Online NewsHour: --June 10, 1997

GARDENS OF EDEN

JUNE 10, 1997

TRANSCRIPT

New York Times science writer and Pulitzer Prize winner William Broad has explored the Earth’s utmost depths in his new book, THE UNIVERSE BELOW: Discovering the Secrets of the Deep Sea. He speaks with David Gergen. You can also send us your questions for an Online Forum with William Broad. Mr. Broad's answers will be posted June 16, 1997 in our Authors' Corner.

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DAVID GERGEN: So you say in your new book "there was a rush of scientific discovery about the ocean, a rush that is shattering old myths, rescuing lost treasures, and laying bare secrets of nature hidden since the beginning of geologic time." Tell us about this rush to discovery.
WILLIAM BROAD, Author, The Universe Below: There’s a lot going on. The ocean is being thrown open quickly for the first time ever. It’s been a big closed secret for ages and centuries and now because of the spin-offs from the end of the Cold War, we have this wonderful peace dividend happening that is opening it all up.
DAVID GERGEN: And all of the technology that came out of the Navy.
WILLIAM BROAD: Tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars that the governments, ours and others, sunk into mastering the deep for a Cold War kind of stuff. That’s coming out of the closet. You have people. You have technologies that are opening up any part of the ocean. You and I could pool our money, go out and hire a ship today that would go out and pump the deepest part of the Atlantic. We couldn't have done that five years ago.
DAVID GERGEN: And what are we discovering out there?
WILLIAM BROAD: Huge things. I mean, first of all, you have to realize how big it is. It’s the largest part of the biosphere on Earth. It’s just filled with--
DAVID GERGEN: When you say the biosphere on Earth, explain that.
WILLIAM BROAD: The biosphere is the habitable part of the Earth. If you take all the stuff we have on land--the trees--all the stuff we know and love, the fields, you put all that together, and then you take the upper part of the ocean and mix that into the equation. That’s about 3 percent of the biosphere, of the habitable part of the Earth. And the other 97 percent of that is cold and wet and dark and virtually unknown.
DAVID GERGEN: That’s all beneath the top of the sea.
WILLIAM BROAD: All beneath the top of the sea. It’s this huge area, up to seven miles deep, and--
DAVID GERGEN: By comparison--you say that the ocean goes down seven miles--what’s the highest mountain?
WILLIAM BROAD: Everest is about five miles. So it’s going much deeper than the highest mountain on Earth in these deep trenches. And we know virtually nothing about it. Scientists estimate that in the huge dark biosphere that we’re talking about we might have laid eyes on maybe a hundredth or a billionth of it. It’s just a tiny, tiny fraction of what’s out there.
So now we’re on this wave, this rush of discovery that’s going on that's powered by this incredible peace dividend. And all kinds of things are opening up--oceanography, the treasure hunters are out there just scouring the surface of the oceans right now. I’ve been out there with them. I’ve been places I can’t say.
DAVID GERGEN: I’d like to ask you about that, about where you’ve been, because you had a really interesting voyage a few years ago to the bottom.
WILLIAM BROAD: Yes.
DAVID GERGEN: And it’s the bottom that now seems to excite the scientists, what they’re finding. And tell us about your trip and what’s down there at the bottom--these volcanic areas.
WILLIAM BROAD: Yeah. This is--it was a mind-boggling, wonderful experience for me in ‘93. We dove down on a hot volcanic gash at the bottom of the Pacific, down in a little submersible, Alvin. And immediately, you’re overwhelmed with this experience of life--I mean, all these gelatinous creatures and the incredible density of life as you go down just a curtain of fireworks, you know, blowing off as you pass these by.
DAVID GERGEN: There’s a lot of water pressure too.
WILLIAM BROAD: And incredible pressure as you go down, which is why the sea is so unknown. It’s one of the main impediments. As you go down, every cubic--ten cubic feet of water is equal to one cubic foot of lead. So at the level of the Titanic--down two and a half miles--is like having the Empire State Building of solid lead pressing down on you, squeezing you. And I have an example here to show you what happens as you go down.
DAVID GERGEN: All right.
WILLIAM BROAD: As we went down on Alvin, one of these Styrofoam cups is on the outside, and I had drawn on it--drew some pictures for my kids--and this is what happened to it after you got down to the bottom.
DAVID GERGEN: It was crushed into that.
WILLIAM BROAD: It got crushed. It got squeezed down into a tiny little fraction of its normal size. Sea creatures can handle it because they’re mostly water, which is virtually incompressible. But anything with a cavity--and in this case Styrofoam, which has lots of bubbles--gets squeezed enormously.
DAVID GERGEN: Well, scientists have assumed for centuries that animals and life could only exist in sunlight. And they have found something very different.
WILLIAM BROAD: On these hot volcanic gases which are immense. There’s 46,000 miles of them. That’s like seven times around the Moon. It’s the biggest feature on our planet, and we know virtually nothing about it, except that every once in a while when we go down, like I had the privilege of doing, you find there are these lush ecosystems that thrive in total darkness.
They are living on the heat and the chemicals that are boiling up out of the bottom of the sea floor and energizing these long food chains. They start with little microbes that eat the usually hydrogen sulfide is the first chemical they eat, and then other things come and eat the microbes and the little fish eats the big fish.
DAVID GERGEN: Everything—
WILLIAM BROAD: There’s tube worms eight and ten feet long. It’s a whole Alice in Wonderland world. And we’re just starting to find out about it in detail. On my voyage we went down in response to a volcanic eruption, which civilian scientists had listened to for the first time because of these Navy spinoffs. They were able to hear the eruption, so they went out afterwards and were able to study the life that was growing up out of the sea floor.
DAVID GERGEN: But the surprise in recent years in oceanography is that actually life can exist, can take place there.
WILLIAM BROAD: In that darkness.
DAVID GERGEN: In that darkness and with that hot, hot water coming out of those vents.
WILLIAM BROAD: Yes. It’s extremely hot. There are microbes down there that need that heat. They’re called hyperthermophiles. They love it. And it’s this whole alternative universe of life down there which I saw. I mean, I had this wonderful privilege of going down and seeing these gelatinous sheets of life and tube worms and all this stuff coming up in a place where centuries ago people thought there was no life; there was no possibility.
DAVID GERGEN: You call it in your book "The Garden of Eden." That suggests that this may be the origins of life on Earth.
WILLIAM BROAD: Sure. Just almost as soon as this area was discovered people started speculating on it being a possible place for life to have started. It’s hot and it’s constant. It’s down there, cooking the whole time. It’s like a test tube, a scientist’s test tube. And the reasoning has evolved now for almost 20 years, and evidence keeps building stronger and stronger that these places, these hot vents and these black chimneys--with all this hot--enormously hot water coming out--are the place where life began on this planet.
DAVID GERGEN: You’ve been writing more recently in the New York Times that this discovery of this darker ecosystem, darker powered ecosystem, as you called it, is related to the voyages we’re now making to Mars and to Jupiter.
WILLIAM BROAD: Sure. It’s wild. It's how this whole fundamental change of thought that’s going on in the space agency because of we’re learning about our--
DAVID GERGEN: In NASA.
WILLIAM BROAD: In NASA.
DAVID GERGEN: Right.
WILLIAM BROAD: Because we’re learning about these dark ecosystems on Earth. I go into this in some detail in the book. A guy who was very important in this change of mind was Thomas Gould at Cornell University. In 1992, he wrote this long speculative paper saying, well, hey, these dark ecosystems are percolating down there at the bottom of the sea and maybe throughout the crust of the Earth. Why couldn’t they be out there in our solar system, or in the universe beyond?
That kind of speculation is now mainstream. And NASA, as it goes out and looks at Mars, NASA, as it goes out and looks at the moons of Jupiter, Europa, and all that stuff, are thinking very long and hard about the possibility of life driven just as it is down at the bottom of the sea by heat and chemicals coming from the interior of these icy moons, radiating out, and powering these long food chains. On the surface of Europa, this icy moon of Jupiter, the sunlight coming on is insignificant. There’s not a lot of heat from it way out there. It’s two or three hundred degrees below zero on the surface. It’s not a nice place where you’d want to go hang out. But underneath there are more and more signs that there’s geologic activity; that there’s heat; and that there may be oceans even 60 miles deep maybe, dwarfing the ones on earth.
DAVID GERGEN: So what they’re looking for as they goes to Mars and Jupiter--there’s a landing coming on Mars this July 4th--with the Explorer--they’re looking for water; they’re looking for signs of life.
WILLIAM BROAD: They’re looking for water. Yes. If you have liquid water, you get--the chances for life, by all estimates, are great. And that’s what they’re--that’s what they’re interested in.
DAVID GERGEN: So they could find the origins of life, itself, somewhere out there?
WILLIAM BROAD: If they do, I mean, that’s the great riddle. That’s the preeminent question for humans. You know, we think that we found the origins of life here in the deep sea for Earth, and the question is: Are there other Gardens of Eden out there?
DAVID GERGEN: William J. Broad, thank you very much.
WILLIAM BROAD: Thank you.


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