(pulsating light music) (audience applauding) - Hello. Oh, it tends to run away that. And well done for being here. It's a beautiful sunny evening outside, but we have sunshine on our
minds in the inside here. So thank you for joining us. And this is the first proper
book talk for this book. And this book has been
quite a long project. It turns out that the reason
no one's really written about the physical nature of
the ocean engine before is 'cause it's really hard. Anyway, so, yeah, so I'm going to
be talking a little bit about the book, a little
bit about the ocean and sharing some of the
stories from the book. But I want to start with this map here because this is the globe, right? We don't have globes often enough. (indistinct) right with this amazing, great big globe there for
the Christmas lectures. And I think we don't think often enough about the fact that
the Earth is spherical. We live on a spherical planet. But what it means is the ocean is so... And if we turn it round so that
the Pacific is in the middle and you can basically look at the Earth and all you see is ocean. So the ocean, if you
come from anywhere else, is a massive part of it. But if you live on Earth
and you want to see, it's kind of hard. So people obviously want
to unwrap the planet and this is the way to do it. And the guy who came up with
this projection, Spilhaus, he said something which
I think is very profound. He said that normally in
order to see the land, we cut the ocean, but in order to see the ocean, we have to cut the land. And so what this
projection is basically is it's a map of the whole ocean, global ocean, it's all connected together. And it's distorted. Of course it's distorted because it's put onto a 2D surface. But what he did was decide
where to cut the land so that you could see the ocean and see how connected it all is. And a lot of this talk and
a lot of the book really, there's several themes
that run through it, but a lot of them are how we see the ocean and how we think about the ocean because we don't think about it very much. So this is from a book that
was published 150 years ago, "The Hunting of the Snark." It's a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll. And it's got this, it's got a load of nonsense in it. But I'm gonna read you some verses here. And it's talking about a
captain who has gone to sea in a boat with his crew and this is the description. "He had bought a large
map representing the sea "without the least vestige of land. "And the crew were much pleased "when they found it to be a
map they could all understand." And it goes on a bit. And then we get to the
last bit here it says "Other maps are such shapes,
with their islands and capes. "But we've got our brave captain to thank, "so the crew would protest
that he's brought us the best, "a perfect and absolute blank." And the captain, through his map, I mean they go to sea, they get lost and his map is a blank piece of paper. But the point is about this is that this was written 150 years ago, and actually, it was the last year in which western civilization could claim ignorance of the global ocean because while this was written, the Challenger expedition was at sea. on the first global
oceanographic expedition. They went all the way around and they came back with mountains of data that showed how deep the ocean was, that it had life in it, that it was actually an interesting place. It was far richer than they'd imagined. But basically in the 150 years since, in spite of all of that, and in spite of the efforts
of lots of oceanographers, the view our culture has of the ocean pretty much still is a
perfect and absolute blank. It's a very convenient
void to have around. And so the point of all of this, like, the bee that was in my bonnet when I started writing the book is that we can't have this anymore. The ocean is too important,
it is doing things and we just think of
it as sort of nothing. It's just absent. And if you go back then, you know, 100 years after that, 50 years ago, a bit over 50 years
ago, the Apollo mission, so the most, you know, many of you'll be familiar
with this picture, it was the Blue Marble taken on Apollo 17. And the thing that's special about it is that it was a fully illuminated disc. So obviously as they were
traveling to the Moon, they weren't always at an angle where the sun was right behind them and the Earth was right in front of them. And so this picture of the fully illuminated
Earth disc from 1972 was one of a pair of famous photographs, the other one was Earthrise, that completely reset what
we thought of our planet. And what it showed was a
fragile planet hanging in space full of richness and it was blue. And so this picture became
known as the Blue Marble. But the thing about it is
that in the years since, if you really think about it, we go around talking
about blue planet, right? You know, the BBC has
made these documentaries. We mention all the time that we talk about that we live on the blue planet, but we never actually look at that blue. And that's the bit that is
really starting to be a problem, is that even though we
talk about it all the time, we don't really talk about it. And so when we do talk about the ocean, what we tend to talk about
are things like this. So we've got sea monsters, Moby Dick here, that's the Franklin expedition, the one where they tried to get through the northwest passage and then died horribly along the way. And there's huge sort of controversy about whether cannibalism
was involved at the end. And of course the indigenous
people told them what to do and they didn't listen
and all of that stuff. "Blue Planet," there we go. We see lots of pictures of pretty fish. Now I'm not against pretty fish, I think they're very nice. (everyone laughing) I just think they're not really the point. And so the fish are nice, but they're only part of the story. And we hear about the pollution. And so the point about all of this is that we talk all the time about the things that are in the ocean, but we don't talk about the ocean itself. We kind of slide around what
the water itself is doing and the reason for that
is that it's hard, right? And I know we've got some oceans... Some of my colleagues in the audience here and when we're talking about this, I think part of the reason that society kind of slides around
this topic of the ocean is because it's really hard
to see it all in one go, even if you have a map like that. So I think it's a bit like the
blind men and the elephant, you know that one, that very ancient parable, story, where one feels the trunk and says, "Oh, an elephant is like a snake" and another one feels a leg and says, "Oh, an elephant is like a tree." And the problem with the ocean is that it's very big and very small and very fast and very slow and it does all these different things. And our human relationship with it happens in lots of different ways and you sort of... It's not any one of those things, it's sort of all of them. And so to really see the ocean, what you need to do I think is tell lots of the little stories and you tell enough little stories and you see enough different perspectives and then maybe you see the ocean. And so that's what the
book is an attempt to do. It's telling of lots of little stories that set the context
for what the ocean is. And I'm hoping that by
the end you get all the... And then you can see like, "Okay, now I sort of
see what the ocean is," but I think this is why we don't do it. And the thing is that the ocean is such a
rich source of stories. This is not hard to do because the ocean has affected
almost everything we've done. It's influenced our lives. It completely dictates
the way this planet works. So what I'm gonna do
over the next hour or so is just to tell you some of
the stories along the way. And it will feel partial, I'll tell you some little things, but there are other stories. And as you build, the more you build them up, the richer the picture becomes until you really appreciate
the ocean as a place. So let's start with what the ocean is. I mean there's a bit of
ranting along the way, and poo, which won't surprise anyone who follows Cosmic Shambles. So what the ocean is, all right, so the first thing
to know about the ocean is that it has anatomy. And anyone who saw the Christmas lectures might remember this. So let's see who did their homework? Does anyone remember what this is? (Helen stomps)
(audience laughing) Come on.
- It's a Greenland shark. - It is a Greenland shark. Well done. Yes, so the Greenland shark
is a very strange creature. It's basically a baggy jumper
pretending to be a shark. It lives in extremely cold
water up in the Arctic. And which basically means
it lives a very slow life. So as the temperature goes down, you know, enzymes act more slowly and life can act very, very slowly. And so it is thought that this is the largest living creature of this kind of size. And it can live to 450 years old, which is a very long time. So it grows very, very
slowly year on year. And it took a very clever piece of science to work out how old they are. 'Cause obviously if it's that old, you can't watch them from birth to death. But it was a very nifty bit of science to do with the internal
anatomy of its eye. And they are... Yeah, so they... They're sort of ambush hunters, no one really knows how they hunt because they're found with bits of seal, you know, dead seal. But this thing swims at
few centimeters per second, no one's entirely sure. So it's gotta be a very
good ambush predator. No one's ever seen it do it, I think. Anyway, so it's a very slow, very cold, old creature. And it's found... So what we've got here, we've got the... This is looking down at the,
the North Atlantic ocean. And the color here that
you can see in the ocean, this is temperature. So you can see already there's
beautiful patterns here. So a Greenland shark might
typically live up there. So just off the coast of Greenland, between Greenland and Canada in the Labrador Sea. So really cold water, right? That's what we expect. The blue indicates
there's really cold water. But in 2013, I think it was, a ship was in the Gulf
of Mexico, down here. And they were doing surveys to look for the damage caused by
the Deepwater Horizon spill. So they were doing ecological surveys and they put a hook down and what they pulled back up on deck was a juvenile Greenland shark, which looks a bit outta
place there in the warm. And the reason... They weren't incredibly surprised. They were a bit surprised, but it wasn't completely
out of the ordinary. And the reason for that
is that what this is is not a map of ocean temperature, it's a map of surface ocean temperature. It's very different underneath. And so, well, the first
thing about the ocean, and this thing about it
having anatomy is that, and its anatomy is very rich, but this is one of the very basic things is that it's got layers. It's got a warm layer, across most of the global ocean, there's a warmer layer on top, and then there's much, much
colder water down beneath. So down there in the Gulf of Mexico, they put their hook all the way
down through the warm water. And I think the shark was found
a couple of kilometers down, maybe three kilometers down and down there the water
temperature is four degrees C so not completely out of the range of a creature that's used
to living in the Arctic. And so this sort of idea of the ocean... So the ocean doesn't mix up, that's lesson number one, it's too big to mix up. So it can have, water packets can have
different characteristics in different places. And so the ocean does
have internal anatomy. And this kind of warm lid
on top of deep cold water is kind of the most basic part of that but it gets much richer. So then the ocean. So, okay, so there's some anatomy, there's also some sort of physiology. The ocean is doing things all the time. And these are Peruvian boobies. And what they are most
famous for is pooing. And they're... So we'll go through... And this is relevant, I'm gonna take you on the story and we'll come back to how the ocean causes everything I'm just about to tell you. So let's go to this part of the world. So South America, here we are, there is a current that runs
up the side of South America called the Humboldt Current because it was first observed by this guy, well, first observed in the Western world by this guy Alexander von Humboldt. And there was a really good book written about him by Andrea Wulf, "The Invention of Nature"
that I highly recommend. And he was a proper polymath. His mother wanted him
to be a civil servant because that was fashionable
in, you know, Prussian society, terribly civilized. And he instead swanned
off around the world and was interested. And he was interested in how
things are connected together. And in a time when most scientists were busy categorizing everything, he was looking for the
connections between things. Anyway, so he came here
and he found this current. And then there's lots of islands. There's not just the
Galapagos Islands there, but there's lots of little islands. So the current comes up here
and then it kind of turns off just underneath the equator. And so that's where we are. So on those islands, that's where you find
these Peruvian boobies. Now the poo, so before the Westerners arrived, the local population was very careful. So I should say the poo on these islands, it's not a trivial thing, it was... You got a lot of birds, right? And a long time (audience laughing) and it builds up. And so they were sort of
deposits 30 or 40 meters deep of this white arid stuff. And Humboldt took some, it was his fault. He took it, took it back to England, had them analyze it, and they found it was full
of phosphorus and nitrogen, and they worked out to be
really good for fertilizer. Anyway, so the locals already knew it was really good for fertilizer, but von Humboldt picked it up, and guano, so actually the Peruvian word is "wanu," and guano comes from that. So Von Humboldt was the early 1800s. So shortly after that, Westerners started going
and taking this stuff because it was really
useful, this fertilizer. 'Cause it had all these nutrients, this enormous trade in guano came up. And actually mostly what the
Brits did it, was turnips, fertilized turnips. Slightly after this. So Baldrick grew his dream turnip without the benefit of bird poo. Can you imagine what
it would've looked like if he'd had the full help of nature. Anyway, so it wasn't just fertilizer that this stuff was useful for, a few years later, and this
is still in law in America, the Guano Islands Act was passed. And look at these words here. U.S. Congress that enables
citizens of the United States to take possession in the
name of the United States, of unclaimed islands
containing guano deposits. They were so keen to have
bird poo, they wrote a law that said they could
take any bird poo going. And this is because it was
useful for making gunpowder. So basically you've got
incredibly valuable resource. It's there because there's
birds and because there's poo. So that's interesting geopolitically, but it doesn't stop there. So let's look a little bit more at the Humboldt Current here. This is a temperature
map of the same area. And you can see that the colder
water, the light blue there is kind of stretching up the coast. And actually the Humboldt
Current is really cold. Not only is it really cold, it's some of the most
fertile fishing areas anywhere in the world. So even today, 20% of the world's fish catch comes from the Humboldt current. And it's not that big. It's less than 1% of the planet, and yet enormous amount
of fish come out of it. And they're these, mostly
they're Peruvian anchovies. And if you've ever wondered why you haven't had
Peruvian anchovian chips, it's because they get described, even by fans, with words like "bold." And, you know, there's very careful language around them. So basically they're
completely disgusting, but they are very oily,
very strong flavored. But there are loads of them. So they're being hauled
out of this current and they have been for a very long time. So here's a timeline of what's happened to
the Peruvian anchoveta. Between 1950 and 1973,
world fish harvests tripled, enormous extra amount of fishing, but the amount of that consumed
by humans didn't increase. What did increase was that
that leftover fish meal. So a fish is this beautiful thing, right? It's this amazing evolutionary solution to how to live in the ocean. And what you do with that, if
you are economically minded, is you kill it, you dry it, you grind it up, and you make something
that looks like this, which is fishmeal. And so 1960, the people were hauling
enormous amounts of fish out of the Humboldt Current. And it was being fed to pigs because pigs need lots of protein and it was being fed very
specifically to British pigs. So there's this enormous
trade, global trade, that is incredibly valuable,
keeping Peru's economy going. In fish that are being used to feed pigs. And of course what happens if you pull enormous amounts
of fish out of a current is eventually you run outta fish. And when this happened, so Peru, you know, 40% back in '64, enormous amounts of fish, 1972 there's a population crash. The price of British
bacon doubled overnight because suddenly there was no
more protein to feed the pigs. So the point is, there's all this stuff coming
from the Humboldt Current. Right? There's this bird poo, there's fish, there's fish meal, which is feeding people on
the other side of the world and it's all coming from
this very, very narrow area. So why is that? So here's what's happening. So the Humboldt Current, so there's basically a
problem in the ocean, that layered structure I showed you with the warm layer on the top and the cooler water down below that creates a paradox, which, if not solved, means you would have no
life in the ocean at all. And the reason for that is that
in order for things to grow, in order for phytoplankton, which are the tiny sun harvesters to grow, you need both sunlight, you need energy, which comes in the form
of sunlight from the top and you need nutrients. And the thing about the
system in the ocean, we'll come to why a bit later, is that the nutrients
tend to be down below, they get used up in the
surface very quickly, and then there are no nutrients. So basically you've got a problem, in that your nutrients
are all down at the bottom and your energy is all up at the top. So nothing can grow. And the way that, the reason that the Humboldt current is so fantastically productive is that it's got a
solution to this problem. And the solution is that the top layer, I've got a picture here, the top layer basically is pushed, the warm layer is pushed away by the wind across the Atlantic. So the cooler ocean water
that has loads of nutrients is exposed to the sunlight. And then you've got sun and then the phytoplankton can grow and they can feed zooplankton. The zooplankton can feed fish and you get this enormous
explosion of life. So the point here is that there
is a structure in the ocean, there is a structural thing going on where something has had to move, the anatomy has had to move
and it breaks the paradox and then you can have life. And so this is why the Humboldt
Current is full of fish, it's because of this. And then the question is, well, what about the bird poo? You know, fine, there's lots of fish, they're feeding lots of birds, but, you know, we've got
plenty of birds in England and they produce the same
amount of poo per bird. So why would anyone from England
going all the way to Peru to get bird poo when England
is full of defecating birds? And the solution is that, the reason it happened
is that the water itself, that cooler water at the
top stops it raining. And if it doesn't rain, first of all, it doesn't
wash your bird poo away. Second, it doesn't change it chemically. So it basically gets deposited and it stays the way it is. And so the point is that
this is just one example of this enormous... And they were enormous wars
fought over the Guano Islands and enormous economic
consequences of the fish. And at the root of it all, there is a feature in the
ocean that is driving it. And so this is one of
the themes of the book, that these stories are everywhere. It's not the case that the just
happen to be fish over here or there just happens to
be something over here. The things that we humans see
on the surface are the result of this engine turning underneath, which is doing things in some
places and not in others. So the ocean carries passengers, you've got this engine, it's moving, it's creating different
environments that are not mixing up. It's creating anatomy and then it's carrying things around. And not all of those things are things that you might expect. So come to this part of the world. So we're off the coast
of South Africa here and if we go down into the coast there, there's a little bit of coastline
here, near Dar es Salaam, and there's a place called Kimbiji. And a few years ago in Kimbiji there were some sea turtle
conservation officers and they were, you know, it's the sort of beach where sea turtles haul themselves up on the beach and they lay their eggs and
then they go back out to sea. And so, you know, people are concerned about turtles, so they watch them. Now turtles, big flippers, right? That's how they move themselves. That's my best turtle impression. (audience laughing) So there were two sea turtle watches out on the beach in Kimbiji and they saw something
coming out of the water about the size of an upturned kettle drum. And it was walking because
it wasn't a turtle, it was a tortoise. And this is it. Covered in barnacles, it had been at sea, they
estimated for several months. And it had come a long way. It had come from over here, from an island over here. And although this had actually
been known for some time, this was the first time anyone had seen a tortoise
walk out of the water after a journey like that. Now tortoises are actually
quite well qualified to undertake long sea journeys. I have to emphasize the tortoises
do not choose to do this. They go for a bit of a
paddle and it gets, you know, it sort of... They have a bad day. (audience laughing) And so... But a tortoise has a, it's got a long neck like a snorkel. It has the ability to
live for a very long time without fresh food or water. It's got stores. The other thing, oh, and it floats, that helps. It's the females can store sperm, terribly useful. So if a female rocks up
on an island somewhere, she can just start her own colony. She doesn't need to wait for a mate. So the point is that tortoises
get carried by the ocean and the most famous... We'll come back to Aldabra, but oh, this is one actually
that's got washed in. So the other, the famous, there's two sets of islands that are famous for having
very large tortoises. One of them is the Seychelles, the other one is the Galapagos. And have you ever wondered how the Galapagos got
these enormous tortoises? Because the Galapagos
Islands are volcanic, they've never been
connected to the mainland. So what happened is that
the Humboldt current, basically, you know, it
goes up the side there and then occasion a tortoise
walks into the water and the current carries it across. Now most of those tortoises
just get carried out to sea, but enough of them are getting
carried the same direction that over the centuries they
have landed on the Galapagos and enough females have rocked up and, you know, enough
to establish a colony. And that's how the
Galapagos got its tortoises. They were carried there by accident, but they were carried there because a feature of the
ocean was taking them in the same direction. And it's the same in the Seychelles. The tortoise from Aldabra had actually come back the other way. But the Seychelles got its tortoises 'cause, you know, those currents reverse and sometimes they go the other way. So the point is that the
ocean can carry tortoises. So if it can carry a tortoise, you must be able to carry smaller things. And those smaller things
can be really important. So, oh, oh, there it is. I knew there was a current somewhere. So now, the concrete, right? Scourge of our time, according to some people, unless you're really a fan
of brutalist architecture. So concrete goes back a long way. The Colosseum is mostly made of concrete. The Pantheon is the largest
unsupported concrete dome in the world. And it's still standing after 2,000 years. And the thing about concrete, whatever you think about it now, is it is this amazing building material. It's artificial rock and you can make it whatever
shape you want it to be. And the Romans worked at
how to do this very well. And then we've carried on. So these are all, you know, skyscrapers today, although you can, my architect friends tell me you can technically make a
skyscraper without concrete, no one has ever done it. So basically every skyscraper you see has the foundation and
the core of concrete. 'Cause it's the only
thing that's strong enough to do that job. And then, you know, the
modernist architects got going, you get all of this kind of stuff. I'm not into brutalist architecture. Anyway, so let's take... This is all coming back
to ocean passengers, but let's get the long way around. So where does all this... We got concrete, right? Where's the concrete come from? So if you want concrete, concrete is made from two things. It's got rocks and gravel, which are kind of the
main structural component. And then it's got cement, which is the glue that glues
all that aggregate together. So in order to make
concrete, you need rocks. That's not hard to get. You need cement. So what's in cement? And cement comes from something, we use calcium oxide. Calcium oxide comes
from calcium carbonate. And the key thing here is the calcium. Calcium is quite an interesting atom. In the rocks that come out
of volcanoes, it's there, it's not really, really common. You don't get great, sort of, deposits of calcium all by itself. It's a really, really
useful building material. And in order to make concrete, you need to get a lot
of it from somewhere. So in the case of this, we do get calcium carbonate
from rocks, from limestone. But if the natural rocks of Earth don't have very much calcium, where does all this limestone come from? Something had to collect it. You've got this atom which
really is dilute out in the world and something has concentrated it. And this is one of the ways it happens. So the calcium that's in
rocks over the millennia has got washed into the oceans
until it's even more dilute. But the thing about having lots of small living things in the ocean is they're efficient little hoovers
for whatever's near them. And so this is a thing
called a coccolithophore. It's a single cell. The videos of them growing these platelets are completely ridiculous. They sort of grow them on
the inside and push them out. It's bonkers. But what they're doing is
they're harvesting sunlight, they're taking materials
from the water around them, atom by atom, by atom, by atom. And they are building them up
into these little platelets. And if you get a big bloom of these, if there's nutrients and light, you can get something like this. So this is the south coast of England and all that light blue stuff that is a bloom of coccolithophores that you can see from space. So you get these enormous blooms. And the thing about that is, that if the predator, if there's so many all at once, the predators don't have time to grow and to, you know, to eat them all, then you have waste. So it drifts downwards in the ocean, broken little bits of coccolithophores and other calcium-based creatures. And over the eons, you know,
the surface of a shallow sea, which is what that was several
hundred million years ago, basically becomes a graveyard for little calcium-based organisms. And it builds up, and it
builds up, and it builds up. And if it gets squashed in the right way, and if platonics plays your game, then you have something like
the White Cliffs of Dover. And so the point is that
the White Cliffs of Dover is an incredibly concentrated
source of calcium. But it only got there because
tiny, tiny sea creatures extracted every little atom, billions, upon billions,
upon billions of them and put them all in the same place. And then humans came along and just went, "Oh look, loads of calcium, "let's make concrete." And I like this picture very much. And actually this might be the first time I've shown this here, so that, they have all
sorts of very cool things in their collection here. You are not allowed to do this, now I have to emphasize this, but back when the Royal
Institution, you know, in Faraday's day you're allowed
to go collecting things. And so what I'm holding, that's me, is a piece of the White Cliffs of Dover. And I'm a terrible artist. I'm the first person to admit that. But what I'm drawing, and this made me extremely happy because I'm drawing a
coccolithophore with itself, (audience laughing) made my day, that did. But this is the point, I mean, isn't this an amazing thought that for centuries, languages, and history and geography have been taught using tiny sea creatures from the ocean, we're passing knowledge on through the medium of sea creatures. So the point about all of this is that every time you see
a concrete building, we may not like concrete. It has built the modern world. So actually the concrete is the second most produced
commodity that humans create, second only to water. And I'm not really sure
why water's on that list, but there's something like
1.4 cubic meters of concrete produced every single year
for every human on Earth. It's a lot. We can have that debate some other time. But the point is, all of it came from sea creatures. And I love this cartoon, I wrote column about this. The brilliant thing about
columns is that if you're lucky, you get a good illustrator. And the illustrator totally got this. And I really love this cartoon. But the point is that even
something like concrete that we completely take for granted came from passengers of the ocean that were concentrated by
something the ocean was doing and we wouldn't have concrete without it, we wouldn't have concentrated
enough source of calcium. So those are some of the
things the ocean does do. Things the ocean doesn't do. Oh, this makes me cross, right? So the ocean isn't silent. You might recognize, some of you might recognize this, this guy here, before the film came along, when he was taking the mick out of them, "the Life Aquatic," which
is very true to life, apart from the red berets. We don't wear red berets at sea? But he did. So this is Jacques Cousteau who developed an early
underwater breathing apparatus and also developed underwater cameras. And he was the guy that really
showed the world the ocean for the first time. And he took his underwater cameras down, he went off on his ship. He showed the world the
adventures they had underwater. He made this film that premiered
at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956. It won the Palme d'Or and he called it "The Silent World." And that drives me nuts
(audience laughing) because the ocean is not silent. And he must have known
that, he was a free diver, before he was a scuba dive... Scuba diving generates lots of bubbles. They're very noisy. But he was a free diver, he must have known that there is loads of sound in the ocean. And yet for dramatic effect, or perhaps because it
made his sound budget, you know, cheaper, he called this film "The Silent World." So that the same time
he introduced the world to the wonders underwater. He also did it this massive disservice by completely underplaying one of the most important
messengers in the ocean. And by the way, if you... So I read the book of this way back, somebody recommended it to me when I first started studying the ocean. And I didn't see the film
until I was writing the book and I thought I should watch it. My God, it's awful. I mean it's really interesting because they ride turtles,
they kill a whale, they chase fish, they damage reefs, they bomb things. I mean it's astonishing. The only good thing about it is that if you ever don't
feel humans can change, you know, things have moved on since 1956 in the way we treat the ocean. He was very much of his time and he did become slightly
more conservation minded after a while. So anyway, but the point
is that there are... So the book is written, the second half of it, in terms of messengers,
passengers and voyagers and the two messengers in the ocean, the big ones are sound and light. And the interesting thing about
them is that on land here, we completely take it for granted that light is the long-distance traveler. If we want to see the Moon, if we want to see the great sites, we use light because it travels a long way and it's not really affected
by the atmosphere very much. But we also take it for granted that if someone is having a
conversation in the next room, we probably can't hear them. You know, we live in
a little sound bubble, which is quite local. But in the ocean it's
the opposite way around. Light doesn't travel very far, it's not a good long-distance messenger. Sound is your long-distance
messenger in the ocean. And so one of the reasons we
don't appreciate the ocean is that we are looking, and actually we should be listening. And sound is really
important to sea creatures. And I'm just gonna show
you one example of this. Now, this was a great morning. Last summer, I went down into the basement of the Natural History Museum, which is always a good day out. And they genuinely have... You can see all the jars behind and they've got cupboards, and cupboards and cupboards just with jars, with handwritten labels. And they all complain
about Darwin's labels 'cause he had terrible handwriting. But I went to meet this guy Richard Sabin and he showed me this. And this is a strange
thing to find in a jar. It's whale earwax. (audience laughing) There's a few steps here. So first question, why do whales have earwax? So whales evolved from land mammals, land mammals that had
ears pretty much like hers with an inner ear, a middle
ear, and an outer ear. Now as soon as you go into
the water, two things change. If you are swimming,
having a sticky out bit, 'cause this is only
your outer ear out here, having a sticky out bit
causes a lot of drag that gets in the way. So evolution kind of smooth
that out quite quickly. But the other thing is that underwater, and this is true for us as well, underwater, it's much
more efficient to hear through the bones of your
skull, through your jaw. And the reason for that is that, so all of this, the faff, the reason our ears are so complicated is that they are shifting
sound from air into water. We actually hear in water, but it has to go through
a layer of air first. But if you're already in the water, you don't wanna go into air
and then back into water, it's easier just to go through
the bones of your skull and up into the sensing part of your ear. So basically whales can hear underwater, they hear through their jaws and they don't need that outer bit. So over evolutionary time, the outer bit just disappeared. And then because evolution
isn't particularly tidy, that the tube and the everything else just sort of stayed there. And if you go to the
Natural History Museum, now this is their big whale, life-size blue whale model. And if you look just behind its eye, we zoom in just behind its eye. You can see there's those kind of folds where it opens its mouth. And if we look at the back
of the fold just up there, there's a very tiny hole which
has now been sealed over. So in a modern world, it's just a dimple. And that's where its ear was. That's where the tube
comes to the surface. But because it's sealed
over, nothing can come out. But that doesn't stop whale, it doesn't stop the
whale producing earwax. So the earwax is kind
of produced at the ear and it just gets pushed
up the tube in layers and it accumulates over
the whale's lifetime in layers like tree rings, telling the story of a whale's life. And so this is the reason
that they store these samples. It's because they had layers in, they thought they might
be able to work out how old the whales are, but it's much more interesting than that. So the two museums got
together a few years ago, the Natural History Museum in London and the American Museum
of Natural History. And together they realized that because they had lots of earwax samples and because they were all dated, they knew the date the whales died and they could work out their age, they could line up earwax
samples going back 150 years. So they had a global record of
whales going back 150 years. And it's very rich data set. But what they looked at was cortisol, which is a stress hormone. And here is the graph. So we've got time along the
bottom here, 1870 down there, going all the way through to 2020. So the black line, that's the
global whale stress measure. So you could see it's
got peaks and troughs, on this side here, in the blue and the line underneath that is the whaling that was going on. That was the number of whales
that were being killed. And you can see it's not really a surprise that when there's lots
of whaling going on, the whales are all really stressed, right? They're running away
from things all the time, swimming away. So it tracks quite well, the peaks and the troughs are
all kind of in the same place because whaling makes whales stressed. And you can see that in the
global records from the earwax. But there's this exception
here in World War II and you can see that the humans
were busy killing each other instead of the whales. So you'd think the whales
would be having a nice time, but actually that stress takes
a very strong upward peak. And the explanation for this is that all the torpedoes,
and ships, and bombs, were generating an
enormous amount of noise. And it's the noise that was
stressing the whales out because sound is so important in the ocean that if you generate loads of noise that it drowns out the
long-distance communication. Animals are stressed 'cause they don't, you know, they can't operate as easily. And it's written in their ear wax that whales globally were stressed because of the sound pollution in the ocean at that time. So the the point about this is that... And that peak, that peak at the end there, that's what we're doing today. That's modern whale stress, of all the other things
we're doing to the ocean, ask me about that at the end. So the point is that sound is incredibly
important in the ocean, that calling it the silent world
just completely undervalues the most important messenger in the ocean. Okay, so next thing on the list of things the ocean is or isn't, the ocean isn't away. There's this sort of perception that there's this place
in the world called "away" and we can put things in away and they just sort of go away, right? And the ocean is not that place. It doesn't really exist, but it's definitely not the ocean. And I love this map actually, it's a topographical map of London. You've probably recognized, you can see the Thames, you can see the topography, the Thames drains 10% of
the land area of England. It's got an enormous catchment area and water is flowing down
the Thames and out to sea. And, you know, that has
had a few consequences. It's the reason London's here. But if you go back to 1855, and this is Michael
Faraday of this parish. This is a picture from the
Times of London in the 1850s. And the Thames was a mess. There were abattoirs and tanneries and, you know, all kinds of, you know, messy human
activities on the banks. There were... The flushing toilets
had just been invented. So that definitely didn't help. Basically, whatever waste London had, they shoved it in the Thames, and the tide, generally, the tide and the current
would take it out to sea. But if you keep doing that, obviously, you know,
there were kinda limits. And so Michael Faraday left here, safely away from the river, he went down towards the stink and he did this amazing thing. He tried dropping small white
pieces of paper in the water to see how disgusting the water was. And he discovered that as
soon as they went underwater, you couldn't see them at all. And he wrote this great thing, "Near the bridges the feculence
rolled up in clouds so dense "that they were visible at the surface. "The whole river was for
the time a real sewer." So basically, London, you know, turned the Thames into a sewer and it was a problem. And the bigger problem from
me was a very human one. They couldn't agree who was
going to pay for sorting it out. And so the politicians sat
in the houses of parliament, which is right next to the river, until in one year, the
year of the Great Stink. It was a very hot summer, there was very little river flow. The stink was so
overwhelming that, you know, they covered the curtains with things and they couldn't work
because it was just too awful. And then they finally decided
to sort the problem out and the solution that they came up with to get rid of what was in the Thames, this is the famous engineer, right? Joseph Bazalgette. And he built the Thames embankments, he built London's sewer system. And it is still the core of
London's sewer system today. And you can actually see, so it was an amazing engineering
project for its time. It took, sort of, 20
years, it was a huge thing. But if you walk along the
Victoria and Albert embankments, so here you can see, this is the sewer, they built a new boundary to the river. That's the tube, that's the district line over there. So he completely changed the... He sort of hemmed in the river, but it had these two sewers
that ran down either side. And the idea was that... And then he built this, like,
huge network of branch sewers that poured into the main sewers and then it all, sort of,
flowed downwards and out to sea. And this was the enormous deal at the time because once it started working, the levels of disease in
London dropped like a stone because all this sewage
was being taken away. And this, so the way it worked, it worked by gravity, right? So all those pipes were
sloping slightly downwards, but actually because London's quite flat, at the downstream end, they had to be 10 meters
below the level of the river. So if they wanted the tide to take everything collected
in the sewers away, they had to pump it back up
to the level of the river. And that required a huge pumping station. And this is it. These are the Crossness engines, this is called the Cathedral on the Marsh. And they built these beautiful buildings. So you can see they really... You know, everything
else in this sewer system was hidden underground. And the one place where it came
up to the surface was here, the Cathedral on the Marsh. And there's all this wrought iron, sort of these beautiful, and this has been restored
in the past 20 years. It's decorated with golden figs. It's hilarious. So anyway, but on the top of this, there were the four massive beam engines. It's basically also a museum of toilets if you're interested. There are four huge beam engines, steam engines that would
be pumping sewage up. And what is... I highly recommend going, actually, there's only specific times you can go, but there's this enormous hall with a beam engine on each, two on each side. But what is amazing about it is that on one side they've renovated
the engines, they're working, they've repainted them
in their original colors. It's really beautiful. And on the other side, they've absolutely left it as it was, just covered in rust and brown. And it's like walking through a film, like, you walk from one side to the other, it's an amazing place. Anyway, so they built the
Cathedral on the Marsh, this pumping station to... All the better to pump
the sewage into the Thames and out to sea. And of course it sort of
worked and it sort of didn't because they hadn't
actually solved the problem. They'd only moved it. And the thing about a tidal estuary is that sometimes the tide goes out and sometimes the tide comes back in. And so there was an
enormous problem downstream. And the story of what people did, you know, it took a long time, they were taking sewage out
of the mouth of the estuary in what were called Bovril
boats, for obvious reasons, for anyone who's over the age of 40. They were dumping raw
sewage out in the North Sea until, like, the 1990s. It took a long time. But the point about Bazalgette, the point about this
system, this sewage system, which did temporarily solve
London's health crisis, was that it was a linear system. We're gonna produce something over here, we're gonna wash it all downstream and it's just gonna go
away somewhere over there and it doesn't work
because there is no away it came back because the
whole thing is connected. So this was basically the story that the ocean brought London trade, knowledge, people, riches and what London gave to the
ocean was not nearly as nice. (audience members laughing) So how does the ocean
deal with this problem? So, you know, this is a very
simple food chain we've got, this is the ocean. We've got some phytoplankton
enough at the top there, those little sun harvesters,
very simplified way. They might get eaten by some zooplankton and the zooplankton might
get eaten by bigger things. There are nutrients in this system that are moving down the food chain. There's a little bit of
wastage along the way, quite a lot in some cases. But basically nutrients are being moved from one organism to another to another. And there's also poo involved here, the zooplankton poo sinks,
which helps things... You lose nutrients downwards. Things die and then they get recycled back into the water column. But the point, and then the best thing about this, in some places, there's
various ways of doing this, but in some places, so whales, where they eat this stuff is particularly in the Southern Ocean. There's a very simple set. The food chain in the
Southern Ocean is quite simple in a big picture way, in that you have
phytoplankton, you have krill, and then the whales eat the krill and whales are mammals, they've got lungs, similar principle to ours. So they need to come up
to the surface to breathe. And when they come up to
the surface to breathe, they also poo and their poo floats. And if you've never seen whale poo, well, this is quite a
constipated whales poo because normally whale poo
is quite a lot more liquid. But the thing about this
poo is that it's bright red and it's bright red
because it's full of iron. And iron is limited in the Southern Ocean. So the point is that just
in this very simple example, the lesson of this is
that what nature does is it recycles everything. That basically the solution to the planet, the solution to almost all problems is to make things out of poo. You start with the poo because then you've got
a never-ending supply to make everything else with, right? We start by thinking
about some raw material and then generate lots of waste and then we don't know what to do with it. What nature does is it starts with the poo and, you know, everything is recycled. So planet Earth basically has two rules. The energy comes in as sunlight, it gets radiated away as infrared. It's basically flowing
through all the time. And the stuff, the atoms, the atoms we've got on Earth
are the only atoms we've got. So the stuff goes round and round. So the point is, there's a contrast here between the way that
humans solve their problems and the way that natural systems deal with those same problems and that nature's doing better. All right, and just
briefly on the ocean life. So the dolphins are lovely. I'm also not against dolphins, but there's this thing that
we sort of look at the ocean and go, "Oh, it's empty. "There's nothing, you
know, nothing in there." Nonsense. It's just that we can't see it. So just some of the differences between life on land
and life and the ocean. So in terms of biomass, there is vastly more biomass on land. Units, don't worry about the units. But, you know, sort of,
hundreds of times more actual... If we were to pile it all up, there's more of it on land. But productivity, which is a measure of how much of the sun's energy is being captured by the system, photosynthesis, almost the same. So the ocean is living, there is a lot of living
going on in the ocean. And so a lot of it's
too small for us to see. These are often very tiny things. They're floating around. And the turnover time, you know, a tree on land might
live a couple of decades, things in the ocean, small things turn over
in a few days or weeks. So basically the ocean... Life in the ocean is generally very small. It's turning over very fast
and there's no storage. Most of a tree is not actually
doing anything biologically, it's just sitting there, it's storage and you don't really
get that in the ocean. So of the, you know, if you look at the amount
of biomass in the ocean, in all the different size categories, 60% of it is too small for
us to see with the naked eye. And so the life in the
ocean is kind of this web, it's through the engine, it's everywhere, inside the water. So it's not that the
dolphins don't matter, it's just that the dolphins
are the visible bits of an enormous structure, living structure underneath, enormous web. So ocean life's not about dolphins, but I have other rants. So this one, this is my... Ooh, this makes me cross. There is this phrase
that you may have heard. "We know more about the Moon or Mars "than we know about the deep ocean." And it drives me mad! (audience laughing) I don't think anyone should
ever say this ever again. It's completely wrong. Do not say it. If you catch someone
saying it, tell 'em off. It's awful. It's awful because it's wrong
in really damaging ways. And this is just the short version, right? It assumes that the only important outcome of discovery is a map. So it is true that the
surface of the Moon is mapped to a greater precision
than the whole, you know, than large parts of the ocean, right? That's where this came from originally. But it assumes that drawing a map is the only thing that matters. What discovery is all about is, you know, sailing off
somewhere, drawing your map, planting your flag, going
back home to your king, you know, and buggering off
with a pile of gold, right? That is not what discovery is all about. And there is more to life than maps. I love maps. But just thinking that mapping the ocean is the
only important thing to know misses a lot of the point. And just as a short, you know,
of some of the other things. First of all, the ocean's
got three dimensions. It's got this water,
it's got this anatomy, it's doing things, it's got life in it, which is also busy doing things. It's got an enormously varied geology. There's lots of different types of rocks. And then there's this thing, right? There's a class of
polychaete worms that live... There's three species of them, third one's just been discovered, and these are little worms, they live... So a sponge is kind of
barely alive, right? It's technically an animal, but it's mostly not very alive, but it's got lots of holes, and pores and things in it, right? So the worm lives with its head down in the bottom of the sponge
and it grows upwards, but as it grows it's tail branches. And not only does the tail branch, but the digestive tract branches. So basically it branches again, and again, and again, and again as it works its way up through the sponge. And basically after a while, what you've got is a sponge
with a thousand tiny anuses crawling about on the
surface, nosing around. And I am not making this up there are videos online. And it gets better because the worm is head down, like, built into the sponge in this way. But when it wants to reproduce, it's got a problem, right? It's not going dating from down there. So what happens is that
when the day comes, all the little anuses grow eyes and gonads and get rid of some of the digestive bits and then break away and
swim off to the surface to get on with the sex while the worm stays down in the thing and then the next little segment along becomes another little anus, right? Crawling about on the surface. Now you don't get that on the Moon. (audience laughing) (Helen laughing) So the point is that my
objection to this phrase is that it assumes that the Moon
and the ocean are comparable. It assumes that the deep sea is comparable to a dead rock, which is very nice, but it has not changed for 2 billion years and it's not doing anything now. It's very nice. I do not object to the Moon, I just think we shouldn't
compare it to the ocean. Rant over. (audience member speaking indistinctly) So as we have established
the ocean isn't featureless. So I just wanna finish
by giving you an example. So imagine that you are one
of the hunters of the ocean, a big tuna fish, and bluefin tuna are
astonishing creatures. They are sleek machines. They are incredibly muscular, they're warm blooded. They can... Amazingly efficient and agile. They can travel enormous
distances across the ocean. So if you are that kind of predator, you're strong enough and fast enough to go wherever you want, where do you go? Well, you navigate through
these features of the ocean. This is what biology is doing. And if we zoom into a particular
part of the ocean here and we map it in a particular way, which is sea surface height, don't worry too much about that. We can see it's got features, it's got... And here they're labeled in red and blue, depending on whether they're slightly above the average level or slightly below. The point is there's lots of features and we're off the Grand Banks here. So out in the ocean off the
north side of the Gulf Stream. And if you zoom in on these
and you go looking at them, what you see is that those features that are labeled red and blue
are little spinning islands. And some of them are spinning one way and some of them are
spinning the other way. They can be 50 to 100 kilometers across. They can last for months,
sometimes a couple of years. And they're drifting around. And the thing about
these little islands is that they're intact. They're spinning little islands of water, which are just sort of keeping themselves going like a little merry-go-round. And they're kind of
wandering off into areas. There's cold ones that
go into warmer water and warm ones that go into colder water depending on which way they're rotating. And so there are features in even... This is where the Gulf Stream is and they're called eddies. So anticyclonic or cyclonic eddies. And the way that they form is basically, if you imagine you've
got cold water up above and warmer water down
below, you've got a current, this is the Gulf Stream
that's coming across and it starts to wobble,
it becomes unstable. So you start with a little wobble and then just like oxbow lakes in rivers, you know, that wobble can
turn into a bigger wobble. And if you keep wobbling for long enough, you can spin off a ring that's of... It's the type of water
that was on the top side, but it's now spinning
around off on its way in the bottom side. So the thing is that the Gulf Stream is budding off these features. And it's not just that the
ocean is creating the features, it's that biology is
navigating through them to find what it needs. So things in the ocean have preferences. Bluefin tuna like the warm ones
that are rotating that way, they go hunting there,
that's where the cod are. Yellowfin and bigeye tuna, preferentially hunt in the cold ones that go in the other way. And the swordfish hang about just outside. So these are all big ocean predators that can choose where they go. And they are navigating through
the ocean to find features because the physical
structure of the ocean dictates where the biology is. And then hunters will go
hunting in specific places. So the point here is that the physics and the biology of the
ocean are tied together. It might look to a fishermen as though they just
sail out across the sea and sometimes there are fish
and sometimes there aren't. But what they're navigating across are these features driven by the ocean that are providing an environment that either enhances life or it doesn't. So this just... You know, imagine now
when you look at this, I mean the one thing that
bugs me about this globe is that it's just blue, right? It does look like a big blue pond that's just not got
anything interesting in it, but actually it's full of features. They're all water. They're all just water and more water. But it's got distinctive features. And life in the ocean
is navigating through it to find the places where the
resources that they need are. So how to think about the ocean. So some of you may have
heard me say this before. I think that the ocean has three... I think that we have three
life-support systems, each one of us. We've got our own body, we've got planet Earth, our
planetary life-support system, and we've got our infrastructure, the infrastructure of our civilization, the roads and water, you know, pipes and electricity supplies, all of that infrastructure that is a life-support system for us. And when it comes to our
planetary life-support system, the ocean, the physicality of the ocean is not just what makes
life on Earth possible, but it structures everything else. If you came from outer space
and you looked at our planet, you would look at the ocean
before you looked at the land because that's the engine
that's driving everything. It's influenced our
history and our culture. It's built into what we do. And so when it comes to
this life-support system, the ocean is the beating heart of our planetary life-support system. And it's also part of our identity as citizens of this ocean planet. And I think the reason that
this is a particularly good time to talk about this is that NASA is about to go back to the Moon. So the Artemis missions are now preparing to take humans far enough away, once again for the first time in 50 years, to see the blue disc of
our planet, to look at us, to look at our identity as
citizens of this planet. And this time we have to look at that and we have to really see the message that we're broadcasting to
the rest of the universe. And that message, which is us, which is part of us, which
is part of our identity, is very, very simple, it is "We are Ocean." Thank you. (audience applauding) - [Speaker] Fantastic.
