Transcript: Into the Abyss

Sandor Mulsow  0:03  

We cannot get depressed. We cannot get down. We have to jump against the wall. And if I go back, I stand, I stand up, and I jump again against the ball. And we will keep jumping against the wall all the time that is necessary until the wall is down. And that is done by the collaboration and the multilateral Atlas of everybody in this planet. This is our heritage. This is our heritage. Without this ocean, we do not exist. So we cannot destroy the ocean. We already done horrible things to land. We have done already horrible things to the ocean with the contamination of plastic, nano, micro plastic. It’s everywhere, and now we want to take away the bottom of the sea to distress the only, and probably the only source of genetic bank that if any happen on the surface, right, hopefully it doesn’t, but if they happen, it will be able to colonise again, but It will destroy that’s it.

Hannah Stitfall  1:21  

This is oceans life underwater, a series exploring our oceans and the fascinating life within them. I’m Hannah stitful. I’m a zoologist, wildlife filmmaker and broadcaster, and I’m bringing you along as I learn everything I can about our watery planet in this episode, we’re going into the abyss far, far below sea level.

Dr Diva Amon  1:47  

The colour of the water. It’s like this, like crystal clear cobalt blue that just extends as far as the eye can see down.

Dr Laura  1:55  

I have seen that when we come together and we demand change, and we don’t accept the business as usual and the political realities and the inertia that is that is inherent in there. We have the power to change things.

Hannah Stitfall  2:11  

Despite us learning more about the Earth’s waters every day, over 80% of the ocean remains Uncharted. There’s thought to be around 2 million species living in our oceans, but so far, we’ve only discovered about 250,000 of these, thus leaving a massive 1.7 5 million left to be discovered. But what makes marine life, especially in the deep sea, so mysterious, let’s find out this is oceans life underwater.

I’m hoping that my first guest can help illuminate some of the secrets that lie beneath the surface. Diva Amon is joining me from the Caribbean, so I’m pretty jealous on this cold, rainy day in London, she’s a marine biologist who specialises in the little known habitats and animals the deep ocean and how our actions on land are impacting species in the deep so hello, diva. How are you? Hi, Hannah. Thank you so much for having me today. Thank you for coming on for our listeners. Could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit more about what you do.

Dr Diva Amon  3:23  

My name is Diva Amon, and I’m a Caribbean marine biologist. I’m a marine biologist that works both there as well as globally, and I sit at this really weird intersection, weird, wonderful, I don’t know whatever adjective you want to use, where I work on research, and then taking that to policy, and then also working on communicating that to a broader group of humankind and and really, a lot of my work is grounded in this deep desire to see greater stewardship of the ocean, but especially the deep ocean.

Unknown Speaker  3:53  

So busy, then you’re very busy.

Dr Diva Amon  3:57  

Yes, which I love, but also yes.

Hannah Stitfall  4:01  

So can you describe the deep ocean in your own words?

Dr Diva Amon  4:06  

Gosh, where do I begin? I mean, the deep sea is an incredible place. It is the largest ecosystem on the planet, provides about more than 95% of all the habitable space on Earth. So it’s really, really important, and it’s a place that really we are just discovering, along with all of the life within it. It is this enormous reservoir of biodiversity. There are hundreds of 1000s of species, most of which have not yet been discovered. And those species really just live in these in this range of incredible ecosystems, everything from mountain ranges at the bottom of the ocean to lakes to planes to hydrothermal vents, these amazing ecosystems that that gush super hot fluid and power those communities as a result, and it’s really inhospitable to us, which is one of the most things, things I find. Most fascinating. So we are crushing pressures, near freezing temperatures, and there’s absolutely no sunlight. So it really isn’t a place that you and I would be thriving. It’s not very no mistake, No, exactly, the life down there are absolutely thriving, which is totally amazing. There’s a lot of things around the deep ocean that make it really special, the fact that it again is just this place that we’re just discovering, the fact that is home to all of this life, but it’s so much more than that. You know, it is this place that, as we are studying it, is really breaking paradigms that have scientific paradigms that have been there for a very, very long time. It’s proving that life can exist in places we never thought possible. It’s proving that there are functions that we never thought on processes that we never thought possible. And it’s not just that fascinating aspect, but it’s also that this place is incredibly important because of its enormous size, it means that the life there and the processes that happen there are really, really critical for ecosystem services that keep the planet habitable and that essentially keep us and all life alive. And so that might be something like climate regulation. We know the deep sea sequesters carbon and absorbs heat. We know that life in the deep ocean supports fisheries the billions of people around the world rely on as their primary protein. We know that this is a place of cultural significance for many, whether it is inspiring like movies or books, or whether it is a place of spiritual significance, like for Native Hawaiians or many other communities around the world that believe this is part of their origin story or part of their final resting place. So really, it means so much to so many different people, and I think as more and more of humankind gets the opportunity to engage with it, they will also find that it finds a special place in their heart.

Hannah Stitfall  6:58  

And do you remember your first expedition down?

Dr Diva Amon  7:03  

It’s gonna, it’s gonna seem like an eternity ago. It was in 2020, 10. It’s not

Unknown Speaker  7:09  

that long. I mean, sure.

Dr Diva Amon  7:12  

And interestingly, my first expedition down was in between my masters and my PhD. And what we were doing today is we were looking for the world’s deepest hydrothermal vents. And so hydrothermal vents are these incredible ecosystems only found Well, mostly found in the deep ocean, and they have these sort of chimney like structures where super hot, chemical, rich fluid gushes out of them, and that those chemicals in the fluid, then are used by animals living at this ecosystem to essentially create food, so by a process called chemosynthesis, which is very different to photosynthesis, which is what all life in the shallows and on land tends to use. And so we went there, and we were looking for these hydrothermal vents. And I mean, after a few weeks at sea, we discovered, we found them, and they were close to five kilometres depth. And it was incredible itself, just to see this like super black, what looks like, almost like very, very thick smoke gushing out of the sea floor. But what was even better was the fact that these animals living at these hydrothermal vents. Nearly all of them were completely new to science, so no one had ever seen them before. Wow. It was, you know, 1000s of shrimp coating these chimneys. Anemones that eat the shrimp. We now know fish. It just, it really was absolutely incredible to be part of it. And you know, after that, it had that expedition just was so pivotal to my career, and it certainly has a very special place in my heart as a result.

Hannah Stitfall  8:50  

And can you describe, for the listeners, that feeling when you’re standing on the boat and not knowing how far the sea goes below you? How does it feel?

Dr Diva Amon  9:03  

I mean, normally when that happens, it’s because we are either out at sea on an expedition or heading out to sea, and so usually there’s a real feeling of excitement, like, what are we going to find? What questions are we going to answer on this expedition? But one of the most wonderful things for me when you’re out at sea is the colour of the water. You probably know what I’m talking about. It’s like this, like cobalt blue, crystal clear cobalt blue that just extends as far as the eye can see down and again, I think it is that, like unknown that is just so captivating, like what actually is down there, you know, 1000s of metres below us, and it’s a question that for most of the world we can’t answer yet.

Hannah Stitfall  9:47  

And what role does the deep sea play in maintaining life on earth?

Dr Diva Amon  9:53  

Because of the size of the deep ocean, it is our largest ecosystem by far, covers the majority. Sea Of The Planet provides more than 95% of all the habitable space, and that enormous size, combined with all the life that lives with it, is responsible for these functions and processes that keep the planet healthy and habitable. And so that might be something like climate regulation. We know the deep sea is a critic, is absolutely critical for sequestering carbon and also absorbing heat. And without a functioning deep ocean, actually, that we would our planet would not be the temperature that it is, which is especially important now, right? And we also know that a lot of deep sea life is linked to fisheries that billions of people around the world rely on for their primary source of protein. We know that it plays a really important role in detoxification. There are all of these, like, enormous processes that are really important for habitability. But again, there’s like, there’s also this importance to people as well, not just for the ways we use it, but also for the ways we engage with it, from a cultural and spiritual perspective as well.

Hannah Stitfall  11:08  

Can you tell us a little bit about deep sea mining and the threats to the health of our oceans? Yeah.

Dr Diva Amon  11:15  

So currently, and for the last few decades, there has been this threat, which seems to be gathering pace. There have been reserves minerals found in the deep ocean that have minerals that are currently being sought after for a number of reasons. So things like cobalt, copper, nickel, manganese and so on. And as with humans, you know, if there’s money to be made, I think people are interested. And so there has been this accelerating movement to get this industry going. But there’s a lot of reasons that this is alarming. One is that is the environmental potential impacts of this industry. The scale on which this activity is being proposed is enormous. Hannah, like there have been in international waters where this is, which is what I’m going to focus on, where most of this conversation is happening. There have been 31 contract areas leased for exploration, right? So that’s like a precursor to mining, and they’re leased by a body called the International Seabed Authority, which is affiliated with the United Nations. Those areas, each of them is about the size of Sri Lanka, right? So not inconsequential. So when you add up all of them, it’s, it’s over a million square kilometres of sea floor that have been licenced off. And we know that the ocean is, of course, not two dimensional, right? The ocean is three dimensional. And so this mining process is what it currently looks like. It hasn’t happened yet, but what projections currently are is that there’s going to be multiple vehicles that move along the sea floor, grinding up the sea floor, which is where the minerals are. They are often part of the sea floor and part of the habitat that animals live on, right? So they’re going to be grinding up the sea floor to remove as much of the minerals as possible. During that process, they’ll be animals, of course, that will be caught up in that and will die. And then the minerals are going to be pumped up to the surface of the water, where a ship will be. And on the ship, the minerals will be separated from wastewater, sediment that might be in the wastewater, some of the metals that would have broken off during the harvesting process, and then all of that waste is going to be pumped back into the ocean. So not only is there going to be habitat loss and biodiversity loss on the deep sea floor, but because of that grinding and because of that waste being pumped back in, there’s going to be the creation of these plumes, like kind of like dust storms, if you will. And so there’ll be one at the sea floor from the mining process, and there’ll be one at a yet to be determined depth in the ocean right now, there’s no regulations on this. So it could be at the sea surface, it could be in the mesoplogic, it could be right down at the deep sea floor. We don’t know. And in addition to that, there’s also going to be enormous noise and light pollution on scale that has never been seen in the ocean in human history. And again, it’s going back to the scales, right? This is an enormous part of the ocean we’re talking about, and that two dimensional footprint is going to be actually three dimensional because of the plumes. So we’re talking about swaths of the ocean being impacted doing that something of that scale of environmental impact would be problematic enough, in my opinion, but it is that we just don’t have a lot of scientific understanding to be able to manage and mitigate these impacts. There really is so much that we don’t know and that lends itself to the. Fact that we don’t know how this these impacts from mining might also impact ecosystem services that we rely on.

Hannah Stitfall  15:07  

And David, what are we mining these materials for?

Dr Diva Amon  15:11  

The narrative that a lot of the mining companies use that are interested in doing this are they say that it’s for to help us with the climate crisis tackle to help us transition to a more green economy. And that’s because, more recently, our batteries have had things like cobalt and nickel in them, and that’s what many of these mineral these mineral resources down in deep sea have. However, there is a lot to push back on from that perspective. The first is that many batteries. Battery innovation has grown leaps and bounds in the last 10 years, and now we’re moving towards lithium ion batteries. There’s and others that do not there’s an active transition away from using these minerals because of supply chain issues. Right then we know that our ocean is the greatest ally we have against climate crisis, and to potentially open up this industry that would have enormous impact, really does seem very misguided, to essentially try to protect something else. It’s almost like to try to stem climate change. It’s almost like like mining the deep ocean to solve the climate crisis is like smoking to lower your stress, right? And it just again, it seems very myopic and and I think that’s because what a lot of this comes down to is that people want to make money, and one of the main companies pushing this industry forward that is absolutely responsible for this acceleration we’ve seen in the timeline, yeah, there they are absolutely out to make money, and they want to see this industry happen as quickly as possible. So in again, in the absence of like, checks and balances and good management, etc, etc, making sure that it is an equitable industry, all of these things again. So there’s just, there really is a lot to me concerned about it just would be a travesty, I think if it happened, especially on the scale it’s being proposed on.

Hannah Stitfall  17:11  

So if deep sea mining does go ahead, it will bear the costs.

Dr Diva Amon  17:15  

That is hard to answer specifically, but I suspect, and this is my opinion, what we’re going to see is, like many environmental crises, like the climate crisis we’re experiencing now and the oil and gas industry, those who stand to benefit are going to be few and far between, and they will largely be based in global North countries, and those who stand to bear The costs are those who have the least say in these negotiations, and that is the world’s most ocean dependent people, indigenous peoples and local communities and future generations. Also, it’s so much of the risk comes down to the environmental and social impacts, things like fisheries, culture, tourism, right? And and a lot of that could be most impacted in the global south for people who are most dependent on the environment. That is also concerning. And then also the fact that estimates right now of what the benefits will actually be, the monetary benefits are actually they’re saying that they’re going to be minuscule. So it’s not even worth starting this industry for such a small pittance of money. So again, there are a lot of unknowns around this, but it certainly doesn’t look like it’s going to end well for the people who need the ocean and the planet the most.

Hannah Stitfall  18:36  

And what gives you hope when it comes to protecting the deep sea.

Dr Diva Amon  18:41  

Oh, you know, I think there are two things. The first is that there are precedent. There’s precedent. There’s, I think probably one of the most famous moratoriums to happen globally was the one on whaling in, I think it was the 80s. And what we saw happen there was that the International Whaling Commission, its mission was literally to manage International Whaling, right? And then they declared a moratorium, 36 years after its formation, and since then, it’s refocused its efforts on science and also preserving whale stocks, right? And so I think that there’s the potential, because there’s that international precedent. You know, humanity saw that whaling was inherently unsustainable and was result driving many, many species to extinction. That precedent can then be used here with the International Seabed Authority. Once we have more information, we know that it’s highly likely that mining will result in species extinctions will have bigger knock on effects, will result in enormous damage to the ocean and potentially the planet and its functioning. And so we need to pause that. And can we focus the International Seabed Authority on conducting science of the deep ocean, which is desperately needed in the future? That’s number one, precedent and number two. So I’d have to say is really to see the growing awareness and action across all stakeholder groups again, since June 2022, we have had 32 countries come forward asking for a moratorium. We have had or pause. We have had nearly 1000 scientists and policy experts come forward. We have had indigenous peoples from around the world. We have had celebrities. David Attenborough has called for it. The Aquaman, Jason Momoa has called for it, right? Lucas Bravo from what is the show, Emily in Paris, right? Like there have been. There have been so many people that have united their voices and companies right, companies showing corporate responsibility in the absence of responsibility being shown by the international civil authority. And so seeing all of these groups coming together and uniting in just two years to stand up for the deep ocean is just incredible. It is again one of our closest ecosystems to pristine and I feel like a lot of people really want to try to leave it that way, and that’s a really humbling thing. And I think if more people get the opportunity to engage with the deep ocean, that will will only increase and increase and increase.

Hannah Stitfall  21:15  

Thank you so much for talking to us today. Honestly, it’s been great. Thank you, Diva.

Dr Diva Amon  21:21  

Thank you so much, Hannah. You know, just as you can probably tell, any opportunities to talk about the deep sea, and I’m like, super happy to do it, but no, it’s really, it is an incredible place. And thank you for letting me share today. Thank you.

Thank you so much, diva for taking the time to speak to us. We talked a lot about deep sea mining in that chat, which you’re going to hear a bit more about in the next few episodes. It’s one of the biggest threats the ocean currently faces, but it’s alarming how few people actually know about it. We’ll be continuing our deep dive with scientist Andrew Sweetman, next he was the scientist who discovered that oxygen is actually being created in the deep sea.

Andrew Sweetman  22:08  

My name is Andrew Sweetman. I’m a professor in seafloor ecology and biogeochemistry at the Scottish association for marine science. The biggest moment of my career is a difficult one. There are a few, but I think the most recent one has been the discovery of oxygen being produced at the sea floor in complete darkness. I first discovered dark oxygen production, or what we put now refer to as dop, in October of 2013 so my research involves sending instruments down to the sea floor and enclosing a section of sea floor off and measuring the transfer of oxygen across the sediment water interface, across the across the sea floor water interface. And because of the depths that we’re working at, there between four and five kilometres, we only find oxygen consumption. So the animals and the microbes, as they move around and reproduce and feed, they consume oxygen, and that oxygen will be shown as a decrease in oxygen concentration through time. And from that, we can derive a metabolic rate, the amount of energy being consumed, the amount of oxygen being consumed, the amount of carbon being cycled at a depth of four to five kilometres. There is no sunlight, so there should be no photosynthesis, which, if you remember back to high school, is what produces what we have been taught produces oxygen for us to live. But at four to 5000 metres, there isn’t any photosynthesis occurring yet. When we put our instruments down at the sea floor, instead of seeing this linear decrease in oxygen concentration through time, the oxygen was going up and the instrument would come up to the surface after being on the bottom for 36 to 48 hours, and I would see all these bubbles in these syringes which were collecting water from these experiments at sea floor. And they shouldn’t have been there. And I was scratching my head for most of that expedition. So the next expedition, we went out, we took new oxygen sensors. We put the instrument down, the instrument came up, and the oxygen was going up so and I was talking to a colleague, post colleague of mine, Professor Craig Smith, from the University of Hawaii, and we were both scratching our heads, why is this happening? And we were checking our instruments to see if there was any bubbles that we were trapping, but the mathematics of the diffusion rate didn’t make sense. So we came back from that cruise. I sent the sensors back to the manufacturer. I said, Can you please check these and you haven’t crossed the wire? So instead of the sensors measuring a decrease, they show an increase. And they sent them back to me and said, No, no, they’re fine. They’re fine. Don’t worry, we’re calibrating them again. They’re working fine. I would go out to see the next time, and the same thing would happen. And this happened up until about 2021 and then by this point, I lost faith in these oxygen sensors, so I decided to take a new method to measure oxygen consumption, and that is a Winkler titration method. So it works on a completely different principle to the senses. So then all of a sudden, I realised we got two methods here now that are showing the same thing. And you know, it was like, my god, I’ve been seeing this for eight and a half, nine years, and I’ve just been ignoring every time there’s something, there’s something going on here. And yeah, and that’s how it that’s how it started in the summer of 2021, in terms of whether ecosystems are relying on this oxygen. We don’t know if that’s the case, the you must remember that the sea floor in the Clarion clip in zone, it’s such an oxygenated habitat anyway, that if you were to take the nodules out, there would still be oxygen for these environments to exist. So it’s possible that with deep sea mining, it doesn’t have that much of an effect ecologically on the oxygen concentrations at the sea floor. Now that’s not to say that their removal will not alter the ecosystem, because there’s been lots of studies that have shown that when you remove these nodules that’s hard substrate habitat, it can lead to significant changes in biodiversity and ecosystem function, but in terms of the removal of the nodules and the impact on the oxygen budget in in the environment, I’m not so sure it has that big of an effect. The other thing that is important to realise is that we don’t know if the process happens naturally or if it’s something that we are essentially turning on, switching on when our instrument comes down to the sea floor. So we need to do further experiments to see if this process is continuous in nature, or it’s episodic in nature, or it just doesn’t happen naturally. It can happen, but we’re essentially turning it on by our instrument coming down and disturbing the sea floor in some way. So there’s lots of lots of questions that we need to answer before we can even start to understand what the impacts of mining might be.

Hannah Stitfall  27:44  

We’re going to take a quick break, and I’d love if you could spend it. Following us over on Tiktok and Instagram, you can find us at oceans pod. This podcast doesn’t just explore our blue planet’s breathtaking beauty, but also exposes the dangers that threatens it to find out more about Greenpeace’s work to protect the oceans and how you can support go to greenpeace.org forward slash oceans.

Sandor mulso is a Chilean marine geologist and environmental scientist. He has also served as Director of the Office of Environmental Management at the International Seabed Authority, the UN’s regulatory body for deep sea mining. He is now a full time campaigner and activist speaking out about the dangers of deep sea mining. Sandor. Hello. Welcome to the podcast. Where are you joining us from today?

Sandor Mulsow  28:46  

I am joining you from a city in the coastal zone of Chile. It’s called Vina del Mar. It’s like 100 kilometre from Santiago towards the west, and I am still at night, still very early here. Looking forward to chat with you guys

Hannah Stitfall  29:03  

so quickly for our listeners, can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your work?

Sandor Mulsow  29:11  

Yes, my name is Andrew Musso. I am a marine geologist. I’ve been working all my life on the oceans and most of the time in the coastal zone, but also in the deep sea. And my my trade as a my geologist is a radio chemist, so I know I work with nuclear physics and using the radioactivity and elements of radioactivity in nature to answer problems for peace, not to create bombs or that kind of stuff. And I have been working since everywhere, actually, in Canada, United States, most of the Maghreb region in Africa, in Monaco and Norway, and lately, and finally, in Chile, where I landed here in. 2004 and since then, I’ve been very much concerned about the deep ocean, particularly in that area of the world where no jurisdiction or legal governance exists, and those are the international waters.

Hannah Stitfall  30:17  

And since you’ve been studying the deep sea, I mean how many discoveries have been made?

Sandor Mulsow  30:24  

Well, not particularly on my side, but in many discoveries. And actually, if the listener understand that every time, when we take a sample from the deep sea, and the deep sea define of water depth below 200 metres, so away from the continental shelf, every time we take a sample of sediments, we found a new species. So that’s that’s tremendous, tremendously relevant for worldwide, because it means that we have not sampled all of the ocean, because every time we go out and we take a sample, we collect and we get a new species, this is tremendous. And remember, this is a place which is very dark, very cold and very deep. We cannot go without a special equipment, like a submarine, and even a very specific kind of submarine to go to those depths. So most of the time we just send samples to samplers to get samples. So we get a kind of distorted reality of the deep sea. But if even with those kind of strategic sampling, we get all these astonishing discoveries, this is amazing just to know that the only thing that separates us from all the other planets with life is the ocean. So that’s something that we need to cherish for the future generation, and that’s my goal right now in my my new the challenge to keep working on this.

Hannah Stitfall  31:49  

I always think that people that study the deep sea and scientists that go down there, you know, you are almost the world’s last explorers. You know, we’ve, we’ve done all of the top side, but down there, we still really don’t know what, what is there. And it must be a fascinating field to work in.

Sandor Mulsow  32:09  

Yes, it is not, not only that, but even you know when, when, when you, most of the people see Google Earth, you know, and you can rotate it in your screen, and you see all the bottom of the sea, and the chip, actually there is more than 40 or 50% of that port of the ocean that they have never been sampled. Wow, so we don’t even know. So some of them are just approximation of how they look like. But it’s not somebody will go with the boat and with the with the special equipment, you know, solar and seismic equipment, to to measure exactly where the depth and how many sea mounts are. There wasn’t a study long time ago where the calculated the estimated sea mounts in the North West Pacific and the real sea mount that existed. And it was completely different story. So there are places where we have new sea mount that were never seen. They not even recorded. So we have a lot of things to do. I hope young people are listening this, and this is the way that we should go. I said you should study marine geology. You should become a national refer. We need more people with new skills, smart people, to keep working on this.

Hannah Stitfall  33:13  

So do you remember the first time you heard about deep sea mining? Tell us about that moment?

Sandor Mulsow  33:19  

Yeah, that moment was in, I remember very clearly. It was in 2006 2007 in I was here in the committee of Chile, of the oceanographic committee, or National Oceanographic committee, and we received an invitation from something that I didn’t know even know at that time, called the International CBS authority that if anybody from this organisation would like to come and see one of the session in Kingston. So we in the committee. We decided, so, you know, I’m not going. Nobody knew about this thing. And I said, Okay, I will ask my university if they, if they can sponsor me, and I will go. So my university sponsored me, and I went, and I didn’t realise this, what is this thing? You know, there’s a bunch of 70 countries meeting here deciding what to do with the deep sea and deep sea mining and the minerals, which is the common heritage of humankind. And nobody knows. I didn’t know. So I was panic. And I remember I talked to the Chilean ambassador at that time who was representative of this meeting. And the guy said to where, of course, they were from Chile. So we spoke Spanish, and I said, How are you doing? You know, I’m Sando from Chile. I came here and her servant. So you guys asked me, said, Do you have your CV here? Yes, I do have my CV. I came, I handed my CV, and I became immediately member of the legal and technical commission, and immediately became the president of the legal and technical commission. So then I started realising, on on site, working 24/7 for at least two weeks at that time, what was going on at that time? There were very few contracts. There were only seven contracts, and there were. Ending reports and how it was like something that it was going on for, for a decade, and nobody in the world knew. I said, No, this cannot be so I stick to them. And they never let the night on. The activities on the deep sea that’s

Hannah Stitfall  35:14  

quite wild, that talks about deep sea mining has been going on, yeah, but

Sandor Mulsow  35:19  

it you need to remember that at the beginning a there were few countries, like six countries, that they have some sort of they were looking for these minerals in the Clarion clipper tonnes, but there was no regulation. And in 2001 that was the first time that they sat down in the international authority said, You know what? We need to regulate this thing. So in all those six countries, they provide the international debate authority with the information that they have for many years. This is starting in the 70s, right? And for many years, to the international debate authority. And then they became like a contractor. They gave them a licence, but they didn’t pay, right? But what they did it was to provide the information of the area that they are explore. They did explore for a few for developing nation, and that that was the way that this thing was going to be happening. So in 2001 this started. So I knew about the deep sea mining four years later. So nothing what? Nothing really happened at that time. There were only seven contracts. But this is escalated very fast. Today. We have 31 contracts already for exploration, with the view of exploitation, of deep sea mining everywhere in every single ocean. So everywhere right now, the ocean has been like a divided and I said, privatise. This is the common energy of humankind. How can we can privatise this one without telling or without thinking that what we are going to live to the new generations? This is unthinkable

Hannah Stitfall  36:50  

now, sandal, we need something from you, and I want you, if you can, to describe the deep sea for us

Sandor Mulsow  37:01  

this distorted view as many things in science, but we need to see no and most of the time when we go to the deep sea, we bring light. Otherwise we don’t see anything, right? And the only thing that we could we could see without light is some if we do some certain movements in the water, we will see flashes which are bioluminescent only. That’s the only light that you see on the bottom of the sea. It is dark, no light whatsoever. Very cold, four Celsius, and we cannot go because the pressure is like 600 atmosphere. So it’s not possible to go, but it is the most important habitat on this planet. The other thing everything is slow. Things move slowly. Current are very slow. So the growth of the animal is low. So if you destroy or disturb this one, it takes ages to recover, and we know that, for example, there are at least 1919, one nine experiments done by scientists where we went down on the bottom of the sea, and we scratch with the metal things, maybe one metre, two metre in width, to really provoke destruction of the surface of the ocean and then go back to the same places to study the recovery after 37 years, no recovery, no recovery, no not even a little animal go inside of those tracks. So that just tells you how slow the things are. And when we talk about deep sea mining, that’s why I’m so eager to fight for this. Every single mine for deep sea mining is going to be 3000 square kilometres. 3000 square kilometres. Let’s put it in mind. So in perspective, I’m from Chile. Here we are a miner country. 300 years of mining, the biggest open pit copper mine is chuquicamata, the biggest. You can see it from the satellite. And that one is only 15 one, five square kilometre. Every single mine in the deep sea is going to be 200 times. Wow. And I don’t need to do any scientific study to tell you and to tell everybody that the ecological impact is imminent and irrevocable, irreversible. So the only way to be a good citizen of the war is to defend the deep sea for the future generations. It gives us a lot of things too, and things that they are not obscure, for example, I’ve been exploring, and if I see bioluminescence, just, just close your eyes and imagine. How does it work? How does, for example, a giant squid show himself to another giant squid to mate in this vast area of the deep sea Where is no. Light. So I did a an choreographer and produced a ballet on that, a ballet, yeah, so, so it’s called Ballet of the deep. I’m going to, I already performed one piece in a theatre in my city to the young people, and I’m going to do it now in Copiapo is north of where the miners are. And then in Santiago. And I hope to bring the same idea to do it in Jamaica in July for the international civil authority annual assembly. Still that in czechos, little money and in money, but is to show that not only darkness, right, and we associate darkness with scare. You know, when you are a kid and the lights off in Europe and made something on the under the bed, right? But actually not, if you, if you think, if you think that the deep sea provide me with intangible benefits, cultural benefits, that’s what we need to think. We need to preserve the deep sea so other people, young people, not all, and both, like me, they can also get impressed and create and bring to the everyday table at lunch, breakfast, dinner, the deep sea.

Hannah Stitfall  41:19  

How do you stay hopeful when talking about such scary developments every single day?

Sandor Mulsow  41:26  

Boy, this is a tough question.

Doing the ballet? No, I’m not doing not only doing the ballet, I’m painting the deep sea. I’m painting something that I have a machine, which is called SPI goes to the bottom of the sea, penetrate the sediment floor, the sediment, water interface, and take a picture. So that picture now I look at it, I model the picture, I look at the picture, the picture’s information, and then I look at it like this, and I create a profile of the bottom of the ocean. And I’m painting this one, of course, in with bioluminescence and all darkness. And so that’s that’s keep me going. You know, this is the deep sea. The deep sea is telling me to do this. I am being inspired for something that I cannot go and swim around. I cannot go bear to see. So I’m doing that. And but also, I am a Joining Forces, collaborating with the music composer, and we compose the first movement of a symphony of the deep, and we are preparing the second one.

It is depressing. Yes, it is depressing. But no, they can take the freedom, the money wherever these entrepreneurs, but not the creativity of human and we have a a poet here in Chile, Violetta para and she died, and in one of her, if I hope I will, I quote her properly, but he said, at some point, she, she, she’s thankful to to the to the life. They gave them the eyes, they give it the mouth, they give it the ears and and and the eyes to see how far the bad and the good are. I consider myself not too good, but close to the good ones. And so if I if those good gun lose the pushing, the energy to keep fighting, then we are done.

Hannah Stitfall  43:40  

And lastly, what is your favourite thing about the deep sea? The

Sandor Mulsow  43:46  

favourite thing is that I check every single journal, and every time I see something, for example, you know the discovery of this, the manganese nodule, they are doing electrolysis and producing oxygen. That’s amazing. So every time I I think I read maybe 1020 papers a day only on deep sea mining. On deep sea, no mining deep sea, of course, I’m putting an eye on deep sea mining. I’m an editor for front I work as a reviewer for Frontiers in Science. So most of this information came to me before they are published. And I see every time there is novelty, everything is novel coming from the deep sea, everything is novel and why we want to destroy it. If you think one thing that strike me, of some human people, do you know, how many tonnes of gold do we have, right extracted, like 1000 tonne. And you know where that goal is. It’s a store in banks. Why do we take gold to store it and we destroy the land to stockpile it? This doesn’t make any sense. This is not thinkable. This is not human. This is only greed. And right now, deep sea mining the only motivation that. Ha, it’s greed, greed of few, and we need to stop it. Of course, I need to keep fighting. I will never stop fighting.

Hannah Stitfall  45:07  

Well, sandal, thank you so much for talking to us today. I’ve just got one quick question for you. Do you think your ballet is going to be coming to London at any point because I would like to see it, or

Sandor Mulsow  45:19  

I would love to. I would love to. And if you, if you know anybody, that you can help, help me to contact any ballet company, and all the, all the music is original. Everything’s original, fabulous.

Hannah Stitfall  45:31  

I mean, I mean, ballet is not particularly my remit, but I will, I will do some research for you and let you know. Okay, but thank you so much. It’s been lovely talking to you. Thank you so much.

Sandor Mulsow  45:43  

And thank you to you guys, and please keep fighting and don’t put your hand downs and we are going to win this. We will, pretty sure thank you.

Hannah Stitfall  45:58  

Last year, I had the incredible opportunity to travel to Svalbard, an archipelago located halfway between the north coast of Norway and the North Pole. I joined the Greenpeace team aboard the Arctic Sunrise as it set sail on a journey across the ocean. During my time there, I had the privilege of speaking with the crew and learning about the groundbreaking work they’re doing to protect this fragile region. This next story comes from that very ship, Laura Mella Greenpeace’s Nordic polar advisor, and the global project lead for their oceans campaign, was one of the first people I spoke to on board. She told me about the crucial work that Greenpeace’s ships are doing to help protect the Arctic and its future.

Dr Laura  46:48  

I have a very, very vivid memory of standing on the bridge wing and looking outside, and there was this incredible soft light and a moon ball above the eyes closed, and I felt this urge to was like, if I just breathe into my mouth and then I close it, will I be able to capture some of this so that I can bring it back home and and show to others, like, what are the ways that I can preserve this experience and have this very physical memory of of just how amazing place it is. I’m Laura Miller, and I lead Greenpeace’s global protect the oceans campaign. This summer, Greenpeace has been supporting research into the development in glaciers, and documenting the retreat of them, and comparing the landscape to how it looks now, to what it looked like a few decades ago, is is just striking, and it’s a very clear sign of the warming that is happening everywhere. I think witnessing the ice melting is a very humbling feeling, and it really puts me in perspective of what is the scale that we as humans have been able to influence the planet that feels very big and very powerful, and also thinking that if we lose the species that live in the sea ice, there’s no way of bringing them back. There’s no way we can reverse those changes. There is no undo button we can press to bring the ice back, to make the planet cooler. And the only way we can really do that is by reducing emissions and try to prevent it from getting worse, and then doing damage control. But the same forces that feel so powerful and the scale of things that make us feel that, for example, the ocean can always take more and we can always take more from the ocean, and we have been setting in motion forces that we are not able to control. I think that is a very, very humbling and very scary feeling. I have seen that when we come together and we demand change and we don’t accept the business as usual and the political realities and the inertia that is that is inherent in there, we have the power to change things. And I think the global ocean treaty agreed at the United Nations last year is a huge, huge win for all of us who have been very, very concerned and who have been outspoken about our concerns and the need to act right now. So Greenpeace is here in the Arctic now to really highlight the urgency and the need to act now, and also the opportunity that we have sailing across the world’s oceans, we have been able to witness and observe and talk. Moment incredible worlds that are underwater and that are invisible to us for most of the time, and being able to show just the opportunity, in contrast to the fact that while we have this opportunity now, we also know that marine life has been pushed to the brink of collapse, and the ocean crisis is getting worse day by day. So every day there are industrial, destructive fishing fleets scooping life out from the oceans, and there are plans to go ever further deep down to mine the deep sea bed. So in order to have this opportunity to really preserve the wonderful and also vital life in oceans. There is really no time to waste at all.

Speaker 1  50:55  

Next week, we’ll be taking a journey through Norway where we’ll explore its breathtaking landscapes and learn why it’s so crucial that we protect these stunning natural wonders.

Andreas B Heide  51:06  

You’re a bit scared, but you also want to see these whales. So I try to make like whale sounds underwater to attract them

Christian Aslund  51:12  

up here in Svalbard, when people see it how bad it is up here, that would be a reminder that it is we live in any crisis.

Andreas B Heide  51:22  

Everyone’s seen this footage of orcas hunting seals, and when you’re dressed up like a free diver, you do look a bit like a seal.

Speaker 3  51:30  

We have leading scientists saying it’s embarrassing to be in a region because we give such sound advice to our government, and they just disregard everything we’re saying.

Haldis Tjeldflaat Helle  51:42  

I am hopeful, I think that we can turn this around. It will go back to be more like it was before.

Hannah Stitfall  51:57  

This episode was brought to you by Greenpeace and Crowd Network. It is hosted by me, wildlife filmmaker and broadcaster Hannah Stitfall. It is produced by Vicki Wright, Catalina Noguera, Robert Wallace, George Sampson, Kate Stevens, Steve Jones and Christina Irivnak. Sound design is by Crawford Blair. The music we use is from our partners, BMG, Production Music. The team at Greenpeace is James Hansen, Alex Yallop, Jeane Meyer, Marta of charik. Flora Hvesi, Becky Malone and Alice Lloyd Hunter, archive, courtesy of Greenpeace. Thanks for listening. See you next week.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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