The Deep Seabed (featuring Dr. Andrew Thaler)

25:48And they are chemical rich. They're full of hydrogen sulfide. And there are microbes and animals that have evolved to take advantage of that hydrogen sulfide and create energy through a process called chemosynthesis as opposed to photosynthesis. Whoa. Crazy. Relying on chemistry for life. That's scary. We all do. Wait, well, that's how photosynthesis works too. But it doesn't have chemistry in the name, so it's less creepy. How do you end up with less biomass but more diversity? That seems to be counterintuitive to me. So a lot of that is because of just the sheer amount of space. A very powerful driver of speciation, especially in the deep sea, is isolation by distance, which is just that as individuals of any group get further and further apart, they tend to drift apart genetically as well.

26:38And so you get speciation driven by isolation. And so that is one of the big drivers for that huge amount of biodiversity. It's also – it's a very stable environment, so it receives relatively little disturbance. And so when you have stability over large timescales, there's fewer selective pressures, which gives more and different kinds of organisms a chance to thrive and survive. So you do get it driven like that. And then, you know, there are some weird ecosystems. So hydrothermal vents obviously have huge amounts of selective pressure on them. Hydrothermal vents are actually kind of the opposite of the general deep sea.

27:13They have incredibly high biomass, but relatively low biodiversity compared to the background deep abyssal plain. And is that just because it's a huge food source and if you can eat it, there'll be a lot of you, but not a lot of organisms are specialized on that food source? And why do you think that trend is different at the hydrothermal vents? So it's not just that it's a readily available food source that a few species have evolved to take advantage of. It's also a very toxic food source. So if you haven't adapted to survive at a hydrothermal vent, I mean, this thing is rich in arsenic. It's full of heavy metals.

27:47It's lightly radioactive. It's hot. It's coming out of the vent at 400 to 500 degrees. So it's the Virginia of the deep sea, you're saying? Oh, come on. I was going to say it's the Venus of the deep sea or something, but Virginia, that was a low blow, man. I know. Just to point out, since we're doing this, I did a climatological assessment of Mordor at one point for fun. And it turns out that the climate of Mordor is about the same as Southern California. Take that, Daniel. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. One does not just move to Southern California, okay? One must get tenure. Yeah, exactly.

28:32But I'm fascinated by the fact that there are two different sources of energy here. You have photosynthesis from the top drifting down, and you have chemosynthesis from these vents. Do you have two completely separate energy chains there, or do you have critters that rely on both, or are they totally segregated? You very rarely get critters that rely on both. They generally are. Hydrothermal vents are, you know, unique is a weird word to use because there's a bunch of hydrothermal vents around the ocean. But they're unique ecosystems. They're, you know, you don't have a lot of overlap between hydrothermal vents and 900 thermal vents.

29:06There are some opportunistic species that kind of hang out at the vent periphery and take advantage of that extra biomass. But they're kind of general deep sea scavengers like squat lobsters that you see in lots of places. But, you know, one of the weird things that happens with the habitat forming species at hydrothermal vents. So in the East Pacific, you get these big deep-sea tube worms, giant tube worms, fastest-growing invertebrate in the world. They can grow up to 12 meters long. They have these bright – the tube gets up to 12 meters long. The worm itself is kind of not the whole tube. They have these bright red plumes that they stick into the hydrothermal vent plume.

29:43For some reason, we called both of those plumes just to confuse everyone. So the tube worms have a plume that they stick into the hydrothermal vent plume. Not cool. But that's where they extract energy from. They don't have digestive systems anymore. You can find like remnants of their digestive systems. But for the most part, they have a special chamber inside where their stomach would have been called a vestimentiferum. And inside that is where they host all the microbes that take the chemical energy and turn it into food for the tube worm. And you see that again and again at different hydrothermal vents.

30:14So in the Western Pacific, the vents are dominated by a couple of species of snails. And they do the same thing. They've pretty much lost their digestive system. They have a little bit more of a digestive system, but it's not fully functional anymore. And they have a chamber inside their mantle cavity that they host microbes as well. Yeah. So this sounds really far away from humans, like, you know, at pressures that would absolutely kill us. So do you still see signs of humans in these environments, even if we're not going there very often? So we find on every single dive, we almost always find trash.

30:50Trash. Bottom of the Mariana Trench, they found a can of Spam. Aw. Unopened. So if they had recovered it, it probably would have still been good or, you know, as good as it could be. It would have still been bad. Yeah. No noticeable deviation from standard. Okay. You know, we find beer bottles all the time. We find plastic bags. We find a lot of ship waste, so trash that we know comes off of ships. And, of course, we find microplastics. And one of the things I've been working on over the last couple of years is there's a hydrothermal vent system in the mid-Cayman spreading center. So just south of the Cayman Islands in the Cayman Trench, which is the scene of James Cameron's The Abyss, if we're going to keep coming back to James Cameron.

31:31But the deepest hydrothermal vents in the world are there, and they're at about 6 ,000 meters depth. And it's a shrimp-dominated system. So it's covered in these little, these blind shrimp. So these shrimp rimacaras hypocyte, they don't have eyes anymore. They've lost their eyes, but they have evolved this little eye spot on the back of their carapace that they can detect black body radiation from. So that allows them to see where the hydrothermal plume is and get as close as possible without getting fried. So these vents are covered in these shrimp. I've got samples of these shrimps, and we've been looking at microplastic uptake in shrimp from the world's deepest hydrothermal vents.

32:09So this is an ecosystem that was discovered in 2012, 2013. It's the deepest hydrothermal vent in the world. It's been visited by scientists a handful of times. And it's absolutely loaded with microplastics. I find them in every shrimp we look at. They are. The microplastics are getting there before we are. All right. Well, let's all take a break to go have some Zoloft because that's pretty depressing. And when we get back, we'll talk about what kind of resources you can find on the deep seabed.

33:05Pay Later, and all major cards, so you can focus on the future. When you need a partner trusted by millions, there's one platform for all business. PayPal Open. Grow today at paypalopen.com. Loan subject to approval in available locations. Aging doesn't stop, and neither should you, with Vital Proteins Collagen and Protein Shakes. Because around the age of 30, your body needs more support for movement and recovery. On workout and rest days, reach for a 30-gram total protein shake, or go with our classic collagen peptides. Help support healthy hair, skin, nails, bones, and joints. So you can stay vital, stay you.

33:40Visit VitalProteins.com to learn more and where to buy. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Apple Vacations, where your story starts. The Splash into Savings event from Apple Vacations is here. Now through June 25th, save up to$150 on vacation packages. Plus, instant savings at select resorts in Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and top U.S. destinations. Use promo code JUNE26 for these limited-time offers. Start planning today at AppleVacations.com or contact your travel advisor.

34:15Apple Vacations, where your story starts. And now, another appliance triumph from our friends at Grand Appliance. With two dogs, every washload came out covered in fur. I went into Grand Appliance looking for a fix, and they recommended the Maytag Top Load with PetPro Hair Removal System. They had it in stock and installed it days later. And you know what? It really works. Lint rollers are a thing of my past now. Great recommendations from the appliance experts. Shop GrandAppliance.com. GrandAppliance.com.

35:00And we're back. We're talking to Andrew Thaler about the deep seabed. And we've been talking about the amazing biodiversity that you've got down there. But there's other things that people care about that's down there. And those are resources. So what kind of resources do we find in the sludge pile that is the deep seabed? Oh, boy. So the deep sea is, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on who you talk to, absolutely loaded with mineral resources. as well as some other resources that are a little bit more unexpected. So deep-sea mining is a thing that people have been talking about a lot in the last two years in particular since a presidential executive order came out to kind of supercharge the U.S.

35:42push towards deep-sea mining. And what they're looking for primarily is what are called polymetallic nodules. So polymetallic nodules are cobblestones that form on the deep-sea floor, and they form by minerals in seawater accreting around a hard object. So often it'll be something tiny like a diatom test, the little glass skeleton of some of those plankton that sinks in the seafloor. Sometimes it's as big as a shark's tooth, so you can cut into some of these nodules and find a shark tooth in the middle of them. But it takes over the course of five or six million years, these nodules kind of grow as minerals sort of accrete from the surrounding seawater and are deposited onto them.

36:23And they just kind of get bigger and bigger and bigger. And they're rich in things like cobalt and nickel and manganese and a little bit of copper. Some people are talking about getting the copper out of them. It's not a particularly impressive amount of copper. No one's getting excited over the copper. But the nickel and the cobalt in particular, because nickel and cobalt, of course, are something we need for electric vehicle batteries. And so these things accrete just because the water is flowing over something. And then what's the chemistry of that? Why does it come out of the water and accrete onto the object?

36:52So there's metals in the seawater. And it's actually interesting you asked this question. We don't know the full geologic process for how it accretes. There is sort of this combination of pressure and the metals in the seawater that makes them a little easier to come out of solution when they come in contact with these hard structures. So you only get them forming in deep waters. You can't like grow a nodule in a coastal bay or a coastal estuary or anything. It has to be in the deep sea. But we actually don't know the full process for how these nodules form. And these metals are only present in seawater, right?

37:23You can't like do this in the Colorado River or something because that comes from rainwater, which goes through the evaporation process, which leaves those metals behind. Is that right? Correct. But you can, I mean, you can pan for gold in the Colorado River. So those metals, the metals do occur. They just, the deposits are different. And, you know, I would, depending on where you're looking in the world, those deposits may actually be ancient seabed that are now being eroded away and the metals are washing out. So how common are these things? Are they everywhere on the seabed? Are they totally rare?

37:51They are. Polymetallic nodules are fairly common on the seabed. You find them particularly in the Pacific because the Pacific is a very old ocean. So it's had a lot of time for these sorts of things to form. You find them a little bit in the Indian Ocean. Not so much in the Atlantic. There's a few smaller deposits in the Atlantic, but it's predominantly the Pacific where you get polymetallic nodules. Another point for the West Coast right there, if we're keeping score. We're not. You do understand, though, when we're talking about the Pacific Ocean, California is the eastern coast. Yes. That's true.

38:28We got you. East and west are all relative. This is true. Yeah, we live on a globe. So that's just the polymetallic nodules. There's two other resources that are being targeted for exploitation. Wait, first I want to understand more about these nodules. Sure. Can you just like pick them up? I mean, we're talking about mining. Are we digging into the seafloor or can you just like cruise along and gather these things? So this is one of the curious things about nodules that we don't have a perfect answer for, but they only occur at the sediment seawater interface. So you don't find them buried. You only find them sitting on top of the seafloor.

39:00And you can kind of see from how the nodule is structured that they're sort of breaking down at the point where they're in contact with the sediment and then reaccreting above. So they do, they stay on top of the sediment. You could just pick them up. You know, these are about the size, they're cobblestone size, so they're not particularly large. And most of the proposals for just picking them up involved having a multi-ton tracked vehicle with a gigantic vacuum head that pumps up, you know, the top 10 centimeters of seafloor while pumping up tons and tons of these nodules to the surface. That sounds very disruptive to everything else that's down there.

39:34It is. And part of the problem with this is that the nodules themselves are habitat. So within a nodule field, we talk about the deep abyssal plane is incredibly biodiverse. The nodule fields are two to three times more biodiverse than the surrounding deep abyssal plane that doesn't have nodules on it. And you get lots of animals. The animals that thrive in the nodule field, they're using the nodules as habitat because it's hard structure for them to grow on. So you'll get things like glass sponges and corals that grow on top of the nodules. You get lots of different kinds of worms that kind of preferentially hang out around the nodules.

40:09They like to be underneath. Sometimes they're on top of the nodules. Just because it's structure, like they just need something to grab onto. It's structure. Exactly. Yeah. Wow. Scientists did just find a species of whiplash squid, a new species of squid that hides in the nodules and leaves two of its tentacles just kind of dangling up and just grabs whatever it can as things are wandering through the nodules. which I think is great. It's almost like it's a squid that's pretending to be an anglerfish. Love it. You said it goes through and it pulls up the top 10 centimeters. And so I guess it's just like pulling up 10 centimeters and sifting through and anything that's hard, it sends up and anything that's not, it just kicks out the back?

40:46Well, it depends on the technology being discussed. There's a couple of different companies. They all have slightly different technologies, but generally speaking, They're going to pump a slurry of sediment and polymetallic nodule up to a production support vessel on the surface. The nodules will be dewatered and the sediment will be removed and then pumped back down and released in either a midwater or a deep sea release plume. So they'll be pumping everything they can up and then pumping it back down. Dewatered. I love that term. I like to dewater after a shower, for example. Well, so anyone who has gone on a dive knows that if you go super deep and then you come back up, you need some time to depressurize.

41:27So it sounds like if you are shooting everything up and then dropping everything back down, anything that lived in the deep sea as it gets shot up is going to explode. Like anything living will not survive that if it gets up and down, right? That would be my guess. Yeah. So the general consensus is that in the immediate mining area, it's comprehensively destructive. So where the mining tool is passing directly over, anything that gets caught by that tool is going to be destroyed. Okay. All right. So that's one of three. What's the other main categories of resources? So the other one is unfortunately also deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

42:04Oh, no. So these are, you know, these are these incredibly novel ecosystems on the seafloor. They have an energy source unlike anything else that we really think of. Although once we discovered hydrothermal vents, we started finding chemosynthesis everywhere. Because once you see it, you can start looking for it. Unfortunately, the same chemical process that supports these incredible ecosystems is also one that is tremendously good at bringing precious metals out of seawater and delivering it into solution. So at hydrothermal vents, the chimneys – we call them chimneys where the hydrothermal plume is coming out.

42:40The walls of the chimneys, they can be rich in gold. They can be rich in silver. They can be rich in copper. They can be rich in zinc. Basically, any metal that you think of as occurring in a vein. So you think if you get like a vein of copper or a vein of gold. Those veins, even on the surface when we're mining in places like Cyprus, are ancient hydrothermal vents. So Cyprus was an incredibly important site of copper mining during the Bronze Age. It's kind of, you know, the foundry of civilization, if you will, where the Bronze Age was created. And within the copper mines in Cyprus, they had all these very weird fossils that people kept finding.

43:20And the Cyprus copper mines are still going today. They're a 6 ,000-year-old copper mine that's still productive. In 1977, when we discovered hydrothermal vents, you know, the geologists who were working over in Cyprus looked at the tube worms coming out of the vents and said, wait, these are the same thing. Oh. Wow. The mines in Cyprus are part of a structure called the Troidosophilite, which is an ancient chunk of ocean seabed that has been uplifted 100 million years ago. And those copper mines are all ancient hydrothermal vents. So there are companies now that are like, hey, you know, why wait 100 million years to get to the gold and the copper?

43:57Why don't we just go straight to the source? And so there have been some proposals to mine directly at hydrothermal vents that are still in the sea. And, you know, the sad thing with those, you know, I'm not a fan of any form of deep sea mining. I think a reasonable argument could be made that there's a way to do nodule mining in an environmentally respectable way. I don't think there's any possible way to mine a hydrothermal vent without completely destroying the ecosystem around it. And these are, I mean, they're tiny ecosystems. If you take the total surface area of every hydrothermal vent that we know of on the planet, it's smaller than Manhattan.

44:33So it's just, you know, the abyssal plain is half the surface of the planet. And hydrothermal vents are practically nothing when we compare it to that. How big is an individual vent? They can be quite big. They can be several acres. They can also be very small. You'll have vent fields that are only a couple hundred square meters, and you'll have some that are, you know, several kilometers. But they don't get – they're not enormous. They're not like these gigantic things that cover entire swaths of the seafloor. They're very discreet. And you can get places where you just get like a single hydrothermal vent plume and nothing else.

45:06And then the ecosystem, as you know, could fit on your desk. And because they're so separated, that must mean that the ecosystems are quite distinct. They're very distinct. You can, in fact, if you show me a video of a hydrothermal vent, I can pinpoint anywhere in the world that it's from just based on the animals around it. Deep sea geolocating. Every hydrothermal vent is functionally its own unique ecosystem. And there's some connectivity between them. But they are very, very, very unique. I mean, you know, very unique is not a thing that works in the English language, but you know what I mean.

45:39We're with you. And so did that evolve once and then spread somehow between these widely disparate events? Or did it evolve many times independently? That is a great question. We don't know completely. The evolutionary origins of hydrothermal events are still a bit of a mystery. It's likely chemosynthesis evolved multiple times in multiple different families. Wow. So you have them. You have situations where like East Pacific rise is dominated by tube worms. Mid-Atlantic Ridge is dominated by giant swarms of shrimp. Indian Ocean is dominated by the scalyfoot gastropod, which is the snail that grows its shell out of iron and has – it's a perculum, is covered in iron plates.

46:23Incredible. And it's like it's so rich in iron that when you bring these snails up to the surface, they start to rust. What? That's crazy. It's like visiting alien worlds. They're all different. Yeah. So astrobiology and deep sea ecology share a lot of affinity and a lot of work that goes into understanding how life could form on other planets. Gets a lot of its foundational research, particularly from work on hydrothermal vents. It is, in all likelihood, none of us are ever going to see an alien ecosystem. A hydrothermal vent is the closest thing you'll ever come to it. So you should be reading a lot more about these, Daniel.

47:01Daniel's really into aliens. One of my favorite books is a book called The Deep, which has these incredible pictures of deep sea organisms. And they all look like aliens to me. It's incredible. There's a species of isopod called a munopsid. And there's a bunch of very weird species of munopsids out there. And it's one of those deep sea animals. It's highly mobile. So you don't see them very often. You don't sample them very often. They live very deeply. So often when we see a munopsid, we're probably the first person ever seeing that species and probably no one else will ever see that species again.

47:35Wow. Kind of – it's like a rare glimpse into the ocean. I have a video up on YouTube if you want to look it up. I was at the bottom of the Cayman Trough, 6 ,000 meters, watching the ROV feed. And this munopsid isopod swims by and I swear it looks exactly like the alien from the abyss. Which is not a surprise because James Cameron gets a lot of his inspiration from deep sea animals. But it looked like the alien from the abyss just like swimming and it's got like four paddles and it kind of rose through the ocean. And you see like the four paddles going in quick succession. It just swims right past the camera kind of teasing us and then swims away.

48:11And guaranteed that is a species completely undescribed. It's probably the only person to have ever seen that particular species and no one will ever see it again. That's crazy. And I think that's kind of cool. There's still so much in the deep ocean that there's just like the potential for discovery is, I mean, we're functionally exactly where we were 200 years ago when we started exploring the deep ocean, which is we are just getting started. Man. All right, let's do our third resource category before our break. The third resource is ferro-manganese crusts. So they form kind of like nodules, but they form on the sides of seamounts.

48:45And so you get these kind of dense cobalt and nickel-rich crusts that grow on the sides of seamounts. And of course, the problem with these is that sea mounts are also incredibly ecologically important for a number of species. What is a sea mount? A sea mount is a mountain that's underwater. Okay. So why isn't it a sea mountain? I don't know. I don't have a good answer for that. It's shorter. Because you say sea mount, I'm thinking of a seahorse. I'm like somebody's like riding it. But all right, sea mountain. So sea mounts tend to support a tremendous amount of both biomass and biodiversity. You get a lot of cold water coral reefs grow on seamounts.

49:22So there is off the coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. And this isn't a seamount. It's actually a plateau. But it's a region called the Blake Plateau. And it's this kind of giant elevated geologic feature in the U.S. Atlantic coast. And on the Blake Plateau is the largest cold water coral reef that we have ever discovered. It is larger than the state of Vermont. Wow. It may very well be the largest contiguous ecosystem in the continental United States. Wow. It's just massive coral reef field at about 800 to 1 ,000 meters depth. We didn't know about it until about five years ago when we first started characterizing it.

50:01But in the 1970s, a deep sea mining company did a bunch of experimental test mines on the Blake Plateau without even knowing this coral reef was there. And dragged all their mining tools right through the middle of the largest coral reef in the deep sea without even knowing it. And it took us another 50 years to figure out that the coral reef was there. So this is, you know, when I say the potential for discovery is enormous, like I'm not just talking about like tiny little ecosystems that are sort of weird anomalies, but also like gigantic ecosystems that we haven't even begun to characterize yet.

50:32All right. Well, I want to hear more about the unexplored deep sea. But first, we got to take another break.

50:46Every business has an ambition. PayPal Open is the platform designed to help you grow into yours. With access to business loans so you can expand and hundreds of millions of PayPal customers worldwide. Your customers can pay all the ways they want today with PayPal, Venmo, Pay Later, and all major cards so you can focus on the future. When you need a partner trusted by millions, there's one platform for all business. PayPal Open. Grow today at paypalopen.com. Loan subject to approval in available locations. aging doesn't stop and neither should you with vital proteins collagen and protein shakes because around the age of 30 your body needs more support for movement and recovery on workout and rest days reach for a 30 gram total protein shake or go with our classic collagen peptides help support healthy hair skin nails bones and joints so you can stay vital stay you visit vital proteins.com to learn more and where to buy these statements have not been evaluated by the food and drug administration.

51:43This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Apple Vacations where your story starts. The Splash into Savings event from Apple Vacations is here. Now through June 25th, save up to$150 on vacation packages, plus instant savings at select resorts in Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and top U.S. destinations. Use promo code JUNE26 for these limited time offers. Start planning today at applevacations.com or contact your travel advisor. Locations, where your story starts. And now, another appliance triumph from our friends at Grand Appliance. With two dogs, every wash load came out covered in fur.

52:25I went into Grand Appliance looking for a fix, and they recommended the Maytag Top Load with Pet Pro Hair Removal System. They had it in stock and installed it days later. And you know what? It really works. Lint rollers are a thing of my past now. Great recommendations from the appliance experts. Shop GrandAppliance.com. GrandAppliance.com.

52:57All right, we're back and we are talking about the deep sea, whether it's more like Mordor or Southern California. Those are the same thing. Yes, functionally the same. All right. I was trying to trap you. But tell me more about how little we know about the deep sea. What are the opportunities there for like real surprises? Not just in terms of like new weird creatures, but new features or new ecosystems or just like big surprises. Yeah, so we've observed less than a percent of the seafloor and actually less than a tenth of a percent of the seafloor has been directly observed. And within that, just tenth of a tenth of a percent of the seafloor, we found things like hydrothermal vents.

53:41We found whale falls. We found methane cold seeps. We found the largest deepwater coral reef in the world. So, you know, really, even just within that tiny fraction, we have revised how we understand how life on planet Earth functions several times over. And we really are just getting started when we talk about deep sea exploration. So one of my favorite stories is I have a piece of art on the wall of my office. Unfortunately, I'm in the wrong office now where I'd show you. But it is a painting that was made right after the discovery of deep sea hydrothermal vents. And in this painting, it's like a profile of a hydrothermal vent going into the sediment.

54:21And the artist has drawn these caverns underneath the vent, and the caverns are full of tubeworms. And the idea was, when vents were first discovered, was that kind of the tubeworms on the surface were sort of anomalous, and maybe most of the biology was happening underneath the surface within the crust of the earth. That theory very quickly fell out of favor. It was sort of this weird kind of, oh, gee whiz, wouldn't that be a neat idea that someone proposed in the late 1970s. And then, and then in 2023, researchers that were on board the DSV Alvin that were sampling hydrothermal vents on the East Pacific rise decided, what if we flip over some rocks?

55:01And they flipped over some rocks and they found caverns of tube worms underneath the hydrothermal vent. So this is one of the most studied hydrothermal vents in the world. and like you can still make fundamental discoveries about biology on this planet by flipping over a rock, which is the best thing ever because that's how every biologist gets their start. These are our favorite discoveries, yes. So why is it so hard? I mean, that sounds like a naive question. I know it's hard to go to the deep sea floor, but like, can't we see it from the ocean? Like, do you need to go there in order to like see what's at the ocean floor?

55:38Yeah. So, you know, we can map the seafloor with multi-beam sonar, but we can't really tell what's happening down there ecologically unless we go there. And by go there, I usually mean go there with a robot. You can go there in submersibles too. You can do a lot more surveying with a robot than you can with a submersible. And, you know, one of the things that bothers me about deep sea mining is that the mining fields, particularly for polymetallic nodule mining, they're so large. that if the mining companies are being honest about their desire for transparency and having, you know, active monitoring of the mining prospect with ROV assets and everything, within about two or three years of a mining operation getting going, we'll probably double the amount of observations we've made on the seafloor.

56:23Which says to me, we're going to double the amount of discoveries made on the seafloor. And if all those discoveries are being made within a mining site, like how do we triage that? How do we decide what requires us to stop and take a step back and, you know, commit to like a hydrothermal vent level discovery within a mining field. It's going to be like, well, then you just need to stop because all your environmental impact assessments are now out of date. And also we need to spend 30 to 50 years trying to understand this ecosystem before we could even begin to tell you what's going on there. And anything funded by the company is going to have a huge conflict of interest, of course.

56:55Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That seems like a really nice transition to who gets to make these decisions about where the exploitation gets to happen and whatnot. So what are the rules governing the deep seabed? Where do they come from? So there is a treaty called the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea that is functionally the constitution for the ocean. And it defines a lot of how nations get to approach what are effectively resources that exist beyond national jurisdiction. So all the things that fall on this planet and outside of any nation's territory. And that includes things like polymetallic nodules.

57:33Most polymetallic nodule fields are in the high seas. Hydrothermal vent deposits, cobalt-rich ferromanganese crust deposits. It also includes things like how you can lay and protect subsea cables. So we have transatlantic cables that carry data across the Atlantic Ocean. We have 99 % of all of our digital data is still carried on transoceanic cables, not via satellite. So all that telecom communication infrastructure is controlled by the agreements made in the law of the sea. Things like, you know, I'm pulling up all the ones that seem suddenly and very politically prescient at the moment. Things like freedom of navigation through straits.

58:14The rules for that are laid out by the UN Convention of the law of the sea. There's another treaty that's just coming into effect now called the High Seas Treaty that oversees how biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction is treated. So now we're starting to talk about marine genetic resources as well as mineral resources. But all of those rules are laid out in the Convention of the Law of the Sea. And the Convention of the Law of the Sea creates this agency called the International Seabed Authority, which is the UN agency that is tasked with overseeing the exploitation of mineral resources of the high seas as well as the protection of the marine environment.

58:52And does it have any actual authority and enforcement capabilities? I mean, these things are treaties between sovereign nations, right? So here's where things get tricky. In general, yes. In general, the countries that have signed on to the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea and ratified the treaty have been working together to develop a mining code. It's been a slow process. It's 170 member states plus the European Union. So it's an incredibly complex, incredibly detailed negotiation. But for the most part, that negotiation has generally been working, not working quickly, but working. Unfortunately, the United States never ratified the law of the sea.

59:33So we're not party to the treaty and we're not party to the convention and we don't participate at the International Seabed Authority. Previous to that, the U.S. has been treating the law of the sea as customary law. We haven't ratified the treaty, but we have been functionally aligning U.S. policy and U.S. international law to the conditions set out by the law of the sea. And that's important for things like Google wants to run cables between their headquarters and Singapore. They need the law of the sea to function in order for those data cables to work. American mariners like to be able to freely travel over the high seas.

1:00:09That depends on the law of the sea working. To some extent, it has continued to work. But the U.S. has decided to basically become a rogue state when it comes to deep sea mining and is going to begin issuing mining permits to companies that want to mine in the high seas. It also is going to begin issuing mining permits to companies that want to mine within U.S. territorial waters. And the U.S. has the second or third largest territorial sea in the world, also something defined by the U.N. Convention of the Law of the Sea. But functionally speaking, nation states can let anyone mine in their own waters that they want.

1:00:44It happens fairly rarely. It's politically more difficult to mine in national waters because it's closer to shore. It's closer to inhabited areas. Because it's much easier to campaign politically against something if it's only functioning in one country rather than functioning across a multinational regime. But the U.S. is going to attempt to begin issuing permits to mine in both U.S. waters and in high seas in an area called the Clipper and Clarion Zone, which is sort of like ground zero for the deep-sea mining development. It is this region of the Pacific that is just to the east of Hawaii that is fairly rich in polymetallic nodules and where most of the work has been done on understanding the ecosystems there and on developing the technology.

1:01:26And so these resources are supposed to belong to everyone according to like international law. According to the Law of the Sea, the Law of the Sea is an incredible document. If you just from a like – you know, from a policy wonk standpoint, like you rarely get such like a breathlessly hopeful Star Trek-y document. But like – I mean it really is. It says that the resources of the high seas are the common heritage of humankind. They belong to everyone and the resources, if they are to be exploited, must be exploited for the good of humankind, including future generations. So we have to consider how mining them today will impact people who maybe need a healthy ocean 30 years from now.

1:02:11You know, it's as far as international treaties go and considering it was negotiated at like the height of the Cold War, you know, with Soviet and U.S. brinksmanship kind of at a fever pitch. Like to have a document like this that got ratified by almost the entire world is really impressive. And it'd be a huge shame if it falls apart because, you know, the U.S. is having a four-year lapse in international diplomacy. So at this point, have any resources actually been extracted or exploited? What's the difference between extraction and exploitation? I mix those up sometimes. Yeah. So the two terms that get thrown around in deep sea mining are exploration, which is not like my kind of exploration, but it's more like prospecting.

1:02:55It's finding the resources, quantifying the resources, doing the groundwork that you need to do to get permits to mine the resources. And exploration includes doing the environmental impact assessments and environmental impact statements and all those kinds of, you know, regulatory things that have to happen. And then exploitation is the commercial mining of the resources. So currently, the ISA has issued 31 exploration leases, mostly for polymetallic nodules, but also for hydrothermal vents and for ferromanganese crusts, and has issued zero exploitation permits. So only one true deep sea mining exploitation permit has ever been issued.

1:03:37And it was issued to a company called Nautilus Minerals who wanted to mine a hydrothermal vent in Papua New Guinea. And that was issued in 2011. I actually worked on that project. Most of my PhD was done at that mining prospect, trying to understand the environmental impacts of mining this site. The company went bankrupt before it was ever able to mine. Its mining tools, which it built, are sitting and rusting in Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea. They were never able to build a vessel to support the mining operation. And the project is kind of, it's sort of a zombie project. And occasionally, like there's a company that owns the rights still, although the actual permit expires at the end of this year or at the end of last year.

1:04:18I can't remember which. Every so often someone tries to revive it, but it's not really clear what will happen to it in the future. But that's the only commercial license that's ever been issued and no commercial ore was ever extracted or sold. So at this moment, we're in a rare point in history where we have this emerging extractive industry that we have the opportunity to get the environmental rules in place before any extraction happens. And that's – for major industries, we've never really had that before. So it's a rare opportunity to try to get it right or say, no, we're not going to do this.

1:04:53But like, you know, it would be a real shame if we let this opportunity pass. And what does getting it right look like? Getting it right looks like finding begrudging consensus among 170 different countries, all of whom want different things from the industry. So there are some countries that are sponsoring mining companies and they want to profit directly from the mining. There are moratorium countries that don't want to see mining progress and want to see much better environmental rules and are pushing for strong regulations. There are countries that view their main source of income from deep sea mining as this common heritage principle.

1:05:33And they want to make sure that the taxes and the fees and the royalties are sufficient that any mining that happens – because they don't have – they don't do any mining on their own. But it's the common heritage. So everyone should get a financial payout from this enterprise. And so there are countries that see that payout as what they want. So they're negotiating very heavily for a strong royalty system. And there are countries that have terrestrial mines. There are countries that have terrestrial cobalt and terrestrial nickel mines that are like, we need to make sure that this industry doesn't disrupt our industry.

1:06:05So they're being protectionist about their own industries and making sure that there are mechanisms in place where if deep sea mining adversely impacts their economies, that they get compensated. You can see some of these are mutually conflicting goals. And that's the reality of international negotiation when you have this many countries working on it is that no one's going to be happy with the final outcome. But if you can find a begrudging consensus, that's a heck of a lot better than the alternative. So has there not been more exploitation because the rules aren't set yet or because technology isn't there yet or both?

1:06:41So if you were a mining company, you would say the policy regime is the only thing preventing this industry from maturing. And I've heard that from many, many mining executives over the years. The reality on the ground is that there is no company today who is ready to mine the deep sea. If all the rules were in place, if all the permits were issued, if the only thing that you were waiting on was a go order and you gave deep sea mining companies the go ahead to start tomorrow, not one of them would be able to start in the next two years. And in fact, the only company that ever did get the go-ahead, it took them another five years to figure out that they were bankrupt before they could even start mining.

1:07:19And briefly, what is the biggest technological hurdle for these companies to do it? At the risk of sounding a little too much like Herman Melville, the technological barrier preventing deep sea mining is the sea. I walked into that one. The sea is an enormously difficult environment to work in. In a lot of ways, it's much, much harder to work in the deep sea than it is even to work in space. And you'll push back on it, but I will challenge you this. Would you rather be in space in a full ocean capable submarine or at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in a spaceship? I want to be on the couch. Yes, secret option C, couch.

1:07:59Yeah, yeah. Well, we've established the couch has a higher fatality rate than either of those options. But it's more comfortable. Yeah, I don't know. Both of those scare me. I'm claustrophobic. So, you know, the ocean is a tremendously difficult, logistically complex place to work. We're talking about a deep sea mining operation in the CCZ, the Clipper Dinclarian Zone, would be probably the most logistically complex mining operation ever undertaken. Operating multiple vessels, multiple robotic assets. And the ocean is just notoriously good at destroying technology. Electronics and saltwater very famously don't get along.

1:08:36And, you know, even like the most elite deep sea exploration programs like the guys out of Woods Hole, the folks at IFRAMER in France, you know, the failure rate on those ROVs is very high. The amount of downtime they have is tremendous because the ocean is just such a hard place to work and so destructive to equipment. So, you know, I think even if a mining company was ready to go ahead today, there's a huge learning curve that has to happen as you begin scaling up to commercial production. And the reality is you are talking about sending a robot down to 6 ,000 meters to collect ore and pump that ore up to the surface.

1:09:13So if you're doing that, that also means you are handling a 6 ,000-meter cable that is running from your ship down to the ROV and then a 6 ,000-meter riser and lift system that is pulling ore all the way up. No one's ever done that before. We've had a couple of deep ocean drilling expeditions where they've been able to do things like this because they're all very short-term operations. just the sheer technical complexity of handling that much cable. There's maybe a handful of ships that currently exist right now that could handle that much cable. And if a mining tool needs power, so you're talking about pumping down gigawatts of electricity to get the mining tool running, it's enormously technologically complicated.

1:09:58And we're just right at the beginning of testing the technology. I think one mining company has tried to do a holistic test where they sent down a prototype mining tool, which was like much smaller than what they proposed to actually use, and use a riser and lift system to pump everything up to the surface and do their midwater plume to release everything. And their original plan was to get something like 20 ,000 or 30 ,000 tons of ore. They only recovered a couple thousand tons of ore. The system failed several times. It's just hard. Everything in the ocean is hard. Nothing in the ocean is easy.

1:10:29and there's nothing you can do in the ocean that is easier than if you were doing it on land. Well, and the mantra for space is space is hard. There's a lot of parallels between these two environments, I think. Oh, absolutely. I mean, space is easy. I mean, compared to the deep sea, space is easy. Okay. All right, all right. So I feel like one of the - Space is hard to get to, but easy to be in. Deep sea is easy to get to, hard to stay. Like I'd get to the bottom of the Mariana Trench right now. I just wouldn't come back. Yeah, yeah. You can drop something and it'll get there on its own. Spam can do it, right?

1:11:02Yeah. That's right. That's right. Yeah, you just need a rock. Okay, so we've talked about this amazing biodiversity that we don't understand very well. And we've talked about these resources that are important for things like electric vehicles, which maybe this is oversold. I'm going to be interested in your opinion on this. But, like, you know, I feel like electric vehicles are an important part of how we're trying to drive down our carbon dioxide emissions. And so what should we be doing? Should we be recycling more? Should we be using less of these resources? Should we be mining them from different environments?

1:11:35What do you think is the solution there? So there's a couple of different things happening simultaneously as we are in the midst of what is hopefully a genuine renewable energy transition. It is absolutely true. If we wanted to electrify the world's automotive fleets, if we wanted to massively expand our use of renewable energies, we need metals. And those metals have to come from somewhere. And right now, those metals are coming from places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which does not have a great environmental track record and has a pretty terrible human rights abuse record right now.

1:12:09It's coming from Indonesia where they are strip mining rainforests for nickel. So there is a tremendous amount of biodiversity lost there. and you know i think there there is a compelling case that deep sea mining could be better than than some of these alternatives i think the reality of the situation on the ground is that if we genuinely need these metals we're going to get them from wherever we were going to get them and i don't see deep sea mining as something that would actually impact terrestrial mining at all as it scales up like looking at the proposals currently on the table 30 years from now deep Sea mining, if it were allowed to progress with the most optimistic projections today, might be accounting for 3 % of global metal production for these metals.

1:12:52So, you know, it's not going to have a significant impact on the very damaging and very destructive mining that is happening on land. If you want to improve mining happening on land, you have to invest in technologies that make mining happening on land better and cleaner and invest in governance policies that prevent human rights abuses and all those things, all the unfun things that aren't just like, let's build giant robots and drop them in the ocean. It's kind of one of those technocratic solutions where you're like, oh, look at all these problems. If we just drop giant robots in the ocean, we won't have any of those problems.

1:13:23When in fact, you have the same problems, plus now you also have giant robots in the ocean. So if I give you a million dollars and you have to invest it in either asteroid mining or deep sea mining, what are you investing in? Well, I'm not investing in either of those. You're taking the million and running. Secret option C, you're buying a really nice couch. I think I'm actually federally prohibited from investing in either of those. So I think we'll leave it at that. All right. You know, the other side of that equation is that there are new battery technologies that are in development. And solid state batteries have been all over the news this week in particular as a promising metal-free alternative.

1:14:04And so I think, you know, the reality is you've got to look at recycling technologies. So urban recycling. Some of these metals we don't need to produce any more of. You know, gold, we can have a circular economy for gold right now. We don't need to mine another ounce of gold out of the earth. We could stop. And there's enough gold in circulation to meet all of our technical demands. Gold, unfortunately, is also a precious metal and is used as a luxury signifier. And so, like, there's other reasons people are mining gold. But there's no, you know, there's no industrial justification for mining gold at this point.

1:14:37Copper is getting there. We could be much more aggressive about recycling copper. Nickel and cobalt, that one's a little bit trickier. Nickel and cobalt recycling is also fairly intensive because they tend to be alloyed. But we can begin, you know, the recycling process for those metals. One of the things that kind of came out of left field is that, like, the projections for metal recycling are below where we thought they'd be because electric vehicle batteries last longer than we thought. But, you know, if you look at the first generation of electric vehicles, there are all these predictions.

1:15:06It's like, oh, you're going to have to swap your Toyota hybrid battery out every five years. And that just never turned out to be the case. Nice. So, yeah, part of it is that a lot of those metals we were predicting we'd have through the recycling market are still driving around in cars right now. We can be better about how and when we use. I mean, really, the answer is don't consume as much. Stop buying stuff. I mean, dramatically – like you can't spend your way out of these crises. Part of it is changing lifestyles and investing in walkable communities and investing in EVs that aren't cars. You know, an e-bike can replace 80 percent of a lot of people's automotive needs while consuming a fraction of the metals available.

1:15:49Looking at other technology, like plug-in electric hybrids are a great kind of middle ground for, you know, you get a smaller battery that uses less metals, but you're still electric, you know, 80 to 90 percent of the time if you're being diligent about charging it. And so you have a significant reduction in both gas consumption and metal demands. So there's a lot of options out there that aren't just like drop a robot in the ocean or don't. And it really is going to take a variety of solutions on a variety of fronts to get to the real answer. And, you know, deep sea mining, my suspicion is that the industry itself will never be a particularly large industry, but there's going to end up being some like – we're going to get to some like niche metals that are going to be hard to find in other places where they don't have like existing mines that you had to fix or solve.

1:16:38So things like some of the most advanced solar panels need tellurium. And there's not a ton of tellurium mines in the world. There's one seamount that happens to be particularly rich in tellurium. And I worry that people – and it's in the UK's territorial waters. So I worry that people will be looking to that to get the tellurium out of that one seamount. The high Arctic has nodule fields and crust fields that are rich in scandium. And we don't use scandium for a lot, but we use it for ultra-lightweight aircraft frames. So if we start electrifying airplanes, maybe we're going to start needing more scandium.

1:17:09I don't know. So I think those niche cases where it's like very particular metal demands are probably a much more likely and more promising approach than like this wholesale, let's just get tons of cobalt. All right. Time for your alien question, Daniel. Yes. So we sent you on an alien planet. James Cameron has funded this mission. And you're landing. And my question to you is where do you want to explore first to find the greatest alien diversity? Do you expect it to be in alien oceans or on alien land? Ooh. I mean, I'd be looking for where the energy is coming from. You know, if we're talking somewhere like Venus, you'd be looking in the atmosphere.

1:17:50It's pretty energy rich. If we're getting, you know, out to the gas giants and landing on some moons, I'd be looking for, you know, I think the best bet for life is places that have energy and stability, which tend to not come in the same spot. So I wouldn't look for something that's like tremendously volatile. You know, one of the predictions for where life on Earth started is at what are called serpentinite-hosted hydrothermal vents. And serpentinite-hosted vents are different than the regular hydrothermal vents where you've got a tremendous amount of tectonic activity. What you've got with serpentinite vents is it's a trunk of ultramafic seafloor rock that's off axis.

1:18:33So it's not sitting on like fault lines. But there's a chemical reaction that happens when seawater contacts like olivine and a couple other minerals that produces heat. So you get an exothermic reaction. It produces these low-level diffuse flow hydrothermal vent plumes that are – they're warm. They're 80, 90 degrees, but they're not these magnificent black smokers that you're used to seeing. You know, I say you're used to seeing as if everyone just stares at black smokers every day. But it's a slightly colder event, but they're also very stable. So they persist for thousands of years. And so you've got an energy source that's not somewhere that's getting frequently disturbed.

1:19:11You've got all the chemicals you need for life. And you've got like that chance for everything to mix and mingle. So I would be looking in oceans where we can find energy that is not particularly volatile energy. Fascinating. Excellent answer. Also, I kind of would just be looking everywhere. I sort of expect life to be cosmopolitan once we have the ability to look. You know, microbes for the most part. But I expect once we can actually start getting to other worlds, we'll just find it everywhere. Daniel hopes so. He's really into aliens. All right. Now, you do know the one big deep sea, deep space connection, right?

1:19:47the waters under Jovian moons? No, I'm talking about Point Nemo. So Point Nemo is a spot in the Pacific Ocean that is geographically the furthest from any inhabited landmass. And in the 1970s, the U.S. and the Soviet Union got together and said, hey, we've got all this stuff in space that's going to start coming down. We should pick a target for it. And so most of the major space assets, including all the mirrors and eventually the International Space Station when it comes down, are dropped on Point Nemo. Wow. So it is the deep sea graveyard for outer space. Oh, man. I want to operate a submersible through Point Nemo.

1:20:32That's amazing. It would be really cool to do a huge – I mean, you'd never find anything. There's such tiny targets in such a big ocean, and mostly they break up. All right. Notably, I think the U.S. once missed Point Nemo and accidentally dropped one of the old Sky Labs over Australia instead. And they got a fine for that, actually, a fine for littering that I think they never paid. Sorry, Australia. It was a little part, I think, not a big one. All right. That was amazing. It was so great having you on the show. Thank you so much. And have a good one. Thank you so much. This has been a delight.

1:21:12Thanks, everybody, for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman. He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and XDNKUniverse. Come engage with us. You can email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. We really do want to hear from you. And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord, where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

1:21:51And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an iHeart Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

1:22:01Introducing the all-new Mazda CX-5, featuring more connection. Hey, Google, where's the nearest Pilates class? Safety that has your back. more discovery on the scenic routes, more passion in the details, and more control in changing weather. The all-new Mazda CX-5. More to move every side of you. See it in five films at mazdausa.com slash five sides. Google is a trademark of Google LLC. Sequences shortened and simulated. Aging is real, and so are the benefits of new Vital Proteins Collagen Sparkling Water. Because around the age of 30, your body needs backup to keep your collagen up. So get your daily glow up now in three fresh flavors, strawberry blossom, lemon lime, and blood orange.

1:22:47Improved skin health in as little as 30 days thanks to collagen peptides. Cheers to that. So you can stay vital, stay you. Visit vitalproteins.com to learn more and where to buy. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Apple Vacations, where your story starts. The Splash into Savings event from Apple Vacations is here. Now through June 25th, save up to$150 on vacation packages, plus instant savings at select resorts in Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and top U.S. destinations.

1:23:19Use promo code JUNE26 for these limited-time offers. Start planning today at AppleVacations.com or contact your travel advisor. Apple Vacations, where your story starts. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales. And somehow, none of them talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in. An all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing. All in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs.

1:23:58And best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com slash iHeartRadio. That's O-D-O-O-O dot com slash iHeartRadio. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.