Planet Visionaries – Ep 19: Deep-Ocean Discovery with Sheena Talma and Katy Croff Bell

It's amazing how little we know. Two-thirds of our planet is covered by deep ocean. It's the largest and most critical habitat on Earth. But this vast ecosystem remains virtually unexplored. Only 0.001% of the seafloor has been visually observed. That's the focus of Katie Croft-Bell, who's developed lower-cost deep-sea research and exploration systems, opening our understanding of the deep blue sea. Meanwhile, in the Seychelles, Sheena Toma works to collect marine wildlife data in fishing areas, informing sustainable fisheries and helping us better understand deep-sea ecosystems. Together, Katie and Sheena reveal the social, scientific, and technological pathways to exploring and protecting parts of the ocean that humanity has barely seen. Last week, Andrew Thurber and Alison Fong described their work with the Rolex and National Geographic Perpetual Planet Ocean Expeditions, looking at microbes in the deep ocean. This week, we speak to two more intrepid explorers who hope to make invisible parts of the sea visible. If you haven't listened to or watched the previous episode, just search in your podcast app or on YouTube for Planet Visionaries and click on the previous episode. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you stories of inspiring people who are helping to solve today's most pressing conservation issues. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. My name is Sheena Toma. I'm from the Seychelles. I'm a deep-sea biologist. The first time I was exposed to the deep sea was in a submersible. I remember specifically being lowered down into the ocean, the open ocean, seeing the light change as we descended to 200 meters. And after that, I was hooked. I'm Katie Croft-Bell, and I'm a deep-sea explorer. I've never been in a submersible. Most of the work that I do is from boats, and I send robots down into the ocean. We've only seen about 0.001% of the deep ocean. And so if you put all the dives on record together, that's only an area that's about the size of Rhode Island or even less. What we know and what we've seen of the deep ocean is not very much, and it's also super biased. So most of it has been done within the waters of the U.S., Japan, New Zealand, and very little elsewhere. What we're trying to do is to open it up and see a much, much bigger sample of the global deep sea floor. I think it's more than 66% of our planet is deep ocean, and that's crazy. If I could only ask one question and be satisfied, how is the bottom of the ocean connected to the top of the ocean? Because I think that's how we would get more people interested in caring about the ocean as a whole. On almost every cruise that we go on, we find something new. So imagine what we know of the deep sea in this super teeny tiny amount that we've seen, imagine what's left in the 99.999%. And that's what I'm really excited about. Hi guys, thanks so much for joining me on Planet Visionaries. Sheena, Katie, Katie joining remotely today. Thanks for making the effort. Let's just dive in. So tell me about what you do. Actually, what I do is complicated. When you're from a small island, when you're from a small island developing state, you never wear one hat. And that's because there's lots of things to do and very little time. So I tend to work primarily on researching the deep ocean in my own backyard. But I also work on advising the Seychelles government when they go to biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction agreements, and I work with education. So I want to be able to share what we do, not just to the science community, but also to kids at school. Katie? I have a background in engineering, archaeology, and geology. What I do now is run a nonprofit called the Ocean Discovery League. And our mission is to accelerate deep sea exploration around the world, because we haven't seen very much of it. So I'm not interested in any one organism or one place in particular, but rather looking at the global deep sea as a whole. What is the deep sea? Great question. How deep do you have to go to be deep? 200 meters. So over 600 feet, and then all the way down to the bottom, about 11,000 meters, almost seven miles. Yeah. And would you agree, Katie, that, I mean, definitely from a scientific perspective, we would say the deep sea is 200 and below. But when you're talking about access to what is deep, like in the Western Indian Ocean, we might say it's like 50 or 60 meters and below, just because that's so hard to access. Yeah. What are the practical limits for diving, basically? How deep do scuba divers go? Just sort of recreational scuba divers, like 60 feet certification, and then advanced is 100 feet, so about 30 meters. So not even close to getting to the deep sea. Talk about, you know, both of you sharing this mission of exploring the deep ocean. I mean, why does that matter? It matters for so many reasons. I mean, the deep ocean covers not only this great depth, but also about two thirds of the planet. So most of the planet is deep ocean, and this huge volume drives, you know, nutrient-rich waters come from the deep sea and feed plankton up at the surface, which are really important for producing oxygen. They're also really important food for fish, which billions of people rely on. We're discovering more and more chemicals from deep sea organisms that can be used for pharmaceuticals, for HIV, cancer, COVID treatments, all kinds of things. And we're barely scratching the surface on that. It also preserves human history. There are thousands of shipwrecks in deep ocean that are really, really well-preserved, that are sort of important capsules, time capsules for us to be able to study. Are there actually lots of shipwrecks in the deep ocean? I mean, it makes sense, but do you actually find things like that? You've seen quite a few, haven't you? Yeah, absolutely, especially when I was working in the Mediterranean Sea. And actually, there was one project we were doing in the Straits of Sicily, sort of in between Italy and Tunisia, and we were looking for evidence of volcanic activity in this area. It was Halloween night in, I believe, 2011, and we're live streaming from the ship. And so anybody in the world can watch what we're doing. And somebody wrote in and asked if we had ever found any World War II airplanes at the time. And we said, no, but we're in a place where we certainly could stumble across one. And then 10 minutes later, one of the pilots of the remotely operated vehicle, the ROV, just loses his mind. He's like, oh my God, look at the sonar. And we could see on the sonar the shape of an airplane. We come up to it, and it was a World War II airplane. And it was one of the Italian planes that probably got shot down in the Battle of Pantelleria in World War II. So yes, we absolutely find things. It's not an everyday occurrence, but there are ships, there are planes, there's basically anything that went down in the ocean. So talk about the biological side of it, though. How much life is there at the bottom of the deep sea? This is something that both Katie and I have been trying to work on. It's like, how do we make more people care about the deep ocean? And the deep ocean is full of different types of landscapes, essentially. And it has underwater mountains, for example, that might have corals growing on it, or sponges, or organisms like that. It might have abyssal plains, which are like long plains of sandy bottom. And that still has stuff there. It has sea cucumbers down to 4,600 meters and even deeper. Are those really, really strong cucumbers? Because the pressure must be insane, right? Well, actually, they're very, very soft sea cucumbers, right? So they're like jelly. They're very jelly-like. Oh, because they've already been squished? I mean, isn't the pressure insane? The pressure is insane, yes. But they're like gelatinous organisms. So they've been able to adapt. So they don't get squished the same way? Exactly. So they've been able to adapt to living at those depths so that they don't get squished by that insane pressure. I mean, even some of the fishes that you find in the deep ocean are very jelly-like. Interesting, because they can't get harder, so they get softer in a way? Yeah, in some instances, exactly. So that tilio, that hard skeleton that we often think of with tuna or something like that, it wouldn't do very well. And most of the organisms don't have air inside their bodies. That's one of the biggest things for pressure. So if there's no air, then they're effectively the same density as the surrounding water. So the pressure doesn't bother them one way or the other. What else do I not know about the deep ocean? I'm like, this is so interesting. Tell me more about the deep sea. Well, you started off with some of the habitats, Sheena. Seamounts, abyssal plains. You also have hydrothermal vents, areas where you have volcanic activity that's really shallow, really close to the crust, the surface. And so that would be sort of comparable to hot springs and things on land? Yes, exactly. Like methane seeps. Yeah. So you have ocean water seeping down into cracks in the earth's crust, getting super hot and really enriched with different kinds of minerals, and then coming back up into the water. Like a yellowstone underwater. Yeah, totally. And then you have the basis for whole new ecosystems that we didn't know about prior to the late 1970s. Previously, we thought we knew that all life on earth was based on the sun, photosynthesis. But because of this discovery of hydrothermal vents in the late 70s, now we know that you can have huge ecosystems in the deep ocean that are based on chemosynthesis or energy derived from chemicals. Is the correct way to think about the deep ocean, for me as a layperson, to think of it basically with the same richness as terrestrial land, what I think of as the earth, and that same kind of richness is occurring underwater, but we just don't know anything about it? Totally. Yellowstone of the sea, and then there are big forests. Instead of having a forest made up of trees, you'll have a forest made up of organisms, like corals, or sponges. Lots of sea cucumbers all over the place. I'd go more with the corals and the sponges. So definitely, organisms that just don't move and stay in one location. But it is comparable to the boreal forest in Canada or something, and then you have deserts. The problem is we haven't looked everywhere. So some of the kind of work that you're describing, like you look at a map, you can see rainforest, temperate forests, mountains, deserts, all of these different kinds of habitats have been mapped out on land. Obviously, it's really convenient for us to do that. And with satellites, it makes it even easier. You just walk around and look, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Whoa, there's a frog. But in the deep ocean, it's so much harder. And because it's harder, the tools are really expensive. It's hard to do when you're down in the deep ocean, either in a submersible or with a robot. It's like being on the side of a mountain in a blizzard at night with a flashlight. You can't really see a whole lot at any one time. Oh my God, I know all about that. Yeah. I thought that might resonate. So as a result, over the last 70 years or so of having the technology to go to the deep ocean, we've only seen a teeny tiny fraction, 0.001% of it. And what we've seen is very concentrated in certain places, like in the waters of more affluent countries like the US, Japan, and New Zealand. So because of that, we don't have a global map of the biogeography, like the distribution of life, the distribution of habitats all over the world. And so that's one of the things that we're trying to change. We know where certain hotspots are. So we know where certain sea mounts are or hydrothermal vents are, but there's no clear picture of exactly what that looks like globally. So you're sort of saying it'd be as if you looked at the coast of California in a few places and you're like, this is what land is like. And you're sort of like, well, this is one tiny snapshot of some land. So how does your work fit into that, Katie? You're trying to make the deep sea more accessible. I mean, how do you do that? We're sort of working in three areas. One is to create this biogeographical map of the deep sea floor. So we're working on a new initiative called the Global Deep Sea Exploration Goals to set out 10,000 points around the world that will give us a more representative and unbiased look at the global deep sea. So we want to get institutions, individuals, anybody who has access to the deep ocean to be a part of this so that we can see the whole deep ocean and be able to start to make that map of the world. But right now with the current technologies that we have, it's really hard to do. Ships cost tens of millions, hundreds of million dollars a year to operate and most places don't have those kinds of resources. So we're working on tools and systems that are more affordable, more accessible, so that more people can be involved in deep sea exploration research, like Sheena. So she's been working with me and my team for many years now and is sort of poster child for somebody in a place who has huge interest, huge dedication and knowledge about her home country and region, part of the world, the Western Indian Ocean, but didn't have access to the kinds of tools needed to be able to study and explore the deep ocean. So we're trying to identify individuals like Sheena who are going to be a part of this and make sure that they have the tools, the access, the network to be able to create programs of their own and just really see them shine. What kind of tools do you need to explore your quote-unquote backyard? One of the biggest things that Katie has touched upon is the fact that, you know, it's so hard to access because it's so expensive. Katie and I have been working together with her previous prototypes that could go down to 1,500 meters. These little guys. Wow, it's that tiny little thing? Yeah. Goes down to 1,500 meters? 1,500 meters. It has a camera, temperature and depth and GPS sensors on board. Wow, so you can kind of get the basics. Yep, exactly. Wow. But those basics are really important to get people interested because if there's one thing I've learned, it's imagery is important. Going to the deep sea is great, but being able to take whatever you learned from the deep ocean, whether it's footage or your experience and bringing it back to the community. Once they see all the sea cucumbers, they're like, let's go back. Exactly, they're like, oh my word, why is it there? But that is true. I mean, I'm joking, but it's like, if there's so much life at the bottom, you're like, that's great. Like, let's look for more things down there. No, exactly. And I think one of the barriers is definitely the price tag attached to the equipment and the fact that expertise lies in certain pockets around the world or specific equipment lies in certain pockets around the world. And the science game is always about, hey friend, can you lend me your equipment because I want to do this? And hopefully your friend is keen enough to lend you their equipment. Classic. And so Katie, part of your mission is to make the equipment cheaper and more accessible. And then Sheena, you're trying to use this equipment to basically just map the area. Well, I mean, do you mostly work around the Seychelles? So I work with different organizations that plan and do expeditions within the Indian Ocean. So I've been fortunate to be on several expeditions in the Indian Ocean. But I think my aim is not just to use it in my own backyard, but to also share the experiences within the region and get more people interested in doing the work. How do you get more people interested in doing the work? I mean, you're saying sharing the imagery, sharing the discoveries, like showing the tremendous opportunity there is to explore. But I mean, is that enough? I mean, do you see people interested in the work as a result of that? Yeah, 100%. One of the most inspiring things is being able to get up on a stage, speak to a room, and then people come up after and be like, that is so cool. How do I do that? Right. So that's just planting the seed. I think what's really important is that there's a long-term goal to it to ensure that you don't just present the shiny toy, but there's actually a way to ensure that other people can take up the baton and do the work. And I think that's one way in which affordable technology comes in, because at least in the smallest sense, it gives you the access and the ownership of equipment that can get you there. The best part is also, Katie, that you can deploy it from small vessels. So you don't need a giant yacht. Exactly. The other thing about deep sea research is it's always been done on very large vessels. So how do we go away from that and start using vessels that are more accessible within small island developing states or developing countries, nations? Yeah. So Katie, talk a little bit about the technical challenges in making probes. What do you call that little thing you just held? Well, this one is called Makanu, which is loosely translated from Hawaiian as coconut eye. It was a project that we started in 2020 with the Polynesian Voyaging Society. And we had planned to do a kids' workshop during the Pacific Festival of Arts and Culture in June of 2020, which, as you can imagine, never happened. But instead, we got to work with a lot of people like Sheena around the world to be test users for this system. And we learned a lot about usability. So it's not just the price tag when it comes to accessible technologies. It's also the usability. What kind of software is required? Do you need to have a PhD in engineering to use this thing? Or can you just open it up, look at a quick start guide, fire it up, and throw it in the water? And that's really where we're trying to get to. How close are you to that? Well, with Makanu, I think we were basically there. Do you think it's easy to use? It was a great tool to use because we did go through three prototypes before that. So, you know, they were still starting it up. We were testing it. So we had to test and play around. And we had Zoom calls to open it up and fix it. And me and my dad were sitting on a Zoom call and opening up this thing and fixing it. And did it work? Yes. You fixed it? Yeah, we fixed it. So I think that is also the beauty. We weren't afraid to test it because it was cheap enough for us to use it. Honestly, hearing about the evolution of this technology kind of reminds me of drone technology over the last 10-15 years because I've done a lot of filming with drones through climbing stuff. And I remember that 15 years ago, it was all somebody's custom octocopter. It was like one guy can service it. He made it. It's crazy. And now it's like DJI drones that come out of the box. Literally, all my friends now just like poke a button. It does its thing. It's super chill. You're sort of like, man, it's so much more user-friendly, but it means that people... And it's so much cheaper that people aren't afraid about losing it, not afraid about breaking it. It's more available. So basically, you're trying to follow that track for deep sea exploration. Yep, absolutely. So the next project that we're working on right now, we're working with a company called Blue Robotics based out in California to create a low-cost deep sea camera and sensor system. So the new system is called DORIS, the Deep Ocean Research and Imaging System. And it's going to be able to go to 6,000 meters, which will be able to cover about, what, Sheena, 98% of the entire ocean. Yeah. And it'll come in at a price point of like $10,000 or less. So rather than this being an academic exercise, like Makanu was, that was very prototype-y. A lot of the problems that Sheena had were just because we didn't have the team to be able to get things to a commercial point where, like you say, open the box and do the thing. So that's why we're working with Blue Robotics right now. And so we're just planning our first training workshop this spring. So super excited about that. And we'll be getting systems in the water this year. Talking to you guys, I'm realizing how much opportunity there is on the more technical side, like tinkers, inventors, people like computer scientists, basically like electrical engineers. There is a lot of opportunity to make a real difference in the world and in exploring the world in fields that aren't technically science per se. How do you feel about these fields that aren't specifically deep sea exploration, but are adjacent and are obviously required in order to do the work that you're doing? Well, one of the things about deep sea exploration is that we need people with all kinds of skills and talents to be a part of it. Especially on a ship, it's sort of a microcosm of a society. You've got the captain, you've got the ship's crew, you've got the cooks, you've got the engineers. You need all these different people to be a part of the team. And then you have the science team, you have the biologists, the geologists, the engineers. If you're live streaming, you have satellite engineer and the videographers and all these different things that you don't always see, but are very much necessary to make this kind of work possible. For example, the expedition that we're running in the Seychelles will use equipment from a colleague in South Africa, the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity. Essentially, those are the only three bits of that type of equipment in the world. So again, it's always like borrowing from friends or being like, hey, can we use the way you've built yours to build one similar? And learning from their experiences. So it really is about being innovative. But I think to your point on, you know, seeing Katie and I sitting here and talking about deep sea work and the work that we do and thinking, man, I could never do that. And that was me. I started my deep sea journey in 2018. That was not that long ago. And I would never have thought that I'd be doing deep sea work or advocating for more deep sea work to be done in the Western Indian Ocean and led by people from that region. So I think it is possible. It's just a matter of carving out the way so that other people can see how it can be done. You were both part of the Rolex and National Geographic perpetual planet oceans expedition. Talk about that experience. So I'm currently in the process of organizing my expedition, which goes out in March. So very exciting. We'll be deploying equipment from the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity, and we'll be looking at how fish change with depth in the Seychelles waters. So part of my involvement has been the documentation of how much of the deep sea floor we've seen. So publishing that paper in 2025, and then from there, establishing these global deep sea exploration goals, and also working on the Doris project, the deep ocean research and imaging system, and making that available to Sheena and other explorers that are involved in this oceans expedition. What do you guys see in the next several years? What does success look like in the work that you're currently pursuing? The research that we did to calculate the 0.001% of the deep sea floor we've seen, we aggregated almost 44,000 dives in the last 70 years to do that. With only 12,000 unique locations around the world that have been seen, and we're going to add another 10,000, we're almost doubling the number of new places that we've seen. And so we hope to be able to look at them. And by we, I mean the oceanographic deep sea exploration community, not just me. It's bringing institutions and organizations and individuals like Sheena together to be able to do that in the next 10 to 20 years so that we can create that total global map of the deep sea floor. How can we bring more people from more places into the community and truly be a part of it to contribute? Yeah, I think for me, it's ensuring that there's legacy. It's not a fulfillment when you're the only deep sea biologist from the Seychelles, right? Success to me looks like having a group of people from the Seychelles interested and leading that kind of work. Having more locally and regionally led work that is focused on the deep ocean. I think the thing that I'm hung up on is just that it seems like this tremendous opportunity that I feel like humans in general are not really aware of. Because you're like, who knows what we don't know? Chemosynthesis that we've only known of since the 1970s or something. It's like, who knows what kinds of things like that we'll discover in the whole rest of the ocean that we haven't even looked at? You got it, man. Yeah. How come you guys aren't preaching the good word to everyone you meet? Being like, guys, but there's this incredible opportunity. Humans should be doing this. People have climbed most of the mountains in the world. I'm sort of like, oh, and you think that the entire undersea world hasn't even been seen? I mean, that's kind of incredible. Yeah. It's like, don't you think? I mean, kids should be like, this is my chance to do something totally new in the world and create things and find things and who knows what. Yeah, I think it's crazy cool. I think just showcasing and showing the avenue of how to do it is where our challenge generally lies because it feels so insurmountable because of all the cost inhibitions. I think this is where Katie's work is really helpful because it really showcases, hey, actually, you don't need that much money. You just need to be curious and you need to be able to be innovative. Do either of you guys have any thoughts about how do you get more people into this? How do you inspire other people? How do you share this? How do you spread the good news? How do you spread the good news? Well, like Sheena was talking about, just collecting video and getting out to as many people as possible is sort of the instant hook. It's really easy to get people excited about deep sea exploration because it's so cool. But then also creating pathways, ways for people to get involved. Right now, there are so many more ways to get involved with deep sea exploration and to get training, especially as a young person than there were when I first started in this field 25 something years ago. I kind of had to make my own way, but now there are internships, there are groups of early career professionals, there are all kinds of ways to get involved, which is really, really exciting to see. And I think that in the next several years, we're really going to see great things come of that because of this huge global support network and people training other people and just an explosion of deep sea exploration research. Yeah, I think I agree with Katie. There are new ways to get involved. There are more vessels out at sea, you know, with the ability to have more people on board to have that first time experience of being on the ocean or seeing how a remotely operated vehicle works, all that kind of stuff. So I think the opportunities are increasing. I think it's very encouraging. A bit of a cautionary note, I guess, though, is the fact that there are a lot opportunities, like new things, new internships, but it needs to be matched with resources to be able for people to be able to continue doing this kind of work. So what is the point of getting a lot of people trained and excited and into deep ocean exploration and research, but not having jobs for them, not having the ability to do this kind of work. So we really need to have that investment, not only in the training and the excitement, but also in the continuation and growth of the field. I mean, we live in a house, so you would think that we want to know every nook and cranny of that house. The house of earth. Exactly. But it is, in a lot of cases, a privilege to be able to study our ocean and ask questions about why fish are found in certain places or be innovative with technology, right? So how do we create a better social construct as well to allow more people to have those opportunities? It's interesting, your metaphor of earth as a house makes me think of the deep sea as sort of this giant basement with like full of dusty drawers and like things and like who knows what kind of treasure if you're brave enough to go down into the dark and like look around. And you've just peeked in a little bit, but you don't really know what's going on down there. Yeah, I'm sort of like, oh, there's this tremendous opportunity for anybody brave enough to go and look. I'm like, oh, that's so cool. Well, thank you guys so much for taking the time. It's a real pleasure chatting with each of you. And yeah, I'm like, I'm gonna go see the deep ocean now. It's so exciting. Come on out with us. Thank you. Thanks again to Sheena Talma and Dr. Katie Croft-Bell. We'll put links to their work in the show notes for this episode. If you haven't heard the previous episode about the Perpetual Planet Oceans Expedition, then check it out in our show notes or on the Rolex YouTube page. Planet Visionaries is a podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative and a Sony Music Podcast production.