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TRANSCRIPT: TAI ASKS WHY – DEEP SEA

Tai Poole: Whenever we hang out, me and my friends love to argue about the really important scientific questions.

Sound Clip: [Zoe] Is cereal a soup?

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Yes, cereal is a soup.

Sound Clip: [Finn] That's a question. If it's using powdered milk. Yes, the water has to be boiled at some point.

Sound Clip: [Pyper] Cereal is not soup. Cereal is a different category.

Sound Clip: [Finn] If you pour cereal into tea, that is soup.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Your description of soup is wrong.

Sound Clip: [Finn] OK. Here's my -

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Because for you, if you were to make cold cereal, that is not soup.

Sound Clip: [Finn] If you boil it. Tea is broth.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Eugh!

Tai Poole: We still haven't come up with a definitive answer, and we've been debating this for months. But, of course, for the record, cereal is 100% a soup. And I hope you guys are all on my side about that.

Here's another one we've been fighting over.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Do crabs think fish can fly?

[laughter]

Sound Clip: [Kaden] Yeah, probably.

Sound Clip: [Finn] What? The crab thinks, "Wow, that fish can float, and I'm confined to the ground."

Sound Clip: [Kaden] I think if we're being like scientific here, I don't think crabs can think a thought that complex.

Sound Clip: [Finn] Yes.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] But, like, what if birds can just air swim?

Sound Clip: [Finn] They're swimming in a fluid.

Sound Clip: [Kaden] They're more kind of like gliding, though.

Tai Poole: Okay. That is kind of silly. But here's the real question that I wanted to ask: Would you rather travel to outer space or the deep ocean?

Sound Clip: [Everyone] Outer space.

Sound Clip: [Zoe] Well, no, the ocean because it has more life.

Sound Clip: [Kaden] Yes, but, at the same time, outer space is so vast, like, you could just go anywhere. The ocean still has its limits.

Sound Clip: [Zoe] True, but -

Sound Clip: [Finn] Also, it just looks really gross, like, dead whales being eaten.

Sound Clip: [Kaden] And I wouldn't want to go that far down, like, just kind of like cruising under the water.

Sound Clip: [Zoe] Wouldn't it be, like, dark?

Sound Clip: [Everyone] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sound Clip: [Pyper] Also, in space, there are so many different galaxies. There are so many different possibilities. And in the ocean, we have a general idea of what's there. But in space, like, we have no idea what could be in, like, the other galaxies.

Sound Clip: [Kaden] It's pretty likely there's aliens.

Tai Poole: So, I agree that meeting aliens would be really cool, but the truth is, scientists actually know more about space than what's in the water of our very own planet. And don't get me wrong, I absolutely adore space, but the deep sea, kind of, has all those same elements, you know. Mysterious creatures, check. Alien environments, check. Hard to get to, definite check. So, I think the problem is there's just so much that we don't know about the ocean, that we just kind of forget about it. I feel like it has this reputation that, when you get deep enough, it's just this empty, dark wasteland where nothing can really live. But is the deep-sea really like this creepy, empty space? What is at the bottom of the ocean?

[Clip of: “Tai Asks Why Theme Music” by Johnny Spence]

Tai Poole: I'm Tai, and this is my podcast, “Tai Asks Why”. There are just so many good questions out there that you really want to have answered. Where is the Internet? How else can we power the planet? What's the deal with screen time? How is the universe going to end? Why are viruses so good at what they do? And what's at the bottom of the ocean?

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Would you want to see the bottom of the ocean?

Sound Clip: [Kien] Definitely, if I go to depths that haven't been explored before, that could be cool. Even though I’m little, it'd be cool to see, like, glowing plants and stuff. And it'd be cool to be like one of the first people to ever go that deep. I could find treasure, you know, that could be nice.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Now, what you think you'd see down there?

Sound Clip: [Kien] If we're in the pitch-black zone, but we're not - we're close to how deep we want to be, but we're not there yet, I don't think we'd see anything. But I think if we got to the ocean floor we would see nothing and then we'd go around and we'd start noticing stuff. And then our eyes would kind of like - our pupils would kind of dilate properly, and we'd see tons of, like, plant life and stuff. Or it could be absolutely horrible with massive animals thrashing you around, and then you would be stuck down there.

Tai Poole: OK, so in order to get to the bottom of this, pun intended, I had to find someone who’s actually seen the bottom of the ocean. And I found just the person.

Sound Clip: [Verena Tunnicliffe] I love the deep sea, it is mysterious and it's deep and it's so different from anything else that we have experienced.

Tai Poole: That’s Verena Tunnicliffe. She’s a marine biologist with the University of Victoria, and she knows better than anyone about what it’s like down there because she’s spent decades studying what lives in the deep. So, I got her to describe for me what it’s like down there when you land a submersible on the edge of an abyss.

Sound Clip: [Verena Tunnicliffe] You're looking at what appears to be an alien landscape. You're looking out, using your lights, and you can only see as far as your lights can go, and you might see suddenly little things jumping in the water, like little water fleas. And then you get these bizarre sponges that form. It looks like something out of “Dr. Seuss,” and they have these little bubbles all over the top, white - brilliant white. And if you touch them, they shatter. Yet these are animals. And a gigantic jelly will float by, and it's got tendrils that are, maybe, 10 metres long, and these are killing machines. And then you might begin to realize that in the sediment there’s all sorts of holes. And then a little tentacle coming out of the seafloor. A giant sea acorn, they're called acorn worms. And you'll suddenly see one of these things, and it's two meters long. It's bright purple. And then you try to look it up when you get back to the surface and find that somebody's only ever seen this once or twice before. So we're always looking at each other saying, "What's that?"

Tai Poole: Wow. That's really cool. As you can tell, Verena has spent a lot of time in submersibles, exploring the water thousands of metres deep. And her lab has discovered over a hundred new species, and nine of them are even named after her. That is really cool. In fact, just before I got her on the phone, she’s pretty sure she discovered, yet another, new species.

Sound Clip: [Verena Tunnicliffe] You know, before this call, I was just in my lab looking down my microscope, looking at a worm, and it's only about a centimeter and a half long, but I'm pretty sure it's not described. Now, the trick is to find the expert in the world who can now take that and fit it into our knowledge of what the tree of life looks like.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Yeah. They’ll find where it fits in the puzzle.

Sound Clip: [Verena Tunnicliffe] That's right.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] That’s so cool. Do you have a favorite yourself?

Sound Clip: [Verena Tunnicliffe] I like the spiders.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Oh, there’s sea spiders?

Sound Clip: [Verena Tunnicliffe] [laughter] There’s sea spiders, yes. They come in all sizes and shapes, but they still have eight legs. Oh, they might be 30 centimetres across and about 20 centimetres high, so they're pretty big. And they've got this long nose, kind of hairy on the outside, looking a little bit like a tarantula. But I actually think they're kind of cute.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Aww.

Sound Clip: [Verena Tunnicliffe] They live by sucking the juices out of anemones, kind of like a mosquito.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Oh, that's a lot to take in. I mean, I'm a little bit scared of the mosquito spiders, because that's kind of like the fusion of the two freakiest things that we have on land.

Sound Clip: [Verena Tunnicliffe] Yes. Yes. We do have our nightmares, but it's always interesting to ask these things, how they make a living, you know, what's important to them. [laughter]

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] At least they're four kilometres down.

Sound Clip: [Verena Tunnicliffe] I don't think they're coming after us. Not yet anyway.

Tai Poole: Even though some of them are really freaky, it’s cool to think that there are so many animals down there to discover. I mean, it really isn't a dead zone in the slightest. I think that the reason people think it’s a dead zone is just because there’s no sunlight way down there. Up here, on the surface, we know that life is based off of sunlight and photosynthesis and all that stuff. Our plant friends all suck up sun energy, and we eat that and get that good energy and that’s what makes me grow and that's what makes everyone else grow. But, down in the deeps, there is no light; however, Verena says there is heat.

Sound Clip: [Verena Tunnicliffe] So there's this whole line of volcanoes, and some of them are actively erupting. We've been there when the volcano has erupted right in front of us.

Tai Poole: What? I never pictured the bottom of the ocean to be this explosive place filled with active volcanos. And just in case you were worried, Verena wasn’t physically beside the volcano, she was up above it on a ship, but her submersible video camera was.

Sound Clip: [Verena Tunnicliffe] Watching the lava being pushed out with the gases and rocks flying out. The rocks were landing on the submersible and then, all of a sudden, the edge of the eruption pit gave away and the sub started sliding down. So, we had to pull it off the ground. but it was a fantastic event. But you know what was really neat was, as we turned away from it, we realized there's tons of animals that live on these hot fluid around these vents and volcanoes.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] OK. I'm sorry. So, you mentioned how things are alive. But, you talk about these, you know, it's dark, it's deep, and there's these hot, like, geysers of water and these massive volcanoes, and these animals are just like chilling a couple feet away from it?

Sound Clip: [Verena Tunnicliffe] Yes. And they are actually chilling because heat doesn't travel far in water. So, unless they make a mistake, which some of them do, they don't enter the really hot water. But what these animals are after, there are very special microbes that love this place. And what they do is they use the chemical energy in that water to make organic carbon. So, it's just like photosynthesis in plants, but it's called chemosynthesis in these microbes. And so, there are a whole bunch of animals at hydrothermal vents, all over the world, that have evolved to live in those nasty conditions - nasty gases. I mean, hydrogen sulfide is a toxin. And they've evolved to cope with those conditions so they can access the food.

Tai Poole: Can you imagine life for these little guys, just living next to these explosive vents, munching and crunching away on the toxic material shooting out? That's pretty cool. But hydrothermal vents aren’t everywhere on the bottom of the ocean. So, in areas where there aren't just toxic sludge shooting out all the time, what do the animals eat?

Sound Clip: [Melissa Omand] All of the life in the deep ocean, in the midnight zone of the ocean, that's not dependent on a hydrothermal event, is reliant on the material that falls out of the upper ocean.

Tai Poole: This is oceanographer Melissa Omand. She spends her time exploring the area of the ocean called The Twilight Zone, which is just below the sunlit layer, but not quite in the deep, dark bottom level.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] So, you're an oceanographer?

Sound Clip: [Melissa Omand] Mm-hm.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Tell me what it's like to go in this crazy submersible deep into the ocean.

Sound Clip: [Melissa Omand] [laughter] Yeah, so, I actually have never been in a submersible. What I do is I build little robots that go down to depths and basically discover things for me.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Oh, my god. That's actually so much cooler. Can you tell me about these robots then?

Sound Clip: [Melissa Omand] Sure. So they are little robots we call minions. And they drop down, we drop them off of a research vessel, and they sink down to what we call The Twilight Zone, and they take photographs of the marine snow that sink down from that top layer. And they also have sensors on them, so they measure the temperature and the pressure of the water at that depth.

Tai Poole: Oh, yeah. You heard right. She said, "marine snow." And, no, it's not same stuff up here that you make snowballs with. Marine snow can be anything from dead plants to whale poop. It's just organic matter that slowly falls from the surface of the ocean and eventually lands on the seafloor. Sometimes, it can take weeks to make that trip. And most of it gets eaten on the trip down, but just enough of it makes it to the bottom that it covers about three-quarters of the sea floor. It's like snow that just won't melt. And there's still a lot to learn about its journey and what's eating it, which is why Melissa has these robots.

Sounds Clip: [Tai Poole] So you called them 'minions' and, unfortunately, because you did so, I can now only picture the little yellow things from “Despicable Me”. Can you describe what they actually look like?

Sound Clip: [Melissa Omand] Well, they are, you know, kind of disturbingly, similarly shaped to the minions from “Despicable Me”. They're like cylindrical shaped, and they've got a round head just like the minions from the movie. They're made out of glass, so that makes them look pretty different. They're actually transparent. So you can see through them, except for the electronics and the batteries inside.

Tai Poole: She’s only sent a few of these minions out so far on test runs. But, the goal is to send out swarms of them to cover these huge areas in The Twilight Zone. But the only hitch is it's kind of hard to get these guys to the exact right depth. If they’re too light, they'll just float on the surface, and too heavy, they'll just plop right onto the bottom.

Sound Clip: [Melissa Omand] It's really - it's actually surprisingly tricky, like, that was the part that caused us to lose our very first minion that we put in the water. We didn't add quite enough weight at first. And so, the minion didn't sink because it had little, tiny air bubbles just stuck on the outside of it. And just that tiny amount of extra air was enough that it couldn't get all the way down to the depth that we wanted, and it just stayed at the top. And so, we ended up solving that problem by taking a Lifesaver candy and stringing an extra little bit of weight onto a Lifesaver candy, and then hanging that on the minion. Some other oceanographers before me had discovered that Lifesaver candies dissolve in seawater after 20 minutes. And so that was like the perfect amount of time to have that extra bit of weight, basically, pull the minion through the surface and then drop off at its target depth.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] That is the best thing I've heard all year. Like, that is absolutely wonderful. You get Lifesaver candies, like, how does someone just look at the candy and say, "Let's just slap that on a minion."

Sound Clip: [Melissa Omand] I would love to know the answer to that. I wasn't there when whoever it was figured this out, but I am so grateful to them because it's such a fabulous, very low-tech, very inexpensive solution. And it worked great.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] And, you know, if you have a couple extra Lifesavers you can just, you know, put them in your mouth see if they dissolve, that kind of stuff.

Sound Clip: [Melissa Omand] [laughter] Yeah.

Tai Poole: I love picturing this massive swarm of these little swimming robots with little Lifesavers attached to them in the giant expanse of the ocean. It's just hilarious to me. And, I mean, I know Kien really wants to be an underwater explorer. And the more I’m learning about it, I want to go down too! But Melissa says it’s more likely to be a minion than a guy like me.

Sound Clip: [Melissa Omand] I think it's definitely the future of ocean exploration, is to have more and more of these autonomous robots throughout the ocean to begin to address this huge challenge of just how expansive the ocean is and how challenging it is to get measurements from all ocean depths.

Tai Poole: So Verena and Melissa spend a lot of time looking at the deep sea. Getting measurements and spying on animals. But there is another way to explore the ocean and that's with our ears.

Sound Clip: [Bob Dziak] Well, you know, light can't penetrate very far underwater. But that's not the case for sound. Sound waves can propagate almost limitlessly throughout the world's oceans. As you can imagine, many marine animals use sound to orient, navigate their environment, as well as find food. So, sound is kind of a critical component of the ocean that these animals use to survive.

Tai Poole: That’s Bob Dziak. He’s a research oceanographer with NOAA - that’s the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is kind of like the NASA of the ocean. His specialty is ocean acoustics. So, basically, listening in on the sounds that travel through the water.

Sound Clip: [Bob Dziak] By studying the, kind of, ambient soundscape and what normal sound is like in the ocean, we can then see how, perhaps, human-made sound comes into play and how that might affect marine ecosystems and might affect their, you know, their health and stability.

Tai Poole: Bob and his colleagues wanted to listen in on the deepest part of the ocean, a place 11 kilometres down called the Challenger Deep. It’s part of the Mariana Trench, which is kind of like The Grand Canyon, but going down from the seafloor.

Sound Clip: [Bob Dziak] So, we wanted to test that idea and see if it was really one of the quietest environments on the planet. And we used a special hydrophone, you know, which is an underwater microphone. But we built it so it can withstand the extreme pressures at those depths, you know, 11 kilometres underwater is equivalent to like 16,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. So, it really has to be a really strong system to survive that. So, that's how we did it. We just went with the ship over the site, and we put this anchor with a hydrophone and a float on it, and the anchor took the hydrophone down to the bottom of the seafloor.

[splashing sound]

Sound Clip: [Bob Dziak] It took six hours to get there. It was a really long, slow descent. But it got to the bottom of Challenger Deep and made its recordings and lasted for about three weeks.

Tai Poole: Bob was expecting it to be super-quiet. But instead, he heard things like this.

[whale and dolphin noises]

Sound Clip: [Bob Dziak] Baleen whales, dolphins, and dolphin clicks as well.

[whale and dolphin noises continue]

Sound Clip: [Bob Dziak] I do like the baleen whales, you know, their kind of little moans. And I do like the dolphin clicks. I'm a geophysicist - I like earthquakes, and that zone there at Challenger Deep had lots and lots of earthquakes while we were recording. We got, I think several hundred. When the earthquakes get really big, really dramatic.

[earthquake noises]

Tai Poole: So, earthquakes, I can understand. Whales and dolphins swimming WAY overhead, that’s impressive. But it kind of makes sense. But Bob’s recorders also heard this.

[ship engine noises]

Tai Poole: Those are ships, on the surface, 11 kilometres away!

Sound Clip: [Bob Dziak] And so, we thought it would be acoustically isolated there, but actually it wasn't. There's a lot of surface ships and a lot of sonar activity around the area. So there ended up being a lot more human-made noise than we expected. We could hear their propeller. You know, it was just like it was right there. It really was surprising how it was able to be that crystal clear. It was pretty amazing.

Tai Poole: So if the animals down there do know we exist, they’re probably not super-happy with us.

Sound Clip: [Bob Dziak] You know, the thought is that ocean noise is increasing globally, in the last 30 years, and that has been thought to be due to ship - increased ship activity worldwide. We're really kind of in the beginning of, kind of, quantifying what would you call quote, normal sound is, in the oceans. So, then as sound changes in the future - or it does change we would have an idea of what's going on. Why it's changing and how much it has. And our one thought is that, you know, as climate change is taking hold, ocean temperatures are warming and ice at the poles is breaking up. So all that kind of adds up to bigger storms and ice noise and actually makes for a noisier ocean. A noisy ocean is probably not really a great place for animals that use noise to survive.

[whale, dolphin, underwater noises]

Tai Poole: Ugh, well, humans can really be the worst. Here we are just starting to learn more about these incredible underwater creatures, and it turns out we’ve already been ruining their lives with our noise pollution. Maybe we need to give them a bit more consideration, you know? Don’t get me wrong, I love space and I still want to meet an alien, but I also think that we should pay closer attention to our own planet and study our ocean so we can take better care of it, and the weird, wacky things that call it home. Yes, even the mosquito spiders.

Sound Clip: [Verena Tunnicliffe] We can never understand everything, but we do have to learn to appreciate how we are connected to that deep ocean, which through many means is nourishing us by keeping this whole cycle going on this planet.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Wow, that's - I mean, that's an amazingly poetic way to end this. Thank you so much. I'll leave you to discover a new species, I guess.

Sound Clip: [Verena Tunnicliffe] [laughter] Well, I've got an exciting afternoon in front of me.

Tai Poole: Now, I have one more big question this is all leading up to, my magnum opus.

Sound Clip: [Melissa Omand] Alright.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Do crabs think fish can fly?

[laughter]

Sound Clip: [Melissa Omand] From a crab's perspective, they're definitely flying overhead.

Sound Clip: [Bob Dziak] I would think that crabs do think fish fly. Poor crabs. I feel for them. But they seem like they have a pretty good life too, and there's a lot of them, around us at least out here. They seem pretty happy.

[Clip of: “Tai Asks Why Theme Music” by Johnny Spence]

Tai Poole: Thank you guys so much for listening. I'm Tai Poole. This show was produced by Amanda Buckiewicz and Judy Ziyi Gu. Judy’s also our digital producer. This podcast was created by Veronica Simmons and she is also our editor and sound designer. The theme music is by Johnny Spence. Sound engineer is my dad, Minh Nguyen, and our location manager is my mom, Nicky Poole. Thanks guys for all that you do. Today my guests were Verena Tunnicliffe, Melissa Omand, and Bob Dziak. Special thanks go out to Austin Pomeroy for his recording help, Kien for sharing his thoughts, and my friends Zoe, Pyper, Finn, and Kaden for dealing with my wacky questions all the time. Our senior producer is Tina Verma and Executive Producer of CBC Podcasts is Arif Noorani. Until next time, I'm Tai. Keep asking why.

Transcript: Tai Asks Why - Season 3: What Is At The Bottom Of The Ocean?

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