Science Friday - Outdoor Influencers, Northwest Passage, Undersea Volcanoes. Aug 31, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: August 31, 2018

NASA is exploring a deep-sea volcano off the coast of Hawaii as a test run for human and robotic missions to Mars and beyond. The mission, dubbed SUBSEA, or Systematic Underwater Biogeochemical Science and Exploration Analog, will examine microbial life on the Lō`ihi seamount. The mission has two objectives. The first is to learn about the operational and communication challenges of a real space mission through a deep ocean dive. The second is to learn more about the geology and chemistry that support life in the deep ocean, as a glimpse of what alien life might require in places like the oceans of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. You’ve probably had the experience of scrolling through your Instagram feed, coming across a picture of some hidden swimming hole, secluded mountain trail, or pristine beach, and thought, “I want to go THERE.” Popular accounts on Instagram and other social media services can increase the visibility of remote places, making them more accessible and encouraging people to venture into the outdoors. But some are worried that the accounts can attract too much attention to fragile places that may not be able to withstand hordes of visitors. Zoe Schiffer, who recently wrote about the issue for Racked, joins Ira to talk about social media and the great outdoors, and whether guidelines for “leaving no trace” need to be updated for the digital age. On August 23rd, a team of scientists, students, and a professional film crew aboard the research vessel Academik Ioffe set out from Resolute Bay in Northern Canada. Their mission? To study the arctic environment as part of the Northwest Passage Project. The expedition was supposed to last three weeks, but just one day after the crew embarked the vessel became grounded and the expedition had to be suspended. Brice Loose, chief scientist aboard the Academik Ioffe, and microbiologist Mary Thaler, a passenger aboard the vessel, join Ira to share what happened and discuss the science that had to be put on hold.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A little bit later in the program, we'll be checking in with a NASA expedition, exploring the high seas as a simulation for space. But first, the relationship between China and the U.S. has been rocky of late. There's been a lot of talk about a trade war between the U.S. and China, and now some of this animosity is spilling over into negotiations between scientists from each country, and it involves the bird flu, potentially your health. Maggie Kerth Baker is here to fill us in on that story and other short subjects in science.

She's senior science writer at 538.com. Welcome back, Maggie. Hi, thanks for having me. You're welcome. Now, this doesn't have to do with the tariffs passed by President Trump, right? But China is holding back on bird flu strains. Tell us about that. Well, so the New York Times reported this week that the Chinese government is refusing to share samples of the H7

and nine strain of bird flu, or to give researchers in the U.S. data about human patients. These are things that are supposed to be shared under a World Health Organization agreement, but China basically has stopped sharing disease information with us, and some of the scientists told the times that they're afraid it's actually tied to those tariffs, that worsening relationships between the two countries are sort of resulting in unwillingness to share scientific data, too. And I understand the NIH recently started looking at how scientists are sharing their data with foreign governments. Yeah.

So in the other direction, we have our National Institutes of Health is urging grantees here in the U.S. to better protect their research and their data from foreign governments, and that includes China specifically. So Science Magazine reported that there's been both a Senate hearing on this, there's been a formal memo issued on the topic. and the NIH is really worried that its own grant peer review system is leaking unpublished research and helping scientists and other countries steal ideas. And that China bird flu data, that would be important. Would it be, would it not? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, we're talking about a strain with a 40% fatality rate. You know, there was an outbreak in 2016 and 2017 in China that infected nearly 800 people. And let's move on to something else more hopeful. Well, not a good sign. big gun violence study that looks at gun deaths worldwide and one section looks specifically at U.S. school shootings, and it seemed to be overreporting in this number. Tell us about that. Yeah, so this was the first time that the Department of Education came out with an official federal government number for school shootings in the U.S. And they came up with 235 school shootings.

But NPR's Anya Kamenetz did this investigation and called up each of these schools and asked them about these cases. And what she found is that only 11 of those 235 could be independently confirmed. It looks like at least 161 of them never happened at all. So what did they find as the general trend of gun violence in the U.S.? How do we rank with the other countries? Well, this is from a different study. There's a report from the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation that found that the U.S. is second in the world on gun deaths in 2016, and that the top six countries that were accounting for half of the gun-related deaths on Earth, only 10%, they involved only 10% of the global population. So we have

a really high rate of gun deaths compared to the rest of the world. But it's also interesting because it's kind of mixed in with these other numbers where our gun deaths have been falling for the last 30 years. And we have kind of situations like this where maybe. be the number of really scary school shootings is not as big as we thought it was. Well, let's dive into that a bit for me. Why, why the discrepancy in the figures? Well, the discrepancies seem to come from sort of problems with filling out paperwork, basically. So one of the examples was the Cleveland Public Schools reported 37 school shootings. But when NPR called them to confirm, it turned out that all of those were actually

nonviolent incidents where students were just found to be in possession of a knife or firearm on school grounds. So it's sort of an accounting. Yeah, kind of accounting errors, basically. You need to separate knife violence from gun violence. It seems pretty simple, you know. If you want gun deaths, you can't put knife deaths in there with it. Yeah, it sounds like in that particular case, the number was just entered on the wrong line.

I don't know if we're getting better or worse. Human error. Let's move on to. Scientists released a study about the Higgs boson, but it's kind of back to the future. future story, new old story. Well, sort of. So six years ago, as we all remember, after much effort and many confusing news articles, scientists finally found proof of the elusive Higgs boson particle. But it turns out that they found that proof in the most unlikely way possible.

And now they've spent the last few years basically trying to do the same thing again, but in a way that's much more statistically probable. So when we go looking for Higgs bosons, we don't actually look for the particle itself because it just breaks up and decays too fast for that, you know, 10 trillions of a nanosecond, and it is gone. So instead, we look for these things that it decays into. And back in 2012, what they found were two photons, two particles of light. And that's something that probably only happens in less than half of 1% of Higgs-Boson decays.

In contrast, about 57% of Higgs is should decay into these particles called Bodies. quarks and anti-bottom quarks. But it wasn't until this week that scientists were finally able to see that much more common type of decay happen. So it was sort of popping the cork about being right then. Yeah, yeah, a little bit. And what's particularly interesting about this is that the reason that it took them so long to see this common way for a Higgs to break down is because the initial proton collisions

in the Large Hadron Collider that make the Higgs is for us to find also just produce lots and lots of quarks, so they were kind of shopping for the, trying to find the forest for the trees in there. In a short time we have left, there's something really new, a new neuron found in a human brain? Yeah, this really previously unknown type of human brain cell and a cell that seems to have no analog in mouse brains, which could have some pretty big impacts given that mice are the models that we use for human health and behavior research. Have they classified what it is? They're calling it a rose hip neuron.

We don't know exactly what it does yet. And there's some speculation that it might be unique to humans, but we don't know whether that's true yet or not either. But it's kind of one of those things that could help explain why some of these experimental treatments for things like brain disorders, Alzheimer, schizophrenia, why those things fail in humans, even if they work in mice. Rose hip neuron, great name, I think. Any one of those neurons should smell so sweet.

Sorry, Maggie. Thank you, Maggie. Yeah, thank you. Maggie Kurt Baker, Science writer, senior science writer at 538.com. Now it's time to play. Good thing, bad thing, because every story has a flip side. Now you've probably had the experience of scrolling through your Instagram feet, right? And you come across a picture of some hidden swimming hole.

Ooh, a nice secluded mountain trail, a pristine beach. And you think to yourself, hey, I got to go there. But there is some bad news. There is a downside. Joining me now is Zoe Schiffer. She's a freelance writer based in Oakland, and she recently wrote about the issue of outdoor influencers for a rec. That's an online science site.

She joins me by Skype. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Glad to be here. Nice to have you. So what's the good thing about these massively popular accounts sharing their outdoor photos? I think the good thing is pretty straightforward. I mean, more people are getting outside.

In 2015, there was something, and like 4 million people who visited Yosemite, which was a record-breaking year for the park, and the following year it was 5 million. That means more money from entrance fees and more people who could potentially care about conservation and environmental policy, either because they themselves have this new connection to the land

or they're hearing about the issues on social media. And influencers really see themselves as part of this trend by inspiring other people to get outside. Oftentimes they're the ones talking about conservation issues first and really bringing them into the mainstream. And I like to think of it. as like an accessibility argument. The outdoors shouldn't be an elitist sport,

and people from all backgrounds should be able to find out about outdoor spaces and enjoy them. So that's really the positive. All right, so let's talk about the downside. What's the downside? The downside's pretty big here. I mean, the human impact on these outdoor spaces is huge. Not all of them have the resources to keep up with a big influx of visitors.

I mean, it's one thing for four million people to visit Yosemite, but for a hidden hot spring that was previously known by a handful of people to go viral on social media, that can be really detrimental. Some other ones are that not everyone is aware of how to be safe in the outdoors, if this is a new experience for them. There have been incidents of people dying as they try to get a particular shot. And not everyone is aware of Leave No Trace principles, which is really what I wrote about in the piece.

Tell us about that. Yeah, so Leave No Trace is really a framework for how to make decisions and enjoy the outdoors responsibly. They've had the same seven principles since 1999, and with every new technology, be it drones or handheld GPS devices, or social media now, they've been asked by a large number of people to add a principle that specifically references the tech. And they haven't done so yet. They're kind of waiting to see how the situation evolves before they do it. But they have published a set of guidelines that I think

really speak to how we can use social media outdoors in a way that's responsible. And these are don't tag specific locations. So if you want to chat or share where a photo was taken, choose a general area, not the like specific hiking trail. And don't post photos of yourself. breaking the rules by like lighting a campfire where campfires aren't allowed or getting too close to the wildlife, because those kind of actions encourage other people to do the same. So they have not yet posted anything special, though. You say there's another principle that they might post. Yeah, they've called the hikers for an eighth leave-no-trace principle have actually written one. It says be mindful when posting on social media and consider the potential impacts of rapidly increased use can have on wild places. But leave-no-trace

themselves have not added a principle yet. They've posted a set of guidelines, which is like a watered-down version of a principle. You could think of it that way to just guide people. And I think in the next few years, if social media continues to have the impact that it's been having, they will go ahead and add any of the principle. Yeah, because I can see, you know, a lot of people just going out there and trampling up the stuff. Yeah, it's true. I mean, I like to think the baseline is just that we all have to be mindful about the impact that our digital actions can have on the world around us. And if we do that, I think there's a way to use social media responsibly outside. Good words. So, thanks for taking time to be with us today.

Yeah, of course. Thank you. We'll watch for that eighth principle coming out. Zoe Schiffer is a freelance writer based in Oakland, and her article about this recently appeared on Racked. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we'll check in with a NASA mission. It's not up into space. It's, well, down to a half mile into the ocean as a volcano outside, right alongside Hawaii. And we're going to go there and talk about that

and some research expedition that got grounded. It's a tale of the sea when we come back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. On August 23rd, a team of scientists, students, and a professional film crew set out aboard the research vessel Academic Jaffe to study the Arctic environment.

The expedition was supposed to be a three-week tour, but just 15 hours after the vessel embarked, it ran into trouble, quite literally, and the expedition had to be suspended. Here to tell us what happened and talk about the science that had to be put on hold is Bryce Luce, chief scientist aboard the Academic Cafe and assistant professor of oceanography, University of Rhode Island. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira, thanks for inviting us. You're welcome.

Mary Thaler, postdoctoral research. researcher at the University of Laval and one of the vessels expedition members. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, it's great to be here. Let's talk about this, Mary, so the expedition was underway for, what, not even 24 hours before the vessel ran aground? What does that mean? What did it feel like?

Well, we had gotten on board the previous evening. Some of the scientists had been working through the night to get their equipment set up because we were planning to have our first sampling. our first sampling station the following afternoon. And I'd gotten up in the morning. It was after breakfast, rounded up a few of the students, and they were helping me set up the gear. And as we were working in the laboratory space, there was a sudden shock. It was about 11 o'clock in the morning.

It was strong enough. One of the girls were sitting on a crate and slipped off onto the floor. And when we opened the door of the lab and looked out, the deck was on a very slight. slant and what had happened was the ship had run up onto an underwater rock and the had completely stopped moving and everybody was rescued everybody was okay from the ship yeah yeah we were had a ship nearby very fortunately they were able to take us off and everyone was completely safe um Bryce this is sort of it's sort of uh you know I'm not going to say poetic justice but it's sort of an interesting coincidence is because you were there to actually research the ground

that would be safe to swim in, you know, to sail in. Yeah, it's true. You know, we're basically operating in one of largely unexplored waters. So this is the Nunavit Territory of Canada. It connects the high Arctic with the North Atlantic around Greenland. And it's an area that's traditionally for much of the year, like really covered in heavy ice. And so much of the area that we're transiting through is not well charted, so we don't really have detailed maps of the ocean bottom.

And I think this might be part of what led to the incident that occurred with us. We weren't there to do mapping, or at least not mapping of the bottom, but we were there instead to focus on mapping of the ocean properties, both of the marine microbes as well as the gases dissolved in the water, methane and carbon dioxide, for example. and then carry out some seabird surveys in the area, which dovetail nicely with what the Canadian Wildlife Service has been doing for years now.

Does this have anything to do with the Northwest Passage and all the Arctic being free of ice, increasingly free of ice, and maybe a new climate happening over there? It certainly does. In fact, we actually had to be rerouted at the beginning of the expedition because a large part of multi-year ice,

which is ice that's lasted for several years, basically broke free this year, and moved it to the northern part of the Northwest Passage, so we weren't able to transit there and had to go someplace else to an area that's even less well-known. And, you know, this multi-year ice breaking up is yet another indicator of increased temperatures and the loss of ice during the summertime

as a result of climate change. Mary, had you been able to stay, what kinds of science were you planning to do in the Arctic? Well, I'm an environmental microbiologist, so that means my particular interest is anything in the water column that's single-celled. So when we think of the Arctic, the images that pop into people's minds are often polar bears, large marine mammals like seals, things like that. But in fact, the very basis of the food web, what is harvesting sunlight energy and turning that into food for the rest of the organisms, are these single-celled algae. And so we were going to be going out, collecting samples,

and just looking at what kind of communities and species were living in that water and how they've been changing over the years. Now, I know you've been on research vessels in the Arctic before. What have you learned from your many times going back? Well, this was, in fact, my eighth voyage to the Arctic on a ship. We have been seen changes in the previous definitely. One of the biggest changes in the Arctic is that it's getting fresher, in fact. So connected with a lot of ice melting and snow and ice melting on land, causing more outflow

from the rivers, we're seeing increasing volumes of freshwater being added to the ocean. And that, of course, changes the amount of nutrients available. It changes the way that the water mixes and, and, and, circulates and that has a strong effect on single-celled organisms living in it. So with all that freshwater, are you going to see, you know, a layering? Is the freshwater going to sort of sit above the seawater? That's exactly what happens. Fresh water is less dense than salt water, so it floats on top. And because it has this buoyancy, it resists being mixed by the wind. it's almost like oil sitting on top of water.

And this is very crucial because the nutrients that support food webs are deeper in the water column. So that wind mixing is what brings it up to the surface and makes it available. That's really interesting. That's something that hasn't been seen before up there. No. Wow. Bryce, will these same expedition members get to come back and complete their mission at some point in time? So that's not 100% certain, but that's definitely our goals.

We've got a great relationship with the operator of the vessel, and we're already basically back at our institutions regrouping for next year. We had a really great team of like 16 undergraduates from universities across the lower 40 of the United States, as well as from the Nunavut territories of Canada, and we really hope to basically essentially get the whole group, get the expedition back together and try this again. How disappointed everybody must be? Yeah, there were definitely some tears and some long faces on the way back when it was clear that things weren't going to proceed.

But I think everybody's hopeful that we're going to get a chance to do this again. And that's kind of the way it is with science. You know, this isn't the first time that an expedition has had to stop or make a change. And you just kind of continually, when you're operating in an area like this, you just got to be prepared to regroup and go out of it again. We'll have to send you up a better sonar, I think. Stay up. We would love one. Yeah, thank you.

I don't know why you don't have that. Yeah, so for you, Mary, this is an old hat. You've been up there eight times? You understand these sorts of things happen, right? It is not the first time I've had science delayed or rerouted or even canceled. What matters is perseverance. We get up there. It's a challenging environment.

You have to hang on to your sense of humor. and you're calm and know that sometimes things will work, and it will be amazing, and sometimes you'll run into a few roadblocks, literally. We should name your next vessel, The Perseverance or something. Yes. I think so. All those Antarctic explorers, all have those vessels named something like that. Well, thank you very much for both of you for taking time to be with us today, and good luck next year.

Thank you, Ira. Very best Hope Expedition that resumes next year. Bryce Lewis is chief scientist aboard the academic Yoffay and assistant professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, Mary Thaler Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Laval. Speaking of underwater, we usually associate NASA with exploring space, right? A spacecraft to Pluto, a lander rover, an orbiter, a satellite. but one of NASA's latest missions, the Space Agency, has set its sights on the seas. The mission is called Subsea, Systemic, Systematic, Underwater, Biogeochemical Science and Exploration Analog, Subsea.

And true to the name, they're exploring an underwater volcano, half a mile deep off the coast of Hawaii's Big Island. It is a test run for learning to pilot more complicated missions out in space. and to learn how we might hunt for life out there too. Here to tell us about it are Darlene Lim, a geobiologist at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. She's also principal investigator of the subsea mission, and she joins us today from the EV Nautilus off the coast of Hawaii's Big Island. Hi. Hi. Hi there. Hi.

Hi. Nice to have you. Thanks for having me on this show. This is great. That's great. Thank you. You're welcome. Also with us is Shannon Cobbes Novotio, Novotio, a

the volcanologist for the subsea mission, and based in Idaho State University, and she joins us today from the Inner Space Center University of Rhode Island. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks. It's great to be here. Let's talk about this mission, Darlene. Dr. Lem, you are calling us from the ship. We are right now, right? That's right. That's right. Tell us exactly where you are. So, yes, I'm certainly. Yeah, so we are about 30 kilometers just offshore of the kind of southeast portion of the big island of Hawaii, and we're sitting almost right on top of what's called the Loehi Sea Mount. So as you mentioned, the top of the sea mount is about a thousand meters down, so about a kilometer down.

But then it actually descends down even deeper than that to greater than five kilometers in depth. So it's a huge kind of geological environment within which we're trying to explore. And as you mentioned, one of the purposes of our project is to understand this environment, not only as it stands as a point of interest in terms of ocean sciences and earth sciences, but also as a point of comparison for other systems in our solar systems, such as the oceans on Enceladus and Europa. So it's an incredibly rich environment for us to explore scientifically. and then operationally, you know, I'm on a ship, as you mentioned, but then Shannon's on shore

at the Interspace Center, which is essentially an analog for mission control. And so we're interacting with these folks onshore, you know, our intellectual capital, a whole bunch of scientists, ranging from graduate students to postdocs to senior scientists, and they're providing us with feedback every step of the way to help us basically have, you know, reach the highest scientific productivity we can as we go about this exploration and scientific data gathering. So, Shining, you're sort of like, as she says, mission control and watching, is it real time stuff coming back? Yeah, so I'm actually here with a whole team of scientists and researchers that we're watching live as these things are going on. It is my first time getting to work with the research vessel, so it is fascinating trying to learn how to actually do this,

how to actually give guidance from sort of Earth from mission control to help them give us the science that we need to be. be able to move forward with the project. Sort of sounds like an undersea thing that Bob Ballard would be doing, not too far from you. So Bob is intimately involved with this project. Of course, the Nautilus is managed and staffed by crew from the Ocean Exploration Trust. And also, of course, the funding comes from NASA and then NOAA to, you know, enable this project. But, yeah, I mean, this is a really exciting opportunity. And we can talk about, you know, all the scientific and operational research elements.

But really, at the crux of it, what I think is very personally satisfying is that we're bringing together ocean sciences, the ocean sciences community, as well as the planetary sciences community and the human spaceflight community, you know, all into one umbrella project. And that's a dialogue that I think is super important. We don't want to keep reinventing the wheel every time that we think about, you know, sending robots or humans into space. We want to learn from best practices of other groups that go out and do a whole bunch of different types of research in very extreme environments. And this is certainly a challenging environment. You know, you have humans that are on a small vessel that are trying to do their best and work at, you know, 24-7. We're on and off shift, and we're trying to do our best despite the elements that have come in at us, including Hurricane Lane. So it definitely is a wonderful analog to space.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, talking about undersea exploration right outside of the, the big island in Hawaii with Darlene Lim and Shannon Kobesvanovnaut. Sorry, Shannon. That's okay. It's a bad one. It's Novotnyak. Nevotnyak. Okay. So this basically is sort of a rehearsal because we're thinking about going to maybe some of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn where there may be life under sea. And so you're practicing for missions sort of like that? Is that what you're doing? Well, it's sort of like that. We're practicing for a variety of different things. What we're doing right now, actually, is we're actually at the beginning of our preparations to launch, submersible, two submersibles actually. One's called the Hercules.

One's called Argus. Excuse me, Argus. And Hercules actually has a lot of sampling devices on it, which allow us to capture water, which is coming out through some of the hydrothermal systems, the vents that are in the Loehi Sea Mount area. And so as we collect that, that water, we're actually storing it, it will get analyzed, some of it will get analyzed on the ship, other components will get analyzed on shore. But every time that we analyze and we learn a bit more about what type of chemical constituents are inside that water, how that water might be reacting with the rock around it, what kind of microbial life might be associated with that rock, and what the rock looks like in general, we get a better sense of what kind

of chemical energy might be coursing through this system. And it gives us a platform, kind of foundation from which we can springboard and develop hypotheses and ideas about systems such as Enceladus, where we know that there is some sort of water rock reaction happening in the deep subsurface or sub-ocean and deep ocean's environment of that moon. And we certainly know a few things about what that chemistry might be like from the Cassini mission data that's come back. So putting all that together helps us to formulate plans for how we might sample, certainly, and what kind of things we might want to sample in the future as we send robotic missions far off to these places. I would imagine you also have to practice the time delay that's involved in sending signals or

instructions back and forth. Are these robots going to be, you know, sort of able to work on their own, or are they totally controlled? Right. Yeah. So certainly in terms of exploring and that will be a robotic mission. And it will be very much the same way that we conduct planetary exploration right now, and that you are sending signals to the robot itself, and then that takes a long time depending on the distance that you're talking about, to actually reach the robot and then actually enact whatever it is that you need it to do. But what we're actually interested in when it comes to the delay

isn't necessarily associated with that type of robotic mission control interaction. interaction. It's more actually to do with the fact that the ship is a really great environment in terms of its capacity to act as an analog or a point of comparison for humans, for example, orbiting around Mars. And then having to interact with people like Shannon on shore or on Earth when they're actually conducting robotic research on the surface of Mars, in which case there's not a long lag time between when somebody might want to push the robot forward and it goes forward. Unlike right now, there's a huge lag between when we send a signal from the Earth to Mars and want the robot to move forward. But still, there will be a disconnect.

There will be a time delay between those people around Mars and then, you know, Shannon on Earth. So that's the type of thing that we're interested in. Yep. I will talk more about it. We're going to take a break and come back and talk about how deep sea microbes might teach us something about extraterrestrial life like Saturn and Celadus, as we're talking about. We'll look more into it. Stay with us.

We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking this hour about NASA's Sub-Sea mission exploring an undersea volcano off the coast of Hawaii's Big Island as a simulated mission to space. My guests are Shannon Cobes Novotnok, volcanologist at the Sub-Sea Mission based at Idaho State University, and she's talking to us from the Inner Space Center at University of Rhode Island. Darlene Lim, geobiologist at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley and a principal investigator of the subsea mission. In addition to simulating a trip to Mars or beyond, the subsea mission is also investigating the geological and chemical clues that support life in extreme places, like a volcano vent under the seas, as a possible glimpse at the factors that might help extraordinary extraterrestrial microbes survive under the seas of, say, let's entail it us. And I'd like to bring on another guest now who specializes in ocean microbes.

Julie Huber is an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts. She also joins us from the Inner Space Center University of Rhode Island. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks so much. So this sounds like a really exciting mission. Give us an idea of what's living down on this vent down there. Is it a tubeworm or crab, weird stuff like that? Yeah, so the underwater volcano we're working at,

the Wii He-Sea Mount doesn't look like most of the systems we've studied on Earth. There are no giant black smokers. There are no big tube-worm communities. And actually, you know, if you tune into our video, it almost looks like the surface of Mars. It is covered in this red iron. And there are not a lot of large animals. And so it's a really, I think, great analog for thinking about life on other ocean worlds, because it's almost completely dominated by single cell life forms, so by microbes.

So you have like a big mat of microbes on the bottom there. Is that what your picture is showing us? Yeah, so basically where these fluids are leaking out of the sea floor, they're bringing a bunch of interesting chemical constituents from reacting with rock at very high temperatures, and Louiehi is loaded in iron. And so all that orange stuff you're seeing is various forms of iron, and in many cases, microbes that are eating that iron.

Sounds like you get very, you know, very turned on, very excited by this kind of stuff. Well, you know, I've been staring at the seafloor for over 20 years now, and it still gets me really jazz. Sometimes I can't believe that what I'm looking at is actually on our planet. It's that foreign. Do we know what kinds of microbes these are? Are they bacteria or the archaea? Perhaps, do we know?

So the microbes that we can actually see in those iron mats are pretty well. studied and they are mostly bacteria, a group of bacteria like I mentioned that are eating that iron. What we know much less about are the microbes that are coming out of those hydrothermal vents, so actually in those fluids. And we think that those are microbes that actually live beneath the seafloor in the rocky matrix that makes up the entire volcano. And so we are trying to capture those fluids and study them. So you're saying that the microbes on the mat of the ocean are not the same of what's coming out, oozing out? What happens to those that are oozing out? Where do they go or what happens? So that's a really good question and it's something

we're trying to figure out. The microbes that we can see on the seafloor in those iron mats, you know, they like growing, for example, at room temperature, yet we know coming out of those fluids there are microbes that grow, you know, 50 degrees warmer than room temperature. And so we hypothesized that they're living in a warmer habitat beneath the seafloor being fed by those volcanic fluids, and we're just trying to catch them as they leak out. Wow. Shannon Cassini was just out investigating and sell it as it. What did it see and what clues did it give us about geology or possible life?

So Cassini is this ice ball that has a liquid water ocean underneath the ice, and then we think a rocky interior inside of that. And one of the really cool things about Enceladus is when Cassini flew by, it saw these geysers shooting out of the South Pole, and it went through them, it was able to actually measure things. We know that that ice and the water, the liquid underneath is water.

We know it's got salts in it. We can actually tell that it's probably got a warm interaction with the rock underneath that's really consistent with these hotspot volcanoes like Louiehy, and very different from the plate tectonic-style ones at Mid-Ocean Ridge is like what Julie was talking about with black smokers. That's part of why

this is such a great location. Our number 844-724-8255, if you have a question. We have a tweet from Alex's interesting tweet. He says, between Europa and Enceladus is one considered a more plausible candidate for extraterrestrial life. Wow, that's a great question. It's funny.

We did a kind of of a talk show with some folks at NASA yesterday. And Penny Boston, who's the head of astrobiology, the NASA Astrobiology Institute, she was actually asked that similar question. And for her, it was like picking between children. You just can't. You know, they're both plausible. They're both exciting, I think, regions for us to consider going to explore when it

comes to astrobiology. And the fact of the matter is that we just don't know that much. So you can't really make that kind of judgment call yet. I think it would be very premature. sure. But they're there. We're really excited about it. And I think no matter where we go, it will definitely open our minds to what else is possible. What do you learn from this expedition that would help you, besides the basics, and you're starting from the basics here, do you follow this up and then fine-tune and do more and more

of these projects? Yeah, absolutely. And I can answer this kind of at a high level and then let Julie and Shannon answer from their perspectives, but absolutely, you know, from here we get the samples, we get the data that we are looking for at the end of the expedition, and then from there, it takes a lot of work for folks to then analyze to the level of quality that they're looking for so that we can then publish our results, it goes through a peer review process, and then also to apply our results to mission architecture development, other sorts of engineering discussions and so forth. So we have to certainly check and double check everything that we bring back so that we can start with a high level of quality and then inject that level of rigor

into subsequent conversations. And then next year we go to sea again. And that expedition will be very much the same as this one in terms of, you know, the area that we explore will be complementary to Loehi and then we'll have this telepresence set up as well. But the fundamental difference will be that we're going to inject a latency, a time delay between the ship and shore and start to look at how the whole system fluctuates or maybe reacts to that. new working environment, which will be much more analogous to working when you have humans orbiting Mars and then humans on Earth interacting with them. Do you think that a mission like this, does it help NASA decide where to go in the future by what you learn underwater here?

Darlene, what do you think? Yeah, absolutely. I do. And that's the whole reason why we're here. You know, to get to this point to actually do this research, we had to, as a team, gather up our ideas and then present that for it in a proposal. And that goes through a very rigorous evaluation process to decide whether or not this work will have impact,

if it will have an expected level of significance to NASA that they would like to see. And certainly it passed that muster, and we're here now. And so any bit of knowledge that we're going to be gaining from the work that Shan and Julie and so many others are doing on this project, we're going to be able to make much better decisions. We'll be much more informed around mission design when it comes to robotic missions to these ocean world systems,

and also operationally when it comes to both those types of missions as well as these other future human spaceflight endeavors. Our number 844-8255. Julie, could it be possible that there are life forms living in some of these strange places on Earth that are unlike anything else on the tree of life? I mean, we had a program a few weeks ago about biologist Carl Woz who discovered archaea,

and he actually received some of his funding from NASA. Did he not? I mean, obviously people know that we might find, it's possible you might find something totally new, Julie. Absolutely. And this is the fun of being a microbiologist, that, you know, the tree of life evolves constantly as we make new discoveries and rebuild the tree of life.

And Carl's work was the beginning of that framework. There have been completely new lineages of microbial life, discovered in the deep ocean, but they've also been discovered in soil in your backyard. They've been discovered in ponds. You know, basically every habitat we examine, we find new microbial life. What's really different about doing in the deep ocean is that there are habitats in the deep ocean that are untouched by humans for, you know, billions of years. And we know that microbial life has been on this planet for billions of years. And so we're really studying microbial life in a more isolated way. than in the surface world.

And so there's huge potential, and there have already been some really amazing discoveries. 844-724-8255. Is it possible, Julie, that these bacteria living down could have some useful commercial purposes when you discover them?

There are all sorts of practical things you can do with microbes. To be clear, I don't do anything practical. And you're proud of it. But I love interacting with sciences from both industry and biomedical world who are interested in, for example, the genes that these microbes carry, you know, the enzymes they can make, you know, can they help us in molecular biology, for example, in DNA sequencing, in making better dish soap, things like that. There's a lot of potential, and it's a very active area of research, and it's something I always keep in mind in trying to share my data. that those scientists can move their science forward to. Let's go to Framingham, Massachusetts.

Nancy, hi, welcome to Science Friday. Excuse me, Mom. Yes. Yes, I just want to say that my father's Naval Academy Transvate, Bill Anderson, took the nuclear submarine Nautilus underneath the Arctic Ice Pack surface at the North Pole. I think this was approximately May of 1958 when I was a schoolgirl. It was a big deal.

It was quite an achievement at that time. He was followed by another classmate Jim Calvert in the submarine skate, also service at the North Pole. And the whole purpose of these expeditions under the Ardener Ice Pack was basically to, map the floor of the archery ocean. Jim Cabin went on to become superintendent of the Naval Academy, and it's buried in the same cemetery as will be Senator McCain. Thank you. Thank you for calling up with that. That was a historic, and actually the Nautilus

is on exhibit out there in Groton. I've been out there and seen it, and it's a great place to go visit. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. We're talking about to see exploration. It's always great to have people call in with historical facts because they know I'm a science historian. So I love the, do you ever think about that when you go underwater? Shannon, do you think about, gee, I'm in a long line of underwater explorers? You know, this is my first time, and I can't tell you how exciting it is to do. I'm used to working on the Earth's surface where I get satellite imagery and I get all of these precursor things. And suddenly I have really none of that. And it's kind of like trying to.

explore a dark room without doing a scavenger hunt with a penlight. And I keep telling myself, all of these amazing people were doing this. They've done all these great discoveries. And I can do this too. And it's such a pleasure to be part of it. So I imagine this is also, you mentioned it, someone mentioned it before, that this is also a teaching moment for learning how the whole staff has to coordinate together, work on the project. Absolutely. It's really important as we're trying to get real good science. out of this, that we're working together as a team. We're not just a microbiologist, a volcanologist, a geochemist,

that are all just getting things from a ship. We're out working together to find things that we can correlate together, make sure all of our science ties together so we can build that entire chemical food chain that you were hearing about a minute ago. 1-844-8255. How long will this be running for a project, and how will you know? I'll throw this out to all of you. Let me ask, Shannon, let me ask you first.

How will you know this is a success? Well, from my perspective, I need to have a certain number of rocks from these different textures and from these different water seeps. And there's going to be different levels of success. It depends on how many rocks I get to have and how well I can link them up to the others. But we need all of these samples from them as well. Is this sort of a tethered robot that goes down and picks stuff off the floor? Yeah, we're using a remotely operated vehicle, so there's no people inside of the vehicle,

and it is tethered back to the ship, being controlled by pilots on the ship. Darlene Lim, as a geobiologist, what would be success for you? You know, honestly, as PI, number one thing is safety. I want to make sure everybody comes back in good health and the safety of the equipment as well. And then just making sure that people like Shannon and Julian, all the scientists in general, and the researchers that we have looking at the ops and the tech end of things get the data that they needed to acquire over the course of this expedition. I want to mention that only about 9% of our lives is spent doing the actual field work.

The other, you know, 91%, 92% of the time is actually spent back home organizing this, getting ready thoughtfully for this type of expedition because you really only get one shot. And that's another pressure that's put on us, which is very analogous to going into space. It's hard to do this research. It's really important we get the data back for a number of different reasons. And then, you know, that additional pressure of working in this difficult environment, it creates an incredible opportunity to learn in a very, what's called high fidelity, really great analog for a number of reasons that we've discussed.

So definitely safety first and then our research, that, you know, let's meet our goals. That's our priority. And this volcano off the coast of Hawaii, the big island, unique volcano someday, perhaps creating another part of Hawaii? Yes, we have actually had the incredible opportunity to do some mapping on our way to the Luigi Sea Mount of the offshore region where the lava has been entering into the ocean. And so we've been doing this mapping for Adam Sewell, who's at Hooie as well as the USGS and ourselves, so we can start to understand what's actually been going on in the ocean as a consequence of all the, seismic activity and the eruptions that have been going on on the mainland.

Yeah, so we've really had a wonderful experience. Well, good luck to all of you, and we'll be checking in on your progress. Hopefully, we'll have you back on to talk about it. Have a good mission. Darlene Lim, geobiologist at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, principal investigator of the subsea mission. Julie Huber is an oceanographer at Woods Hole, Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts. It's Shannon Cobbs Novotniak, a volcanologist at Subsea Mission based at Idaho State University.

One last thing. Before we go, a warm welcome to K-H-N-S. Thanks for bringing Science Friday to Alaska's Northern Community. Thanks for joining the Science Friday family. Our producers, Charles Berger, is our director, a senior producer, Christopher Antaliyata. Producers are Alex Slim, Christy Taylor, or Katie Heiler. Our intern is Lucy Wong, and we had technical and engineering help from Rich Kim and Sarah Fishman. We're active all week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all the social media. If you have a smart speaker, you can ask it to play Science Friday.

And every day now is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato in New York.