TED Radio Hour - The mysteries that lie beneath

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

From our planet's underwater caves to its ancient soils, there are entire worlds right beneath our feet. This hour, we explore the subterranean forces that shape our lives above the ground. Guests include cave diver Jill Heinerth, death care advocate Katrina Spade, soil scientist Asmeret Asefaw Berhe and paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim. Original broadcast date: March 11, 2022.TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading.

From TED and NPR. I'm Minouche Zamoroti. And today on the show, What Lies Beneath? Starting with someone who spends a lot of her time beneath the Earth's surface in underwater caves. You know, most people hear the word cave diver, and they picture me, like, jumping off of a cliff into the ocean. It's like, no, that's not it. at all. I'm actually swimming through water-filled passages beneath your feet. This is cave diver Jill Heinrich. The best way for me to describe it is to think of the planet as a body.

And I am swimming through the veins of Mother Earth. I've been cave diving all over the planet in underwater caves in Florida, the Bahamas, underneath the Ural Mountains in Siberia, inside lava tubes and volcanoes and even inside icebergs. Jill has hundreds of stories to tell about magical adventures she's had deep underground. But often these dives are pretty dangerous, like the one she took in January 2011 in Northern Florida. I was guiding a scientist into a very small underwater cave. And it was for the purpose of sampling some algal material. that might closely resemble life we would find in outer space.

The dive was going as expected until it was time to exit the cave, which was really more like a narrow passageway. That's when Jill's diving partner got wedged in the rocks. And in the moment she got stuck, her gear became entangled in our safety line, and she became wedged in this space that was about as big as sliding. underneath your bed, like literally shoulders pinned to the ceiling and chest scraping along the floor.

And as she became entangled and unable to swim forward, she panicked. And in that panic, just a couple of errant fin kicks stirred up everything to the point where I was literally like suspended in chocolate milk. I couldn't see anything. And I had one hand on the guideline and one hand on her. And she was moving to my left. And I'm stretching out my arms more and more and more. Until the guideline is being stressed in my right hand and she's in my left.

And I feel like getting tighter and tighter and tighter. Like a piano wire. And then suddenly ping. The line separates and I have the bitter end of a guideline in my hand. and my diving partner in my other hand. And I'm thinking, oh boy, we're in trouble now. The guideline is basically a rope leading back to the mouth of the cave. Yeah.

If you don't have the guideline, the cave is just full of traps. You know, it's not marked by anything other than your guideline. And so you would have to re-explore in complete blackness to find your way out. So Jill started to think through all she needed to do to save them. I needed to calm now my partner. She needed to get them unstuck. I needed to patch the guideline and then work our way out of the cave.

Her thoughts were racing. You know, oh my gosh, I have to get out of this cave. Two women can't die in an underwater cave. That would be international news. And then you think crazy things like, oh my gosh, I have to get home. My husband doesn't know how to do the taxes. But the important thing is just to take that deep breath and center yourself and just make the best next step towards survival and then keep doing it until you get home safe.

But how deep were you into the cave, like from the mouth of it? So we were over a thousand feet back in the cave, and we had to come through several small, restrictive spaces in zero visibility, and that could take you a long time. Now, I had to patch the guideline, and that needed two hands, and that's when I lost track of my partner. Where did she go? I mean, where was there to go if you're all tight and packed in like that? Well, that's the thing, eh? When you can't see, you don't know.

And in the end, it took me an extra 73 minutes to get out of the cave. As I worked out of the cave, searching for her all the way out, I stopped and checked side passages. And then finally, when I got to the doorway of the cave, there she was in the entrance. And that was the most beautiful sight I've ever seen. And, you know, I would have quit cave diving. I just know that would have been my last dive if she hadn't made it out. And there she was. Her mask was full of tears because she was certain that I was dead.

You know, she had already called out an emergency and people were racing to the scene, probably expecting to recover my body from the cave, not to do a rescue. There are not very many rescues in underwater caves. Oh, Jill, that story is terrifying. And it makes me wonder, what? compels you to keep diving even after experiences like those? Well, in the discussions that I had with my husband Robert after that dive, it forced us both to reflect on why I do this,

why I go into these places. And I believe we all have a calling, and this is mine. It's to try to illuminate complex issues about how we are connected to our water environment. It's about sharing climate change information through my adventures, because really everything we do on the surface of the earth gets returned to us to drink. Anything that happens on the surface of the earth can soak into the ground and end up in places that I swim through. So I can see the results of humanity's interactions with things on top of the earth that they might not feel are really connected with their water systems. But I can assure you, I see the connections. I swim through them.

From waterways tunneling below us to ecosystems that only exist deep in the soil. We rarely give much thought to what's happening beneath the earth's surface. But there are some amazing mysteries and opportunities waiting to be discovered if we're brave enough to go down and take a look. So today on the show, stories and ideas about what lies beneath and how appreciating underground worlds could change. how we live above ground. For Jill Heiners, diving into caves can feel like time travel.

Exploring these voids in the planet is so important because these are like museums of natural history. I mean, we can work with scientists and unravel interesting information about Earth's past climate. You know, we can learn about ancient civilizations that have used these as portals to another world. And these are also places where there is life.

Here's Jill Heinrich on the TED stage. It turns out that caves are repositories of amazing life forms, species that we'd never knew existed before. Many of these life forms live in unusual ways. They have no pigment and no eyes in many cases. And these animals are also extremely long-lived. In fact, animals swimming in these caves today are identical in the fossil record that predates the extinction of the dinosaurs.

So imagine that. These are like little swimming dinosaurs. What can they teach us about evolution and survival? I also get to work with paleontologists and archaeologists in places like Mexico, in the Bahamas, and even in Cuba, looking at cultural remains and also human remains in caves. And they tell us a lot about some of the earliest inhabitants of the animals. these regions. So, Jill, when you're looking for a new place to dive, how do you know where to go? Like, is there, I don't know, a secret map for cave divers that has like X's in the jungle in Mexico?

Or like, or do you ever think like, do you have a hint? Like you're like, I think there's going to be a cave here and do you ever stumble upon one? I mean, we still use some pretty crude research methods in order to find places where we might find caves. I, I mean, I do everything from looking at old archival maps and comparing them to current maps. I look at writings. Like, I've read back as far as some of Alexander the Great's accounts of traveling through the western desert of Egypt. Really? But we also look at Google Maps and look for sinkholes.

And, you know, different cave divers will cooperate with others in exploration as well. So we'll sort of tag team exploration efforts and share our results with each other as we explore something new. My very favorite project of all was over 15 years ago when I was a part of a team that made the very first accurate three-dimensional map of a subterranean surface. This device was actually creating a three-dimensional model as we drove it.

We also used ultra-low frequency radio to broadcast back to the surface our exact position within the cave. So I swim under houses and businesses and bowling alleys and golf courses and even under a Sunny's Barbecue restaurant. Our water planet is not just rivers, lakes, and oceans, but it's this vast network of groundwater that knits us all together.

It's a shared resource from which we all drink. We don't really talk much about what's going on beneath the ground other than, well, sewer systems. Or in Florida, they're starting to understand, when it rains and the water doesn't go anywhere because the so little drainage, that sort of permeability between what's above and what's beneath, do you think of them as being separate worlds or do you really see them as interconnected in some ways? No, I see the whole planet as interconnected. I mean, I've traveled through the plumbing of the planet. I've traveled even through the

man-made plumbing of the planet exploring urban caves in stormwater. water systems. In fact, I went on one journey where we paddled up the Wakiva River, this incredibly beautiful natural resource in Florida to find the source of the Wakiva. Well, the source of the Wakiva is a Best Buy parking lot. Really? Yeah, we literally traveled through the storm sewer systems and climbed a ladder and popped up in a Best Buy parking lot. It's like, wow, you know, this incredible natural environment full of beautiful wildlife and birds and fish is being served by, you know, the water that's running off this parking lot, collecting, you know, heavy metals off the brakes of cargos and everything else. And when you're walking through that stormwater

conduit, you're seeing the greasy, horrible stuff that will end up in that river. So I'm literally in the sustenance, the water that fuels the industries that we rely on. So it's this incredible journey where I get to go inside and see the health of the planet and wonders of places that nobody else has ever taken pictures of before. That's Jill Heinerth. Her book is called Into the Planet My Life as a Cave Diver. You can see her full talk at ted.com. On the show today, What Lies Beneath?

I'm Manushe Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Minouche Zamoroti. And on the show today, what lies beneath? As the prayer goes, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Sometimes it's hard to hear, but eventually we'll all return to the earth, which means one of two default options, usually.

Burial in a casket, or for more and more people, cremation. So cremation is extremely popular and it's rising in popularity very quickly. So I think two years ago it hit 50% of Americans choosing cremation. And it's expected to rise up to, you know, 70, 80% in the next decade or so. This is Katrina Spade. She's a bit of an expert in what is broadly called death care. And she says there are a couple reasons why cremation has gotten so popular. Imagine, for one, the cemetery.

that our families might have been buried in, we probably have moved away from. And so there's less of a place-based desire to be buried in one family plot, for example. The other reason is that cremation is much cheaper than conventional burial. By conventional burial, Katrina means a body filled with embalming fluid, put in a casket that's placed in the ground, surrounded by a concrete liner. And then I think it's true that folks think that cremation, is more environmentally friendly than conventional burial. But put together the manufacture and transport of all of that stuff

that goes with a conventional burial, and compare it to cremation, which uses fossil gas to burn the body, and emits particulates in mercury and carbon in the atmosphere. And in fact, they're really on par with each other from a carbon footprint standpoint. Katrina started learning about all these environmental problems while she was an architecture student. And I didn't like the wastefulness of it.

Even aside from like the pollution, I thought, you know, I might have something left to give back when I die, like whatever is in this husk of a body. And so why burn it up? And I knew about natural burial, which is where a body is like laid into a grave, usually in just a shroud or a wood or cardboard sometimes coffin. And it's really about returning to the earth. And I thought, that's beautiful. And yet, I love living in cities. And I hate the idea that if you live in a city, like so many in the world, do you'd have to leave it after you die in order to choose an environmentally beneficial choice. So I was thinking about this and what would the urban equivalent to natural burial be?

What would it mean to return to the earth but stay in my city? So those were the very first inklings of this idea. Katrina Spade explains her idea on the TED stage. Back in architecture school, I was thinking about all this, and I set out on a plan to redesign death care. Could I create a system that was beneficial to the earth that used nature as a guide rather than something to be feared? Something that was gentle to the planet.

That planet, after all, supports our living bodies, our whole lives. And while I was mulling this all over, over the drawing board, the phone rang. It was my friend Kate. She was like, hey, have you heard about the farmers who are composting whole cows? And I was like, hmm. Turns out that farmers and agricultural institutions have been practicing something called livestock mortality composting for decades. mortality composting is where you take an animal high in nitrogen and cover it with co-composting materials that are high in carbon.

It's an aerobic process, so it requires oxygen, and it requires plenty of moisture as well. In the most basic setup, a cow is covered with a few feet of wood chips, which are high in carbon, and left outside for breezes to provide oxygen and rain to provide moisture. In about nine months, all that remains is a nutrient-rich compost. The flesh has been decomposed entirely, as have the bones. I know. So I would definitely call myself a decomposition nerd, but I am far, far from a scientist. And one way you can tell this is true is that I often call the process of composting magic.

So basically all we humans need to do is create the right environment for nature to do its job. It's like the opposite of antibacterial soap. Instead of fighting them, we welcome microbes and bacteria in with open arms. These tiny, amazing creatures break down molecules into smaller molecules and atoms, which are then incorporated into new molecules. In other words, that cow, is transformed. It's no longer a cow. It's been cycled back into nature. See? Magic.

You can probably imagine the light bulb that went off in my head after I received that phone call. I began designing a system based on the principles of livestock mortality composting that would take human beings that transform them into soil. Turning humans into soil, this notion came to you back in grad school and you were like, I'm going to do this. I am going to figure out how to compost bodies. And over several years, you did research, you recruited advisors, and then you tested your idea. Yeah, so there was no question in my mind that we could compost humans. We had done, we partnered with Washington State University and the soil science department there to do a pilot project where we composted

six humans who had donated their bodies to that work. And that was to prove it was safe and effective. We couldn't just say, oh, well, you know, we do this with cows. We had to prove it worked with humans. And so after that pilot program, you launched a company called Recompose. What does it offer? What we do at Recompose is place each individual body into a vessel, a stainless steel container that's about eight feet long and four feet tall.

And it's housed in a hexagonal array. So if you look at this vessel system from the front, it looks a little bit like a beehive. And inside of each vessel is one human body laid into a bed of woodchips, alfalfa, and straw, and cover it with more of the same. And then over the course of a month, that vessel, we provide oxygen to the vessel via a fan system. We're kind of constantly errating that plant material, which is what provides the perfect environment for microbial activity. And those microbes, by the way, they're on us right now as we speak, and they're in the air and they're on the wood chips. So we don't have to inoculate them into the vessel.

They just exist naturally, and they'll break the body down and wood chips in straw in about 30 days. What does it turn into? Does it look like soil? It looks a lot like soil or maybe a little more like a compost that you would buy at a nursery. In 30 days that fast? Well, no, not quite. So it's about six weeks total. After 30 days, we remove the soil, and then all of the material goes into what we call a cure bin.

And so curing is a fancy way of saying compost is drying out and finishing its process. So for another two to four weeks, the soil is cured, and then it's ready to go back to families. And if families would rather, they can donate it to conservation efforts. I'm still pretty flabbergasted by your process here, your system to compost humans. But once the process is finished, like how much soil is there? Well, because we use so much plant material to cocoon the body in, the final result is a cubic yard of soil. And that's three feet by three feet by three feet. Oh, that's a lot.

Oh, yeah. It fills a pickup truck. And it's really interesting because, Over the years, I've noticed this like push and pull between the ritual and the meaning and the sort of natural side of things and then the industrial side. Like when we have families, when they want the soil, we say, okay, well, you're going to need a pickup truck or you're going to need a trailer of this size. And so then they, you know, pull up with their trailer and we forklift the soil in. And there's this kind of moment of sometimes it's of levity a little bit because it's like, oh, this was my person. once. And now it's a huge amount of soil that I can go use and start that orchard if I want.

What is human compost like? Are you going to grow super crunchy apples if you use our soil? Like, what are we like as soil? I was certain that human compost must be special. And it turns out, in fact, the compost we make is pretty good. But we shy against calling it like spectacular. It's just really good compost. I don't know why that makes us sad, but I don't know. Maybe I thought our big brains would make it particularly nutritious or something. Nope. But it is worth noting that when you look at the avoidance of pollution from cremation and conventional burial, and then you couple that with the sequestration of carbon that happens

when you compost wood chips, alfalfa, and the body, we're saving about a mess. ton of carbon per person. I mean, it's very different than lowering a casket into the ground and everybody wearing black and then throwing dirt over it and then leaving that person behind. I remember one of the first funerals I went to, there was something incredibly sad about leaving the person. It felt like, but now he has to stay there in the ground away from us. I can't explain it.

You know, I was a child. But there was something, it just didn't feel. kind, but I don't know if you've heard that from other people. Well, there's a couple of things that feel to me a little bit different than that experience, which sounds hard, by the way. One is that we do mark the moment where we lay the body into the vessel because it's the minute that this transformation is going to begin. And so our staff will do what we call a laying in ceremony where the body is on

a cradle in front of the vessel. We lay plant material on the body. We then load the body into the vessel. And, you know, the closing of that vessel door isn't totally unlike the burial, I guess, in a lot of ways. I think the difference for me is that we have like a dozen staff people working in this facility. We have this array of hexagonal vessels. They're white and inside of most of them is a body decomposing. And there's this kind of liveliness about the place in a way. Really? I mean, we like to, on the day when we're laying someone in, we often play the music their family said they loved. So sometimes we'll have like Bob Marley

going in the background. And so I think there's something about this, the place where this is happening and knowing that the transformation does end and a new person joins the hive, if you will. that is a little bit more lively than your typical cemetery, perhaps. I have to imagine that while there are people who are very supportive of your work, there must also be people who are not, Katrina. I mean, I have to say when I have mentioned this to people, human composting, they take a beat and they kind of look at me like, what are you even talking about?

And I wonder for some people like, you know, not only is it maybe shocking, but also perhaps disrespectful? You know, the first thing is that I have certainly had folks take a beat when I mention what I do. And then a lot of the time, if you went back to those people like a few days later, you'd be surprised after giving it some thought, thinking about the current options, a lot of people are like, actually, this is actually pretty nice, you know. It's not for everybody. There's no question.

And I really think everyone should have the option they want. As long as they're being intentional about it, I don't think there's really a wrong way. You know, yes, it's more polluting to go with cremation, but also I drive a car. So it's like a little hypocritical to say that you shouldn't have whatever option you want, I think. But the problem is that people choose their death care, or they, I should say, they don't choose their death care. They just go with the default. A lot of the time, it's not a meaningful choice. It's just, well, I guess I'll creamate grandma.

So I assume you want to be composted, right? Wouldn't it be weird if I said no? That would be really weird. I mean, but I have to ask just to make sure. I do want to be composted. But mostly what I want is for my kids and partner to do something every year. Like mark my death in any way every year. So what do you mean by that?

Like play a song or go to a place? Because that is what we do now, right? Like we go to pay our respects in a graveyard. We go to a stone if the person is cremated. Like what you're kind of suggesting is that we pay our respects to the dead in a very different way. It's not about going somewhere. It's about the ground beneath our feet and knowing that they are there with us in some way. Yeah.

I mean, think about what happens during the composting process is our molecules are rearranged. And we cease to be human. And that is pretty powerful, I think, to just think about truly going back to the earth and then kind of dissipating. Like the entire planet is supported by the process of decomposition. That is how soil is created and what all of life is based on. So if you can just get into that mode and think, okay, I'm going to just be jumping into the stream of creation.

You know, yeah, I think it can feel pretty joyous. That's Katrina Spade. She's the founder of Recompose, a company that composts human remains. You can see her full talk at ted.com. As we just heard, Katrina wants to make burials more eco-friendly by harnessing soils power to decompose a body and then hold onto the carbon that gets released. Keep that carbon underground. This process is called carbon sequestration, and our next speaker says it could be used to solve the biggest problem that our planet faces.

The health of the soil system is extremely important part of addressing the climate crisis. This is Osmeret-Asofow Bear-Hay. I'm a professor of soil biogeochemistry at the University of California and Merced. Osmeret has been studying dirt for decades. The hook for me happened when I realized how important soil is in regulating life as we know it in the Earth system. And the more Osmeret learned about soil, the more she realized that we humans were squandering its superpowers. Here she is on the TED stage. Climate change happening because of increasing amount of greenhouse gases we keep releasing to the atmosphere.

You all know that. But what I assume you might not have heard is that one of the most important things our human society could do to address climate change lies right there in the soil. Human actions are now releasing 9.4 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. But the concentration of carbon dioxide that stays in the atmosphere is only increasing by about half of that. And that's because half of the carbon we keep releasing into the atmosphere is currently being taken up through a process we know as carbon sequestration. So in essence, whatever consequence you think we're facing from climate change right now, we're only experiencing the consequence of 50% of our pollution.

But don't get too comfortable. The ability of these natural ecosystems to take up carbon dioxide, from the atmosphere and sequestered in the natural habitats, is currently getting compromised as they're experiencing serious degradation because of human actions. We treat soil literally like dirt. We haven't been taken care of the soil, even though soil has actually been making our lives possible.

In a moment, more from Asmerit Asafau-Berhe on the climate change solution that's right beneath our feet. I'm Anoush Zamorodi, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR. We're right back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoosh Zamoroti. On the show today, what lies beneath? We were just talking to Osmeret, Asafal, Bear Hay, a soil scientist at the University of California.

I love soil in all forms. I think soil is just beautiful. Osmeret says that soil is one of our best tools for fighting climate change because it can store vast amounts of carbon. Here she is again on the TED stage. There is about 3,000 billion metric tons of carbon in the soil. That's roughly about 315 times the amount of carbon that we release into the atmosphere currently.

And there's twice more carbon in soil than there is in vegetation and air. Think about that for a second. There's more carbon in soil than there is. in all of the world's vegetation, including the lush tropical rainforests and the giant sequoias, the expansive grasslands, all of the cultivated systems,

and every kind of flora you can imagine on the face of the earth. Plus, all the carbon that's currently up in the atmosphere combined and then twice over. Hence, a very small change in the amount of carbon stored in soil can make a big difference in maintenance of the air to atmosphere. But soil's not just simply a storage box for carbon, though. It operates more like a bank account. And the amount of carbon that's in soil at any given time is the function of the amount of carbon coming in and out of the soil. Carbon comes into the soil through the process of photosynthesis

when green plants take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and upon death, their bodies enter the soil. And carbon leaves the soil and goes right back up into the atmosphere when the bodies of those formerly living organisms decay in soil by activity of microbes. One of the things that make soil such a fundamental component of any climate change mitigation strategy is because it represents a long-term storage of carbon.

Carbon that would have lasted, maybe a year or two, if it was left on the surface, can stay in soil for hundreds of years, even thousands and more. So soil has this amazing capacity to store carbon, but we humans have been messing with the soil. And in your talk, you say that half of the world's soils are considered degraded. Is that one of the reasons why we have a warming planet? Because we've damaged the soil. So it can't take in as much carbon as it used to and as much as we need it to. Yeah. So human actions in particular, the way we've changed land use and land cover globally,

including through deforestation and intensive cultivation practices, they typically contribute about 15% of the CO2 that we keep releasing to the atmosphere every year. So it's a big portion of the CO2 we keep releasing to the atmosphere. carbon that would have stayed in the soil system is not staying. It's rather going back into the atmosphere's greenhouse gases because we keep cutting down the trees. We keep overtilling the soil and disturbing the soil to a point where its ability to hold on to that carbon is diminishing. And since the human act community started engaging in agriculture in a large-scale manner, we've released on the order of about 120 billion metric tons of carbon that was in soil

into the atmosphere. Yeah. So, and this, the fastest rate of loss has been happening in the last 200 years since the Industrial Revolution. So remember that the most important ways we use soil as human community is for supporting plant productivities, but we also build the infrastructure, right? It's where we build our roads and bridges and everything. And those are part of the processes that are responsible for the large-scale degradation of soil globally. Close to half of the soils in the world right now are considered degraded,

meaning their ability to support plant production and to support life is compromised. So that means like all the rainforests that have been cut down and all the millions of heads of cattle that are grazing, on planes. All of that means that the soil underneath is not as rich as it once was. Yeah, and all of these intensive deforestation and grazing practices, in particular overgrazing, beyond the capacity that the land can support. All of that compromises the physical stability of soil, the chemical nature of soil, including provision of the nutrients that are needed to support the microbial communities. So this is why it becomes really important to think about managing soils

in a climate-smart way. Fortunately, I can also tell you that there is a solution for these two wicked problems of soil degradation and climate change. And the solution lies in simultaneously working to address these two things together, through what we call climate-smart land management practices. And we can accomplish this by putting in place deep-rooted perennial plants, putting back forests whenever possible, reducing tillage and other disturbance from agricultural practices, including optimizing the use of agricultural chemicals and grazing, and even adding carbon to soil whenever possible from recycled resources such as compost and even human waste. This kind of land stewardship is not a radical idea.

It's what made it possible for fertile soils to be able to support human civilizations since time immemorial. In fact, some are doing it just right now. There's a global effort underway to accomplish exactly this goal. This effort that started in France is known as the four-per-mill effort, and it sets an aspirational goal to increase the amount of carbon stored in soil by 0.4% annually, using the same kind of climate smart land management practices I mentioned earlier. And if this effort's fully successful,

it can offset a third of the global emissions of fossil fuel-derived carbon to the atmosphere. But even if this effort's not fully successful, but we just start heading in that direction. We still end up with soils that are healthier, more fertile, are able to produce all the food and resources that we need for human populations and more, and also soils that are better capable of sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and helping with climate change mitigation. I'm pretty sure that's what politicians call a win-win solution.

Wow. Okay. So if we could reduce our CO2 buildup by a third just by focusing on soil, Osmarat, why aren't we talking about that in the same breath as how we're going to save our oceans or making sure that the polar ice caps don't melt away? I think in some ways it's because we had grown so accustomed to take soil for granted. And part of this is because the group of people that are affected, and the group of people who have been addressing it have been two distinct groups, right? And I personally feel it's important to highlight the human element of this discussion because in many ways, a lot of the impacts of climate change are going to be felt by economically

speaking, the least fortunate amongst us, the folks who live in poor nations, you know, small island nations near the equator in coastal margins. but their voices, and especially until recently, had not been part of our climate conversation. And the fact that climate change has become a threat multiplier, i.e., it's actually exacerbating the problem of food and nutritional insecurity, water insecurity in many parts of the world, had not gotten enough attention in our discourse. So you're saying that, you know, if there was more diversity in the people who are calling attention to all these climate change problems we have and the potential solutions, that more people might understand the role that soil plays, which would in turn help us all. Exactly.

Yeah. In many cases, it's like whenever we have more diversity in science, we end up addressing societally relevant questions, right? Yes, that is correct. You know, I'm sitting here and I'm thinking about how rarely I actually touch soil. I live in a city. I go to the park all the time. But when was the last time I actually felt the dirt? Not recently. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's true, right? Human communities evolve in agricultural societies where they were intimately aware of the land around them.

properties and they knew what it could support and what it couldn't. And they work the land, literally speaking, to support their livelihood. Many of us in modern times don't have that connection. And in many ways, we've lost the connection to a point where soil is just the stuff beneath the asphalt or the concrete that we step on every day, right? It's not even the thing we experience unless we're out hiking in the trail somewhere or in a park. And so that connection, is lost. We all can have a role to play here. We can start by treating the soil with the respect that it deserves. Respect for its ability as the basis of all life on Earth. Respect for its ability to serve as a carbon bank and respect for its ability to control our climate. And if we do so,

we can then simultaneously address two of the most pressing global challenge of our time, climate change and soil degradation. And in the process, we would be able to provide food and nutritional security to our growing human family. Thank you. Asmerette Asafal Bear Hay is a soil scientist at the University of California, Merced. She's also President Biden's pick to lead the Department of Energy's office. Office of Science. You can find her full talk at ted.com. We want to wrap up our show about what lies beneath with a paleontologist.

Recently, researchers reported that they believe the spinosaurus may be the largest ever carnivore in history. And that finding builds on the work of paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim, who in 2014 found the fossils that proved the spinosaurus. hunted its prey in rivers 97 million years ago. Here he is on the TED stage. These dragons from deep time are incredible creatures. They're bizarre. They're beautiful.

And there's very little we know about them. I've been on a quest to uncover new remains of a giant predatory dinosaur called Spinosaurus. A few bones of this animal have been found in the deserts of Egypt, and were described about 100 years ago by a German paleontologist. Unfortunately, all his spinosaurus bones were destroyed in World War II. So all we are left with are just a few drawings and notes. From these drawings, we know that this creature, which lived about 100 million years ago, was very big.

It had tall spines on its back, forming a magnificent sense. sail, and it had long slender jaws, a bit like a crocodile, but that was pretty much all we knew about this animal for the next hundred years. My fieldwork took me to the border region between Morocco and Algeria, a place called the Kemp. It's a difficult place to work in. You have to deal with sandstorms and snakes and scorpions, and it's very difficult to find good fossils there. But our hard work paid off. We discovered many incredible specimens, the largest dinosaur bone that had ever been found in this part of the Sahara.

We found remains of giant predatory dinosaurs, medium-sized predatory dinosaurs, and seven or eight different kinds of crocodile-like hunters. These fossils were deposited in a river system. The river system was also home to a giant car-sized silicate. a monster sawfish, and the skies over the river system were filled with parasaurus, flying reptiles. It was a pretty dangerous place, not the kind of place where you'd want to travel to if you had a time machine. So we were finding all these incredible fossils of animals that lived alongside Spinosaurus,

but Spinosaurus itself proved to be very elusive. We're just finding bits and pieces, and I was hoping that we would find a partial skeleton at some point. Finally, very recently, we're able to track down a dig site where a local fossil hunter found several bones of spinosaurus. We returned to the site, we collected more bones, and so after 100 years, we finally had another partial skeleton of this bizarre creature, and we're able to reconstruct it. We now know that spinosaurs had a head a little bit like a crocodile,

very different from other predatory dinosaurs, very different from T-Rex. But the really interesting information came from the rest of the skull. We had long spines, the spines forming the big sail. We had leg bones, we had skull bones. We had paddle-shaped feet, wide feet. Very unusual. No other dinosaurs feet like this.

And we think they may have been used to walk on soft sediment or maybe for paddling in the water. We also looked at the fine microstructure of the bone, the inside structure of spinosaurus bones. And turns out that they're very dense and compact. So that's useful for buoyancy control in the water. We CT scanned all of our bones and built a digital spinosaur skeleton. And when we looked at the digital skeleton, we realized that, yes, this was a dinosaur unlike any other. It's bigger than T-Rex. And yes, the head has fish

eating written all over it, but really the entire skeleton has water-loving written all over it. Dense bone, paddle-like feet. And the hind limbs are reduced in size. And again, this is something we see in animals that spend a substantial amount of time in the water. So as we fleshed out our spinosaurus, I'm looking at muscle attachments and wrapping our dinosaur in skin, we realized that we're dealing with a river monster, a predatory dinosaur, bigger than T-Rex, the ruler of this ancient river of giants feeding on the many aquatic animals. So that's really what makes this an incredible discovery. It's a dinosaur like no other. And some people told me, wow, this is a once in a lifetime discovery.

There are not many things left to discover in the world, right? Well, I think nothing could be further from the truth. I think the Sahara is still full of treasures. And when people tell me there are no places left to explore, I like to quote a famous dinosaur hunter, Roy Chapman Andrews. And he said, always there has been an adventure just around the corner. And the world is still full of corners. There was true many decades ago when Roy Chap and Andrews wrote these lines, and it is still true today.

Thank you. That's paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim. You can find both his talks at TED.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show this week about what lies beneath. This episode was produced by Katie Montalione, James Delahousie, Fiona Girin, Sylvie Douglas, and Matthew Cloutier. It was edited by Katie Simon, Rachel Faulkner, and James Delahousie. Our TED Radio production staff also includes Diba Motisham and Margaret Serino. Our audio engineer is Brian Jarbo.

Many thanks to Catherine Sefer for her help with this episode, too. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablewe. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Feelein, Michelle Quint, Sammy Case, and Danielle Balezzo. I'm Manus Zammerodi, and you've been listening. to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.