In short
The Documentary Podcast: Looking for No Man's Land
Episode Overview In this episode, Looking for No Man's Land, host Caroline Steele and producer Florian Bohr embark on a quest to find a location on Earth that remains untouched by human influence. They explore the profound impact humans have on the planet, questioning whether any truly pristine ecosystems exist. Through discussions with various experts, they reveal that humanity has altered nearly every corner of the globe.
Key Themes
- Human Impact on the Environment: The episode begins with alarming statistics about climate change, deforestation, and rising sea levels, emphasizing the extensive changes humans have made to the planet.
- The Concept of No Man's Land: Steele and Bohr set out to discover if a truly unaffected ecosystem exists, engaging with experts who suggest that such a place may not exist at all.
- Exploration and Discovery: The journey unfolds through conversations with various scientists and environmentalists, showcasing a mix of hope, skepticism, and the pursuit of knowledge.
Important Discussions
- Existence of No Man's Land
- Initial Skepticism: Many experts express doubt about the existence of a location that is entirely unaffected by human activity.
- Historical Context: Discussion with Earl Ellis reveals that even 12,000 years ago, 75% of Earth's land surface was altered by humans.
- Scientific Insights
- Climate Change: Conversations with NASA scientists about temperature changes and atmospheric carbon dioxide illustrate the widespread nature of human influence.
- The Ocean's Zones: Exploration into the ocean reveals that various zones, including the sunlit, twilight, and midnight zones, are all affected by human actions such as overfishing and pollution.
- Hydrothermal Vents
- Discovery of Life: The team considers hydrothermal vents as potential no man's land, but experts reveal that even these ecosystems are impacted by human pollution, such as microplastics.
- Bacteria Dependent Ecosystems: Hydrothermal vents rely on chemosynthesis, raising questions about their isolation from human influence.
- Underwater Caves
- Cave Ecosystems: Discussion about unique cave systems leads to the idea that they might be less disturbed, but experts indicate that even these environments are not immune to human impact.
- Olms as Indicators: Research into the olm, a cave-dwelling creature, suggests that its existence indicates a stable environment, yet pollution and invasive species still affect them.
- Subglacial Lakes in Antarctica
- Hidden Lakes: The episode culminates in the exploration of subglacial lakes beneath Antarctica. These lakes, insulated by thick ice, may be the closest thing to no man's land, as they have remained untouched by human activities.
- Microbial Life: Scientists studying these lakes have found microbial life, suggesting that while these environments are relatively pristine, they are still connected to the broader ecological impacts of climate change.
Conclusion Caroline Steele reflects on humanity’s relationship with the Earth, suggesting that while we have altered the planet significantly, the focus should shift to how we can coexist with nature rather than simply preserving untouched spaces. The quest for no man's land reveals the intricacies of our impact and the potential for responsible stewardship of the environment.
Key Takeaways
- There are very few, if any, locations on Earth that remain completely unaffected by human influence.
- Both historical and contemporary data show that humanity has had a lasting impact on ecosystems for thousands of years.
- Subglacial lakes in Antarctica may represent the most pristine environments currently known, yet even they are not completely isolated from human influence.
- The pursuit of no man's land is not merely about finding untouched places, but rather understanding how to live sustainably on a planet profoundly shaped by human activity.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOIntroduction to No Man's Land
0:30 to 2:19
Caroline Steele introduces the quest to find untouched ecosystems on Earth.
“Follow Merrin Talks Money on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.”
The Search for Untouched Ecosystems
2:19 to 4:03
Exploring the possibility of finding places on Earth that have not been affected by humans.
“Thank you so much for agreeing to have a chat with us, especially as I don't think you know much about what we're going to talk about.”
Historical Human Impact on Earth
4:03 to 6:01
Discussing the extent of human influence on the planet over thousands of years.
“But we're still going to give it our best shot.”
Climate Change and Its Effects
6:01 to 8:13
Investigating how climate change has altered ecosystems and environments.
“12 ,000 years ago, only about 25 % of Earth's land surface, that's not including Antarctica, was uninhabited and not used intensively.”
Mapping Human Impact on Earth
8:13 to 11:21
Using visualisations to demonstrate the pervasive impact of humans on the planet.
“They have a scientific visualisations department, which takes dense data and turns it into something easier to understand.”
Exploring the Oceans for No Man's Land
11:21 to 12:54
Turning attention to the oceans as potential sites for untouched ecosystems.
“I want to leave you some room for the rest of the podcast.”
Understanding Ocean Zones
12:54 to 14:03
Learning about different ocean zones and their environmental challenges.
“Could somewhere in our oceans be no man's land?”
Impact of CO2 on Ocean Life
14:03 to 14:35
Learn how increasing CO2 levels affect marine organisms and their energy use.
“A lot of the animals control the pH, the acidity inside their bodies.”
Exploring the Twilight Zone
14:40 to 15:28
Discover the peculiar life forms that inhabit the twilight zone of the ocean.
“You proceed from the sunlit zone into the twilight zone.”
Journey to the Midnight Zone
15:32 to 16:36
Uncover the characteristics and challenges faced by life in the midnight zone.
“The next zone below the twilight zone is the midnight zone.”
Show all 26 chapters
Descending to the Ocean Floor
16:40 to 20:45
Follow a marine biologist's journey to the ocean floor and the discoveries made there.
“But he said we're getting closer to no man's land.”
Plastic Pollution in No Man's Land
20:48 to 21:20
Hear shocking statistics about plastic found deep in the ocean and its implications.
Human Impact on Pristine Oceans
21:31 to 22:31
Explore how human activities have altered even the most remote ocean environments.
“It is absolutely crazy to me that there are places in the world that, you know, Alan goes down and is submersible, is the first person there and we've already tampered with it.”
Investigating Hydrothermal Vents
22:43 to 23:28
Learn about unique ecosystems that thrive near hydrothermal vents deep in the ocean.
“I think we need to talk to people who know more than us.”
Darwin's Insights on the Galapagos
24:17 to 28:01
Discover how Darwin's observations in the Galapagos relate to today's environmental crises.
“Fish, shark and turtles were popping their heads up in all parts.”
Discovery of Hydrothermal Vents
28:01 to 28:34
Learn about the surprising life forms found around hydrothermal vents.
“and they went down and came into this oasis of life.”
Chemosynthesis and Early Life
28:34 to 29:39
Explore the process of chemosynthesis and its significance for life on Earth.
“Why was there a thriving patch of life, kilometres beneath the surface, clustered around a jet of hot water?”
Impact of Humans on Hydrothermal Vents
29:39 to 31:06
Understand how human activities have affected hydrothermal vent ecosystems.
“To work out if hydrothermal vents are truly no man's land, we need to have a better understanding of how they work.”
Underwater Caves and Alms
31:06 to 36:36
Discover the unique ecosystem of underwater caves and their inhabitants.
“I would guess that almost all vent samples that you could take, you would probably eventually find microplastics in them.”
Hypogenic Caves as Pristine Environments
36:36 to 39:27
Learn about hypogenic caves and their potential as untouched habitats.
“It usually just completely wipes out the whole population.”
Exploring Hidden No Man's Lands
39:27 to 41:44
Dive into the concept of undiscovered no man’s lands across the globe.
“We've just stumbled across some huge no man's land, Florian.”
Subglacial Lakes in Antarctica
41:44 to 42:01
Examine the untouched subglacial lakes beneath Antarctica's ice.
Exploring Subglacial Lakes in Antarctica
42:01 to 43:10
Learn about the discovery and significance of subglacial lakes hidden beneath Antarctica's ice.
“Let's have one last go, see if we can find another no man's land.”
Drilling into the Unknown: Lake Vostok
43:10 to 45:46
Discover the challenges and breakthroughs of drilling into Lake Vostok and its implications for science.
“Dominic Hodgson is the Director of Science at the British Antarctic Survey.”
The Search for Microbial Life in Lake Willans
45:46 to 47:55
Follow Trista Vic-Majors' quest to uncover life in Lake Willans and the unexpected findings.
“In 2013, she was part of the team that sampled Lake Willans.”
The Hope of No Man's Land
47:55 to 50:06
Explore the philosophical implications of finding untouched ecosystems and what it means for humanity.
“So even though I would say humans affect pretty much everything on Earth, And these lakes, we just haven't, we just haven't gotten there yet.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
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0:42Now, NASA says global sea levels rose by more than expected last year. The agency blamed an unusual amount of ocean warming. You're probably more than familiar with news like this. The world's biggest rainforest, the Amazon, has lost an area the size of Germany and France combined. I'm Caroline Steele, a science broadcaster and journalist, and these headlines really worry me. Every year, the Greenland ice sheet loses 270 billion metric tonnes of ice. It's hard to overstate quite how much we've changed our planet. From flooded homes in Spain to forest fires in Australia, from rising oceans in the Pacific to barren plains in East Africa.
1:31So when my friend and producer Florian asked me the following question, I just couldn't get it out of my head. Is there anywhere left? So yeah, the idea of this mad quest is to find a place. Is there any place on Earth that humans haven't affected? A location that is just unchanged by us. I think it needs to be an ecosystem. I think there needs to be some life there that is still pristine. Somewhere that would be exactly the same if humans had never set foot on planet Earth. I don't know if that place exists. And if it does exist... I don't know either. Can we find it? But that's the idea. I think I want to try to find it.
2:25Fine.
2:29We're looking for no man's land. Thank you so much for agreeing to have a chat with us, especially as I don't think you know much about what we're going to talk about. No, but I think that's a good sales pitch. I'm intrigued. There are people out there who have a head start on this. Environmentalists, scientists, climate journalists. How much do you know about what I'm going to ask you about? Nothing. Nothing. I haven't the faintest idea. So we thought we'd save ourselves some time by giving them a call. I think you should just jump into it, but it's all very mysterious, right? And telling them about our plan.
3:09We are working on a series. We're looking for no man's land. In the hope that they might give us some clues, some idea of where to start looking. OK, I think you will be looking in vain. I have really bad news for you, I'm afraid. There's not a place. You will not find it. It does not exist. We are not talking here about uninhabited, right? No, not uninhabited, unaffected. OK, none. Nowhere on Earth. I don't want to be rude, but I think it's maybe a bit naive to even think... That there might be somewhere. That there might be somewhere like that because we've been such a rapacious species and we've created so much change in the world.
3:54Maybe we've bitten off more than we can chew. Most people we contacted don't think we stand a chance of finding no man's land. OK, Florian, I've got your present. But we're still going to give it our best shot. A map! In my experience, all great quests start with a map. Yeah, and we have a pen. Yeah. And we can just tick places off. Given the odds aren't in our favour, I think we should begin by ruling places out. OK, worth a try. This is Earl Ellis, Professor of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in the US. Let's go over here. And he's got his own map to show us.
4:38OK, you can see it says 10 ,000 BC there. So that's 12 ,000 years ago. And let's take the patterns of basically the last 40 years or so and then project back in time. And so that's what we're looking at here is kind of what we call a backcasted look at land use and population densities 12 ,000 years ago. OK, and what's the map showing us? The places that look kind of greyish, that is an area that has no evidence in the data of a permanent human population or any form of intensive land use. But the majority of the map isn't this sort of light blue colour. It's either green or brown. So you're saying even 10 ,000 BC, humans were impacting the majority of the surface of the Earth.
5:30Yes. We really have a sustained relationship that's been going on for thousands of years. That's fascinating to me because I think the way we almost, like when we came up with a question, is there a no man's land? I think I was sort of thinking about it from the perspective of since the Industrial Revolution, since humanity has impacted everything on a global scale. But you're saying it goes back much further than that. Oh, much deeper, according to this model, which I think underestimates the extent of people and land use. 12 ,000 years ago, only about 25 % of Earth's land surface, that's not including Antarctica, was uninhabited and not used intensively.
6:1175 % of the Earth's surface was already changed by humans in some way. That's right. So not only might no man's land not exist now, it realistically also might not have existed 12 ,000 years ago. I think so.
6:30If you've seen one of those illustrations of the megafauna of North America before people, it's unbelievable. It was once home to huge mammals, woolly mammoths, giant sloths and short-faced bears, which despite their name were very big. The classic stories are basically about people coming to inhabit lands where they've never been before. A social hunter, a species that is capable of hunting very sophisticated ways, very intensively. And so there's a lot of pressure on their populations when people show up. So it's the Americas, Australia and these kinds of places. You start to see some species go extinct.
7:14Wow. So like as soon as people arrived, likely they impacted ecosystems in fundamental ways. Yes. Now, there's an ongoing debate about whether the North American species were wiped out entirely by humans or by the dramatic climate shifts at the time. The bottom line is people contributed to these extinctions. There's pretty good evidence of that.
7:40Are we going to do this by crossing places off? Fresh off our call with Earl, Florian and I pull out our own map. Scribble through Peru. And start crossing off huge swathes of land. There goes Europe. Most of it is already gone. A large chunk of Russia is OK. And realistically, humanity's current influence is much, much worse. Our biggest impact? Climate change. We need to talk to somewhere with a global perspective on atmospheric temperature. NASA. They have a scientific visualisations department, which takes dense data and turns it into something easier to understand. So yeah, do you think you can help us out?
8:28Yeah, I think I can. This is Mark Subarow. Let's talk about how temperatures have changed. To do that, we're looking at another map. So this is the map. But what we're showing is not absolute temperature, but we're showing changes from the average. Blue spots are colder than average and red spots are warmer than average. And what's the average? How do you measure that? In this case, we're looking at the years 1951 to 1980 to create a baseline temperature and we're subtracting that off. This is no ordinary map. It's a whole series of them stitched together into a video, showing how global temperatures have changed over time.
9:09OK, so in the 1880s, you've got a spread of some places blue, so colder than average, some places red. Then the 1900s, 1920s. But still quite blue. So far, so blue. And now we're in the 80s and there's lots more red. until 2024. Eventually, the majority of land is really dark red.
9:38But Florian and I are desperately clinging. There's like a few bits and blobs. Okay, do you want to draw the blobs? Onto some tiny patches which aren't yet red. A bit of blobs sort of south of Australia. Yeah. And then maybe a few blobs here. Then Mark pulls up another map. And this is a visualisation showing the most important greenhouse gas, which is carbon dioxide. But not all carbon dioxide in the air is caused by humans. So we need to separate it out by source. In our computer modelling, we can try to model out the different effects. We've actually done that. So this is a visualisation showing that.
10:18Florian and I are looking at a rotating globe, cloaked in different coloured clouds of carbon dioxide. There's red from fires. Green from plants, which mostly absorb carbon but also emit some. The same is true for oceans, with clouds of blue. And finally, there's yellow, for burning fossil fuels. Oh, it's everywhere. Looks like a marble with smoke inside of it, and yellowish smoke. So the entire Earth is covered in a layer of human-made CO2, is that right? Yeah, so that's the important part. We're not responsible for all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We're responsible for about one third.
11:02But that's a big change, right? That's 50 % more than it was before. Yeah. And you would say that's sort of spread everywhere. It's spread basically everywhere. So the tiny bits of our map that we hadn't scribbled out yet. Yep. I'm just going to scribble them out. Yeah. So now we just have a scribbled out map. I want to leave you some room for the rest of the podcast. I don't want to undermine everything. I think you might have done, Mark. Look at our mat. Basically, we're going to have to get really creative, right? Because the entire surface of the Earth has changed temperature. And if it hasn't, if there's a fortunate little pocket, which has for now escaped that, the atmospheric composition has changed because of human-made carbon dioxide.
11:48If you had to have a guess about anywhere on Earth that might be unaffected by humans, have you got any ideas? I think you start looking under the water. Yeah. I think that's where I'd look next. Yeah, definitely.
12:02Ruled out the entire surface of the earth. Yeah. Florian and I leave the cool. Yeah, I wasn't expecting to rule out this much. This early. This quickly. There's no land left. And from so far back in time. That's true as well. We humans have always changed our environment and driven species to extinction. All the places we normally associate to nature, if we want to go into nature, those are all affected. And we haven't just transformed the land. Now we've warmed the surface of our earth and we've altered the air we breathe. Yeah, should we pack up the map? Oh boy, map! It's time to throw our map in the bin.
12:50We know where to look next. Yeah, oceans. Let's do it. Could somewhere in our oceans be no man's land?
13:02The oceans are vast and it is a good place to look. This is Geoff Drazen, a deep sea ecologist at the University of Hawaii. He's helping us go underwater. And it turns out the ocean isn't just one vast uniform space. It's divided into a series of distinct zones. The first lies just below the surface. The epipelagic zone. The epipelagic zone. Yeah, the sunlit zone. The sunlit zone, let's go for that. Yeah. This is a portion of the ocean I think most people are familiar with, at least a little bit. The sunlit zone is affected by humans in the ways you'd probably expect. There's a lot of overfishing and warmer waters from climate change.
13:48And there's the creeping effects of ocean acidification. So ocean acidification occurs because carbon dioxide that is emitted from fossil fuel burning into the atmosphere is soaked up by the oceans. The CO2 dissolves into the oceans. And when it does so, it lowers the pH. It makes that seawater more acid-like. A lot of the animals control the pH, the acidity inside their bodies. and if you change the pH outside of their bodies, that means they have to regulate things and use more energy to do so. And so it takes more energy away from activity, reproduction, growth. Okay, that's not no man's land.
14:34No. Which was to be expected, I guess. Which was to be expected, yeah. Exactly. Next stop. You proceed from the sunlit zone into the twilight zone. The twilight zone. And here you still have some light. There is enough light for animals to see sunlight coming down from the surface all the way down to about a thousand meters. And this realm is inhabited by lantern fishes and vampire squids and all kinds of amazing organisms that look very bizarre compared to what you've just observed in the sunlit zone. For now, these weird and wonderful animals are safe from the threat of overfishing. But the warmer and more acidic water remains.
15:23OK, so again, twilight zone, not no man's land. Should we go deeper? We should go deeper. Moving on. The next zone below the twilight zone is the midnight zone. To the midnight zone. and here when you descend below a thousand meters you are in a realm where the animals can no longer even with their really you know well adapted eyes no longer can see sunlight there's still light in this zone animals still have bioluminescence and they can see one another with that bioluminescence but they can't see sunlight anymore so the only light in this zone comes from the fish themselves comes from animals yep comes from the animals themselves or or microbes microbes make bioluminescence as well.
16:08But even this dark world full of glowing creatures isn't safe from the impact of humans. There is still the effects of climate change to some extent. That's really not so much changes in temperature, but changes in pH, the acidity of the ocean. And the ocean is big, and so it's probably more in some places and less in others. But the effects are declining. We're getting closer to no man's land. That was sort of what I was expecting. Yeah. But he said we're getting closer to no man's land. We're getting closer to no man's land. At this point, Florian and I are feeling hopeful. So I think we go deeper.
16:53And deeper, I guess, will mean to the seafloor. What if we go to the very bottom? So I know a guy who I think probably has been to the seafloor more than anyone. So we give marine biologist Alan Jameson a call. Our submarine is capable of going to maximum ocean depth, which is just short of 11 ,000 metres, and that's in the Mariana Trench, and there's a place in the Tonga Trench, which is just a tiny fraction shallower. 11 ,000 metres. Alan's taken his submersible Baku to the deepest places on Earth. So the current time is exactly 8 o 'clock in the morning, local time. and we'll wait for our permission to dive.
17:38In fact, he made a recording of a dive to the second deepest point in the ocean, horizon deep in the Tonga Trench. Right, that's us just left the surface. And already you can see the sunlight starting to diminish. It's this beautiful shade of blue. Beautiful, beautiful Pacific blue colour and it just very quickly dims down into complete darkness. Quite often we switch all the lights off and we just watch the bioluminescence because as the sub's travelling through the water, all these little animals give off light when they get disturbed by the hydrodynamics of the sub. And you can see this really lovely kind of bluey-green light show that it's almost impossible to record with a camera.
18:21It's one of those special privileges you only get if you're actually there. Wow. Most of the descent is just waiting. We've actually got genuinely nothing to do for the next three hours. We just chat like you would be chatting to someone at a bus stop.
18:40Finally, Alan and his pilot see the seafloor loom into view. And we can see the bottom. There it is. Rising deep. It's the second deepest point on earth. And as they're exploring the bottom of the trench... All right, what's that white thing? Biggest thing I've seen so far? Alan spots something. What the hell is that? It's got a plastic bag look about it, doesn't it?
19:12Yeah, a plastic bag. Like me, you might be surprised by how relaxed Alan sounds about finding a piece of plastic more than 10 ,000 metres below the surface. But for him, this is a normal Tuesday. I don't recall ever doing a dive anywhere where we don't see something, which is man-made. Even very, very, very, very far offshore. We did one before Tonga, the previous one to that. We were a thousand miles north of Samoa on the equator, which is probably one of the most remote places you could get to. And I said to the pilot, look, there's something there, this big red, really nice, nice red target.
19:54Let's go and have a look at that because something caught my eye. I thought it doesn't look right. so we pulled the sub over and it was a packet of Chinese cigarettes. You could actually read the brand as if someone had just dropped them on the way to work. And you think we're like four kilometres underwater, a thousand miles from anywhere. I mean, it's maybe naive, but I'm really surprised that everywhere in the deep ocean has plastic. Well, it gets worse. Where it gets really upsetting is the closer you get to not being able to see it, the bigger the problem is. Alan has looked at microplastics in crustaceans that live in the deep Pacific.
20:35And in the least polluted place he's studied, three out of four had plastic in their gut. This isn't looking good for no man's land, Alan. No, it's not. The entire deep sea is being fed by plankton from the surface, organic matter that's created on the surface and then sinks the more effect we have on the surface the more affects every single thing underneath it i think everyone's quite aware the surface of the ocean is now being affected by humankind therefore every cubic meter of water below that is also being affected because that's where all the energy comes from it's all been changed and it's all been changed by things that humans have decided to do so i would put my dollar on there not being a single place in the ocean that hasn't got some measurable impact by humans okay i don't think you'll find anywhere.
21:31It is absolutely crazy to me that there are places in the world that, you know, Alan goes down and is submersible, is the first person there and we've already tampered with it. We've already changed it. We've reshaped our oceans in immense ways through overfishing, climate change and plastic pollution. And seeing a packet of cigarettes just sort of feels like everyday littering. You know, it's what I expect to see when I walk down the... Even the creatures living on the deep sea floor depend on food and energy from above, a world we've already irreversibly altered. You know, I'm such a fan of Blue Planet, Planet Earth, and they really paint this picture of a sort of pristine, natural world.
22:19But even when I watched Blue Planet back in, what, 2003 or something. When seven-year-old me was glued to the TV... Was that world actually unchanged by humans? I probably wasn't looking at No Man's Land.
22:37So, Florian, we are out of land. We're out of ocean. It feels like we've reached a dead end. I think we need to talk to people who know more than us. Yeah. But on a call with environmental writer Emma Maris. Higher up in the ocean, you've got stuff that's all going to be affected by fishing. She gives us a new idea. If you're really deep and you're looking at organisms that are getting their energy from the, you know, sulfur vents, from volcanic heat vents coming out of the center of the earth, technically still in the ocean. What if there's an ecosystem that doesn't depend on the surface at all?
23:20Hydrothermal vent ecosystems? A fiery alien world hiding in the deep? That's where we're heading next, in Looking for No Man's Land.
23:39I've spent the last three decades trying to better understand money across the boardroom, the newsroom, and the trading floor. That's longer than most podcast hosts have been alive. But even though I've got questions, join me, Merrin's Upset Web, every week for my show Merrin Talks Money from Bloomberg Podcasts, where I have in-depth conversations with fund managers, strategists, and experts about how markets really work. And join me for a separate episode where I answer listener questions on how to make those markets work for you. Follow Merrin Talks Money on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
24:1517th of September. The bay swarmed with animals. Fish, shark and turtles were popping their heads up in all parts. These are the words of Charles Darwin, written in 1835, shortly after he arrived at the Galapagos Islands, a trip that inspired his revolutionary theory of natural selection. Welcome back to part two of Looking for No Man's Land. I met two very large tortoises. One was eating a cactus and then quietly walked away. Darwin described this remote cluster of islands as a little world within itself. The birds are strangers to man and think him as innocent as their countrymen, the huge tortoises.
Read the full transcript
25:00But even 200 years ago, the Galapagos were far from pristine. Whalers roamed the waters Invasive species walked the land And the famous giant tortoises had been decimated Of course the numbers have been much reduced Not many years since The ship's company had brought down to the beach in one day more than 200 Today the Galapagos are a symbol of evolution itself But perhaps they also tell a story of how deep Our destructive relationship with nature runs I'm Caroline Steele and almost two centuries after Darwin set foot on the Galapagos Islands my producer Florian and I are on a mission to find a place on earth humans haven't affected somewhere we haven't changed whatsoever.
25:51I think it needs to be an ecosystem I think there needs to be some life there that is still pristine. So far we've discovered that remarkably humanity has left its fingerprints on the entire surface of our planet and inside our oceans. We are out of land. We're out of ocean. Which doesn't leave us with many places to look. I think we need to talk to people who know more than us. Yeah. But luckily, we've been given an idea. Hydrothermal vent ecosystems. A deep sea ecosystem utterly different from the rest. could hydrothermal vents be no man's land we're on a video call with bob ballard oceanographer and explorer he happens to be the person who first found the titanic's resting place i wish my mother was alive to know that i'm doing an interview and they don't give a hoot about the titanic they want to know about hydrothermal vents yeah we're 100 here for the vents yet.
26:59Back in 1977, Bob was part of the team that discovered hydrothermal vents. He was exploring a parting of two tectonic plates just over 300 kilometres from the Galapagos Islands. To get a picture of what was happening below the surface, Bob and his crew dragged a camera underneath their boat while also looking for any changes in temperature. And there's a temperature spike. And so what do we see? Initially, we see barren rock, no surprise. And we come to the moment we saw the temperature spike, and it's all clams. It was just, what the heck is this? Because the deep sea is in total darkness. And we were taught there was very little life in the deep sea.
27:52and then we literally called the submarine that night, dived on this location, and they went down and came into this oasis of life.
28:10We've arrived at what looks like a Clambake area, 122244. The submersible crew could hardly believe what they saw. They're abalone shells. They're shells. They're big shells. They're living. There's some living ones here. They quickly realised that they had made a huge biological discovery. Hydrothermal vents. Bob and his team were baffled. Why was there a thriving patch of life, kilometres beneath the surface, clustered around a jet of hot water? It wasn't until we sampled the water coming out and we brought it back to the lab and when we opened the container... The smell of rotten eggs filled the boat.
29:00Hydrogen sulphide. We had to open the windows. Giving the scientists a clue. And that was the key. We began to put the chemistry together and realise that we were looking at a process that was duplicating photosynthesis in the dark. A process we now call chemosynthesis. The bacteria in the vents were using chemical processes to generate energy. And we were looking at more than likely where life began on Earth.
29:38So what do you reckon? Do we think it's no man's land? I don't know. I have my doubts. OK. To work out if hydrothermal vents are truly no man's land, we need to have a better understanding of how they work. We call someone who's been studying them for over 40 years. I'm now retired. Verena Tunnicliffe is a marine biologist based in Canada. Hydrothermal vents begin with ordinary seawater. Cold seafloor, ocean bottom water. And through cracks in the rock on the seafloor. Quite leaky, there's lots of little cracks. The water filters down. Quite deep into the crust, let's say 10 kilometres down into the crust.
30:26Where it becomes superheated and picks up minerals and gases, including... Hydrogen sulphide, the rotten egg gas. It then rises... It emerges at the seafloor. Where bacteria use the gases in the water to generate energy. To then sustain life. What an exciting place this would be for our no-man's land. So our big question is, are hydrothermal vents no man's land? Are these ecosystems sort of truly unaffected by us humans? Aha. What about microplastics? I would guess that almost all vent samples that you could take, you would probably eventually find microplastics in them. As we found them just about everywhere we sampled.
31:22Oh no There's this warm water and hot water Coming out on the seafloor And it's rising, right? The water at the seafloor is rising up So that means it's pulling cold water in from the sides That's how the microplastics would be getting in And trapped in there So I think that's ruling it out If there's microplastics That isn't completely free of humanness Okay I'm going to dash your hopes even more The animals living in the world at the vents have babies and many of them the larvae rise up in the water column and spend a long time up in the water. So it's not a totally isolated system basically.
32:07Exactly. Hmm. As we get off the call Florian and I exchange a defeated look. I was sure we had it. Yeah. Just like Darwin's Galapagos Islands almost 200 years ago, hydrothermal vents are not no man's land. They both helped us understand something really fundamental about life on Earth. And both of those places have been changed by us. Yeah. We've ruled out the surface of the Earth. We've ruled out the oceans. We've ruled out the sort of sneaky extra that we might have found in the oceans. This time, we're not quite sure what to do. Yeah, I don't know. Genuinely, where do we go? I don't know. We're going back to the drawing board.
32:57Hello. How are you doing? Good, how are you? I'm all right, thank you. I'm on a call with my very qualified friend, Ben Garrett, Professor of Evolutionary Biology. So how much of an idea have you got about what I'm going to ask you about? Literally not a clue, Caroline. I'm Caroline Steele and my producer Florian and I are trying to find somewhere on Earth that humans haven't altered. A place we haven't affected in any way. No, you won't find anywhere surface habitat where it's unaffected by human impact. But after mulling it over, he has an idea. It's going to have to be underwater caves. There are Eastern European cave systems where you still find alms.
33:46Oh, I've just looked up a picture of an Olm. They are weird. They're like a cross between a salamander and a snake thing. The nice thing about them is if there was a large amount of climate change, they'd be dead straight away. So they're a good clue. They're a really good clue for a stable environment that really doesn't change at all. Could Olms be the gatekeepers of a pristine world? Are underwater caves no man's land? Hello, hello, can you hear us? This is Dusan Jelic, a Croatian conservationist, researcher and importantly, cave diver. OK, then we should be all set up. He explores the underwater caves that lie hidden across southeastern Europe.
34:34And this is what one of those dives might look like. So you come to this kind of beautiful turquoise colour, white, large spring. Then you jump in. It's very cold. The water is between 6 and 12 degrees. A few metres below the surface, there's an entrance. An opening just big enough for you to fit through. And then you manage to squeeze yourself in. And the space in front of you opens up. So sometimes these are like whole cathedrals of space. It's huge. It's obvious that nobody ever, ever before managed to get into that system. Dushan squeezes himself through underwater caves to get closer to his favourite animals, alms.
35:25They look like this and they look skinny because they can eat only every several years because their metabolism is so low. Wait, they eat only once every several years? Yeah, because they are so slow and they're very slow to catch the prey itself and then they need time to digest it in these kind of temperatures but also they actually live up to 100 years. What? They live up to 100 years. So they only they don't eat often they move slowly and they live up to 100 years. Yeah yeah well now you know the secret of long life. Eat less move slower. Yeah. Do you think they remain unchanged by humans?
36:06Do you think they could be no man's land? I would say most of them are unfortunately affected. Maybe they are not researched yet, but humans already had some effect on this system. Frustratingly, underwater caves are not no man's land. Dushan often comes across invasive fish and traces of pollution. Then you see how sensitive they are. It usually just completely wipes out the whole population. And even if you do find a lot of happy alms, there's still a problem. The water they live in comes from rain. We've changed the composition of our atmosphere. We've changed the pH of our rain. So it's not completely unaffected.
36:59For sure. in this way. Like anything that manages to end up in the atmosphere will end up around the globe. At one point there, I thought we were going to be able to call it a day. Florian and I sit in our recording studio. I was sure we had it. Again, without a no-man's land. I guess overall it does make sense though. And again, because of water that we've changed. If the water in the caves is connected to the rain, we know we've changed our rain. But before we ditch caves altogether... But I do think the idea of caves is still a good one. We decide to try another expert. I think it's probably our only shot.
37:42Someone who specialises in life under extreme conditions. Hazel Barton is a professor of geological sciences at the University of Alabama in the US. OK, let's do it. and she agrees, water is the problem. There's a special kind of cave, it's called a hypogenic cave. Hypogenic caves form underground as water rises from below. The water dissolves the rock above it until it hits a type of rock that won't break down. And you end up with these enormous branching caves. So the one that's the most famous is in the United States, New Mexico. It's called Lechuguilla Cave. It's about 152 miles long now, and it's only got one entrance.
38:26La Chagia Cave formed millions of years ago in the Guadalupe Mountains, and importantly, it's dry. The cave is so old that the mountains have continued to rise, so we knew that that connection to the groundwater stopped about 4 million years ago. Hazel knows this cave very well. you have to hike across the desert for a couple of miles until you come across a hole in the ground you do an entrance drop i think it's 17 meters and you get to a network of enormous passages and it gets big and then it gets small and big and you're doing traverses over pits and finally we map the cave as we explore it so you can go to the end of the map and if there's a passage there you know no human has been beyond it.
39:14It's like the last place on Earth where you can go as a human and actually put the first footprint somewhere. So, yeah, that is like your no man's land. We've just stumbled across some huge no man's land, Florian. This is great. I was not expecting this. Devil's advocate. But my moment of celebration is cut short by Florian. You know, it's connected to the air in some way, right? Has climate change in some way affected the cave through CO2 affecting the air in the cave? As far as airflow, you do see air exchange. You know, the cave is at a lower pressure. And so what happens is it acts like a big log and it just inhales.
39:57And then when the pressure drops outside, it breathes out. How far does that penetrate into the cave? I don't know. Okay, so it might not be that the whole cave is no man's land. because I would argue that we have changed the carbon dioxide in the air. So I think where it mixes with the outside, I don't think we can count. And it also makes me think, actually, I mean, this is a cave that we know about because it has an entrance. But I'm sure there must be caves in other places that don't even have an entrance at all, but that have been created in the same way. So like a hypogenic cave that's completely sealed off.
40:34Those must exist, right, somewhere. Oh, yeah. We reckon there are thousands and thousands of miles of cave like that in the Guadalupe Mountains. But we just don't have any entrances. I mean, does it mean there's like a thousand no man's lands that we just haven't set foot in? Undoubtedly. Wow. Okay. We've not just found no man's land. We've found no man's lands. So is it just in this area that you think these kinds of caves exist? I think they're all over the world.
41:08We've found no man's land. All over the world. All over the world. Sprawling, hypergenic caves underneath New Mexico. I thought it would be like a really specific cave in one specific location. Yes. Like Lechuguilla Cave. And there could be thousands of them. You know, you might be hiking in an area in the world. Hidden underneath our feet. And underneath you there's this huge, like, miles-long sprawling cave and you have no idea. And maybe it's better that way. It means we can't go spoil them. I agree. But then... What is this look? Florian gives me a look. Hear me out. What if we don't stop here?
41:56We've found one. I mean, what if there's more of them? But could there be others? Let's have one last go, see if we can find another no man's land.
42:12Lakes underneath the ice of the ice cap of Antarctica, which have been sealed off from any kind of atmospheric or human influences, and which are still, I would guess, unspoiled. This is geologist Jan Zalasevich. Apparently there's fresh water thousands of metres below the Antarctic ice sheet, subglacial lakes. The surface of the ice cap, that's already contaminated. You know, it's a human affected environment all the way across. But beneath it, underneath a three or four kilometre thick sheet of ice, which has been there for millions of years, you know, is my candidate for somewhere that's still pretty pristine.
43:00How did the water get there? Why isn't it frozen? And is it truly sealed off from the rest of the world?
43:09OK, that's recording now. Yep. Dominic Hodgson is the Director of Science at the British Antarctic Survey. He's been on several expeditions to Antarctica to study subglacial lakes. Why do subglacial lakes exist? Because the ice above them is frozen. Why are they suddenly warm enough to be liquid? OK, so there's two main processes here. The planet itself is producing heat from its rocks and the ice sheet is very insulating, so that heat builds up and creates melt water. And secondly... Well, the actual weight of the ice itself creates heat. So with a particular thickness of ice, you will reach a point at which the pressure of the ice itself creates a melting of its bed.
43:59So how many of these lakes are there in Antarctica? Do we know? Yeah, there's various compilations done. I mean, there are probably around about 400 now that have been well characterised by satellite imagery, but there's undoubtedly many thousands more. Thousands more? I would say so. Thousands more potential no-man's lands. Have we ever drilled through the ice into a lake to find out more? Yep, so there's been several expeditions to do that. The Russians at Lake Vostok was the first access experiment. After the call, we start doing some more research. Vostok, V-O-S-T-O-K. British, American and Russian scientists were all trying to drill through the Antarctic ice sheet and reach a hidden lake.
44:49Drilling in different lakes. Ah, OK. This sounds like the space race to me. After 20 years of drilling, in 2012, the Russians succeeded. They broke through into Lake Vostok. For a moment, it seemed like a huge scientific milestone. But I think there was an issue. But there was a problem. Let me look this up. The Russians had used kerosene to stop their borehole from freezing shut. Anti-freezing fluids, like sort of drilling fluids. And when the drill hit the lake, water surged upward, mixing with the kerosene as well as bacteria from human skin. So they didn't get a sample of pristine lake water?
45:33No. Oh! So the first pristine sample came later, from a completely different lake. At the time, I was a PhD student. This is Trista Vic-Majors, a microbial ecologist at Michigan Technological University in the US. In 2013, she was part of the team that sampled Lake Willans. Trista was trying to answer one big question. Is there life in the lake? We didn't know really what we were going to find when we got there. I mean, that is a scientist's dream, right? Or an explorer's dream. Trista's job was to place the murky lake water on a slide and look at it under a microscope to see if we could see bacterial cells.
46:28I actually did get to be the first person who looked in the microscope. It was actually a fairly peaceful moment. Trista looked down the eyepiece and saw small dots, glowing a bright greenish-yellow. Bacteria stained by dye. I have often said to people that if I never did anything else interesting in my entire life, that would be OK with me because that was just unbeatable.
47:03Microbial life just exemplifies all of the ways in which life can be amazing. They can get energy from rocks, essentially. These bacteria generate energy from chemical reactions, just like the ones that live in hydrothermal vents and in deep caves. So I guess I think we're ready for the big question, which I'm slightly nervous to ask you because I'm very invested in this being no man's land and I don't want you to pop my bubble. But do you think that subglacial lakes can be no man's land? They can be completely unaffected by humans? I think that these lakes are as removed as you can get while still being on Earth.
47:54They have the benefit of being trapped under this thick layer of ice. So even though I would say humans affect pretty much everything on Earth, And these lakes, we just haven't, we just haven't gotten there yet. We found no man's land.
48:23Another no man's land. We found two. Two, yeah. It's time for another celebration. The fact that there's life in there, in this basically frozen place with no sunlight. Subglacial lakes, hidden beneath the ice, have existed for millions of years, completely unchanged by humans. It's crazy that that exists. Yeah. After months of cools, dead ends and mounting frustration. Was this harder or easier than you expected? I think a lot harder. Yeah, a lot harder for me as well. We've found another no man's land. I'm quite happy. I think we've done well. We found two. It's time to call it a day.
49:15Can I ask you a question? Yeah. Why are you so keen on finding it? While making this series, some of the experts we bothered with our questions took the chance to ask us questions too. Two. Two. The idea of no man's land gives you hope. Why does that give you hope? To live on planet Earth is to change planet Earth. And that's not automatically bad. The way we're acting is not bad because we are humans. The things that we do that are destructive are bad because they're destructive. This quest has left me with no doubt that we've gone too far. We've destroyed forests, waters and creatures that call Earth home.
49:57But perhaps our goal shouldn't be to have no impact entirely. That capacity for humans to touch absolutely everywhere on this planet must be turned to the capacity of humans to mediate their touch, to be able to live with our planet so we don't destroy it. If we can learn to live with our planet rather than against it, maybe we'll find that there's no need for a no man's land at all.
50:32I'm Caroline Steele and my producer is Florian Boar. Looking for No Man's Land is a BBC Cymru Wales production for the BBC World Service. I've spent the last three decades trying to better understand money across the boardroom, the newsroom and the trading floor. That's longer than most podcast hosts have been alive. But even though I've got questions, join me, Merrin's subset web every week for my show, Merrin Talks Money from Bloomberg Podcasts, where I have in-depth conversations with fund managers, strategists and experts about how markets really work. And join me for a separate episode where I answer listener questions on how to make those markets work for you.
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From the publisher
Humans have spread to every corner of the globe, transforming ecosystems and reshaping landscapes. Is there anywhere left on Earth that is unaffected by humans? Anywhere we haven’t changed – at all? Presenter Caroline Steel and producer Florian Bohr begin their mission to find No Man's Land, if it exists.
