>> Jeniffer: This is going to be an extraordinary conversation for me, and I'm going to be honest with you, I'm a little nervous about getting it wrong because I learned so many amazing things in this stunning, work. It is one of the most beautiful books I've ever readdeveloped. Susan writes with, you know, like, some books are lyrical and poetic. This book is musical. It's written with so much love and emotion that I just absolutely fell in love with the deep. Learned so much
about it. So thank you for being here, and thank you for your extraordinary ability to make something so unknown, tangible, bringing it to us. >> Susan: thank you so much, Jennifer, and thank you so much for coming. I'm really looking forward to speaking about this. I always think of anything I'm writing about as, like, I'm at. I'm a curious person who goes out and finds cool
things. And then I feel like a ten year old kid in a treehouse and just wanting to call other curious people into the treehouse to say, look. Look at this. I mean, look what this is. Can you believe we didn't know about this? >> Jeniffer: It's a total call to the curious. And it's such a cast of characters in this book who are all drawn by the same thing. This curiosity to the deep, this thing we don't understand.
Speaking of ten years old, so you grew up in Toronto, nowhere near the deep, as it were, and you didn't even start swimming until you were ten. Is that true? >> Susan: That's true. by the time I was 14, I was at the. I was competing at the national championships. So it was a question of just diving in. And, I mean, I was always completely obsessed with water. And we, had a summer place on a lake. Canada's full of lakes. And north, of Toronto, there are these lakes that are very dark.
The water's very dark. And I would just sit for hours and hours and hours on the dock and hope to see a. But I was at the same time fascinated and terrified of them. so I think my swimming career was a little bit late in getting started because it was just a question of. I was scared. >> Jeniffer: Speaking of fear, on page four, which I should have marked it in advance, I think I want you to read it. There's this piece where you talk about astonishment, the emotions, starting here. Do you want
to read that for us? Starting with, the inaccessible way. Yeah. >> Susan: So before I read this, before I read this, let me just sort of connect what I just said about these lakes. Because obviously, growing up in Canada, I didn't have access to the ocean. and yet these lakes, whenever I would see a fish, and there are some quite big lake fish in Canada. I mean, there were fish with. Does anybody know a musky, if there's anybody from the
east? there were muskies. And every so often I would see something big and it would just kind of come up from below. And it occurred to me really early on that there was like this parallel universe beneath the surface and we couldn't see it because these waters were, they're not like some clear waters, they're like very dark and you can't see the bottom. And I just remember thinking anything
could come up from there. And that was so compounded later in my life when I ended up at the Farallon Islands writing about the resident great white sharks there. the farallones, was that on massive steroids. So here was this very dark, inscrutable water and a great white shark would pop up or a blue whale or some kind of, creature I'd never seen before. And that's when I really started thinking this is a massive environment. Massive. I mean, we think of the Earth as being a very large place.
And it is often said that 70% of the planet is covered by ocean. But what gives you a better sense of just how immense the deep ocean is, is if you think of Earth as a three dimensional living space, a biosphere, 2% of that is land. Everything we see, everywhere we live, all of that 2%, 98% is salt water, is ocean. And 95% of that 98% are waters below 600ft, which is water that
scientists define as the deep ocean. So the fact that we don't know, we cross the surface, we see a little bit in the sunlight zone, small fraction of the ocean, the ceiling of a room, right, a giant room. I just always could never look at any body of water from Canada to the farallones to beginning to work on this book and not wonder, like, what's down there. And, at this very moment, it's exciting because we are really the first people to ever have the technologies and the ability to find out.
Jules Verne had to make it up. >> Jeniffer: And it's really only recent, totally recent. >> Susan: We are like, if I had written this book, two years earlier, it would have been obsolete almost immediately. Because while I was reporting it in the beginning, there was. We can talk about this more specifically, but there was, a vehicle, invented that could go to full ocean depth safely, repeatedly, with a passenger, a pilot and a scientist, or a pilot and a journalist in
my case. And that changed everything. >> Jeniffer: And what year was that? >> Susan: That was 2019. >> Jeniffer: Incredible. >> Susan: Yeah. So now I'll read this because I think I wanted to give it a little bit of context. >> Jeniffer: Okay. Thank you. >> Susan: Yeah. But the. >> Jeniffer: You're welcome to start from. >> Susan: I'm just looking to see if, But the inaccessibility of the deep, I thought, made it even more alluring. Others wanted to visit Paris. Bora Bora, the Serengeti.
I wanted to go into the ocean's abyss. The idea of an unknown aquatic realm ever present below us, but invisible, unless we look for it. An underworld within our world had always worked a sort of spell on me, an alchemical mix of wonder and fear. It may seem as if those emotions would cancel each other out, but the opposite is true. When you add them together, you get the sublime, which transcends both the
passion caused by the great and sublime. In nature is astonishment, wrote the 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke. And astonishment is the state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended with some degree of horror. But, he added, it was a sort of delightful horror. The abyss might be terrifying, but you wouldn't notice because you'd be too busy gaping in awe. >> Jeniffer: Yeah. >> Susan: At least that's how I imagined it. And I wanted to see if I was right.
>> Jeniffer: Isn't that beautiful? I read that a couple of times. I was like, oh, my God, this is. You just have this ability to pull us in. But let's go back to the beginning, as you did in this book not too long ago. We knew nothing of the deep. We had no ability to go that deepen. And people were starting to. So you bring us back to the history and the first pioneers, Aristotle being. I learned quite a bit. Aristotle, pliny the elder. And, you know, people were afraid of the ocean,
these monsters. And so take us back to the research you did to kind of give us a grounding in what we're discovering here. >> Susan: Yeah. So I have the sense, I think it's a. I think it's a pretty good bet that as long as there have been humans gazing out over the ocean and maybe not being able to see any other land, just as far as the eye can perceive a horizon, and thinking, what is it? What's down there? Where does it go? How deep is it? And it's amazing how long that went on, with all kinds
of wacky theories and beliefs. So I did try to trace it back early, I believe. Aristotle is often called the first marine biologist because he did a lot of studying of marine, creatures in a lagoon. And he did it in a kind of empirical way and learned a lot of things that he was the first person that we know of to, for example, identify whales as mammals, all kinds of things like that. He was doing science back then. >> Jeniffer: Pretty good science, really?
>> Susan: Well, yeah. I mean, yes, absolutely. There was a lot of, like, pliny the elder was talking about myth and lore and superstition and all kinds of things. But Aristotle was, like, looking, finding things, taking them apart, looking how they worked, making observations that turned out to be, in a lot of cases, extremely accurate. But I believe that there have probably been humans that are not in the western canon, or culture in ancient Oceania.
certainly in, like, in Polynesia and Melanesia, there are oceanic peoples that were probably wondering about this and parsing it as best they could, way before Aristotle. That's my personal guess. >> Jeniffer: How could they not? >> Susan: How could they not? And these are ocean people, right. But, there was, for a long time, the idea of what was in the deep ocean was pretty simple to wrap up in a single word, which was monsters. >> Jeniffer: Monsters, yeah.
>> Susan: So when you think of the old maps, and maybe they even have some, replicas of them in this library, when they didn't know what was going on in any patch of remote ocean, they would just put, here be dragons, or here be monsters. But in 15, 38, there was a map printed that was created by a catholic priest and historian from Sweden named Olus Magnus. It's called the Cartomarina. And if you've seen drawings, these drawings of what they perceived as sea monsters, you've probably seen the
Cartamarina. It's very famous. And so I flew to Sweden to see an original copy of it. There are only two that we know of, and it's really big. It's like 23. often when we see it, it's colorized. But the original was not colorized, and the colorized version kind of destroys it. The real version in this huge, massive wall, it looks like he drew it with a pin. I mean, he worked on it for, like, 35 years. And Olus's, job was to travel around northern Europe and Scandinavia,
collecting for the church. And he had a notebook and he had a sketchbook, and he talked to people. And, if you can imagine a 16th century medieval farmer from Norway who's walking along comes upon a stranded sperm whale, you know, a 50 foot long animal with seven inch teeth and an eye the size of a hubcap. And, you know, what is it? There's no context, of course, it's a monster. So Olav's, Magnus really took a lot of trouble to sort of categorize these monsters and he gave them all
names. And, so in his map, once you get offshore, the north Atlantic is just kind of frothing with sea monsters. so for me it was a good place to start because along with being a cartography of Scandinavia, which was kind of an unknown part of the world at that time, it was a beginning of a cartography of perceptions about how humans considered the deep ocean. That's where it began.
And then the enlightenment came along and there were some instruments and there was a more rational way of, determining science, but that was really perplexing for the ocean, and particularly the deep ocean, because we weren't that far along with the instruments. their sort of method was to take a weight, put it on a line, on a spool, and then let it go down to the seafloor and just kind of sense when it hit the bottom and then wind it back up and the winding it back up.
M the length of a man's arm is the measurement of a fathom. So that's how they would determine, okay, it's how many fathoms deep, pretty, rudimentary. But there were some incredible naturalists around the 17th, and 18th and 19th centuries, 18th, and 19th in particular. And they started, sort of supposing that probably there was nothing down there. >> Jeniffer: Yeah, the ozoic theory. >> Susan: That's right. And it lasted for, they called it the ozoic theory without life. And that theory lasted
for a really long time. Like, it wasn't really completely dispelled till 1876. And even though there were some people who were dropping weighted nets to very, you know, to like, depths way the ozoic theory basically said that anything below about 2000ft, there was nothing there. And there were people dropping trawl nets down to 12,000, 14,000ft. And the oceans deepest, regions are, you know, can be as almost as much as 36,000ft deep, and coming up with all kinds of animals.
But some, some people hypothesized, some scientists hypothesized that the seafloor was probably sealed in ice, there was probably nothing there. And, probably because we couldn't live down there and there's this crushing pressure. And they knew that because if they dropped any sort of, item with a cavity and it would come back imploded, some scientists felt that it was probably, the pressure
was so intense that nothing could sink. All the way down, like, nothing was heavy enough to make it to the bottom. So everything that went down, ships, dead animals, humans that fell off of ships were all kind of lost in space, floating through the mid waters. And all of this was dispelled, like, 150 years ago. >> Jeniffer: Right? >> Susan: Yeah. >> Jeniffer: Which is incredible. >> Susan: It's incredible. >> Jeniffer: And the cast of characters who did that.
Bibi, can you talk to us about him and his exploit? >> Susan: So, let me just back up to run into bb. there was a. The first deepsea expedition happened from 1873 to 1876 and it was a british expedition called the HMS Challenger that was, Queen Victoria funded it, a warship that was kitted out with science labs and they went around the world for three and a half years, improved without a doubt that there was life, really splendid life, all
the way to the bottom. And now we know that there's even a thriving biosphere miles beneath the seafloor, but enough to dispel the zoic theory. And so this was, they brought back all these data and scientists from around the world. About 70 different deep sea scientists and various other disciplines spent 20 more years writing a 50 volume set of here's everything we know about the deep ocean. And it was
extraordinary. And one of the things that had puzzled them was that a lot of the fish would come up, glowing. They would have these sort of circular, glowing, and they saw bioluminescence sometimes on the surface of the water. But they didn't know how any of these fish functioned because when you bring a deep sea creature up to the surface, it really just kind of looks like a deflated balloon. You can't tell much about it, but they were puzzled by a lot of these
stranger looking creatures. So now we're at the beginning of the 20th century and, in 1930, the man that Jennifer was talking about, William, Beebe, he decided that he would be the first man to go into the deep ocean. And by the deep ocean, what he really meant was the twilight zone, which is the uppermost layer of the deep ocean and it goes from 600ft down to about
3300ft. and I call it the Manhattan of the deep because far from there being nothing living down there, there are more creatures in the twilight zone than in all the other regions of the ocean combined. And there are three much bigger realms below the twilight zone. But the twilight zone is just this happening place with quadrillions, literally quadrillions of animals in it. And 80% of them are bioluminescent.
So that's the manhattan of the deep. Like, it's just this blinking, flashing, throbbing, like every eater be eaten. night club of a place. And Bebe was the first man to see it. and he was a bit of a celebrity in the 1930s. He was one of the curators, at the Bronx zoo, which was brand new. And he'd gone all over the world, to collect exotic animals for the zoo, and was very, very interested in the ocean and was kind of a swashbuckling guy and a bit of a
celebrity around New York City. And also a very, like, probably the most popular natural history writer of his era. so somebody at one point, Britain's Prince George just gave him an island in Bermuda and gave him a ship, as one does, and he be decided that he was going to explore a two mile cube of ocean in its entirety, survey it, like find out everything that lived from top to bottom. So he started trawling with nets, and he very quickly realized that all the creatures came up
mangled beyond recognition. So he determined that he wanted to go. He wanted to go. And, this was of course, reported in the New York Times because he was such a celebrity. Like BB is going to be the first man to explore the abyss. And, there was another man who was an engineering student in New York named Otis Barton, who read this in the paper and was very disappointed because he wanted to be the first man to go into the abyss. But here's the famous
William Beebe. But Otis Barton had one thing that Bebe didn't have, and that was a big trust fund. And also Beebe, I think he was a scientist and kind of a showman, and Barton was an engineer and, could write checks. So, he went to engage a naval architect and they created this craft they called the bathysphere. And if you see this bathysphere, you just cannot believe that two six foot something men crawled into this. It's just a steel ball with 5ft in
diameter. It has a hatch that's about six inches wide that they had to squeeze themselves through. It has three very, small viewports, but they only ever used two of them because the only material that they had for a viewport was, fused
quartz or a very strong glass. And when they, Barton ordered like five of them, and when they pressure tested them, they knew enough to know that they should pressure test them, but they didn't even pressure test them very hard, and three of them immediately cracked. So they had two. The only two that survived the pressure test went on to the viewports, and the third one was plugged with a metal cover. And the idea.
The thing is, the idea of a viewport blowing out, which would, of course, never happen now, is so terrifying because nobody knew exactly what would happen. And this was a very, heavy object, and it was going over the side of a ship on a long cable. So, basically, a, two thirds of a mile long steel cable, which also was very heavy. If anything happened on either end of that cable, they were on a straight shot to the bottom, and that's where they
would remain. And they also. This is the part that also cracks me up, is they had telephone wires running in through this cable, and they're using bottled oxygen to breathe. and, like, if the sparks from the telephone wires in an oxygen. I mean, just. It's just like this when you read about BB. But they did 30 dives. They did 30 dives. In a couple of the dives, they sent the bathroom down, and they. And one of the windows did blow out, but nobody was in it. And on one
occasion, the winch got tanked. They couldn't pull it up, but nobody was in it, and they fixed things. So I always kind of think of it as like a spin of life's roulette wheel for Phoebe. But when they got down to the twilight zone, he just. He just went berserk. He was a really beautiful writer. and he just saw these crazy, beautiful, glowing, twinkling, sinuous, gelatinous creatures. And so the telephone line was for him to, in this stream of consciousness riff, call up
everything he was seeing to this. He had, like, this bevy of very attractive female transcriptionists, and they all lived on this island in Bermuda. So that was William Beebe. but it left an astonishing record of what lived in the twilight zone. >> Jeniffer: When did you know you needed to write this book? >> Susan: I wanted to write this book when I went to the Farallons and saw that there was this massive party in the ocean,
that you could not see. But I also knew that I didn't know enough and that it was the way that I approach a book is I immerse myself. And because I'm writing about the ocean, it's literal immersion. And I couldn't get. I couldn't crack that one way mirror, so I went off. But I just started thinking about it all the time and really amassing
information. And I'm very thankful that it was my fourth book because it took absolutely everything that I learned about the ocean in order to be able to access the immensity of this, not only the different there's four different layers of the deep ocean. There's the twilight zone that I just mentioned, the midnight zone, which is, 1000 meters to 3000 meters. So 3300ft to about 10,000ft. And then the abyssal zone, which is 3000 meters to 6000 meters. So 10,000 to
20,000ft, give or take. And then that's the abyss of the abyss is the largest ecosystem on earth. Below that is, the hadal zone, which is from 6000 meters to 11,000 meters. And that's named after Hades, the God of the underworld. And the Hadal zone accounts for 45% of the depth of the ocean. But it only occurs in trenches where tectonic plates collide and one plate is subducting. So the Mariana trench is one that people are familiar with, but there are about 37 hadle trenches. So there are these
extreme vertical environments. Like the Mariana trench is 44 miles wide and, 1500 miles long. And, so it's just, you know, it's a very steep trench. and in each of those environments there are biological sciences, geological sciences, biogeochemical sciences. And I wanted to understand the whole. And it's just a lot to bite off. I could not have done this as a second book or even a third. >> Jeniffer: Book or maybe anyone else. I feel like you were the person to write this book.
>> Susan: I definitely was, obsessed. I mean, I do think that books require a certain degree of obsession because of just the sheer volume of research and particularly, of course, in nonfiction, and in sort of a science adventure travel, like. Yeah. in pursuit of a story, I will go anywhere, do anything, read anything, go to any trouble, as you. >> Jeniffer: Will find out when you read this book. How long did it take you to do the research? >> Susan: Seven years.
>> Jeniffer: Okay. Which is really not bad. >> Susan: And my other books have all taken five years and Covid was thrown in there, so. Yeah. Yeah. And it really helps to find amazing. I always do look for really great characters, particularly scientists or others who are working and, studying in this environment, sometimes interacting with it for other reasons who are amazing guides. >> Jeniffer: Yeah. >> Susan: Yeah.
>> Jeniffer: Well, let's start with Kirby. Yeah, he was an amazing guide who led you to your next guide. And it sort of happened that way where one person would open a door to another. So kind of bring us through that. >> Susan: So you're mentioning Terry Kirby. I was living on Maui, and I had heard through the grapevine that the University of Hawaii had two 2000 meters manned subs. They were called the Pisces. And, the chief pilot was a man named Terry
Kirby. And we had mutual friends. So I went over to Oahu to talk to him, saw the subs and was just immediately like taken by the sheer volume, and the extraordinary content of the stories that he could tell. And so the Pisces could go to, could take, a pilot and two scientists to 2000 meters, which is really pretty good. there aren't that many subs that can go very deep. There are only about five, subs that can go below 4000 meters. There were six before the titan imploded. But the titan
is a very extreme outlier. you can't even really call it a submersible. It's more like somebody's hobby that tragically killed people. But, these subs are very, very, very much a feat of engineering. They have their own ships, they have their own crews of engineers. they're serious, serious business. So having access to two 2000 meters subs and they weren't at the time, accessible to dive because their mother ship was, being
refitted. But one thing about submersibles that's different than submarines is they need a mother ship. They have to be, launched and recovered. And when they're below the surface, they carry weight that makes them negatively buoyant. And they go down and then they drop some weights. The weights are usually steel bars. Looks like phone books or steel, pellets. But in any case, steel that biodegrades against the background or the ocean.
and then they become neutral and they cruise around for as long as the batteries will allow with thrusters, their propellers. And then when it's time to go up, they drop their major weight and they're positively buoyant and they are recovered at the surface of. I started to learn about submersibles. I had started to learn with Terry as my guide and a couple of his other pilots. And they had been working in the Pacific. And, the pacific is kind of my. It's
my muse. And there are hundreds of thousands of submarine volcanoes. 75% of all volcanism on earth is in the deep ocean. And Terry had been diving on active volcanoes all over the place. And these are not only geologically fascinating, but like, biologically and microbially. And, so I would just sit there and listen, rap to his stories. And of course, they'd explored all the world war two shipwrecks too, around Oahu, when there are a lot of them. and he had found a
lot of them. So it was just story time. but at one point it didn't look like the Pisces were going to go back in the water anytime soon. And I had already agreed to write the book. My publisher was excited about it, and I was still not sure, how am I going to get to dive in a submersible? You just can't buy a ticket to do it. But then, so we're talking 2017. I heard that this company was going to build a 4000 meters sub. And I called them up.
They were called Oceangate. And I said, they didn't have it, the sub, but they were like, we're going to take people to the Titanic and we're not only going to build a 4000 meters sub, we're going to build a 6000 meters sub and we're revolutionizing this. And I said, well, that sounds really interesting. And then I went back to, this could be my ticket to get. I don't want to go to the Titanic, but I want to
go to 4000 meters. So I get back to Hawaii and I said to Terry, hey, I think I might dive in this. This ocean gate sub. And Terry just stopped in his tracks and said, and this is in 2017. You must never, ever set foot in that sub. because Stockton Rush had come out to the University of Hawaii with his big plans and run them past various people and wanted the university to get involved. And it was from the start, like, just a tragedy waiting to happen. So I started a file, hoped I would never
have to use it. Ended up writing about it for Vanity Fair in 2026. >> Jeniffer: Wow. Yeah. Now, that wasn't in the book. You didn't? >> Susan: No, because the book was published by the time this happened. >> Jeniffer: Yeah. >> Susan: The sub, tragically was lost in basically what happened to the sub was what absolutely everybody told him. What happened to the sub. >> Jeniffer: Yeah. Yeah.
>> Susan: And so Terry and various. Various other characters in the book, at numerous stops along the way of my reporting, would say, like, nobody really thought he was actually gonna do it. >> Jeniffer: Right. >> Susan: Yeah. And we prayed he would, but he did. And, m. Yeah. So, yeah, the book came out in. Well, the incident happened in July. The book came out two weeks later, but it was printed in May. Yeah. So that's also why I wrote about it for Vanity Fair.
>> Jeniffer: There's a lot of things I want to ask you. And I realized we're coming up, we're going to run out of time. >> Susan: And that's the problem with the deep ocean. >> Jeniffer: There's so much to talk about and read. let's start with how much the ocean gives to us, because I think that's such an important message in this book is that it's our life force, and I don't think people are aware of that to the extent. so talk to us a little bit about how much we need our oceans.
>> Susan: Well, yes, I mean, think about, what I said at the beginning is 95% of the biosphere, right? Like, we know we live on an ocean planet, but we live also on a deep ocean planet. And the deep ocean, you know, I'll speak about that. Just specifically right now, is the motherboard of the planet. Of course, it's 95. It runs the climate, it's the engine that runs the climate. It is responsible. We knew, up until very recently, we believed that 50% of the
oxygen. We knew that 50% of the oxygen we breathe is created by phytoplankton and plankton at the surface respiring in photosynthesis. So the ocean is responsible for the fact that we can be here breathing oxygen. But now, just recently, they've discovered that there is also what they call dark oxygen. There are, metallic, elements on the bottom of the ocean that act, emit small voltage and split water molecules into hydrogen and
oxygen. So we're also, there's oxygen being created at the bottom of the ocean, and that's just kind of a sense of how much we don't know. But every system that sustains us and keeps us alive, I guess, you know, obviously there are other elements like the sun and the atmosphere, which keeps us from burning up, but the ocean has created the conditions for life to be habitable on earth. It's where the carbon cycle is, it's where the nitrogen cycle mostly is. It's where 80% of the microbial biomass
of earth is. And I don't know how much you guys know about microbes, but the more I learn about them, the more I just am completely clear that microbes run everything. And so the ocean is this microbial, repository, it is the, as I said, the sediments themselves are alive. And, it's this data bank of genomic creativity that the earth has basically archived in these living sediments. So there really isn't much that the ocean doesn't do for us all these services.
It is absorbing, about 90% of our excess heat right now. We would be in real trouble if it stopped. But we don't know where that tipping point is. it absorbs about 30% of our excess carbon dioxide. And the reason for that is pretty wild. It's very complicated and I'll simplify, but all those quadrillions of tiny animals in the twilight zone. Every night they swim up to the, hundreds of feet to the surface and eat phytoplankton. That has been. It's carbon because it's
been nourished by the sun. And then they swim back down that same night. And when you're a fish this big, that's a long journey. And excrete that, or they're eaten by another animal, and that is then excreted. And in that way, they are cycling in a biological carbon pump carbon out of the atmosphere and sequestering it in the sea floor. And these tiny creatures sequester the equivalent of America's total annual emissions. >> Jeniffer: Wow.
>> Susan: and it's the largest animal migration on earth. and it happens every day. It's a vertical one. Yeah. >> Jeniffer: Covid-19 part of the vaccination came from the deep. >> Susan: Yeah. So from an enzyme in a hydrothermal vent. And so hydrothermal vents are, in the same way that when the plates collide, they subduct and they create these trenches. And that subducting plate is also where we get our major tsunamis. When the plates are battling and one slips, that's any earthquake over
eight has come from a subduction zone. And a lot of them, if they're vertical, will cause a big tsunami like the Tokyo one or the indonesian one. but on the other side of the plate, the plates are pulling apart and they're moving in both directions, more or less at about the speed that your fingernails grow. And, so when they pull apart, magma comes up from the mantle and creates new seafloor. And in the beginning, by the way, kind of major thing, we only discovered it in, like,
1977. people were like, well, then the earth is getting a little bit bigger every year. Well, no, because on the other side of the plate, it's getting subducting. Yeah. So it's in perfect equilibrium. But on the new part, on the magma comes up, there are hydrothermal vents. And the hydrothermal vents, basically, gush out a mix of microbes and minerals and elements from the mantle. And, again in the seventies, we discovered that life had a completely new trick up its sleeve. Didn't need
the sunlight, didn't need photosynthesis. There were animals all over the deep ocean surviving instead on energy sources and minerals, and microbes that were coming from below. So just like I said, with oxygen, we've got this top down source and a bottom up source. Same with life. And I believe it's probably the same with everything. In the ocean. But, yeah, so the, these incredible creatures, they call it chemosynthesis, as opposed to photosynthesis.
>> Jeniffer: Ah. I mean, there's possibilities for cures for cancer and many diseases, and there's so much that we don't know about the deep. And yet on the horizon, we're looking at the looming possibility of deep sea mining. Can you talk a little bit about that? And how extraordinarily what a catastrophe that would be for our planet? >> Susan: Yeah. Well, one of the reasons why there is so much potential, in these sediments is because these
microbes, the ocean for as many microbes as there are. And I think the word that I came up with after asking your end was nonillions, which is like ten to the 37th or something like that. there's even exponentially more viruses, and they're ancient. And so these microbes have all these different metabolisms and these different, strategies for dealing with these being attacked by viruses. I mean, on scales that we can barely, we can't even really imagine. And, these are very novel
ways to approach things and that. And we are this, they call it bio prospecting. And it's a very, very, very young science. And we're learning that there's this deep biosphere that goes even beneath the seafloor. So the seafloor that, let's just say 15,000ft, because that is the abyssal zone. the hadal zone will go deeper, but most of the earth is covered by waters in the abyssal zone. And when those waters hit the seabed, they form something called the abyssal plain.
And it's very huge. It covers 54% of the earth. There are massive geological features in there as well, like, giant mountain ranges, all kinds of things you said, like. >> Jeniffer: Mount Everest turned upside down in some cases. >> Susan: Oh, dwarfed and everything. It's just. Once again, I think it's really hard for us to wrap our heads around how big it is. It's so immense. but so, on the abyssal plain, there are these metallic orbs that form, and they're pretty widespread. And I wish I had a
picture. There's pictures in the book. they look like little tiny cannonballs, but they're not just metal. They're composed of manganese, copper, cobalt and nickel. But they aren't like lumps of metal. They're more like corals or trees, because they're formed by microbes, and microorganisms live inside them. we don't know how microorganisms form them we're kind of curious about that. They accrete these metals from the seawater at the rate of about like a 10th of a
millimeter every million years. So these things are completely ancient. And they then host an entire ecosystem on top of them. Because they're on this sediment plain. So they're a hard surface. So animals live all over them. Some of the oldest lived and most interesting animals on earth live attached to these nodules. So since the seventies, this is the largest metal deposit on earth. but it's in a realm that's very hard to get
to. And now we know enough about the science of it to say it's kind of the womb of the earth. It's one of the most stable environments. The water is exceptionally clear. One scientist told me the only more stable environment is inside a cave. the abyssal zone. You can't call it completely pristine because we have plastic and nanoplastics. But we haven't been down there monkeying around. But deep sea mining is something that has been a glimmer in the corporate eye for
decades. And It is not happening yet on any kind of industrial scale. But it's kind of on the verge of happening now. And it's probably more complicated than I want to get into about why. But let's just put it this way. There are companies in some countries. But the companies are the really bad actors. And they're hooked up with Some of the small South Pacific nations that
are really desperate. Like in particular this nation called Nauru which is 8 sq mi. And These companies can't mine the seafloor without the sponsorship of a country that has signed the treaty of the law of the sea. And with Nauru's help, this one company called the metals company has forced this issue forward to the point where the entire world has gotten involved. And it's just a battle. And what they plan to do is Destroy a 2 million square mile area between Mexico
and Hawaii called the clearing Clifford zone. And it would be like clear cutting a forest but taking the top 20ft of topsoil too. They would take all of the nodules, all of the living sediments beneath them. and this is really not. This is dredging technology. It's going to cause a giant cloud that will kill every animal. Because the water is so clear. They've never evolved to dealing with any particulate. They will then shoot everything up a three mile pipe. And it's animal and mineral,
right. Because it's everything that lives on the nodules. There's no plants in the deep ocean because there's no photosynthesis. So animals, minerals up the pipe, they would then separate out the nodules and then blast everything else, down and release it in a continuous fog at 1200 meters, which is the area of the twilight zone and midnight zone, where all of the animals communicate, hunt, mate, do
everything with bioluminescence. So it's the like, of all the things that we do that I don't like in the ocean, this just dwarfs. But here's the good news, and I really think it is good news. I think it's too insane, even for us. This is the biggest carbon sink scientists have banded together to say, look, we need at least 30 years more study because we don't know what we're even destroying. And it's not going to grow back. When they're gone, they're gone, the microbial services
that are happening. But the greatest thing that happened recently to prevent it from happening was that they realized that these nodules were actually the ones that are splitting the water molecules. So these nodules are creating oxygen. >> Jeniffer: Yeah. >> Susan: oxygen. Oxygen, yeah. And so that's a real stick in the spoke of these companies that want to rip them up. But it's just also their idea is that we need nickel and cobalt for ev batteries and for a greener future.
Let's destroy this last. I mean, the thing that's keeping us alive. but now the battery chemistries are moving away from cobalt and nickel, so there really is no reason to do it. >> Jeniffer: So there's hope. >> Susan: I actually think this is a battle that we will win, and I think it's a pass fail test for humanity, and I feel very optimistic that we won't do it.
>> Jeniffer: Nice. Yeah, I'm glad to hear it. So, yeah, I want you to tell everyone about your deep experience before we run out of time. >> Susan: Okay. >> Jeniffer: well, and I wish we could talk about Victor. He's my favorite. >> Susan: Well, I will. Victor, I wanted to get into a submersible, and I, got in nonfiction. You set out to write about a subject, a story, and then you go out reporting, and so there's a certain amount of serendipity involved, and, like, who do
you meet? What do they tell you? What do you find when you really look? And so I will come right out and say, I think there's an element of luck involved. And this book, I got extremely lucky because as I was kind of sulking after being told I couldn't dive with ocean gate, I couldn't figure out anybody else. I could dive with the Pisces right over the water. And I heard about an expedition that was going around the world to go to all the deepest
places in every Hadel trench. And I immediately started asking around, found some people that I knew through my. This is why I say it really took me all the books to be able to write this one and got an introduction to the people that were doing this expedition. And it was all, at the auspices of a man named Victor Vescovo, who is a very interesting character from Texas. And Victor is a guy who's made quite a bit of money, although he's not a billionaire.
we kind of invite billionaires to spend their billions on ocean research because the government doesn't do it. It gives like a dollar to ocean research for every, every dollar, for ocean research, NASA gets 150. So there are a number of very wealthy individuals who have sponsored, science expeditions and have their own ships and have their own subs and have their own robots. And it's, as far as I'm concerned, all the better. More the
merrier. Victor wanted, to go to the deepest spots in the ocean because nobody had ever been to them. And he, had been to the top of every mountain range, and he had skied to the north and south pole, and he was looking around for something to do. And he, is a very smart guy. He's almost like a Vulcan, kind of, but with like, he's not your average texan. He's got a long, blonde ponytail, and he's kind of like, looks like a raptor. And he's almost Asperger's because he's so
smart. And, he found the best company to build this sub. >> Jeniffer: One of my favorite things, he says, is for relaxation. He studies military history. History. I was like, okay. >> Susan: Speaks seven languages, including Arabic. It was in naval intelligence, doing, I forget what. It was like some crazy thing where they locked him in a room in Pearl harbor, like, trying to analyze stuff for 20 years. and he, ah, found this company in Florida called Triton submarines. And I always refer
to them as the apple of submersible design. There aren't that many submersible companies, but Triton is just magnificent. And so he caught the right, and nobody thought there could be a fullish in depth passenger submersible. It had been tried before James Cameron tried it in 2012, and his submersible basically started to disintegrate on the bottom of the Mariana trench. he won't tell you that, but I'll tell you that. And I know people that were on the
expedition and he. Eleven, of his twelve thrusters failed. He couldn't go anywhere. There were cracks in it. It never dived again. Victor wanted one where he could take a scientist, and it could dive repeatedly, safely, to the greatest depths that nobody had ever been to. And the great thing about Victor was that he brought all the top hatel
scientists along and bankrolled it all. Although Victor's not a billionaire, like he actually had some, as wealthy as he is, incurred quite a bit of personal risk. and it was an expedition called the five deeps. and so I actually just kind of got invited onto the five deeps. >> Jeniffer: Awesome. >> Susan: And it's just a massive stroke of luck. And also to be able to meet the top scientists in the hadel zone. And also I love scientists because they're so passionate
about what they study. These scientists had dedicated their lives to studying this realm that they had never seen. And Victor started taking them down and every dive was just this massive revelation. And so once that expedition was over, he decided to keep going. And so there was another expedition called Pacific ring of fire. And I got onto that one. And then at some point, I asked Victor very nervously, do you think I could maybe dive with you sometime?
He knew I was writing a book and he turned to me and said, sure, let's go to the Mariana trench. And I won't do any spoilers, so I got to do, As far as I know, I'm the only journalist that got to do this because Victor then couldn't really afford to keep the sub in the ship and sold it to, It has a very happy ending because it was sold to a man named Gabe Newell, who was, I think, number, three at Microsoft at one point. And Gabe is obsessed with the ocean and hired all the Heidel scientists
and basically gave them the sub and the ship. So now that that sub and ship just goes around the world doing science funded by a billionaire, it's pretty awesome. And sometimes people get really edgy when I mention this because like, there is a Google, Eric Schmidt has the ship, Ray Dalio has a ship. And people think this is really awful, but it just. The ocean needs, they have these resources and let's get them for the ocean. We need this. >> Jeniffer: One, hundred percent.
>> Susan: And to dive that deep is just extraordinary. The best way I can say it is. It's like meeting the earth for the first time and it's awe and the ocean. One of the things I love most about it is that it requires humility. A real, true humility, because you really understand life from a different perspective. and I come back with as many details as I can so that I can share them with readers, and we can all
revel in this experience. But I will also say that if you ever have a chance to dive, first of all, make sure you're in a sphere. Has to be a sphere. That is the only shape that. That can withstand the pressures and distribute them equally. >> Jeniffer: Tell us about the egg. >> Susan: The egg. well, one of the. They sent an egg down. An egg survived the Mariana trench. >> Jeniffer: Outside. Not inside the sphere. >> Susan: Outside the sphere. Think of it. It's like if you take a sphere and you
crush it, it just becomes stronger. If you step on a coke can, you know what happens? The sphere is the shape. And, all of these subs go through like a much a, very expensive, very rigorous testing that's akin to the FAA, but much more involved, more like NASA, probably. again, the only sub to have ever skipped that step was the Titan. And that's why the realm of Manson Mercibles has 100% safety record.
Outside of that tragedy. the only sub that would go to full ocean depth was Victor's sub until 2023, when the chinese government created a three man sub. so there's only two of those in the world. and it just. It just can't fail to change everything. Like, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. It feels very serene, but also, it's very serious. You know, it's very serious. You can feel the gravitas of it, but it's serene. Yeah. >> Jeniffer: And you can feel it so well in the
book, reading your words, it's such a beautiful experience. I hope everyone will read this book. Let's open up to questions. Does anyone have any questions for Susan? Oh, hi there. >> Speaker C: I'm sort of curious about how much money it takes to launch a rocket up into space. What is the comparison of the cost to create these submersible? >> Jeniffer: Good question. >> Susan: Yeah. Victor's, submersible, they all need a mothership, so that adds the cost.
And, Victor's sub was, I think it cost about $80 million. And then there's the operations. Like, for every hour they dive, they need about two and a half hours, 3 hours of maintenance. And, you know, the environment is just unlike space. It's incredibly the, pressure. I mean, at the bottom of the Mariana trench, the pressure is, 20,000 pounds per square inch. Which one person, told me is the equivalent of 307 seven s fully fueled, stacked on top of
it. So that is not an issue that you're going to have in space. And you need the same kind of a controlled life support system because every. So, like a lot of the times people will say to me, well, how do you decompress? Do you need a decompression stop on the way up? And it's like, no, that sphere has got to be unbreachable. That one is four inches of titanium. In a perfect sphere, it has to be perfect. and I mean, the trouble that they go to, to build this,
it's just such a feat of engineering. And to give you a sense of how, I mean, between 2012, when James Cameron became the third man in history to go down to the bottom of the Mariana trench, and, sorry, between 1960, when two men for the first time, one from the navy, one who was a swiss physicist, went to the Mariana Trench in, a craft called a bathyscaph, between then and 2012, when James Cameron went, that was three people. During that same time, something like 250
people went to the international Space Station. So it's a really. The engineering costs and problems caused by the saltwater itself and the pressure, I, think, make it more expensive over the. I mean, there are three Mars rovers and two full ocean depth submersibles. >> Jeniffer: Yeah. And it's like almost all privately funded, which is just insane to me. >> Susan: Yeah. The government doesn't fund any manned. Well, no, that's not true. the national science. There's one, sub
that I dived in fairly recently called the Alvin. It's the US Navy's research sub. >> Jeniffer: That's the one on the COVID Yeah. >> Susan: And, that's it, though. And scientists wait a really long time for that sub. It's the only sub that we have that does research. the other tools that they have are really capable too, like Rov's. They're really useful for certain things. They can take amazing. they have fiber optic cables, so you can
get amazing. You can send them into places that are too dangerous, perhaps, where, you know, in a place where you might not be able to get a sub, a sub might get trapped or something. There are autonomous vehicles. we are just. We're living through a golden age of finding out what's down there and science has everything to do with it. Yeah. >> Speaker C: My concern would be how did China, come get involved in
this? Because that's my concern would be what their reasoning or desire is to do this and it wouldn't be just empirical research. >> Susan: You're quite right. They're all about mining. you know, it's a little bit like enervating to know that the US, does not have any full ocean depth assets.
China does now. And one time when Victor dived into, one certain area of the mariana, Victor ended up diving 15 times into the Mariana trench, into the challenger deep, which is the deepest spot, and took down twelve different people, including the first female, scientists. And, one thing that they found when they were down there, because nobody had been there, was a whole bunch of fiber optic cable.
and keep in mind, he was in Navy intelligence for 20 years, and he believes that the chinese government is using some of their full ocean depth assets to put listening devices at depth that nobody else can, find them. And that they knew that the sub was coming and would be traversing the trench. And so they cut the instruments and left the cables. Leaving cables as entanglements is one of the most dangerous. Subs
don't implode. Except for the titan, subs do not implode, but they get entangled in cables sometimes. so that was kind of crazy. And, china has something like ten, ocean research vessels, and they also have two subs. One goes to 6500 meters with three people, and the other one goes to, I think, 4000 meters. So we have one 6500 meters sub, they have 111 thousand meter sub, one 6500 meters sub, and one 4000 meters or 5000 meters sub. And, they have ten. They also have, like, a whole chain of ocean
universities. They are playing the long game and investigating the deep ocean in a way that America is absolutely not doing. And, I hope that changes. >> Speaker C: I'm hoping that even if the government isn't, our government isn't willing to fund that. They're being apprised of that and have the understanding of what the potential could be if they don't m put that on their, wish list or to do list that they need to. I mean, space travel is fine, but. >> Susan: This is where we live, right?
>> Jeniffer: Exactly. >> Susan: Oh, man. yeah, no, I don't want to. >> Speaker C: Be or be behind China on anything related to our survivability here on earth. >> Susan: Right. And, you know, if something happened, one of the reasons we have the Alvin is because a submer, two. Let me see if I get this right.
two us planes, a B 52 bomber and an aerial refueling plane, ah, collided over the Mediterranean and a hydrogen bomb fell into the Mediterranean at a depth that we, and I think this happened in like the fifties. Don't quote me, but it's around that era. and there was no vehicle of any kind that could get this out and you couldn't just leave it lying around there. so they created the Alvin. so we do have this one sub and we have some pretty good rov's but the French have a 6500 meters sub, the
Japanese have a 6500 meters sub. The only subs for the Heidel zone are Victor sub, which is now privately owned for scientists and hasn't got the ability to do the heavy duty science work like, installing instruments or recovering instruments. It's more of an observation and has a manipulator on for taking samples of sediment and fauna. But like some of these subs, like the Alvin have, it's like going down with a portable, like, garage.
and the chinese sub is so big it travels with its own crew of 80 technicians. >> Jeniffer: It's crazy. >> Susan: It's got a bathroom in it and believe me, they don't have bathrooms. And So yeah, if anything happens below 6500 meters, any of our assets, anything like that, we have no ability to get it. Not even an rov. We don't. But Woods Hole is working on this and they may have some Rov's soon, but it's an astonishing
gap in security, I think. And especially when you consider that all of our information runs through seafloor cables and there are hundreds and hundreds of seafloor cables and those are incredibly easy to access if you can go down there and do it right. Yeah. So that's a very interesting point. Yeah. Thank you. >> Jeniffer: And with that, I think this gentleman. Can I get one more question? Yes, sir.
>> Susan: It just seems hard to believe the navy with all of our submarine force are not studying all this and have no motivation to do that. >> Jeniffer: It seems incredible. >> Susan: Well, they have woods hole and they have scripts and yet it's the vehicles and, you know, a submarine. we don't know exactly what depths the subs go to, but let's just say it's.
Russia had a sub that could go down to 20,000ft. It was called the loric and Russia had some very strange subs and the Lashark was like a pearl necklace. So sphere, sphere, sphere, sphere with tunnels between them and something happened to it. I think it caught on fire and they all died. And of course it was completely secret. It could be that the US has some vehicles like that, but I think I would know about them. Actually. I have some pretty good contacts, and it's confirm or
deny kind of thing. But, the submarines can't go very deep. They really can't. Like, I would say 600. It's not a submarine thing. It's something else. >> Jeniffer: Yeah. >> Susan: Yeah. >> Speaker C: Well, I would just add on there, I'm retired from the Navy. But my feeling would be is it's not that the Navy's not interested. It's also an matter of funding. >> Susan: Yeah. >> Speaker C: And if you can't get that point across,
because that's the first. I'm so glad I came, because I have no understanding of this at all. And this is serious and feels very serious. >> Susan: Yeah, totally agree. >> Jeniffer: It is very serious. >> Susan: It's 95% of the planet. Victor is a great emissary for this. You know, he's still, I guarantee you there are people in the Navy that have, he's debriefed. Yeah. >> Jeniffer: Well, please buy a book. Get it signed by Susan. She's gonna be in the back. >> Susan: And.
>> Jeniffer: Thank you. Oh, she's gonna be signing up here. >> Susan: Yeah. Oh, shoot. >> Jeniffer: All right. Can people get up here? >> Susan: Thank you so much for coming. >> Jeniffer: Okay. Yeah. Thank you. >> Susan: Thank you. Jennifer.