the moment, is planning what is sort of the equivalent of the International Space Station, really. A set of under sea research bases. There certainly are some benefits to putting humans down there, in terms of the science that we can do.
Having said that, of course there's depth. I don't think we're going to get to spend long periods there. We're only just going to have brief visits to the very deepest parts of the ocean rather than setting up home there. But I think there are so many parallels in terms of how a human can exist in these places where we are just not supposed to be, whether it's outer space or into the ocean. It's a similar case of stepping out beyond our envelope of a place we should really occupy. Therefore, we are visitors to both of those places.
Why do that? Well, I suppose it's that human connection, isn't it? I guess that's the strong part of it. The excitement, as you say, about putting people in space. I know a couple of astronauts - friends of mine - who've gone on and actually gone to space programs. It just blows my mind to think that they should, at some point, get off the planet. It is crazy, and we can't get away from just how exciting and different that is.
I do wish that we could have the same response to people who go into the deep ocean as well, because it is just as an extraordinary feat of technology and of ambition to do that. There's so much more to see you when you go there, as well. There's all that life, for example. So yeah, I don't know. Do I think there should be colonies at the bottom of the sea? I mean, maybe. Perhaps it would help change that view of it being a really important part of our world, if there were lots of people down there. I don't like the idea that we're going to have to go down there because we've ruined everything else on land. That would be a shame, before we had an option of just sort of hiding ourselves in the deep ocean. But you know, I guess the idea of where humans are and what we can do does really influence our outlook and our connections to places. I don't like to think of space science and deep sea science as being in opposition to each other. They've got so much to teach each other. Astronauts train in the deep ocean. We study the oceans from space. It goes both ways.
Mason: I'm fascinated to learn what sort of research will be done in undersea research laboratories. It does sound very Bond villain-esque and reminds me almost of of seasteading. The great thing about having a lab in the middle of the ocean is that it's outside of nation states. I'm sure there'd be all sorts of weird and wonderful research that could potentially be done outside of the Geneva convention, there.
But looking back more positively at what you've been able to do, Helen, which is to give us more deep sea awareness. For any folks who've listened to this podcast and been inspired by what you've said and what you've shared, how can they learn more about our deep oceans?
Scales: I think that we're in, again, not only this golden era of research and discovery in the deep ocean, but also communicating what's down there. We've got some amazing tools at our fingertips to show everybody.
One of the things I have got a huge soft spot for and have spent many a sleepless night watching are these real time broadcasts of deep sea research expeditions. Not many have been happening during the pandemic, but they are coming back online now. There are various organisations that basically transmit what they're doing live on the internet, on YouTube. You can just plug in and watch what science is happening miles down beneath the waves, nn the other side of the planet.
I remember very clearly one morning - it was late in the morning, actually, or late at night, I should say - kind of tuning into one of these things and just being completely transported to this seamount in the Pacific. I was watching an octopus going about its day, hunting for food. There I was with a couple of hundred other people logged into this website, with the scientists telling us what we were seeing. It's just mesmerising. It's incredible. It's the real time part of it, as well, that really gets me. The idea that - okay, with a few seconds delay - that octopus is doing those things right now, and we're watching. We're in its world. All of that stuff is archived, and so there's incredible footage online now from all of these wonderful expeditions.
There are lists. I've put a list at the end of my book, 'The Beautiful Abyss', of all these places you can go. There's things like the Schmidt Institute. There's Okeanos. Have a look online for deep sea research and you'll find amazing resources that will take you into the world with these scientists that are doing all this research. Watch TV shows, read books, and learn about it. Tell your friends.
What I would love is for more people to embrace the deep and how fascinating it is just by learning, listening and looking. Next time you hear a news headline about something like deep sea mining or deep sea fishing or a species that's been discovered, you've got that connection and that sort of base understanding that this isn't just a weird alien space. It is our planet. It's such an important part of our planet. Knowing about it helps to make those connections, too - between us and that space. I think there has never been a better time to know about the deep ocean. The science is there, the communications are there, their stories are out there to find - whether that's on the pages of a book, on the TV screen, or on YouTube; it's all out there.
Mason: Well, there we go. Forget Big Brother. Big Bubble is the next big trend in reality TV. Helen, you've done such a wonderful job at taking the deep sea out of sight, out of mind and bringing it to the forefront of our consciousness. For that, I want to thank you for being a guest on the FUTURES Podcast.
Scales: It's been such a pleasure. Thank you so much. It's wonderful to talk about the deep and to share all these wonders. Thank you so much. It's been fab.
Mason: Thank you to Helen for showing us why it is vitally important to protect and conserve our ocean.
You can find out more by purchasing her new book, 'The Brilliant Abyss: True Tales of Exploring the Deep Sea, Discovering Hidden Life and Selling the Seabed', available now.
If you like what you've heard, then you can subscribe for our latest episode. Or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram: @FUTURESPodcast.
More episodes, transcripts and show notes can be found at FUTURES Podcast dot net.
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Credits
Produced by FUTURES Podcast
Recorded, Mixed & Edited by Luke Robert Mason
Audio Editing by Elliott Roche
Transcript by Beth Colquhoun
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