Deep sea exploration
Discovery
BBC
4.3 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 14 February 2022
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
UCL oceanographer Helen Czerski explores life in the ocean depths with a panel of deep sea biologists. They take us to deep ocean coral gardens on sea mounts, to extraordinary hydrothermal vent ecosystems teeming with weird lifeforms fed by chemosynthetic microbes, to the remarkable biodiversity in the muds of the vast abyssal plains.
Helen's guests are Adrian Glover of the Natural History Museum in London, Kerry Howell of Plymouth University and Alex Rogers, scientific director of REV Ocean.
They discuss the dramatic revelations made by deep ocean explorers in just the last forty years, and the profound connections that the deep sea floor has with life at the Earth's surface. They also consider the threats to the ecosystems down there from seabed mining and climate change.
Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker
Picture: Black smoker hydrothermal vents, Credit: Science Photo Library
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, let me ask you, son. |
| 0:03.7 | Have you heard George's podcast? |
| 0:06.1 | Me and Ben Brick are back with a blast. |
| 0:08.1 | This time with stories from Africa's past, not too distant, unsolved mysteries, unsung |
| 0:13.7 | heroes from untold histories, I'm trying to make sense of the present day. |
| 0:19.5 | Join me on this journey, by pressing play. |
| 0:23.8 | Have you heard George's podcast, Chapter 4? |
| 0:27.2 | Listen on BBC Sound. |
| 0:30.2 | You're listening to Discovery from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:33.0 | I'm Helen Chersky, a physicist and oceanographer at University College London. |
| 0:37.9 | Now for the last episode, Kevin Fong took Discovery off planet Earth to discuss space exploration. |
| 0:44.0 | But it's often forgotten that the most dramatic photos from the Apollo Space missions weren't |
| 0:48.2 | of the moon. |
| 0:49.2 | They were of Earth, and it wasn't until we went to the moon that we really saw Earth's |
| 0:53.4 | ocean and named ourselves the Blue Planet. |
| 0:56.8 | Today we'll be voyaging into that blue to explore the deep ocean. |
| 1:01.2 | It's always been seen as a place of mystery, a place for the enigmatic Captain Nemo and |
| 1:06.0 | sea monsters like Moby Dick and the Kraken. |
| 1:08.9 | But we don't need to rely on fiction writers anymore for our view of the deep, because |
| 1:13.2 | scientists are showing us that the reality of the deep sea is far more interesting and |
| 1:18.0 | important than Jules Verne ever imagined. |
| 1:21.2 | So what do we know now about what's down there? |
... |
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