Julie Flaherty: The ancient Greeks had many colorful myths, but in their island-filled civilization, they had a particular fascination with the sea.

Marie-Claire Beaulieu: The sea is a place of nourishment for the Greeks, but in a much more sort of spiritual and cultural way, they think of the sea as a place where you can travel between the worlds of the humans and the gods.

Flaherty: That’s Tufts classics professor Marie-Claire Beaulieu. She says the Greeks saw the sea as a place of transformation, where a journey across the water could change a person’s fortunes or a dive into the depths could turn mortals into immortals.

Beaulieu: The ocean is actually the hinge of the world according to the Greeks, and this is a place where you can go down into the underworld or up into Olympus. So the sea is really this point of transition between spiritual realities.

Flaherty: As much as the Greeks saw power and promise in the sea, it also embodied danger and uncertainty. They depicted it as both a roadway for commerce and a terrifying, unknown void—and not much has changed. We take food and resources from the sea but know surprisingly little about what goes on in its depths. With climate change, we feel the threat of rising sea levels in the same way the ancients probably dreaded a tidal wave from Poseidon. 

This is Tell Me More, the Tufts University podcast. I’m Julie Flaherty. Today we’re talking with some modern-day sea explorers: alumni and faculty who are helping us to better understand our useful, beautiful, frightening ocean. From shipwrecks to sea creatures to glaciers, they’re uncovering things we’ve never seen before. And even those who’ve been working on the ocean for decades find it’s a thrill every time it gives up one of its secrets. 

Growing up in Rockport, Massachusetts, Amy Bower was never far from the ocean.

Amy Bower: I was always turning over rocks and trying to see what was underneath and digging in the sand. And of course, living on Cape Ann, that’s the real open ocean right there. It’s very powerful. The storms are very strong there, and I just became fascinated with it.

Flaherty: While an undergrad at Tufts, Bower spent a semester sailing and doing research on a tall ship before going on to study oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. That’s when she got the news that threatened to set her adrift.

Bower: While I was in graduate school, I was diagnosed with a degenerative retinal disease called retinitis pigmentosa, and the diagnosis was for very slow, gradual vision loss over decades. I was pretty devastated at the time, because I just discovered this cool career and I was totally into it and I didn’t know anyone who was blind. I certainly didn’t know any scientists or grad students or professors or anyone who was visually impaired and doing science.

Flaherty: Despite her declining vision, Bower plunged ahead, becoming a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where for 35 years she studied deep ocean currents. She made countless research voyages and was even part of a team that won a blind sailing world championship in 2015. Even so, it hasn’t been easy working in a field that relies on data that’s usually displayed in graphs, charts, tables, and maps. Magnification devices and screen readers have been important, but she also sought other ways.

Bower: Over the years, I started to hear more about data sonification, which simply put is mapping numbers to sounds.

Flaherty: Have you ever seen a movie where someone pulled out a Geiger counter to check for radiation?

Bower: And the closer you are or the more radioactive it is, the more clicks. That’s a form of data sonification.

Flaherty: Bower wants to take the data she collects on ocean currents and map it to sounds so that she can more easily make sense of it. But she and a multidisciplinary team are also exploring ways that data sonification could make ocean science more accessible to people who are blind and low vision. For example, here’s data on how much carbon dioxide is absorbed by the ocean and then released into the atmosphere over time, converted into sound.

Flaherty: These auditory displays are the kinds of things that could be used in a science museum.

Bower: Blind and low-vision people often avoid museums altogether because so many of the displays are not accessible. They’re all visual—but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Flaherty: Bower and the team use focus groups to help them choose the kinds of sounds they use with different data sets.

Bower: Sound associations have developed for many people. The idea of heaviness and low frequencies is one. Big things tend to make low noises, and little things make high noises. So we all have some kind of mapping in our head already.

Flaherty: Here’s another set of data that tracks tiny zooplankton as they swim from the sunlit ocean layers where they feed to deeper, darker layers where they hide from predators. 

Bower: The people who have tested them say it sounds like bug skittering, and that’s perfect.

Flaherty: This next one tracks the water pressure over an underwater volcano.

Bower: The sea floor is actually rising because this cavity under the sea floor is filling up like a balloon with magma and it pushes the sea floor up. But then when the volcano explodes, the sea floor suddenly drops as the magma chamber empties.

For millennia, I guess, we’ve used pictures to summarize information. Research shows that if you can explore data with other senses besides your eyes, sometimes you pick up patterns that the eyes don’t see right away.

Flaherty: Are there certain sounds of the ocean that are meaningful to you?

Bower: The waves on the shoreline. It just gives me—whether I can see it or not or if it’s dark or not—it just gives you a sense of the ocean’s mood. Is it crashing and loud or is it soft and lapping? That, right away, would tell you what the ocean’s up to. And I’m just always aware even in my subconscious of that, if I’m in the vicinity of the shoreline.

Cape Ann is exposed to the Northeast, to the open ocean, the Gulf of Maine, and it’s just a wilder experience to listen to the ocean there. And I appreciate that, just the fury of it all and it, I don’t know, just touches me.

Beaulieu: It’s the first thing the Greeks think about when they think about traveling on the seas: shipwreck. And so you have all sorts of deities and practices to avert shipwreck. Then we have very early Greek vases where you have a shipwreck, and these enormous fish are gobbling up the sailors. You might be eaten by a bad sea monster, but you might be saved by a good sea monster, which is a dolphin. Dolphins are lucky, dolphins are benevolent, they’re like humans and they’re often messengers of the gods.

Flaherty: With shipwrecks come the promise of sunken treasure. Anna Miller spoke with one alum who finds his reward in exploring lost vessels is learning about the past.

Brendan Foley: I just always have been drawn to the sea and when I was a teenager and still today, I can’t look at a body of water without thinking: I wonder what’s underneath that water? I wonder what’s down there.

Anna Miller: That’s Brendan Foley, who received his master’s degree from Tufts in ’95 and is now an archeological scientist at Lund University in Sweden. And his specialty? Shipwrecks.

Foley: Anything underwater is sort of like our collective memory or our attic. It’s where stuff gets put and we kind of forget about it.

Miller: And Foley is the person who goes looking for it. Instead of donning a sunhat and work boots, he’s in full scuba gear, swimming through jellyfish to get to the bottom of the emerald ocean to work at his excavation site.

Foley: Unlike sites on land for an archeologist, which are always being sort of interfered with, stuff underwater generally is not. It’s in the state more or less that it was when it was lost.

Miller: See, I would think the exact opposite. I would think that currents and sediment would bury everything. I would think, just, it would corrode.

Foley: I mean it’s true to a point. Some things do go away, but other things are really well preserved. So when it comes to ancient shipwrecks, wooden shipwrecks, in the world ocean system, yeah, the wood does go away because there are animals that make their living by eating that organic material. But in other bodies of water, like here in the Baltic Sea, the salinity level’s not high enough for these wood-eating critters to survive, so you get remarkable preservation, almost like as if they sank yesterday. The shipwreck that we’re working on, it’s only about two hours away from my house here in southern Sweden and it sank in June of 1495.

Miller: The ship was called the Gribshunden, and it isn’t just any ship. It personally belonged to King Hans who ruled Norway and Denmark at the time, and he had the latest and greatest in boat-building technology. Think of it as the most elegant yacht/warship of its time.

Foley: It’s pretty much the same kind of ship that the great explorers like Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus used for the great voyages of exploration at the end of the 15th century. It’s the first generation of ships that was specifically designed to carry artillery, so the combination of a ship that could be sort of self-supporting and carry artillery, that’s the enabling technology for European domination of the planet after 1495.

Miller: But this ship was also the personal property of a king who wanted to impress, and Foley says that this ship served as his floating castle, especially since its last voyage was to meet with the council that Hans was hoping would elect him to be king of all of Sweden.

Foley: He’s making this full-court press: I’m going to go show off all the prestigious stuff that I’ve got in my realm, really demonstrate my power. And some of that stuff sank on the ship.

Miller: It’s difficult to know for certain what caused the ship to sink, but based on how the ship was damaged, Foley has pieced together the most likely cause was a small explosion below deck, probably from accidentally mishandling stored gunpowder. The king wasn’t on board and the boat was anchored near land, so when the ship sank, the crew swam ashore with few, if any, casualties.

Foley: My group has been doing the first really scientific archeological investigation of the shipwreck, and we’ve excavated about 1% of the total volume of the wreck now. And the things that we’re finding are just extraordinary. There’s no archeological precedent for them.

Miller: Among them, all sorts of weaponry such as cannonballs and crossbows, but also culture, too. They discovered two birch bark panels that had elaborate woodblock prints on them.

Foley: With ornate patterns of mythical animals and floral designs. 

Miller: Oh wow. 

Foley: So the mythical animals include a unicorn, which is just sort of the epitome of medieval art. A lion rampant. A peacock. A stag with a tremendous rack of antlers. And then various animals like a dog, a wolf, a fox, a swan, a goose, and several other birds. 

When you’re excavating underwater, you don’t often recognize what you’re actually dealing with. The visibility is bad. And so we knew we had something special, we could see that there was some pattern on it, but we couldn’t really tell what. And it wasn’t until that evening when we were back on shore that the other archeologists realized that the thing that first popped out was the peacock. And then three days later we were excavating, and another piece of birch bark emerged, and we said, aha, we know what this is: The unicorn jumped out. We could see it so clearly. So it was pretty exciting, but every day excavating on this particular shipwreck is exciting.

Miller: And that’s not even the most groundbreaking discovery.

Foley: The best excavator on the team, Marie Jonsson, she works at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde in Denmark. Marie came to me and said, ‘I was excavating just at the edge of the trench, and I disturbed something that was orange. It really stained the water orange.’ And I said, ‘Well, was it rust?’ And she said, ‘No, it looked like saffron.’ I said, ‘What?!’ And she said, ‘Yeah, it looks like saffron. Here, I brought a sample.’ And she gave me this little baggie, this little Ziploc bag, and I was like, oh my goodness, that is definitely saffron. So we didn’t know what to think of this, and we went back down and over the next couple of days we found a few different concentrations about the size of my fist of saffron. And then as we went through the sediment samples that we collected, our archeobotanists found not just saffron but clove and over 2,000 black peppercorns and more than 60 pieces of fresh ginger root.

Miller: That’s right: He found the king’s spice rack.

Foley: So we were astounded at this, but it all fits the sort of narrative of King Hans sailing to Kalmar with the express intent of trying to impress the Swedish council. So he’s got a huge volume and a huge value in these exotic spices that are imported from the very farthest points on land. The clove only comes from the Moluccan Islands in Indonesia. The thing that stunned me was how integrated the world was, even as early as 1495.

Miller: Do you find that when you’re working on a site, do you ever feel you’re almost time traveling?

Foley: Yeah, it feels like that every single moment. It’s really incredible. It’s the closest thing to time travel or time traveling to the past that I think we will ever have. I guess after doing this for close to 30 years, the take home message for me is that there’s no such thing as an individual history. The human experience on this planet is a great river that’s flowing, and we’re all caught in that current

Beaulieu: According to Plato, Atlantis was a large island in the Atlantic Ocean that was very fertile and kind of a sort of paradise in a lot of ways, was sacred to Poseidon in particular. And the Atlanteans were favorites of the gods and did all kinds of wonderful things, but eventually they started being hubristic and in particular started a war against the Athenian state, and as a result, they eventually got covered over by the ocean.

Flaherty: So they were not the first ones to be punished by the gods.

Beaulieu: Technically, we’re still under the reign of Zeus, so he could come for us too.

Flaherty: The melting of glaciers and ice sheets is the main cause of rising sea levels, to the tune of about two millimeters per year. At least, that’s what it is now. Rebecca Jackson, an assistant professor of earth and climate sciences at Tufts and a physical oceanographer, wants to know what’s going to happen next.

Rebecca Jackson: We can say pretty well how much sea level is rising right now, but the thing we actually can’t do very well or as well as we would like right now is make projections of sea level rise in 50, 100 years, because we’re missing sort of a mechanistic or physical understanding of some of the things that are driving the change.

Flaherty: It seems obvious that ice melts when temperatures go up, but it’s a lot more complicated than that.

Jackson: Our satellite data does this kind of amazing job at telling us how fast the glaciers and ice sheets as a whole are shrinking. Satellite data can only get you the surface and what’s happening where the ocean meets the glacier is happening often half a mile underwater.

Flaherty: That’s why Jackson does her fieldwork as close as she can get to glaciers in Greenland and Alaska, where she studies the complex interactions of ice, water, heat, and salt that take place below the surface.

Jackson: A lot of the physics there are controlled by how much freshwater is draining at the bed of the glacier. It’s actually melted upstream on the ice sheet itself and then drains to the bed of the glacier like a river, and then comes in half a mile below the surface of the ocean. And it drives these upwelling plumes—sort of like smoke coming out of a smokestack that billows upward. That’s happening underwater, and all the details of those plumes then affect how fast both the ice is melting and how fast all the meltwater gets mixed into the ocean.

Flaherty: First, the bad news.

Jackson: Some of my recent work with my collaborators, we’ve discovered that in a lot of places this underwater melting is happening much faster than our theories and our equations and our models would predict.

Flaherty: The good news is that new technologies are helping scientists like Jackson get the data they need to make better predictions.

Jackson: So this is a big kind of challenge and focus of my work and a lot of my collaborators and colleagues, is how to get measurements right where glaciers meet the ocean. Because you have these big ice cliffs, they go hundreds of meters above the water and below the water as well, and they’re breaking off icebergs or calving off icebergs in these big dramatic dangerous events that you don’t want to be anywhere near. And so one big focus in my work is using autonomous platforms to go to the ocean right in front of the glaciers where you can’t go with people and basically send robots up to collect the measurements we want.

Flaherty: These remote-controlled kayaks or boats or small subs can be outfitted with sensors to measure things like temperature, salinity, and ocean currents.

Jackson: But we’re also putting more specialized sensors as well that measure things like the ocean turbulence—how much the eddies and swirls and chaotic motions mix together the fresh water from the glacier with the salty water from the ocean. That’s one of the things we’re really trying to get at.

Flaherty: One glaciologist she works with uses hydrophones to measure the sounds glaciers make.

Jackson: There’s a bunch of different things you can get from the sound of the glacier. One is that when the glacier is melting underwater, all the little bubbles of air and the ice are popping as it melts, and so the sound of that popping actually sort of correlates with how much melt is occurring.

Flaherty: These autonomous platforms mean Jackson can stay safe while getting the data she needs. Of course, there are always risks in these harsh, remote places.

Jackson: The most frightening situations in these environments are often human induced. Like one time we were out on a ship a hundred miles from town, we thought we were running out of toilet paper. That caused a mass panic, but it turns out we actually had an emergency supply somewhere hidden away in the ship.

What melts in the Arctic doesn’t stand the Arctic and so is raising sea levels globally. So the sea level rise that we see in Massachusetts or Florida is the product of the ice melting in the polar region, so definitely a globally important process that we’re seeing the consequences of in our communities around the coasts.

Flaherty: How to plan for a future of rising sea levels? Emily Brognano spoke with one Tufts alum who’s helping people who live on the coast understand how climate change will affect them personally.

Keren Prize: With climate change, there’s this term we use called tipping points, and it’s kind of like where things are happening slowly, slowly, slowly, barely even notice them, and then you reach this threshold where things get crazy.

Emily Brognano: That’s Karen Prize, an urban and coastal resiliency expert and Tufts alum. She spent her career analyzing data to calculate when and where those tipping points will give way to major devastation.

Prize: I really focused on connecting the information and the messaging to what people do care about to make them understand why this is so important. Scientists, they talk with all this jargon and they say all these things to make them sound smart, and the problem is that the general community, you say words like ‘adaptation,’ ‘mitigation,’ ‘resilience,’ what do those words mean to them? You have to relate it to what people do care about.

Brognano: Prize has always been passionate about the environment. Growing up in South Florida, she wondered why more wasn’t being done to address the challenges her community faced when it came to climate change. Take, for instance, exceptionally high tides that flood houses in the same neighborhoods each year, or catastrophic weather events like Hurricane Andrew, which Prize witnessed in 1992.

Prize: I remember seeing all of the damage and seeing people displaced. I mean populations moved because of that.

Brognano: Winds in excess of 170 miles per hour were recorded in Miami-Dade County during that particular storm.

Prize: Once I learned about climate change, it was just mind blowing. I was like, why aren’t people doing more about this? This is what I need to do with my life.

Brognano: That certainty led Prize to pursue an education in environmental sciences and engineering. Now she’s one of the people doing more about climate change.

Prize: There’s this information action gap, and I think it’s because all of this big data is just not digestible. So I found this niche in translating that information to storytelling and really immersive ways to inform the community and to inform decision-making.

Brognano: Once Prize determines what data points are paramount, she creates dashboards, infographics, and other materials that give residents and community leaders a chance to better understand what they’re up against and how they can better prepare for what’s ahead.

Prize: There’s this threshold that the National Weather Service sets, and in 2019 there were nine flood days in Miami where the ocean was higher than that threshold, but by 2050, NOAA is projecting that this could happen as often as 50 days a year.

Brognano: In some communities, people have tried to make light of the fact that their neighborhoods get flooded with two feet of water each year.

Prize: Once a year—we’ve done this for nine years now—everybody comes out during the highest tide of the year in this area of Hollywood where there’s two feet of water in the street on a sunny day. I remember one year it was near Halloween and one of the homeowners at the end of their driveway, they had a skeleton with a little snorkeling gear, and we talked to those residents and they were just like, I just bought this house and I had no idea this was happening. The most important thing for people to know is what is their risk, their personal risk of where they live. I think looking at all of the data related to sea level rise in South Florida, in the end of the day, it’s not a matter of if this is going to happen, it’s when.

Beaulieu: The surface of the sea is reflective, and actually one of the Homeric epithets for it is ἅλα δῖαν, which means the godly sea, but δῖαν also means shining, reflective, kind of metallic. And so the notion is that you can’t see through, right? And so underneath is all this imaginary world, and the Greeks actually imagined all sorts of things there. There is an ode by Bacchylides where the hero, Theseus, jumps under the sea. And there’s a big underwater palace of Poseidon and he goes in there. The undersea kingdom is a little bit like a reflection, but a sort of fancy reflection, of what’s up here.

Flaherty: Did you know that scientists understand more about the surface of Mars than they do about the floor of our own oceans? One reason is that here on Earth, we rely a lot on sonar to tell us what’s under the water. Sound pulses from sonar can sketch out things like ocean depth and topographical features, but without much detail.

Eric Osherow: There’s a reason only 80% of the ocean is mapped, and of that mapping, it’s all sonar data. It’s not a very robust system. It’s not Google Maps.

Flaherty: That’s Tufts alum Eric Osherow. He says that even if you can get a submarine or a robot with a camera down to the watery depths, sometimes it’s just really hard to see down there.

Osherow: You’ll note that the color of the water is really distorted. It’s very green or it’s very blue. There are particles on the water called marine snow. It really makes filming very difficult.

Flaherty: And then there’s the problem of watching all the footage that does come in from, say, a video camera on an oil rig.

Osherow: If, for example, there’s 684 active oil rigs, they might be collecting 200 billion megabytes of data. So 400,000 hours of video. Obviously, no human could possibly sift through all that data. So traditional methods of looking at data inevitably miss crucial insights that might’ve been particularly relevant to mitigating coral bleaching or preventing an oil spill.

Flaherty: Osherow is part of a team of Tufts alums and researchers who aim to change that. Their startup company, called SeaDeep, creates technologies that use AI to both enhance underwater images and analyze them quickly.

Osherow: AI affords the ability to characterize things that you haven’t seen before, as well as the ability to become more accurate over time with the things it’s already seen.

Flaherty: You could argue that it’s never been more important for us to see what’s going on in our oceans, because there’s a lot happening down there, both environmentally and economically.

Osherow: Offshore wind, oil and gas, kelp farms, coral reefs, oil pipelines, subsea fiber optic cables have a problem. That problem is that stuff gets damaged or the environment itself is changing around it. So assessing the environment is really critical.

Flaherty: The SeaDeep technology is based on work by co-founder Karen Panetta, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. She pioneered some of the first machine-learning tools for image enhancement as part of the effort to find Air Malaysia Flight 370, which disappeared over the ocean in 2014. In addition to traditional video, SeaDeep makes use of hyperspectral imaging, which can detect the composition of objects by bouncing light off them.

Osherow: So what that means is we’re not going to have a human guessing. If something is healthy coral or unhealthy coral, or if something is a corroded pipeline or just regular steel, the actual spectrum signature will change. So by training an AI model with that data, it is quite robust in what we can see.

Flaherty: That could include seeing something like a single snail on a piece of kelp in an underwater kelp farm…

Osherow: Once a snail lays an egg on a kelp, you have to throw out the whole stock.

Flaherty: …or seeing corrosion on an oil pipeline.

Osherow: There’s millions of miles of energy cable, of oil pipelines. These things are out of sight and out of mind for the average environmentalist as much as the average regulator. That’s until something blows up, until there’s a massive coral breaching event. The reality of the matter is if we can’t see it, we can’t prevent it.

Collecting visual information is the first stage of protecting the environment as well as this infrastructure that we rely on.

Flaherty: Before AI could help us monitor what goes on beneath the waves, one scientist was a pioneer in photographing life in the hidden depths. Reporter Anna Miller spoke with the renowned biologist about the remarkable creatures that make their home in the deepest, darkest waters.

Miller: Edie Widder, class of 1973, is one of the few people in the world who have been to the bottom of the ocean. She’s a deep-sea ocean explorer, and among many discoveries, was the first person to ever capture a giant squid on camera.

Edie Widder: So the giant squid was this creature of legend for a long time known as the Kraken. We knew they really existed because they float when they died. So there had been dead specimens for years, but it became kind of the holy grail of natural history cinematography to film one in its natural habitat. So giant squid, they’re pretty big. So this one, if it had its tentacles intact, fully extended, would’ve been as tall as a two story building, and they can grow as tall as a four story building. And then it would shift its color from bronze to brushed aluminum. It was just so spectacular and awe inspiring, and here was this creature that was that enormous and had never been seen in its natural habitat. What better example could you have of how poorly we have done at exploring our own planet?

Miller: Edie Whitter is the CEO and senior scientist at the Ocean Research and Conservation Association. She has spent most of her career as a deep-sea biologist and is a pioneer in the field of bioluminescence research, studying how and why deep-sea creatures make their own light. Over the years, she’s created groundbreaking technology to capture never before seen behaviors and discovered even new species in our oceans. She recently wrote a book about her life’s work titled Below the Edge of Darkness: A Memoir of Exploring Light and Life in the Deep Sea.

Widder: When you enter the ocean in a submersible, the first thing you notice is how the colors change dramatically. They go from blue-green near the surface to richer and richer blues till you’re down to indigo blue and then down into blackness. My first dive in a submersible was in a diving suit called WASP, and I made a dive in the Santa Barbara channel. And it was an evening dive. I went down to 800 feet and turned out the lights, and I was just blown away. Later when I was asked what it was like down there, I blurted out, It’s like the 4th of July, which got quoted in the local newspaper, and for which I took considerable amount of ribbing from my colleagues. But I’ve actually lost count of the number of times over the years that I’ve taken people for a dive, and that’s exactly how they describe it. It’s like the 4th of July, only it’s better because you’re not just observing this fireworks display from a distance. You’re right in the center of it. In fact, you’re part of it because every move you make triggers these flashes and glows and sparks that look just like when you throw a log on a campfire, only these are icy blue embers. It’s breathtaking.

Miller: So what kind of animals are capable of bioluminescence?

Widder: So my first expedition on a ship, a trawling expedition, we were bringing up deep sea animals and we were actually bringing them up alive because we had a net that was fitted with a special caught end that closed a depth and kept the animals cold. A lot of people think when you bring the animals up, they die from the pressure change. It’s not so much the pressure change as the temperature change. So if you can keep them cold, you can sometimes keep them alive for short periods of time. And it seemed like just about everything we brought up made light. And this is actually true in all of the oceans of the world. The numbers are pretty staggering. About 75% of the animals that you bring up in a net—the fish, the squid, the shrimp, the worms, the jellyfish—make light and they do it in order to help them survive in a dark world.

Miller: So I think what’s so interesting about your book and your work is I think people think of the deep ocean as just being vast and empty and dark, but you’re kind of saying it’s far from it, but we just might not even know that these creatures exist.

Widder: Yeah, there’s animals in every cubic meter of the ocean, and every cubic meter of the ocean contains bioluminescence as well. The argument could be made that bioluminescence could be the most common form of communication on the planet. There’s people that would argue with me about that, but still it’s pretty huge.

Miller: But to study this type of communication, Widder needs to dive deep—hundreds if not thousands of feet deep—in a tiny submersible and stay calm and not completely freak out.

Widder: Actually, that was one of the concerns. The first dive I did in WASP, down to 800 feet, it was a very short dive because the whole point of it was psychological: They wanted to find out who was going to panic because it is very common to have a claustrophobic response, especially in a little diving suit like that. And I was flying on the first dive, so I was really looking forward to the next one, and I was going to go much deeper on the next dive, which was a couple days later, and I got all the way down to the bottom, which at that part of the Santa Barbara channel was 1,880 feet, and Charlie calls down to say, congratulations, you just broke the world depth record in WASP. And I said, what the hell do you mean? I thought this thing was rated at 2,000 feet. He said, yeah, but nobody’s ever been.

I suddenly had this extremely clear image of how much water was over my head. It had taken more than a half an hour to get down, I think an hour to get down. There would’ve, even if they pulled me at full speed, it would’ve been a half an hour to get back to the surface, and I suddenly had a full-blown panic attack of Get me out of here. And I was just about to give full throated voice to that emotion, and I managed to get under control by watching this jellyfish swimming by that was doing something interesting that I wanted to focus on, and that’s what I did. I just refocused on the jellyfish and that got me through it.

Miller: The ocean is a lot of contradictions—vast but claustrophobic, dark but filled with light—and there’s so much we haven’t explored.

Widder: We live on an ocean planet. We hear that all the time, but I don’t think people really grasp the extent of it because, yes, you look at it from space, and 71% of the surface of the area of the earth is covered by water. That’s just surface area. If you think in terms of the living space on the planet, what’s called the biosphere, the terrestrial living space extends into the tallest trees and several feet below the surface, but it’s an absurdly thin layer compared to the volume of the ocean, which is on average 2.3 miles deep. So the living space on our planet, 99.5% of it is ocean, and we just live on these little dry islands we call continents and have a very, very poor idea of how the machinery of life works.

Flaherty: This episode of Tell Me More was produced by Julie Flaherty, Anna Miller, and Emily Brognano. Our executive producers are Dave Nuscher, Ronee Saroff, and Katie Strollo. Our music is by Shutterstock and Blue Dot Sessions. Please subscribe and rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts or shoot us an email at tellmemore@tufts.edu. Thanks for listening.