What Do House Cats Have to Do With Deep-Sea Mining? The Ocean Story Nobody Expects

1:00:00 Do you want to know how domesticated cats are related to deep sea mining? Then you're going to want to tune in to this episode. This is the how to protect the ocean podcast. If you want more ocean news updates every weekday, this is your time to hit that follow button. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the how to protect the ocean podcast. I'm your host Andrew Lewin and we today are talking to Dr. Andrew Thaler, who is a deep sea ecologist and he's writing a book. And this good friend of mine has come to me and said, Andrew, I need to tell you some deep sea stories, not just about the deep sea mining, but about the deep sea in general. These are stories that are going to knock your socks off. He's writing a book and part of this is telling these wonderful stories.

1:00:44 It's going to be part of the book. So you're getting kind of a sneak peek by being part of this, how to protect the ocean podcast. Uh, and it's, it's phenomenal. Today, we're going to be talking about how deep sea mining has led to the domestication of cats and it's, you're going to want to, I don't want to give anything else away because I want you to hear it from Andrew. Cause he's a fantastic storyteller. And he said, Hey, let's do these stories on, uh, on the podcast. What do you think? And I'm like, let's do it. Like, why not? Is my podcast? Why? Let's let's try and switch it up a little bit, make it a little bit more entertaining. I know I throw a lot of news at you every weekday from Monday to Thursday is like a solo episode. We've been talking about enforcement. And now we're going to talk about deep sea mining. Just, uh, you know, it's the interview Friday, so we're going to be talking about that. Uh, and I just think, uh, it's a lot of fun.

1:01:30 So I'm going to let you hear it straight from Andrew's mouth. Here is Andrew, Dr. Andrew Taylor, talking about the domestication of cats and how deep sea mining led to that domestication. Enjoy the interview. And I will talk to you after. Hey, Andrew, welcome back to the how to protect the ocean podcast. Are you ready to talk about deep sea stories? Just in general, this is going to be a new series that we're going to be doing. Are you ready to start the series? I am ready. The question for you is are you ready? I don't know. I take a step back and enjoy the power of a different Andrew hosting for a moment. This is going to be, this is going to be a lot of fun. We, we've been discussing this for, you know, about a month now. Um, and we'll get, well, I'll let you explain what you want to do on this because this is going to be your show and I'm just going to be like an audience member and kind of interjecting every once in a while and asking questions and stuff.

1:02:24 But this is going to be a lot of fun. We're going to switch it up a little bit. Uh, Andrew's got some stories that he wants to tell. It's part of a larger project that he's working on. Uh, and so we're going to just kind of give it to you, buddy. I want you to just go ahead and before, before we start though, just for those of the, for those of the audience members who haven't heard of you before, haven't listened to you before here on this podcast, why don't you just let us know who you are and what you do. And of course what this project is all about. All right. Well, I am Dr. Andrew Thaler, deep sea ecologist, conservation technologist, ocean educator, and author, and welcome dear listeners to tales from the limitless abyss. So, uh, the backstory behind this little, uh, podcasting experiment we're doing is I have a book coming out in like a year and a half because I have to write it, but I have, I have a contract for a book tentatively titled limitless abyss, the use and misuse of the deep sea.

1:03:22 And one of the things we want to do is as I'm researching this book and as I'm putting together chapters and drafting everything, there's just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these delightful little stories coming out about all the weird ways that humans have used and abused the deep sea over, uh, not just years, not just decades, not just centuries, but millennia. And so I, you know, I want to take a little bit of time throughout the process is a little bit of accountability for me because I got to keep writing the book if, if I'm going to come up with new stories. Uh, so it helps keep me on track and it helps keep everyone a little entertained. And you know, maybe when the book finally comes out, if you've been listening for a while, you'll pick it up. Absolutely.

1:04:04 Uh, but, uh, I want to start today with a very simple question. All right. Uh, Andrew Lewin, why do we have cats? Well, as a, as someone who doesn't own a cat, um, I'm going to say, I don't know. I really don't know how cats came to be. I assume they're domesticated from like the wild over years and years and years of crazy people trying to domesticate tigers and lions and so forth. Is that, is that the right answer? So I'm going to take us back. I'm going to take us back about 6,000 years to the new kingdom of Egypt, uh, to Pharaoh, uh, Ramses and Pharaoh, Tuttmus the third and, uh, the very first deep sea mines back then.

1:04:59 So this is a, one of the really cool things that has come up and one of the, uh, interesting pieces of primary research that has come out of this book is I started asking this question. You know, I talk a lot when I tell people about deep sea mining and I tell people about hydrothermal vents. One of the things I say is that, you know, when you think about metal that comes in veins, so things like copper and gold and silver, in a lot of cases, those veins are actually the stock works of ancient hydrothermal vents. So the hydrothermal vent chimney that forms as this vent grows in the sea floor deposits heavy metals along the walls. And then eventually over millions of years, those vents shut down and they drift off access and, you know, continents up heave and the earth moves and eventually they end up on land.

1:05:46 Uh, and they become things like gold mines. So, uh, those, those structures are called ophiolites. Ophiolites are chunks of oceanic plate that have been uplifted onto land. And are now sitting on land as remnants of ancient seabed. And so I thought, you know, wouldn't it be interesting to like, look at some of the old copper mines that were important during the Bronze Age and, you know, see how many of those really were ancient hydrothermal vents. So, you know, I started in the Egyptian New King kingdom at the, at the peak of the Bronze Age. And I started with a Pharaoh Thutmose III because one of the things that's really fascinating about that most of the third is that he was a conqueror.

1:06:39 He, he spread the Egyptian kingdom across the Levant. And he is the source of the first battles in recorded history. So the first actual he carried, he brought with him a scribe who wrote everything down. So, you know, we don't know exactly what happened, but we know what he wanted us to know happened. And so we have records of, uh, you know, some of these ancient battles, including, um, uh, the battle of Megadow, which is the first battle in recorded history. Um, and we know how many people were killed and we knew what they carried and how many horses they had and how many chariots and all these great things and how many bronze weapons they had.

1:07:19 So I was interested of like tracking back from there and being like these bronze weapons. This was a technological innovation to have bronze over, over copper or over stone. Uh, where did that bronze come from? And could we track it back to a hydrothermal vent? And what I found is that, uh, the Egyptian New Kingdom, their early copper mines were on, uh, the Sinai peninsula. They were 500 million year old Ophieolites. They were hydrothermal vents. Um, the major source of copper for the new kingdom was on the island of Cyprus. Uh, the island of Cyprus itself is in Ophieolite.

1:08:02 Um, so the mountains of Cyprus are all chunks of ancient seabed. This is a hundred million year old chunk of the neotetha sea that was lifted up onto land and slowly over generations, the people who eventually settled on Cyprus were discovered that there were these rich, rich copper veins inside, um, the mountains of, of Cyprus. And in addition to these copper veins, they also found fossils, very strange fossils. And when archeologists started excavating these old, uh, mines in Cyprus and looking at the fossils, you know, this is early 19th century, early 20th century, you know, the Egyptologists, the, the archeologists that were going through ancient Greece, all that fun stuff.

1:08:56 When the Victorians were out stealing everything they could from, uh, from the Levant and from Egypt. Um, they find these fossils and no one knew what these fossils were. They were just these strange, strange fossils. Uh, so they were kind of this weird thing, just something out there, the strange fossil until, and no one knew, no one really could figure it out. Maybe it was a worm. It was some kind of an animal. No one's really sure. Some of them looked like snails. And then in 1977, Bob Ballard dives on the Pacific rise in, you know, the Pacific ocean and finds the first hydrothermal vents.

1:09:37 And on these first hydrothermal vents is riftia pachiptila, the giant deep sea tube worm. You know, these massive tube worms, the fastest growing invertebrate on the world. They can grow several meters long. Um, they have these bright red plumes that come out of, of these tubes that they build that then extract the chemical energy from the hydrothermal vent and turn into food for the animal. And those two worms on the East Pacific rise looked almost identical to the fossils in Cyprus. And so they're like, oh, this is proof positive. This is these old copper mines. These old copper mines are hydrothermal vents. And so I kept tracking different minds across Egypt and the Near East and the Middle East. And we found ophiolites in Turkey and ophiolites in Oman and ophiolites kind of all across these regions.

1:10:28 And they're all ancient hydrothermal vents. Most of them are from the neotethis. So 100 million year old vents. Some of them are 500 million years old. Some of them are incredibly ancient hydrothermal vents. But all of these copper mines, all these copper mines that basically created the Bronze Age are the remnants of ancient hydrothermal vents. So they are effectively the least efficient way to mine the deep sea. You wait till it comes to you. You wait until it comes to you. And honestly, that is probably the best way to do it to minimize your environmental impact on the sea. Yeah, exactly. You wait till the sea floor comes above the surface. Yeah, exactly. Only 500 million years, but it'll eventually get there, right?

1:11:12 Yeah, so Cyprus is a funny. Yeah, Cyprus has been incredibly important throughout human history. It's a major source of copper. You know, it was a driver of the Bronze Age. It was a major cultural landmark. Cyprus has a few very funny animals associated with him. One of this is they had a pygmy elephant. So on the island of Cyprus, this is long before humans. Right, right, right. Several thousand years before human settlement, they had these pygmy elephants as an elephant, but it's a little tiny elephant. And how familiar are you with an elephant skull? I mean, I can kind of picture it, but I don't have one in my backyard or anything. Yeah. So one of the weird things about elephant skulls is that if you look at how the skull is shaped and where the eye sockets are, the eye sockets are kind of fused together.

1:12:00 Okay. So they sort of look like one big eye socket in the middle of the skull, like a little bit of a figure eight, but like one big eye socket. So these pygmy elephant skulls, Greek explorers are, you know, sailing across the Greek islands. They're landing in Cyprus. They're, you know, going into caves in Cyprus and they're finding these elephant skulls that are not big. They're not the size of a full grown elephant, but they're like three, four times the size of a human head. And they've got one big eye socket right in the middle. And so, you know, I don't know if you've read the Odyssey. I have. I've read all three translations of the Odyssey because I love the Odyssey.

1:12:43 The legend of the Cyclops in ancient Greece. One of the predominant theories about where that story comes from is these pygmy elephant skulls that look like a one eyed giant. That's crazy. So it didn't actually have one eye. It was just the way the bones refused together. Yeah, it's just the way that elephant skulls form and where the eyes are in the eye socket itself kind of looks like it's one big thing recessed in. Okay. Yeah. So Cyprus has lots of funny things going for it in terms of animal life. But one of the most interesting things that came out of my research is the earliest record of domesticated cats is from the island of Cyprus and they were domesticated to keep rats out of their copper mines.

1:13:31 So our original pet cats, the very first pet cats are there because we were mining a hundred million year old hydrothermal vent full of fossil tube worms that we couldn't identify yet. And we just needed some help keeping the pests out. And so and so where did what is the or like where's the origin of cats like how like what were they domesticated from where they are smaller felines small wild cats. Yeah, small cats. Interesting. That's so cool. So can you so can you say like any mining area that's on an island or that's like fairly new in terms of the last hundred to 500 million years was essentially created in the deep sea.

1:14:18 So all of these heavy metal mines are produced by hydrothermalism. Okay. In the deep ocean. They're not all from hydrothermal vents. But generally speaking, with the exception of very modern minds where we have the industrial equipment to access very deep reservoirs, very deep reserves, very deep deposits of ore. With big industrial machinery and strip mining and all that good stuff where you have to get really down deep and you can find metal that was deposited from like older magmatic processes that were producing metals with the with the exception of our most modern minds.

1:15:05 Almost all gold mines, almost all copper mines, anything that could be accessed with 20th century technology or or earlier are going to be ancient hydrothermal vents, including and one of my particularly exciting discoveries and it's not really a discovery. We've known about it for a long time. But the really fun bit of the story is that the city of Baltimore sits on top of a massive serpent night hosted hydrothermal vent. No. So Baltimore was very famous for chromium mines back in the day. And part of the reason that my family ended up in Baltimore 200 years ago is for the mining.

1:15:46 Where were they before? They were in pressure. Okay. And they were in Russia. And, you know, we fled the pogroms. Right. Basically how we ended up in America. But we settled in Baltimore. And, you know, part of the reason we settled in Baltimore, which is the industry around Baltimore. And the industry came from chromium mining in a large part. And that chromium mining is the result of a serpentinization, which is a process that creates hydrothermal vents. So, you know, a lot of the Baltimore ultramafic complex, which is the rocks we sit on in Baltimore is from hydrothermal venting. That's so cool. That is so neat. Now, some of the mines that are internal, like inland, you know, I know Baltimore is a bit in, but it's got the coastal kind of structure to it. Would you say are from deep sea mines as well? Like anything in like any mine at all is, is a rise from the deep sea or is that like a different geographic or geophysical process?

1:16:49 So not every, every mine, but for the most part, all the heavy metal, all the heavy metal mines. Yeah. So we are, I mean, that is how you get heavy metals is you dissolve it in seawater and then you put it under enormous pressure. And then you boil that sea water to the point where it goes through a phase transition. And then all those metals fall out of solution and are deposited on the sea floor. Wow. That's incredible. So we have been mining the deep sea for a very long time. Yeah. Just not. We just, we were more efficient at it. We waited. We were more patient. Let's just say, we waited. Just waited till you were, you know, until like generations and generations after. Yeah. Well, it's like oil, right? That's just a very inefficient way to get sunlight. Yeah.

1:17:36 Yeah, that's true. That's true. That's so cool. Yeah, that is so neat. So like, how do you find like a story like this, like knowing the history like this? How do you find that helps like for the listeners out there to bring it to conservation and seeing all these petitions for an RFI is like, you know, request for information and things like that. How do you think this influences them or, or can help them in the fight against deep sea mining? Like just to not let it happen if they don't want to let it happen. So one of the things I'm looking at is all of our cultural connections to the deep sea. So we don't think about the deep sea as something that we're culturally connected to, you know, outside of a few people who are, you know, super jazzed about the deep ocean.

1:18:29 And we don't think about all the ways that we use the deep sea that are maybe out of sight, out of mind, but are actually very important to how society functions. So, you know, like telecommunications tables, tables, telecommunication tables. I don't think we've used tables 99% of our data travels through the deep sea when whenever we're connecting across continents and it has for 200 years. Yeah. You know, we we use the deep sea as a place to dispose of tremendous amounts of waste. It's the use and misuse of the deep sea. So we're talking a lot about misuse as well. But you know, one of one of the ways we dispose of waste in the deep sea is we crash spaceships into a water.

1:19:14 Point in the middle of the Pacific, that's far from land. So that doesn't hurt anyone out when you, you know, drop a spacecraft on the plane, or doesn't blow up as it gets down to the ground. Exactly. So there's all these different ways that we're using the deep ocean that we don't necessarily think about, but are that absolutely important to human civilization and human survival. So one of the reasons I wanted to start the book with this kind of tracking of all these ancient hydrothermal events is to argue, you know, hydrothermal events are responsible for the advent of the Bronze Age. They are, you know, they're not just this thing that we have discovered recently and are like, Oh, isn't that neat? Isn't that interesting? There's this weird thing on the bottom of the sea floor.

1:19:54 They are central to our story as humans and to our story of technological development. We are people of the sea, we have come from the sea and the sea is, you know, from the sea, we have gained almost all of our civilization. Yeah. That's incredible. Never thought about it that way. If you think, you know, when you think about how much we depend on the ocean, we think of what it gives us right now, but not how it's formed sort of our society, you know, at this at this point. You know, the next time you pet a kitty, just think you owe this kid a little bit of protection in the deep ocean. The deep sea gave you a cat. You should you should respect the deep sea for that and that alone.

1:20:36 So my title for this episode should be like cats? Question mark, protect the deep sea. I love it. Absolutely. But I mean, it also goes to show a little bit like in my train of thought and you can correct me if I'm wrong, you know, we start mining the deep sea now in the deep sea. What's going to happen 100 million years from now? If we're that if there's still humans on that long, what's going to happen to the Earth's crust at that point? Are we going to get these, you know, islands or coastlines that have all these heavy metals in or are we just going to go down before they have a chance to rise to. To get that like same with seamen. Oh, 100 million years from now, it's going to be a going to be a whole new. Yeah, we're not going to be a part of it. No, no, for sure. But I mean, it's it's looking at the future of the planet.

1:21:24 Like from a planet perspective, you know, should we even be thinking about that? I can see some people not caring. But I mean, if it's if it's helped us here, it's going to help something for the planet later on. You know, it's a natural process. So, yeah, 100 million years from now, we may have plastic deposits. Yeah, that's true. Probably not plastics not going to persist for 100 million years. It's going to get subducted into the crust of the Earth and turned back into hydrocarbons, then spewed back out. But you know, I would I would hesitate to guess that that the vast majority of humans footprint on the planet will be gone 100 years, million years. Yeah, that's true. That's true. We may leave some fossils behind and there may be a few remnants. Yeah.

1:22:08 Species rarely persist that long. True. True. It's it's a that's a long time. We're looking at it like that's a very, very long time. But this is great. And that I like starting that made. Sorry, go ahead. That I think that's a great start. And that also leads us into our second story. So if we want to, I don't know, pause and then kick off the next episode. Yeah, we can do that. We can do we can do. No, no, we can do to a will what we'll do is we'll answer that. And it here for the first story and then tune in soon. I don't know if we'll do this every other week or for the world. We'll worry. I'll let you know to the audience. I'll let you know when we'll be airing these. Let's just say Andrew has a lot of these stories, which I find if the first ones anything any indication is going to be great. So we'll end it here.

1:22:52 Thank you so much. Andrew really appreciate it. And then we'll we're going to pause it. We're going to record another one and then we'll we'll see you in a bit. All right. Absolutely. Thank you so much. And this is going to be a fun absolutely looking forward to it. Thank you, Andrew, for joining us on today's episode of the how to protect the ocean podcast. It's always great to have him on. He's a good friend of mine. We've known each other for over a decade. And every time he's on the podcast, every time I talk to him really, I'm impressed just with the knowledge that he has and the way he tells it. he tells it. He is such a fun storyteller. I love listening to everything he says about not only the deep sea but just science in general and the ocean in general. And it's great to have him on every time he's on. He's been on a lot and there's a reason for that because he can really tell stories very well and I love to hear it. And we get to chat before and after. A lot of the times it's one of those times where I'm on with a guest and it's one of those times we're like hey maybe we should record a podcast while we talk to each other. That tends to happen. So it's great to have him on. I hope you enjoyed listening to this. Let me know what you think about this episode, what you thought of the story. Hit me up at speakupforblue.feedback. That's speakupforblue.com forward slash feedback speakupforblue.com forward slash feedback. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

1:24:10 You can leave a voicemail or you can write it down. I just want to get some I just want to get feedback and I want to interact with you. That's the whole point of this podcast. We start the conversation on the podcast and then you continue it through that feedback link. So speakupforblue.com forward slash feedback and of course don't forget if you want to hear this type of stories, anything about the ocean, hit that follow button so you get to hear next week's episode. We're going to start Monday and we go Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. So I want to thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Have a great day. We'll talk to you on Monday and happy conservation.