Deep sea

I also had the...

I also had the misfortune of having sent it out about two weeks before everybody and their dog started releasing Monsters in the Deep Sea movies.

Oh, that summer where there was like four months.

Yeah, there was like Deep

And then The Abyss comes out.

And so I can only imagine that...

In the following weeks, everybody and their dog was trying to write a Monsters in the Deep Sea story and sending it off to Analog.

And I guess what might have happened is that Reader of the Slush Pile looked at the first two sentences... of the story and thought, fuck, not another one, and just tossed it.

Please relax and enjoy.

The deep sea is the deep, dark part of the ocean.

That is all it really is, at its simplest.

It is not a complicated idea, not a difficult concept to grasp, not something that requires any special knowledge to understand.

It is cold and quiet down there, a place where the familiar sounds of wind and waves and weather never arrive, where the temperature hovers just a few degrees above freezing and rarely changes from one century to the next.

It covers much of our planet.

In fact, the deep sea covers more of the Earth than any other single environment — more than all the forests, all the deserts, all the grasslands, and all the mountains combined — yet most of it is unseen, hidden away beneath miles of water, out of sight and out of mind for nearly every person who has ever lived.

Few have ever been there.

And some of these features, if they were on land, would be a wonder of the world.

We are having an effect on the deep sea.

Everything we mess with on the surface has a knockdown effect to what's underneath it.

I want to thank you so much for joining us.

It really helps us out.

So I want to get right to our first guest because he has been to the deepest parts of the ocean more than 70 times.

This is deep sea explorer, Alan Jamieson.

What's it like to go to the bottom of the ocean?

you've ever seen like No, no.

But if you've ever seen, like, the viral picture of, like, a blobfish, like, they do not look like that in the deep sea.

And part of that is, like, with the snailfish here, actually, their skin is kind of a... almost gelatinous layer.

And that's because again, they're dealing with these intense levels of pressure in the deep sea.

And if you bring up something that is kind of gelatinous, it isn't going to lose its shape to put it lightly.

And so you might get something that looks very much like a pile of fish goo.

to show the picture,

blur it out a little bit.

That was a good one.

Next, I will ask you, which is scarier, outer space or the deep sea?

They're both scary in different ways.

I'm going to go with the deep sea because while I find outer space scary, it's a blank kind of scariness.

It's almost more a feeling of just absolute desolation.

That's like, it's hard to distinguish scary from like, just there's something sad to me about outer space.

There's not enough, like in my mind, just with my associations, there's not enough like intrigue or lurking danger or unexpected things that might happen.

It's just floating around in nothingness.

Yes.

If you watch David Attenborough's Planet Earth series, the deep ocean, um, episode is, it has some really interesting footage.

There, there's a lot now more that you can see on YouTube, but of course the total amount of footage that we've ever collected is still relatively limited.

But you don't have to go down very deep to see things that really do look like they were designed for a science fiction movie.

I mean, he, Stockton Rush seemed to enjoy emphasizing this.

So it'd certainly be possible for a very well-funded independent company to construct a deep sea bathyscaphe, and I think that, uh, perhaps the scientific rewards aren't deemed great enough for something like that.

But I personally would, uh, really enjoy an opportunity to explore the deep ocean.

Even a, even a few hundred feet deep would be a different world and a, a world worth seeing.

But I guess a new cat is a little bit more woo woo.

Maybe deep sea diving.

But yeah, a new cat species.

First cat, first time in a century, new cat species.

...

Don't, Don't.

You, Mr. Don't We Discover a New Animal Every Day in the Deep Sea.

And I jump for joy at every single discovery.

Luckily, Tim has some teeth from every stage of the potato forming process to show me as they gain metal.

And on the table in front of us are more than 1,000 teeth recovered in one single deep sea trawl.

These are teeth found by the RV Investigator in 2022 off the Cocos Keeling Islands between Western Australia and Indonesia.

And they range from samples of fresh-looking white teeth from a myriad of sharks-

So when you add up all of the sharks in the ocean and all of the teeth in their jaws and all of the teeth that were shed for an entire lifespan, it's an almost unimaginable quantity potentially to be incorporated into the fossil record.

These are filtering down, raining down like very sharp-edged snow continuously from thousands, millions of sharks through deep time.

And many of these teeth, as well as pieces of shell and coral, will over millions of years turn into whole fields of deep sea potatoes.

And there are now companies that want to mine those fields with underwater harvesters to use the metals to make electric vehicles, solar panels, and military hardware.

Welcome to the Museum of Everything podcast, where Dan and Josh, the curators of the Museum of Everything, are here to discuss art, culture, and history, and submarines.

This time, we're going to pick up with the golden age of submarine warfare, but also discuss research submarines and the deep sea.

But before that, we are going to begin, as always, with a round of Museum of Everything pub trivia.

So, Josh, what is your first question to me, please?

Well, it's too bad that we don't know.

But in any event, there's a lot more to say about nuclear submarines.

And we also want to go into bath escapes and deep sea vehicles because that's a completely separate area.

The technology is very different.