Scichat: Deep Sea Adventures with Dr. Dawn Wright: A Pirate's Tale of Science & Exploration

Join us aboard the SciChat ship as we hoist the sails with our esteemed guest, Dr. Dawn Wright, the genuine scientific pirate! 

She's not just any pirate, but a seasoned marine geologist turned data scientist with a tale that will have you on the edge of your seat. 

From her initial days of geology in Hawaii to an oceanography degree and years spent exploring the sea, Dr. Dawn's journey unfolds like a captivating novel. 

Her current role at a software company sees Dawn employing wide-ranging knowledge in data science, truly embodying the modern-day pirate.

Prepare to be enveloped in the mystery and thrill of deep-sea exploration as we descend into the Mariana Trench, a place where sunlight doesn't dare to reach. We brush shoulders with bioluminescent creatures, traverse the alien-like landscape of the ocean floor, and discover the geology shaping our planet. But it's not just about the awe-inspiring, we also confront the harsh reality of human impact on these depths, and the commendable Maui Humane Society's efforts in aiding animals struck by disaster. 

As we reach the end of our voyage, we'll get an insider's look at Victor Vescovo's marvel of engineering, the submersible 'Limiting Factor.' With Dr. Wright guiding us, we'll learn about the balletic precision of descending into the depths, the certification process, and the historic milestones of the Challenger Deep expedition. 

So, hoist your anchors and set sail for a hearty dose of science, exploration, and a dash of pirate panache.

Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:10

Hello mateys, welcome to SciChat on. Talk Like a Pirate Day. Every week in SciChat we bring you an amazing expert to enthrall you with their area of knowledge. My name is Jason Zakowski. I'm the dog dad of Bunsen and Beaker, the science dogs and social media. My co-host is normally Chris Zakowski. She is super sick. She picked up some con crud or whatever, something from the comic con or maybe from one of the kids. She's very, very sick, so she's out as the co-host today. But in SciChat we bring you amazing people and I'd like to welcome a warm, hearty to Dr Don Wright. How are you doing tonight, doc?

Speaker 3: 0:56

I'm doing great and you can call me Deep Sea Don, and my salty dog is named Riley, who's right behind my chair here. We both be wishing you landlubbers and scallywags, or whoever you may be. A fantastic talk like a pirate day. Although I'm so sorry to hear that Chris is under the weather. I'm so very sorry to hear that.

Speaker 2: 1:23

Yeah, I had to drive around town trying to find halls for today. We found them. I had to go three different places. You'd think halls would be everywhere, but you never. It's weird. Yeah, Doc, I have some pirate jokes for you before we get started. Why don't pirates shower before they walk the plank?

Speaker 3: 1:45

I didn't think pirates showered at all.

Speaker 2: 1:50

It's because they'll just wash up on the floor, wash up on shore. Oh, here's another one for you, doc. Why is pirating so addictive?

Speaker 3: 2:05

Ah, well, do tell.

Speaker 2: 2:10

They say after you lose your first hand, you get hooked.

Speaker 3: 2:18

Hook line and sinker.

Speaker 2: 2:23

All right, and one more. What does a dyslexic pirate say?

Speaker 3: 2:31

Oh, I used to know this one. Oh, shiver me timbers, I can't get it.

Speaker 2: 2:44

Instead of R, anyways, oh, okay.

Speaker 3: 2:49

I didn't know that one Okay.

Speaker 2: 2:53

Well, doc, welcome to SciChat. You have a doctorate. I was wondering if you could explain a little bit of your oh Chris's thumbs down nut Chris didn't like that pun. I was wondering if you could explain a little bit of your background in science, and then we'll get to some of the really exciting stuff that you've been up to. Well, I mean not saying everything you do is exciting.

Speaker 3: 3:16

Yeah, yeah. Well, I just have to share too that now I work for a software company. I don't know if any of your listeners are into data science. That's part of where my, what my training is in. But there's this statistical package that is called R, just the letter R. We had some. We had one session today in our, our big research and development meeting that talked about the linkage that we're making between R and R technology, our, which is R-C-G-I-S Right.

Speaker 3: 3:59

So, anyway, my training actually started in geology. So I have my first degree, my undergraduate degrees, in geology, stemming from growing up in Hawaii and being fascinated with volcanoes and wanting to not only understand how volcanoes work on an island but also how they work on the seafloor, because, especially in a place like Hawaii, that's really a series of volcanoes that started underwater and grew to breach the surface of the sea and are above the water. Most of our processes on this planet actually are volcanic. So I started off there, but I did really want to become an oceanographer, and during my time of going to school, in fact, I think it's still pretty much true If you want to become an oceanographer, that's, and a pirate and a modern day scientific pirate, you do need to start with a degree, a first degree that is, in one of the basic sciences, so that you can apply that basic science to the ocean.

Speaker 3: 5:14

So so many people think of marine biology Fantastic, and it's about the life in the sea and the fishes. Most of those marine biologists started off with a basic biology degree. Or, if you're into seawater, you start off with chemistry. Or if you're into the motion in the ocean, waves, weather at the air sea interface, you're into physics. But I really wanted the geology, so it's advantageous to have a natural velocity interview. I went from a geology degree to an oceanography degree with a specialty in marine geology, and then I went to sea. I went to sea and was actually a pirate, especially during equator crossing ceremonies. I did that for three years as a scientific pirate, working as a science technician aboard a scientific floating laboratory that went all over the world.

Speaker 3: 6:12

I did that for three years and then went back for one final piled, higher and deeper degree to learn more about geography and geographic information systems. So I ended up with a PhD in geography and geology but did a dissertation about the ocean and about applying new mapping techniques to the ocean floor. So that's how things started. Then I got a job in academia and now I work also for this software company in Southern California.

Speaker 2: 6:55

That's ERSI right, or did I say that right?

Speaker 3: 7:00

Esri Esri. I'm sorry Esri, I apologize ESRI. Yeah, ESRI Esri.

Speaker 2: 7:08

Can I ask you just a couple of follow-up questions before we move to some of the Marianas Trench stuff, if that's okay? Sure, yeah. So, folks who are in here, thank you so much for coming and we'll open up the floor to questions in about 20, 25 minutes half an hour and I'm saving some big, big questions out that maybe the audience would like to ask. The first off was can I ask you where you lived, grew up in Hawaii? Which of the islands did you grow up on?

Speaker 3: 7:39

Well from Maui and so we know a lot about Maui, recently from the fires. I did not grow up in Lahaina, but I went to Lahaina just about every weekend. I grew up in the middle portion of the island, near where the airport is now.

Speaker 2: 8:01

Kahalui, Kahalui yeah.

Speaker 3: 8:04

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 8:05

So how many times did you go up Haleakala?

Speaker 3: 8:09

Oh gosh, dozens of times, yeah.

Speaker 2: 8:13

So for people that don't know, there's like a big volcano mountain thing on Maui. Is that correct? Like a dormant volcano?

Speaker 3: 8:21

Yeah, it's one of the world's largest dormant volcanoes. Yeah, it's amazing.

Speaker 2: 8:28

It's too bad. Chris is sick, because she would have a story about how I was scared to drive up there, because I am scared of heights and I got vertigo when I was driving and I actually had to switch. Oh no, somebody else had to drive.

Speaker 6: 8:40

I'm from the.

Speaker 2: 8:40

Flatlands. I'm from the Flatland, yeah.

Speaker 3: 8:46

Well, did you get up there at sunset? Yeah, which is yeah.

Speaker 2: 8:50

No, we didn't, we had. I'm trying to think if we had little kids. When we went, we did see there were these plants, these crazy flower things, growing when we were there and they looked like they were alien.

Speaker 3: 9:05

They looked like they came from another planet. I couldn't believe them, the silver, silver swords, silver swords, yeah, wow, yeah.

Speaker 3: 9:12

That was the coolest part of the whole thing. Yeah, I've been up there a couple of times to see the sunset with family and friends and passing by all of the amazing plants and the, but the landscape again. For me, as someone who's interested in geology, during the time that I was living there, I believe the Apollo astronauts were exploring around Haleakala in preparation of going to the moon, because the landscape in the crater and in many of these craters is very moon-like, is very otherworldly, and yet it's an important part of our planet as well.

Speaker 2: 10:08

That's so true and I'm sure everybody in this space. Our hearts go out to anybody that you know that is in Hawaii that was affected by the Lahaina fires. It was, yeah, it was quite a thing that we all saw. I just wanted to mention that without passing over.

Speaker 3: 10:23

Yes, Thank you, thank you, thank you very much. Thankfully, all of my friends none of them have been harmed, but just about any so many of them know people who are still missing or who have been lost or who are homeless right now. So it is very, very sad and very, very tragic, and it's going to take a long time to recover, for sure. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 10:55

And I did. There are a lot of different organizations donating it's. Yeah, I do hear that. I do hear it's going to take a while to recover. I would you mentioned it and I felt like if I just brushed it, brushed past it, it would seem kind of not the best thing to do. So thank you for your words on that, doc.

Speaker 3: 11:13

Oh, yes, and you know one one really neat, if you can find silver linings in these tragedies. I've been actually tracking and sending money to the Maui Humane Society, because the other part of this that's so sad in any of these disasters are the animals, and there's so many dogs and and kitties with burned paws running away from the fire and they got separated from their humans. But the Maui Humane Society has just been doing a fantastic job caring for these animals and getting them reconnected with their people or getting them readopted, and I think veterinary science is that's another really really cool science. I think if I hadn't gone into geology and oceanography, I would have thought about, you know, vet school, but anyway, the all of the, the vets and the volunteers, it's. It's a really, it's a really beautiful thing that that's happening there. We don't hear as much about it in the news, but but it is really. It's a thing that's really happening in a big way on Maui and I'm very proud.

Speaker 2: 12:35

That's good. That's good that there's, you know there's, there's little rays of light there.

Speaker 3: 12:41

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2: 12:44

Well, doc, can I ask you some of the the really exciting questions? If we could move to that, Sure.

Speaker 3: 12:50

Sure.

Speaker 2: 12:52

So we've already had a chat everybody the doc and I have already had a chat for the science podcast and could you tell everybody what Challenger Deep is, Because I got goosebumps when you were explaining it the first time.

Speaker 3: 13:12

So Challenger Deep is the deepest place on planet Earth. It's the deepest spot in the ocean and it's the it's within the Mariana Trench, which is a huge submarine trench that is actually near Guam. And if you think, if you can think about or pull up a map of the world, and so we've been talking about Hawaii, which is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and I live in California, which is right on the eastern part of the Pacific Ocean. But if you go all the way over across the Pacific to places like Japan and the Philippines, and you know, all the way down even to New Zealand, all of those places have these incredibly deep scars, scars in the crust of the Earth, because these are places where a very cold, dense Pacific plate that is constantly in motion it butts up against other plates on the western side of the Pacific and it literally dives into the Earth. It is, it is the geologic term is subducted and as these parts of the Pacific descend into the Earth, they descend into these really large cracks or scars, and these are places where earthquakes occur.

Speaker 3: 14:53

So I think, jason, we talked about the Tonga earthquake and the Tonga eruption. The big news last year was one of the huge volcanic eruptions in all of recorded human history and that took place near the Tonga trench. Well, the Tonga trench is deep, but not as deep as the Mariana trench. So Challenger Deep was actually a place in the Mariana trench that was discovered, if you can believe this, back in the 1870s during the first global oceanographic expedition that was held by the British, and they took a great big piece of lead, they tied it to the end of a rope and they threw that rope over the side trying to find the bottom. And they kept going and going and going and thankfully they had over six miles of rope on board until they were able to feel the bottom and brought all the rope back and measured the length of the rope and that's that they had stumbled upon Challenger Deep and to this day, all of the modern mapping that we have done in that area has confirmed their original discovery.

Speaker 2: 16:04

So that is a lot of rope, Doc.

Speaker 3: 16:07

That's a lot of rope.

Speaker 2: 16:09

Do you think that people? Back then were bamboozled with how deep it was. Oh yes, Like, are there like any journals from the folks that did this there?

Speaker 3: 16:21

are.

Speaker 2: 16:21

They're like I can't believe how deep it was.

Speaker 3: 16:23

Yeah, there are all of the reports from the Challenger, the voyages of the HMS Challenger. In fact, the oceanography school that I went to most oceanography schools have copies of these chronicles from the 1870s, because it's the very start of our science, and so they were absolutely bamboozled back then. We continue to be to be bamboozled now because we know that Challenger Deep exists, but is very much like the moon, where only, in this case, a couple of a few handfuls of people have been to Challenger Deep to see what it's like, similar to. We've only had what 12, I don't know 12 or 20 people who've gone to the moon. We've only had 27 people who have descended to Challenger Deep, and I'm the last person, along with the pilot who was responsible for these expeditions, victor Baskobo. He and I are the last two people who have visited that place, and we did that last summer.

Speaker 2: 17:32

So for people to get an idea, the Titanic is deep where it's resting like wildly deep, but Challenger Deep is like even more bananas deep than that. Is that correct?

Speaker 3: 17:49

Yeah, the Titanic, where we now so many people know about not only where the Titanic is, but how deep it is because of the horrible tragedy of the Ocean Gate's Titan submersible, which was lost at around 4,000 meters depth.

Speaker 3: 18:10

Challenger Deep, my dive went to 10,919 meters, so we are way, way, way, way, way deeper. We were deeper. So for those of you who need to make the conversions, I often tell people that's about 6.7 miles, but many of, perhaps many of you have run a 10K race. So if you run a 10K race from the surface of the ocean all the way down to Challenger Deep, there you go.

Speaker 2: 18:49

So you were in the thing that went that deep.

Speaker 3: 18:54

Yes, there are two submersibles, two vehicles that can withstand the pressure at Challenger Deep. Only two of them exist. One of them is Chinese, it's called the Fendoja. It was built by the Chinese government, but the other one is American, it's the limiting factor. The limiting factor and its ship have been sold now so they changed the name of both the ship and the submersible, but when I was in it it was called the limiting factor and it's a specially designed submersible.

Speaker 3: 19:37

And the reason why there are only those two is that it's very, very hard to engineer anything that can withstand the pressures of the deepest parts of the ocean.

Speaker 3: 19:50

In fact, all of the other submersibles that are like the limiting factor. They are rated to only 6,500 meters or shallower, because maritime engineering I think it's one of the holy grails in terms of designing something that can withstand pressures below 6,000 meters. It's sort of like going to space. You know, we came up with aircraft and rockets that could get to the edge of our atmosphere, but to break into outer space and eventually to get to the moon, and we're thinking about getting to Mars and these other places with people inside these crafts. That is taking a lot of engineering, a lot of amazing technology and it's the same thing for going in the opposite direction, not to outer space, but to inner space. In fact, when we got to Challenger Deep, the pressure there is so high the hydrostatic pressure that it's very similar to being on Venus. The pressure the atmospheric pressure that's on Venus is very similar to the hydrostatic pressure that is at the bottom of Challenger Deep, which is about 16,000 pounds per square inch.

Speaker 2: 21:19

Oh, my God.

Speaker 3: 21:20

So every single inch, you've got that 16,000 pounds of force coming down on that little inch per inch of the around the submersible. So things, in fact this is what happened with the Titan. If you don't have the right materials or the right geometry of what you are sending down there, things are not going to explode, they're going to implode because of that tremendous pressure. And that's sadly what happened to the Titan. The Titan imploded and the occupants they probably didn't even realize what was happening. It happened so fast because the pressure is so immense.

Speaker 3: 22:08

So the limiting factor that we were in it's just the marvel of engineering, because not only is it able to go down to Challenger Deep and come back up, but it can do that repeatedly. Oh my God, when you think about James Cameron, the movie director, he went to Challenger Deep I think it was in 2009, I'll have to look that up, but it was some time ago. But his submersible was only able to do that once it broke. It broke while it was down there and it had difficulties afterwards. They were never able to re-engineer or to fix it to go again. So it had that one trip and he was very lucky to come back alive from his trip.

Speaker 2: 22:57

I didn't know that. I didn't know that. Yeah, Doc, I did some quick napkin math Down at the bottom of Challenger Deep, on every square inch of your body you would have 160 Bunsons. That's all. So yeah, 160 Bunsons for every square inch of your body.

Speaker 3: 23:21

Yeah, that's a lot of lovely doggy, that's a lot of Bunson, that's a lot of dog yeah.

Speaker 2: 23:29

So I think the question everybody's dying to hear or listen to you talk about is what did you see as you descended Like? What was the experience like?

Speaker 3: 23:42

Well, the experience. To me, it's very much like going to outer space, except when you go the opposite direction, deeper and deeper into the ocean. To me it was like a dream, because the submersible descends very quietly and very slowly and we did not feel any changes in pressure. We didn't feel anything inside of the sphere that we were sitting in. The way that the submersible is designed is that you are actually sitting inside of a titanium sphere and then that sphere is covered with syntactic foam and then a metal shell, so the submersible itself can have different types of shapes, but what you are sitting in, what humans are sitting in, for all the submersibles that are certified, you are sitting inside that sphere. Or the first people who descended into the ocean went in a diving bell, which is again, it's the same shape. That's the geometry, but the sphere is pierced with three holes so that we could see out. And so we had a beautiful view as we were taking this elevator ride slowly down from the surface through beautiful blue waters and the blue in the upper part of the ocean. There's the blue in the sky, there's blue when you're scuba diving. There's nothing like the blue as you get even deeper and you're descending through that beautiful zone into a zone that's sort of gray and then into complete darkness. And it is dark. It is absolutely pitch black dark. There is no light, complete absence of light, until you either turn your own lights on or you see creatures at that depth flashing their own lights. Bioluminescence is the scientific term. These animals can create chemical reactions in their bodies and then they can use, they can flash with that chemical reaction to communicate with each other, like to find a mate or to try to find something to eat. And when we got to around it was around 900 meters we started seeing these creatures. We were in darkness but all of a sudden, there, these little flashes of light outside of the window, and Victor started to flash the lights of our submersible to communicate with them and they flashed back as unbelievable unbelievable Now, up close these creatures.

Speaker 3: 26:31

They're jellies the ones that I've seen are jellies, or they are worms. They're called siphonophores. They're also species of fish that have this property as well. Maybe people have seen the angler fish that have the little antenna dangling on their heads with a little bit of bioluminescent material at the end of their little angler. In fact, if you've seen the episode of SpongeBob SquarePants where they go. The episode is called Rock Bottom and they're a lot of really cool. I love that episode, doc.

Speaker 2: 27:11

We've watched that episode so many times with our kids. The advanced darkness right, this, is it normal darkness, this is advanced darkness.

Speaker 3: 27:20

Exactly, yeah, and Steven Hillenberg, who created SpongeBob, SquarePants, he was a marine science educator, so you know it was a lot. Spongebob is a lot of fun, but a lot of it is pretty good. You know pretty good science, yeah. Anyway, it took us four hours to get to the bottom, and it was four hours again, very slow. We descended at around two knots, two nautical miles per hour, just very quiet, very peaceful.

Speaker 3: 27:54

But as we got near the bottom, victor did turn on the lights of the submersible so that we could see the bottom and see where we were landing, and it is a very alien, moon-like landscape. We landed in a fairly flat place. It was full of sand or silt, sediment, heavily sedimented, especially because in the trench. The trench is so steep and, of course, so deep that a lot of material from shallower places comes down into the bottom of the trench through various channels or through faults, and so there's a combination of that, but also places that are very, very rocky, because this is a place where two tectonic plates are grinding together. Now, one thing that was very disappointing, though as soon as we landed, the first thing that we did notice, besides the sedimented landscape, was this green thing that was flashing. It showed up very brightly in our view and I thought we've got the video of it and I said that looks like a lightsaber, like something from Star Wars.

Speaker 2: 29:17

And.

Speaker 3: 29:17

Victor said. I don't know what that is either. Let me drive the submersible up to it to see so we can get a closer look. Doggone it, it was a green beer bottle. What?

Speaker 3: 29:30

At that point, we were at 10,902 meters depth and that is the very first thing that we saw A beer bottle, a green beer bottle, label intact. Don't ask me whether it was a Heineken or a Bex. That was a big thing on the internet. When we first sent the picture of it out on Twitter, people wanted to know. Well, what kind of a beer bottle was it? To me doesn't really matter.

Speaker 3: 29:56

Somebody threw a beer bottle overboard, somebody littered in the ocean and there it was for us to see in Challenger Deep. We didn't have a robotic arm on our sub to pick it up, so we couldn't pick up the litter, but it was just a huge example of how we, as human beings, are leaving no part of this planet untouched, not even in the deepest parts of the ocean, for crying out loud. Anyway, that was the first thing that we saw. It was very, very discouraging and very disappointing, but as we continued on our track, one of the things that I thought was really fantastic as a geologist was this.

Speaker 3: 30:45

We came upon this huge field of angular blocky pieces of basalt. In geology we call it a talus pile, like if you've got a whole bunch of rocks and big pieces of big boulders that fall down a steep hill and they all collect at the bottom. It's a huge pile of rocks, and what this signified what we were seeing was the right where the Pacific Plate was grinding into the Philippine Plate and crunching up all of these fantastically cool rocks, as the Pacific Plate was literally diving inside of, into the lower part of the Earth. And these piles of rocks are also habitats for creatures.

Speaker 2: 31:45

So there's like living things down there like 10,000.

Speaker 3: 31:48

They're living there 10,000.

Speaker 2: 31:49

Yeah, okay.

Speaker 3: 31:51

Yeah, they're living things that are living on these piles of rocks or even in some of the flat sandy areas. I think in the piles of rocks there are fluids from inside of the Earth that are released in these areas, because this is a place where there's a huge crack and so there's Good God. This is like oozing goo out for the creatures, yeah fluids coming up from the crust and these creatures subsist. They like that. It's sort of like the that's Earth goo.

Speaker 2: 32:28

It's sort of like it's like hot Earth goo.

Speaker 3: 32:31

It's sort of like that, yeah, or in the opposite case, where there is a sea floor spreading and you might have heard of these hydrothermal vents Yep, where there is, that's another kind of crack, but in that case sea floor is not being destroyed or munched up like what we saw in the Mariana Trench. There sea floor is being created. Those are linear volcanoes and there are super hot fluids that are coming out during that volcanic process, which is a place where those tube worms and crabs and those types of creatures that we've seen so often in National Geographic, but that's at a much shallower depth. Most of those places are at around 2,500 meters depth, but here, at 10,900 plus meters, we saw anemones. They look like beautiful little white flowers. They're anchored on the rocks and it's like a little white tube and then a little white flower at the end of the tube, and that's the species of anenomy. And we also saw sea pigs, or another name for them are sea cucumbers.

Speaker 3: 33:47

I love those guys I love sea cucumbers. Yeah, and there's a species of sea cucumber that can survive these crushing depths.

Speaker 2: 33:58

What the heck girl? How? What are they made of Beer bottles? That's what they're made of.

Speaker 3: 34:04

Now, I'm not a biologist so I don't have all the details, but there's also a now fish. There are no fish at that depth. Oceanographic science right now we have not discovered fish below around 8,000 or 9,000 meters. So what we did was we had a robot that we sent down a little bit before we went down and had that robot land at around 7,400 meters.

Speaker 3: 34:38

It landed in the trench, but a little higher up on the wall, and it just sat there so that it could record a video of fish, because there are fish in the Mariana Trench that are most definitely at that depth. And so we have this fantastic footage of these snailfish. They are strange creatures. They are white, with dark eyes and they're translucent. You can see their inner organs. They are just amazing.

Speaker 3: 35:21

And there's also we got footage of a beautiful jellyfish at that depth and decopods, which are like large shrimp-like creatures, more like prawns, and then there are smaller shrimp-like creatures that are called amphipods. Now we did see a couple of amphipods all the way down at our depth and those little things can swim, so that was probably the most active sea life that we saw. In fact, we think these amphipods their genus is urythanes. For the biologists who are listening, you name a creature by a genus and then a specific species, and there is a species of amphipod that was discovered by Alan Jamison and colleagues in Challenger Deep that's named urythanes plasticus, because it's the very first creature to have a human-made plastic already embedded in its tissues.

Speaker 2: 36:46

Oh, that's too bad.

Speaker 3: 36:47

Yeah, so it's quite tragic, but these little creatures they absolutely have made a way, they found a way to live, to exist, but they really have been named, discovered and named because of that sad quality. I think we might have seen a couple of those guys floating by our window. Really sad, but the snailfish are really quite fascinating.

Speaker 2: 37:25

It is wild. I think we're all so lucky to have you talking to us because, as you said, there's only been a handful of people who have been that deep it's less than 30 people and you and the pilot have been the last people on Earth to go that deep, which is just, I mean, so cool and congratulations and thank you for talking to us today.

Speaker 3: 37:51

Oh my gosh, I'm all too happy to. I want to talk to as many people about it as possible, because there's so much that we don't know about our own planet and as we look to the stars which is great we need to look to the sea. We need to look into the ocean, especially since the ocean is really responsible for us having life, no matter where we are. Even in Canada and central Canada, every other breath you take is because of the chemical reactions that are happening at the air-sea interface and supplying oxygen for us. We used to and the oceans no, no no, sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 2: 38:39

I am so apologize. Go ahead, doc.

Speaker 3: 38:41

Oh no, I was going to say also. The oceans regulate our weather, our day-to-day weather and our climate long term. So the storms and the beautiful days, everything that we experience on every single, in every single place on this planet where we're living, it is we owe the ocean a debt the world would be so different without the ocean.

Speaker 2: 39:09

I think, like on the science podcast, we used to do a little trivia game called Woo or Wow I kind of miss it, but it was a lot of work and one of the jokes or not one of the jokes one of the trivia is like was how much, what percentage of the earth's oxygen comes from the ocean? And it's like 50%.

Speaker 3: 39:27

Yeah, it's around 50%.

Speaker 2: 39:28

It's a huge, it's not, you know? Of course, thank you to the trees, but it's more like thank you to the seas as well.

Speaker 3: 39:36

And the oceans are absorbing an enormous amount of heat, as well as 25, I think it's 25% of the carbon in the atmosphere. So, as we continue to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and warming this planet, or weirding this planet, my colleague Catherine Hayhoe, oh, we love Dr Hayhoe.

Speaker 2: 40:01

Yeah, she does please.

Speaker 3: 40:04

I do too, dr Hayhoe, and I have the same birthday too. No way. Vaccine C is going to be in our Esri is doing massively open online course that starts next month about climate action.

Speaker 2: 40:21

Have the two of you.

Speaker 3: 40:22

Dr Hayhoe is in the course.

Speaker 2: 40:24

Have the two of you met in real life?

Speaker 3: 40:26

Oh, yes, we are friends.

Speaker 2: 40:27

No way.

Speaker 3: 40:28

We've been friends for quite some time.

Speaker 2: 40:30

That is wow. That is a lot of star power in one room. Doc, I'll tell you that.

Speaker 3: 40:35

Well, see, she is the star and I first encountered her through her YouTube series, you know, global Weirding, and also when she was on PBS Nova several years ago. But yeah, we are both chief scientists, because she's now chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, which is a close partner to my company, my mapping company Esri, where I'm chief scientist. So we've been doing quite a few neat projects together.

Speaker 3: 41:09

And one of them is this course that is free and you can hang out with it for six weeks and learn all about climate science and what you can do specifically, what each one of us can do to take action.

Speaker 2: 41:26

Now we probably we're not gonna have time to talk about Esri. We did talk about it on the podcast. So if you've all been enjoying the discussion we have been having so far with Dr Dawn today Deepsea Dawn, we do get into it with Esri on the podcast and all the cool little things that the website has to offer and what your mapping, that mapping company does, and all that kind of stuff. So I think there's quite a few people, I think, that want to come up to ask you questions, doc. Okay, but I have-.

Speaker 3: 42:01

Oh Dr.

Speaker 2: 42:01

Raven is here.

Speaker 3: 42:03

Wow, yeah, I see Dr.

Speaker 2: 42:05

Raven Another celebrity.

Speaker 3: 42:06

Hello doc.

Speaker 2: 42:06

Raven. So I left some questions out about what you could ask the doc. If you have a question for Dr Dawn Wright about the Marianna Trench no, the Marianna Trench. I said it wrong again on pirate day. Walk the plank Bacco. Every time I say it wrong.

Speaker 2: 42:25

If you have a question for her, please request and we'll bring you up. My co-hostess with the mostess is not well, so she's not a co-host. I'll be running it myself. So just a couple of ground rules. If we don't recognize your account or it's an account that looks like it probably is an inappropriate account to bring into a science discussion, I'm sorry. We're not bringing you up on that. So there's that. So if you do have a question, please request the mic to come up and chat, and I've got a couple of questions in my back pocket for you. If we run out of speakers and doc, do I have you till about the top of the hour? Absolutely Okay, perfect, okay. So Tracy has requested, so we'll bring Tracy up and then, of course, if other people have some questions, there's some in chat that I will read after Tracy go ahead, hello.

Speaker 5: 43:19

Hi Hi Tracy. Hi One thing I learned recently is that pirates didn't actually have people walk the plank, so that was disappointing. It's like finding out that Vikings didn't have horned helmets? Yeah, but since you mentioned that you have a dog, I want to know if you have a pet story for us. Oh, yes, well, my dog is named Riley.

Speaker 3: 43:49

She's a six-year-old golden retriever and she's a real darling.

Speaker 3: 43:53

One of the things about going in a submersible to the bottom of the ocean is that you trust the technology and you trust that you don't get to see everything works.

Speaker 3: 44:10

But Riley and I had a chance to see the submersible, the limiting factor, in pieces as it was being refit, a couple of months before my dive to Challenger Deep.

Speaker 3: 44:25

So this is really cool because I think of all of the 27 people who have been to Challenger Deep and the 20-plus people who have gone down with Victor Baskov and other pilots in the limiting factor, riley is the only dog to have met that team and to have actually hung out with them in their work area.

Speaker 3: 44:53

They go to a special place in San Diego that specializes in deep sea equipment and in testing deep sea equipment and that is really cool and the team invited us to go, since we are not that far from San Diego. So they invited us to what they called the Full Ocean Depth Barbecue and they had the crew there amazing engineers that the people who actually maintain the submersible and get it ready for each dive, and among them are several people who are certified to pilot that submersible. They are the science and engineering crew for the limiting factor, and so it was a real thrill for me to go and to take Riley with me and to have her make friends and to have those friends assure her that I was in good hands that I was going to be in good hands a couple of weeks that I was going to be away from her.

Speaker 3: 45:59

So that's one story.

Speaker 2: 46:01

Tracy, would you trust Ricky with overseeing a submersible retrofit? Maybe Did you hear me out just now.

Speaker 6: 46:14

Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 5: 46:16

I think as long as he's fed well enough, then he might be okay with it with doing it. Otherwise all bets are off, that's my cat. Oh, Ricky is your cat.

Speaker 2: 46:27

Yeah, I would not trust Ginger with any overseeing. She would play with the parts and mess them up.

Speaker 3: 46:37

It would be a whole thing. Yeah, riley was very good. She was on her leash and gave a lot of kisses and got the tour. Yeah, it's too bad she couldn't come out to see with us. I've never been to see. You know, there's also this pirate thing about sea dogs and pirates and other monkeys and other animals that are out at sea, but I don't know if that's true either.

Speaker 2: 47:07

I got you. Do you think Riley would have done well in the submersible as you went down to the bottom of the Mariana trench?

Speaker 3: 47:15

Oh, absolutely not.

Speaker 2: 47:16

Okay.

Speaker 3: 47:18

One thing about the submersible is that you don't. There's no room to move. Oh, okay.

Speaker 3: 47:25

They were just it's a two-person submersible. You're sitting in the equivalent of a gaming chair, sort of, so you're sitting upright, which is good for being mostly comfortable, because the other submersibles that I've been in you had to crawl up. You had to crawl into a fetal position and stick your head up against the windows very uncomfortable. But this submersible was designed so that you could be in relative comfort, because our dive was 10 and a half hours long, yeah, and not even room to really stand up. You could bend over a little bit, but you had to be completely comfortable and still in your seat. In fact, if you've got any kind of problem with claustrophobia or epilepsy or any type of situation like that, then that does disqualify you for doing a dive like that.

Speaker 3: 48:29

So animals it's not built for animals, yeah.

Speaker 2: 48:32

Keep the dogs above 10,000 meters below the ocean surface. Tracy, thanks for your question. We'll go to Paula and then to Real Lucas. Real Lucas, I see your hand up. We'll get to you after, paula. Thank you for waiting, hi, paula.

Speaker 7: 48:50

Hi Dr Don, Hi Jason, hi Chris, hope you feel better. Chris, I kind of was going to ask the question about how small the capsule is, because it must be kind of like a space capsule, and you kind of just answered that question. But, and God bless you, because I probably wouldn't stand five minutes of claustrophobia, that's from MRIs.

Speaker 3: 49:13

I never, I never oh yeah.

Speaker 7: 49:15

To like an MRI it was like being buried. I didn't like that. But anyway, my question is what does that pressure feel like on your body? Number one that's my first question. Number two what is the neatest thing you've ever seen down there, and do you ever find new species of something at that depth? Like are they finding more and more research because you know at these depths that they have never seen before or documented before? So that's kind of a lot.

Speaker 3: 49:46

Yes, absolutely yeah, they're. Just about. Every time any oceanographic expedition goes out to sea, especially to these deep, these deepest places that it's very hard for people to get to or to make repeat visits to A new species is indeed discovered. We we didn't, I don't think we discovered a new species, but the jellyfish that was captured in our robots cameras. That was a new sighting of that species at that particular depth. So that was a new depth record, because not only are we discovering these new species where we are trying to learn about their physiology and about where they live, their habitats, and especially for biologists who focus on HADL biology in the ocean and HADL literally comes from the word to mean hell. You know the deepest parts of the ocean, not just a bissel. The Titanic is at an abyssal depth, but Challenger Deep is a HADL. I love that.

Speaker 2: 50:59

It's like in the depths of hell.

Speaker 3: 51:02

Yeah, so the biologists who specialize in the depths of hell, they, they really have a field day, because they are always discovering new species and then always trying to to discover depth records for these new species. So they may have seen a species at a particular depth. That species may be able to live at depths even deeper, it's just that it hasn't been seen or discovered yet. And this is important, maybe for pharmaceuticals, for, for for biomedical reasons. In fact, they used to to say that there might be a cure for cancer at many of these places in the ocean. I used to tell my oceanography students that, you know, peanut butter is spreadable because of a marine algae that was discovered in the ocean. There are all kinds of really cool uses, at any rate. Yeah, I've forgotten.

Speaker 2: 52:02

Your the first part of your question. The pressure on your body, oh, your pressure. Oh, the pressure yeah.

Speaker 3: 52:09

So that the that is a wonderful thing, because we felt no difference in pressure. We inside the, the submersible, we were still at one atmosphere, and this is the miracle of the technology. So the we were outside the submersible, we were at 16,000 pounds per square inch pressure, that's 160.

Speaker 3: 52:32

Whatever, yeah, 160 Bunsen's, maybe a thousand atmospheres, but inside there was no, we didn't feel any any difference in pressure. And that's the whole point, because you just cannot, you can't make an error there. You have to be at one atmosphere, you have to be able to breathe. We had, of course, sufficient oxygen. We had carbon dioxide scrubbers and then we had sufficient extra tanks of oxygen to last us for 96 hours in case we did have an emergency. So in that case, you have 96 hours to solve your problem, whatever that problem might be, before you do run out of oxygen.

Speaker 3: 53:21

So, yeah, there was the the. The only thing that was problematic is how cold it gets, because at the bottom of the ocean it's near freezing. It's not completely freezing because of the salt that's in the water that prevents ice from from forming. So that's why the ocean is is a liquid from top to bottom in in most places, but it was around. For us inside the submersible it was around 45 degrees Fahrenheit and I'm sorry I can't do the the conversion quickly to to Celsius, for for my Canadians, Seven degrees, a very cool seven.

Speaker 2: 54:11

Yeah, that's, that's, that's chilly.

Speaker 3: 54:14

And it's chilly because we didn't have. We were very judicious in terms of the energy that we were expending in the submersible. We wanted to have as much time as possible to survey and to observe on the bottom to to make sure that we didn't run out of battery power. So we didn't have heat. It wasn't enough battery power to run a heater and there is a little. There's moisture that gets. That's on the inside of the submersible. Even a little bit of moisture that comes in from the hatch, which for for many people is, is very frightening, but for me it wasn't, wasn't frightening at all because of my prior experience. But with that moisture in the submersible, if it gets, if your feet get wet and cold, that's, that's pretty miserable. So you want to be down there with several pairs of of socks and even that that doesn't really help. I had chilled feet for for about eight hours, but anyway, yeah, the the thing about moisture getting in the submersible where you're sitting is from the condensation of your, your breathing, but also some of a little bit of the water comes in, because the deeper you go, the submersible is actually sealing, sealing itself.

Speaker 3: 55:38

We were sitting, as I mentioned before, inside of a titanium sphere that was machined in two halves along with three holes in it, that had acrylic plastic windows so we could see out, but all of the, the minuscule spaces in those areas. The deeper we went, the hydrostatic pressure pushed all of that together and sealed it tight. So the deeper we went, the safer we were. It's counterintuitive, but but it's a wonderful thing about physics. So as we got to the bottom, I felt as comfortable and as safe as could be, because we had reached full ocean depth. There wasn't anything that was going to implode, similar, like like what happened with the with the Titan. They did not have the right geometry or and they did not have everything sealed in their craft, which is which is why they ran into. They had a tragic end, but yeah, it was cool.

Speaker 7: 56:47

Thank you very much for answering my questions Very fascinating, and my hat's off to you. Thank you.

Speaker 2: 56:56

Thanks, paula. We'll go to Real Lucas next. Thank you for waiting patiently. Then Richard, and then random and true doc. Do you have another 10 minutes? Is that okay, or do you have to?

Speaker 3: 57:06

get going. Yes, okay, yeah, I'm good.

Speaker 2: 57:10

Go ahead, real Lucas, with your question.

Speaker 6: 57:12

Hey guys, how you doing. I've been following things with interest. I was lucky enough. I worked for James Cameron during his deep sea challenger days Wow. And worked at the Cameron Pace Group. His scientific, his. I am not an oceanographer and I'm not a scientist, I'm a video guy and a Hollywood guy, but I worked at his 3D technology company, which was heavily involved with the deep sea challenger effort.

Speaker 6: 57:39

Wow, and I was, and not being a scientist and not being an oceanographer, one thing that was I was absolutely amazed by during the process is is how much testing was done, how many and a lot of people think that it's just one dive and then you're done. How much testing, how much prep, how much work Jim and the crew did to to verify scientific integrity and safety. And I also realized that it that the deep sea world, that people that do that, is a very, very small community. And and I'm curious, how many, what was? How long did you guys do? How long have you done prep? And how long did you guys every, every dive that you do? How much?

Speaker 6: 58:26

How many test dives you do before you go, before you go all the way down, or the fact that you've gone down now, do you sort of not do test dives? And where do you base out of? Do you base out of PNG or or where do you guys go from? And last question is what determines each scientific, what determines each scientific goal when you, when you go down to the bottom, what are you specifically looking for and what determines that? So, thanks, guys, really appreciate it.

Speaker 3: 58:55

Yeah, yeah, that's a fantastic set of questions and I can't give you detailed answers about all of them because I'm actually not with Caledon Oceanic, which is Victor Voscovos' organization that tendered the, the, the ship and the sub and did all of the, the testing. I I was able to to see the, the refit, which is wonderful because I think every six months or so they they did take the limiting factor apart and they made sure that all of the, everything was in working order. They upgraded things, they fixed things and they in terms of the, the testing of the submersible and its design. There there are a couple of YouTube videos that were made by Nick Verola. Maybe you know Nick Verola, but he was contracted by Victor to do the all of the videography and the movie making. He was very equivalent to to an organizational videographer and he has made a couple of YouTube videos about the making of the submersible, the design of it, the testing that, that that submersible went through the certification similar to Deepsea Challenger, because I really appreciated James Cameron's comments about Titan in terms of how seriously Ocean Gate needed to to take the entire process with Titan and apparently that was not the case, because it is so much testing, so much work.

Speaker 3: 1:00:37

Now, when I did my dive, I was a mission specialist. On the dive, I was not part of the crew and when Victor Vescovo took me down, that was his 15th dive to Challenger Deep. So, in terms of all of the, the, the maintenance of the sub, the preparation of it, the, the, the ballet that they go through, in terms of getting the sub deployed to start the dive and recovered when you come back to the surface they had fine tuned that process so well that during my dive which is it? It? It looked like a beautiful ballet and everything worked perfectly. There were absolutely, there was absolutely nothing that went wrong, nothing that was out of place. So surely that was the result of the multiple trials and errors, the multiple dives that the limiting factor had been through over that five deeps expedition, where they between 2018 to 2021, they, they went to the deepest points in all five of the world's major oceans. So I just felt, as someone who Victor had invited to accompany him on on my dive, that I was the beneficiary of of just wonderful engineering, wonderful coordination. Everything was just perfect Now, in terms of taking people down with him to Challenger Deep and other places, victor, after the five deeps expedition was completed, he decided to invite some people who who did pay $750,000 to, to go to Challenger Deep and that helped to fund Caledon Oceanic, their organization.

Speaker 3: 1:02:40

But then he also started to invite scientists like myself, who had a specific instrument or specific scientific objective Maybe it was biological for instance with Alan Jamison, the chief scientist of Caledon Oceanic, and now he, alan Jamison, is the chief scientist for the Inkfish expedition organization that now has the ship and the submersible. There's a colleague that I hope I'll get to to see soon because he is soon going to be at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, yt Lin. He is an ocean acoustics expert. So he and Victor tested an instrument in Challenger Deep and it was the same for me.

Speaker 3: 1:03:28

I'm a geologist and a sea floor mapping expert. So we had a prototype side scan sonar mapping instrument that was attached to the bottom of the submersible and our goal was to see if that instrument could function at full ocean depth and return data in terms of the acoustic pictures of the sea floor. So that was a success. And then there each dive had a special goal or a special objective. Victor was also very, very attentive to firsts. So there is Kathy Sullivan's dive, kathy Sullivan, as you may know, is the first American woman to walk in space. She was the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but when Victor took her to Challenger Deep, she then became the first woman to Challenger Deep and the most vertical person in the universe having been up in space.

Speaker 2: 1:04:36

Oh, I love it, I love it so much, I love it so much.

Speaker 3: 1:04:42

For YT Lin. Yt Lin is a physical oceanographer and acoustic scientist, but he's also Chinese, Taiwanese, and Victor wanted to ensure that YT became the first person of Asian descent to Challenger Deep With me. He wanted me to, in addition to my experiment, to be the first black person to Challenger Deep. He took marine biologist Nicole Yamase, who is Micronesian. She's the first Pacific Islander to Challenger Deep, so there were those significant firsts as well. But, yeah, it was really really amazing and it's such an honor to meet you, Real Lucas, and to know of your involvement with James Cameron.

Speaker 2: 1:05:30

That's very cool.

Speaker 6: 1:05:31

Thanks, really appreciate those answers.

Speaker 2: 1:05:33

appreciate you guys, thank you great questions, great questions, real Lucas, thank you. Well, do you have time to take a couple more, doc Sure.

Speaker 3: 1:05:41

Yeah, I'll keep going sure, richard go ahead.

Speaker 2: 1:05:44

And then over to Random and true, thank you for waiting, but Richard first.

Speaker 1: 1:05:50

Yeah, I was wondering about the thermal transition from the surface to the floor and the oxygen enrichment from the floor to the surface, and and if it was possible for communications to be had between the surface and the sub.

Speaker 3: 1:06:12

Yes, well, the the ocean has. We look at properties in the ocean in terms of a vertical profile. So, for those of us who who are on land, like if we, if we're looking at a graph of something like if we look at a graph, for instance, of temperature, temperature changes over time and and you're used to looking at that, at that graph in a horizontal fashion In the ocean, when we take those types of measurements in the ocean, we turn that graph on its side and it's vertical so that we can see the distribution Of the temperature. We can see how the temperature is warmer at the surface, at the top, and then, going down vertically, we can see how that temperature Would decrease to to near freezing At the bottom of the ocean. So there there are these, these vertical profiles of temperature and oxygen and and salinity and other parameters that there there are millions of those measurements that are taken all over the world that show how these parameters change With depth. So that's that's what we actually used in terms of Doing some preliminary mapping of the area before we, before we dove. Because when you, when you're mapping in the ocean, you're actually measuring the speed of sound in water and you you measure how a sound pulse, how long it takes for a sound pulse to get to the bottom of the ocean and back to your instrument and you turn that, that travel time, into a depth. But that travel time changes Ever so slightly, the speed of sound changes ever so slightly depending on how salty or how warm or cold the water is. So we were constantly taking those types of measurements From the ship. But also the submersible has what's known as a CTD conductivity temperature and depth sensor. That's on the outside of the submersible. On the inside of the submersible we we had, of course, our oxygen sensors to make sure that we had sufficient oxygen For the entirety of the dive, and Victor was constantly monitoring that, constantly monitoring the amount of carbon dioxide that was building up, that might have been building up inside of our personnel sphere. He also had an indication Of the temperature inside and we got to the the bottom of that, because Inside that capsule it gets down to about 45 degrees without any heat. So so that's that's definitely all of that was constantly monitored.

Speaker 3: 1:09:17

Now, in terms of of communicating with the surface, we had some sophisticated underwater navigation via acoustic modems, because what, what we use underwater is not light per se For distance and wayfinding and mapping, but it's sound, so everything is acoustic. And we had two acoustic modems On top of the submersible that were able to send pings Up to the ship but also Horizontally to another robot that went down with us. That's another thing about the Titan. The Titan went down by itself, without any type of navigational help like that, and our our small as Real Lucas mentioned, our small community of underwater explorers we were all aghast at that. At any rate, the limiting factor was able to ping off of the other robot that was sent down with us and it was all which, and that robot could also ping up to the ship and then the ship. So it was a triangulation between the submersible, the navigational robot with us, and the, and the ship. So we were able to Find our way.

Speaker 3: 1:10:44

And it was also how we were able to communicate With the surface Through text messaging through those modems, also with voice. So Victor was able to to send a voice message up to the ship. He had to do that every 15 minutes In order to just to let them know that we were all right. So he was bound and Determined to check in every 15 minutes because we were so deep. It took seven seconds For art for his voice to reach the main lab in the ship because of that distance. But so we were able to the main lab in the ship because of that distance.

Speaker 3: 1:11:33

But, yeah, pretty, pretty amazing. And when we got to the surface the communication was via VHF communications with the ship and also with two surface vessels that supported us. There was a little, a little boat that Kept track of where we were at the surface and also a little zodiac as well. The the zodiac help with the actual recovery of our, of our craft, because the zodiac took a swimmer out to To us and then the swimmer put the railings on top of our submersible. We would need that once we got out of the submersible to get back on the ship and Between the little zodiac and the other craft, they also radioed to the ship and the ship came to where we were and brought us back on board. So it's really all quite remarkable. Sorry it took me so long to describe. That's much easier to ship for me to show you a video, which I do have. But Anyway, yeah, I hope that answered your questions.

Speaker 2: 1:12:57

Richard is giving a thumbs up. That was amazing.

Speaker 3: 1:12:59

Okay, okay.

Speaker 2: 1:13:02

We will now go to random and true go for your question for dr Don right.

Speaker 4: 1:13:08

Hi Dr Don. This is Nancy, fellow GIS, or. How are you doing the? The mapping and navigation is fascinating. I was how about the currents? Did you drift a good bit on your way down and how did you correct your Descent as you went down? Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3: 1:13:29

That is a fantastic question. In fact, victor Kept track of, and it's all because of the positioning, because we had to know our x, y and our z at all times and we were Going for a landing point from our that was picked out for us from previous mapping Of the area, and the mapping, the, the bathymetry we had was, was from the ship that had done larger scale mapping of the area and then we were able to, from that, get a or have a map of the Western pool that we were going to descend in, because Challenger deep is actually made up of three depressions the eastern, the central and the western pool. And we were, we landed in the western pool and we had a more detailed map so that we could Hit a landing point and then do a free, a preplanned track in terms of what we wanted to do. Now we needed the, the robot, to go down ahead of us and to settle in place, and so that happened several, a few hours before we actually descended ourselves, the ship was able to communicate with that robot and get an x, y, z position for that that robot. And then we were, once we got down, we were going to ping off of that, triangulate off of that in order to have our position, or know our position every every few minutes or so, absolutely critical in order for us to Not get into into trouble. Plus, we could actually see Ourselves visually when we were, in terms of being in the center of the pool, as opposed as opposed to approaching the wall of the trench. You know, there's only so far we could go, since we were in this narrow trench, but there were currents and so, as we were descending, we could.

Speaker 3: 1:15:38

Victor had to keep repositioning the submersible with thrusters to keep us in as Vertical a descent as possible and to to get us to land where we wanted to land, and we ran into trouble with the robot because currents carried the robot 600 meters To the, to the east of where it was supposed to land. So, even before we Descended, we knew that the robot was out of position and it, on one hand, the good news is that we could still use the robot to help us navigate once we got down there. The bad news is that we really wanted to be close enough to the robot so that we could test the mapping instrument, because we this is a side scan sonar that we had, which side scan sonars are used to Help find shipwrecks, and they will actually pick up imagery Of a shipwreck on the seafloor, and we wanted to fly the submersible over the robot and have the robot Be picked up in our imagery as additional proof that our side scan sonar was working. We were not able to do that, though, because once we got down, we did not have the time we didn't have, we didn't want to run out our batteries, so we didn't have the time to get over and try to find the robot, even though we could hear it. We could hear him.

Speaker 3: 1:17:08

His name was Klosp, he was, he was, he was pinging us, be bobby, we were pinging him. So, yeah, very, very interesting Mapping problem there, but the most important thing is that we were able to hear him and use him for wayfinding, but we never did get the imagery that we wanted of him at least, but we did get imagery of the, the wall of the, of that part of Challenger. Deep Cool, nice question. Thank you, that's great, don congratulations.

Speaker 4: 1:17:46

I don't leave that down at Esri, with a data scientist and the leadership you provided, it's, it's fantastic. Oh, thank you, and since you're a GIS Sister.

Speaker 3: 1:17:54

We have the data in the Esri living Atlas of the world. So if you go to livingatlasarchgiscom and just search for Challenger deep, you can get the pitimetry data, story map and and other goodies. Great, thank you. Great question, nancy, you know.

Speaker 2: 1:18:14

I'm glad you cleared that up. That that's how you were talking to the robot. I thought you were just playing like Marco Polo with it. You know, marco no.

Speaker 3: 1:18:25

No, these were pings. Yeah, sort of like the, the, like the hunt for red October. Oh yeah, you know, send one ping and it's just a pulse of sound and that's language. That's language in the deep. I love how a Scott is somehow the captain of that sub.

Speaker 2: 1:18:47

That didn't make sense to me when I was watching.

Speaker 3: 1:18:53

But anyways, you can't lose with Sean Connery, yeah, so I think we're out of speaker requests and there were some questions in chat, but I feel the questions in chat were answered either by speakers or like as we go through.

Speaker 2: 1:19:10

There is one though I'm just gonna ask about Kala Kalo we he. I'm so sorry I've said your name wrong. Kala we he. What does Klosp stand for? K? L O S P?

Speaker 3: 1:19:26

Oh, victor Vescovo, he is a science fiction fan, and so he named the, the ship, the submersible and the landers After characters in a science fix series of science fiction novels. So there are, and the robot that I'm talking about is called a lander. It's a cage that is outfitted with the instruments and cameras. It can get down to the bottom. You can send it a ping, which will Give it a. That's a signal for it to lift off the bottom and come back on its own. They're, they're, really, really cool, and the organization has three of those Klosp, flair and scoff. And they, they are AI sentient Characters in a science fiction novel.

Speaker 2: 1:20:36

It reminds me of an interstellar, the Matthew McConaughey robots that he talks to, tars, you know, this is kind of like that kind of thing.

Speaker 3: 1:20:45

It's the same thing and Victor's organization, kaladan, kaladan, oceanic Kaladan comes from the science fiction novel Dune, because that's the I think it's the atreus family. They, they lived on Kaladan, the ocean planet, before they. They had to leave Kaladan to go to the, the other planet where most of the action in that that story takes place. I love it. So, yeah, he, he is. Victor Biscovo is just a fantastic, interesting, really wonderful person. Even with with all of his I mean he. He has been to space himself. He has climbed Mount Everest and all of the highest peaks on on the planet. He's he's been to the deepest places in all of the oceans. But he is also An absolute dog lover as well. In fact he seems to be obsessed with my dog Riley, three, three, three dogs of his own, and I'm sure I told him about Bunsen and beaker to please follow them on Twitter.

Speaker 2: 1:22:00

Oh, that's so cool. That's so cool, yeah, very cool. Well, don, I think we'll wrap things up. You've been a gem of a guest. You've answered questions long past kind of our our Timeline. Thank you so much for talking to us today. It's been inspiring, educational, spooky. It's given us me goosebumps. Make sure everybody you're following the doc. If you're not already, click on dr Don writes that's at deep C dawns profile and give the doc a follow. And again, thank you so much for being a guest tonight. Oh, thank you so much. This has been.

Speaker 3: 1:22:43

Totally on my bucket list to to be in your sphere, to be in the Bunsen and beaker podcast and on this side chat and Followed you guys for a long time. I thank you so, so very much, and also all best wishes to Chris that she feels better very, very soon, and to to beaker Speaker wearing the cone of shame. No, we took it off her.

Speaker 2: 1:23:09

today it was um oh, her hotspot was almost healed and, of course, maybe you saw the the video. Ginger versus beaker. And then people were so worried. The red thing on her cheek was the hotspot, but it's the makeup that we gave her for a comic on. For for a comic on yeah, pikachu, the.

Speaker 3: 1:23:31

Pokemon has like red, rosy cheeks.

Speaker 2: 1:23:32

Yeah, and then I should have, I should. I should have like put a little disclaimer like no, that's not her hotspot. Yeah, her hotspot was like a little tiny, like scabby thing up by her cheek. So, yeah, she's okay yeah okay, all right.

Speaker 3: 1:23:51

well, we are huge fans here, riley and I, and we thank you so very much into all of the fantastic people who who listen tonight. Thank you, thank you so much.

Speaker 2: 1:24:03

Thanks, doc and we, dr Don right is a guest on the science podcast. The episode that you're on hasn't come out yet, but we do get into some of your more current work, rather than you know. Of course, we do talk about the challenge or deep, but we also get into some of your newer work. So, if you enjoyed this conversation, keep on checking out the science podcast, because the doc's gonna be up there on the dock at sooner or later with our interview. So, yeah, okay, and have a practical rest of your evening on. Talk like a pirate day, yeah.

Speaker 3: 1:24:36

One of my favorite characters from SpongeBob is. I think it's a really good one. Yeah, it's a really good one.

Speaker 2: 1:24:43

Yeah, it's a really good one. One of my favorite characters from SpongeBob is the flying Dutchman. Yes, it's like the weird ghost, absolutely yeah, he's got some sock, like he wears a sock on his tail or something, yeah. There's like an episode where we much the watched it with our, our kids like 60 times, where he takes Patrick and SpongeBob and he tries to teach them to be his like ghostly crew and they're just terrible, like they're awful, they like crash the ship. Anyways, it's just great humor.

Speaker 3: 1:25:18

And the pirate board game they play. Yeah, love that too. With the treasure map Yep, that they think is a real treasure map.

Speaker 2: 1:25:27

Very cool. Well, we have a little outro, alright, as we wrap up today. Once again, thank you so much, dr Don right, that is at deep sea dawn for being our guest today. What a fantastic discussion. If you're just tuning into this now, let's say you were like listening to the recorder on Twitter and you're like, ah, what, don't worry, we record this and this is a bonus episode on the science podcast.

Speaker 2: 1:25:55

Just a little bit on the Bunsen and beaker front Heads up. If you are listening to this and it is still in September, you probably still have a chance to get the pre-sale Bunsen and beaker calendar, that sale, the pre-sale star stopping like tomorrow or the next day, and guess what? The pens are coming tomorrow. So we're gonna be shipping out the calendars. Well, maybe once Chris is better, but yeah, we're really excited to send those calendars out. People have been waiting and we got. We'll have all the bits and boots to get it to happen. Okay, thank you again to everybody who's listening and the people who asked such wonderful questions. You could be anywhere in the world, but you're listening to science.