What Do House Cats Have to Do With Deep-Sea Mining? A Surprising Ocean Connection

Do you want to know how domesticated cats

are related to deep sea mining?

That you're going to want to tune in to this episode.

This is the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast.

If you want more ocean news updates every weekday,

this is your time to hit that follow button.

Hello everybody, welcome back

to the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast.

I'm your host, Andrew Lewin.

And we today are talking to Dr. Andrew Thaler,

who is a deep sea ecologist, and he's writing a book.

And this good friend of mine has come to me and said,

Andrew, I need to tell you some deep sea stories.

Not just about the deep sea mining,

but about the deep sea in general.

These are stories that are going to knock your socks off.

He's writing a book.

And part of this is telling these wonderful stories.

It's going to be part of the book.

So you're getting kind of a sneak peek

by being part of this How to Protect the Ocean Podcast.

And it's phenomenal.

Today we're going to be talking about how deep sea mining

has led to the domestication of cats.

And you're going to want to, I don't want to give anything else away

because I want you to hear it from Andrew

because he's a fantastic storyteller.

And he said, hey, let's do these stories on the podcast.

What do you think?

And I'm like, let's do it.

Like, why not?

Is my podcast?

Why, let's try and switch it up a little bit.

Make it a little bit more entertaining.

I know I throw a lot of news at you every weekday

from Monday to Thursday is like a solo episode.

We've been talking about enforcement.

And now we're going to talk about deep sea mining.

Just, you know, it's the interview Friday.

So we're going to be talking about that.

And I just think it's a lot of fun.

So I'm going to let you hear it straight from Andrew's mouth.

Here is Andrew, Dr. Andrew Thaler,

talking about the domestication of cats

and how deep sea mining led to that domestication.

Enjoy the interview and I will talk to you after.

Hey, Andrew.

Welcome back to The How to Protect the Ocean Podcast.

Are you ready to talk about deep sea stories just in general?

This is going to be a new series that we're going to be doing.

Are you ready to start this series?

I am ready.

The question for you is, are you ready to take a step back

and enjoy the power of a different Andrew hosting for the moment?

This is going to be a lot of fun.

We've been discussing this for a bit of month now.

And I'll let you explain what you want to do on this

because this is going to be your show.

And I'm just going to be like an audience member

and kind of interjecting every once in a while

and asking questions and stuff.

But this is going to be a lot of fun.

We're going to switch it up a little bit.

Andrew's got some stories that he wants to tell.

It's part of a larger project that he's working on.

And so we're going to just kind of give it to you, buddy.

I want you just to go ahead and before we start, though,

just for those of the audience members

who haven't heard of you before, haven't listened to you

before here on this podcast.

Why don't you just let us know who you are and what you do

and of course, what this project is all about.

All right, well, I am Dr. Andrew Thaler,

deep sea ecologist, conservation technologist,

ocean educator and author.

And welcome dear listeners to tales

from the limitless abyss.

I like it.

So the back story behind this little podcasting experiment

we're doing is I have a book coming out in like a year

and a half because I have to write it.

But I have a contract for a book,

tentatively titled limitless abyss,

the use and misuse of the deep sea.

And one of the things we want to do

is as I'm researching this book

and as I'm putting together chapters

and drafting everything, there's just hundreds

and hundreds and hundreds of these delightful little stories

coming out about all the weird ways

that humans have used and abused the deep sea

over not just years, not just decades, not just centuries,

but millennia.

And so I want to take a little bit of time

throughout the process.

A little bit of accountability for me

because I got to keep writing to book

if I'm going to come up with new stories.

So it helps keep me on track

and it helps keep everyone a little entertained.

And maybe when the book finally comes out,

if you've been listening for a while,

you'll pick it up.

Absolutely.

But I want to start today with a very simple question.

All right.

Andrew Lewin, why do we have cats?

Well, as someone who doesn't own a cat,

I'm going to say I don't know.

I really don't know how cats came to be.

I assume they're domesticated from the wild

over years and years and years of crazy people

trying to domesticate tigers and lions and so forth.

Is that the right answer?

So I'm going to take us back.

I'm going to take us back about 6,000 years

to the new kingdom of Egypt to Pharaoh Ramses

and Pharaoh Tutmus III and the very first deep sea mines.

Back then.

So this is one of the really cool things that has come up.

And one of the interesting pieces of primary research

that has come out of this book is,

I started asking this question, you know,

I talk a lot when I tell people about deep sea mining

and I tell people about hydrothermal vents.

One of the things I say is that, you know,

when you think about metal that comes in veins,

so things like copper and gold and silver,

in a lot of cases, those veins are actually

the stock works of ancient hydrothermal vents.

So the hydrothermal vent chimney that forms

as this vent grows on the sea floor,

deposits heavy metals along the walls

and then eventually over millions of years,

those vents shut down and they drift off access

and, you know, continents upheave and the earth moves

and eventually they end up on land

and they become things like gold mines.

So those structures are called Ophiolites.

Ophiolites are chunks of oceanic plate

that have been uplifted onto land

and are now sitting on land as remnants of ancient sea bed.

And so I thought, you know, wouldn't it be interesting

to like look at some of the old copper mines

that were important during the Bronze Age

and, you know, see how many of those really were

ancient hydrothermal vents.

So, you know, I started in the Egyptian new keen kingdom

at the peak of the Bronze Age

and I started with Pharaoh Thutmus III

because one of the things that's really fascinating

about Thutmus III is that he was a conqueror.

He spread the Egyptian kingdom across the Levant

and he is the source of the first battles in recorded history.

So the first actual, he brought with him a scribe

who wrote everything down.

So, you know, we don't know exactly what happened

but we know what he wanted us to know happened.

And so we have records of some of these ancient battles

including the Battle of Megadow,

which is the first battle in recorded history.

And we know how many people were killed

and we knew what they carried and how many horses they had

and how many chariots and all these great things

and how many bronze weapons they had.

So as interested of like tracking back from there

and being like, these bronze weapons,

this is a technological innovation to have bronze

over copper or over stone.

Where did that bronze come from?

And could we track it back to a hydrothermal vent?

And what I found is that the Egyptian new kingdom,

their early copper mines were on the Sinai Peninsula.

They were 500 million year old Ophiolites.

They were hydrothermal vents.

The major source of copper for the new kingdom

was on the island of Cyprus.

The island of Cyprus itself is in Ophiolite.

So the mountains of Cyprus are all chunks of ancient seabed.

There's a hundred million year old chunk

of the Neotethic Sea that was lifted up onto land

and slowly over generations,

the people who eventually settled on Cyprus

discovered that there were these rich, rich copper veins

inside the mountains of Cyprus.

And in addition to these copper veins,

they also found fossils.

Very strange fossils.

And when archaeologists started excavating these old mines

in Cyprus and looking at the fossils,

this is an early 19th century, early 20th century.

The Egyptologists, the archaeologists

that were going through ancient Greece,

all that fun stuff when the Victorians

were out stealing everything they could

from the Levant and from Egypt,

they'd find these fossils and no one knew what these fossils were.

They were just these strange, strange fossils.

So they were kind of this weird thing,

just something out there, the strange fossil.

And no one knew, no one really could figure it out.

Maybe it was a worm, it was some kind of an animal.

No one's really sure.

And then in 1977,

Bob Ballard dives on the Especific Rise

in the Pacific Ocean

and finds the first hydrothermal vents.

And on these first hydrothermal vents

is Riftia Pequiptola, the giant deep sea tube worm.

These massive tube worms,

the fastest growing invertebrate in the world,

they can grow several meters long.

They have these bright red plumes

that come out of these tubes that they build,

that then extract the chemical energy

from the hydrothermal vent

and turn it into food for the animal.

And those two worms on the Especific Rise

looked almost identical to the fossils in Cyprus.

And so they're like,

this is,

these old copper mines,

these old copper mines are hydrothermal vents.

And so I kept tracking different mines

across Egypt and the Near East in the Middle East.

And we found Ophiolites in Turkey,

and Ophiolites in Oman,

and Ophiolites kind of all across these regions.

And they're all ancient hydrothermal vents.

Most of them are from the Neotethis,

so 100 million year old vents.

Some of them are 500 million years old.

Some of them are incredibly ancient hydrothermal vents.

But all of these copper mines,

all of these copper mines

that basically created the Bronze Age,

are the remnants of ancient hydrothermal vents.

So they are effectively

the least efficient way to mine the deep sea.

You wait till it comes to you.

You wait until it comes to you.

And honestly,

that is probably the best way to do it

to minimize your environmental impact on the sea.

Yeah, exactly.

You wait until the sea floor comes above the surface.

Yeah, exactly.

Only 500 million years.

But it'll eventually get there, right?

Yeah.

Cypress is a funny island.

Yeah.

Cypress has been incredibly important

throughout human history.

It's a major source of copper.

You know, it was a driver of the Bronze Age.

It was a major cultural landmark.

Cypress has a few very funny animals associated with.

And one of this is they had a pygmy elephant.

Oh.

So on the island of Cypress,

and this is long before human settlement.

Right, right, right.

There's several thousand years before human settlement

they had.

These pygmy elephants is elephant,

but it's a little tiny elephant.

And how familiar are you with an elephant skull?

Well, I mean, I can kind of picture it,

but I don't have one in my backyard or anything.

Yeah, so one of the weird things about elephant skulls

is that if you look at how the skull is shaped

and where the eye sockets are,

the eye sockets are kind of fused together.

Okay.

So they sort of look like one big eye socket

in the middle of the skull.

Okay.

Like a little bit of a figure eight,

but like one big eye socket.

So these pygmy elephant skulls,

Greek explorers are, you know,

sailing across the Greek islands.

They're landing in Cypress.

They're, you know, going into caves in Cypress

and they're finding these elephant skulls

that are not big.

They're not the size of a full grown elephant,

but they're like three, four times the size of a human head.

And they've got one big eye socket right in the middle.

And so, you know, I don't know if you've read the Odyssey.

I have.

I've read all three translations of the Odyssey

because I love the Odyssey.

The legend of the Cyclops in ancient Greece,

one of the predominant theories about where that story comes from

is these pygmy elephant skulls that look like a one-eyed giant.

That's crazy.

So it didn't actually have one eye.

It was just the way the bones refused together.

Yeah, it's just the way that elephant skulls form

and where the eyes are and the eye socket itself

kind of looks like it's one big thing recessed in there.

Okay.

Yeah, so Cypress has lots of funny things going for it

in terms of animal life.

But one of the most interesting things that came out of my research

is the earliest record of domesticated cats

is from the island of Cypress.

And they were domesticated to keep rats out of their copper mines.

Hmm.

So our original pet cats, the very first pet cats

are there because we were mining

a hundred million-year-old hydrothermal vent

full of fossil tube worms that we couldn't identify yet.

And we just needed some help keeping the pests out.

And so where did...

What is the origin of cats?

Like, what were they domesticated from?

Were they smaller felines?

Small wild cats.

Yeah.

Small wild cats.

Interesting.

That's so cool.

So can you say like any mining area

that's on an island or that's like fairly new

in terms of the last hundred to five hundred million years

was it essentially created in the deep sea?

So all of these heavy metal mines are produced

by hydrothermalism.

Okay.

In the deep ocean.

They're not all from hydrothermal vents.

But generally speaking with the exception of

very modern mines where we have the industrial equipment

to access very deep reservoirs,

very deep reserves, very deep deposits of ore

with big industrial machinery and strip mining

and all that good stuff where you have to get really down deep

and you can find metal that was deposited

from like older magnetic processes

that were producing metals with the exception

of our most modern mines, almost all gold mines,

almost all copper mines,

anything that could be accessed with 20th century technology

or earlier are going to be ancient hydrothermal vents.

Wow.

Including and one of my particularly exciting discoveries

and it's not really a discovery,

we've known about it for a long time,

but the really fun bit of the story is that

the city of Baltimore sits on top of a massive

serpent night hosted hydrothermal vent.

So Baltimore was very famous for chromium mines back in the day

and part of the reason that my family

ended up in Baltimore 200 years ago is for the mining.

Where were they before?

They were in pressure.

Oh, okay.

And they were in Russia and we fled the pogroms,

basically how we ended up in America.

But we settled in Baltimore and part of the reason

we settled in Baltimore was because of the industry

around Baltimore and the industry came from chromium mining

in a large part and that chromium mining is the result

of our serpentinization,

which is a process that creates hydrothermal vents.

So a lot of the Baltimore ultrometric complex

which is the rocks we sit on in Baltimore

is from hydrothermal venting.

That's so cool.

That is so neat.

Now some of the mines that are internal, like inland,

you know, Baltimore is a bit,

but it's got the coastal kind of structure to it.

Would you say are from deep sea mines as well,

like anything in like any mine at all is a rise from the deep sea

or is that like a different geographical process?

So not every mine,

but for the most part all the heavy metal mines.

All the heavy metal mines.

Yeah, so we are, I mean that is how you get heavy metals

is you dissolve it in seawater

and then you put it under enormous pressure

and then you boil that seawater

or the point where it goes through a phase transition

and then all those metals fall out of solution

and are deposited on the seafloor.

Wow.

That's incredible.

So we have been mining the deep sea for a very long time.

Yeah, just not, we were more efficient at it.

We waited, we were more patient.

Let's just say.

We waited till we were, you know,

till like generations and generations after.

Yeah.

Well, it's like oil, right?

That's just a very inefficient way to get sunlight.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's true.

That's true.

That's so cool.

Yeah.

That is so neat.

How do you find like a story like this,

like knowing the history like this?

How do you find that helps?

Like for the listeners out there

to bring it to conservation

and seeing all these petitions for an RFI

is like, you know, a request for information

and things like that.

How do you think this influences them

or can help them in the fight against deep sea mining?

Like just to not let it happen

if they don't want to let it happen.

So one of the things I'm looking at

is all of our cultural connections to the deep sea.

So we don't think about the deep sea

as something that we're culturally connected to,

you know, outside of a few people

who are, you know, super jazzed about the deep ocean.

And we don't think about all the ways

that we use the deep sea

that are maybe out of sight, out of mind,

but are actually very important

to how society functions.

So, you know, like telecommunications tables.

Telecommunications tables.

Telecommunications tables.

I don't think we've used tables in a while.

99% of our data travels through the deep sea

whenever we're connecting across continents.

And it has for 200 years.

You know, we use the deep sea

as a place to dispose of tremendous amounts of waste.

It's the use and misuse of the deep sea.

Right.

A lot about misuse as well.

But, you know, one of one of the ways

we dispose of waste in the deep sea is

we crash spaceships into a point

in the middle of the Pacific

that's far from land.

So that doesn't hurt anyone

when you, you know, drop a spacecraft on the planet.

Or it doesn't blow up as it gets down to the ground.

Exactly.

So there's all these different ways

that we're using the devotion

that we don't necessarily think about,

but are that absolutely important

to human civilization and human survival.

So one of the reasons I wanted to start the book

with this kind of tracking of all these ancient hydrothermal events

is to argue, you know,

hydrothermal events are responsible

for the advent of the Bronze Age.

They are, you know, they're not just this thing

that we have discovered recently

and are like, oh, isn't that neat?

Isn't that interesting?

There's this weird thing on the bottom of the sea floor.

They are central to our story as humans

and to our story of technological development.

We are people of the sea.

We have come from the sea.

And the sea is, you know, from the sea,

we have gained almost all of our civilization.

Yeah.

That's incredible.

Never thought about that way, if you think, you know,

when you think about how much we depend on the ocean,

we think of what it gives us right now,

but not how it's formed sort of our society, you know,

at this point.

So, you know, the next time you pet a kitty,

just think you owe this kitty

a little bit of protection in the deep ocean.

Yep.

The deep sea gave you a cat.

You should respect the deep sea for that and that alone.

So my title for this episode should be

Like Cats, question mark.

Protect the deep sea.

I love it.

Absolutely.

But I mean, it also goes to show a little bit.

Like in my triant thought, and you can correct me if I'm wrong,

you know, we start mining the deep sea now in the deep sea.

What's going to happen 100 million years from now

if there's still humans on that long?

What's going to happen to the earth's crust at that point?

Are we going to get these, you know,

islands or coastlines that have all these heavy metals in

or are we just going to go down before they have a chance to rise

to get that?

Like same with sea maps.

Oh, 100 million years from now, it's going to be a whole new world.

Oh, yeah.

We're not going to be apart.

No, no, for sure.

But I mean, it's looking at the future of the planet.

Like from a planet perspective, you know,

should we even be thinking about that?

I can see some people not caring.

But I mean, if it's helped us here,

it's going to help something for the planet later on.

You know, it's a natural process.

So, yeah.

100 million years from now,

we may have plastic deposits.

Yeah, that's true.

Probably not.

Plastic's not going to persist for 100 million years.

I hope so.

It's going to get subducted into the crust of the earth

and turned back into hydrocarbons.

Then spewed back out.

Yeah.

I would hesitate to guess that the vast majority

of humans footprint on the planet

will be gone 100 million years from now.

Yeah, that's true.

That's true.

We may leave some fossils behind

and there may be a few remnants.

Yeah.

Species rarely persist that long.

No, true.

True.

That's a long time when we're looking at it.

Like that's a very, very long time.

But this is great.

And that.

I like starting.

We're going to go ahead.

I think that's a great start.

And that also leads us into our second story.

So if we want to, I don't know, pause and kick off the next episode.

Yeah, we can do that.

We can do.

No, no, we can do too.

What we'll do is we'll end it here for the first story.

And then tune in soon.

I don't know if we'll do this every other week

or if we'll do, we'll worry.

I'll let you know to the audience.

I'll let you know when we'll be airing these.

Let's just say Andrew has a lot of these stories,

which I find if the first one's anything,

any indication is going to be great.

So we'll end it here.

Thank you so much, Andrew.

We really appreciate it.

And then we'll, we're going to pause it.

We're going to record another one.

And then we'll, we'll see you in a bit.

All right.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much.

And this is going to be a fun time.

Absolutely.

Looking forward to it.

Thank you, Andrew, for joining us on today's episode

of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast.

It's always great to have him on.

He's a good friend of mine.

We've known each other for over a decade.

And every time he's on the podcast,

and every time I talk to him really,

I am impressed just with the knowledge that he has

and the way he tells it.

He is such a fun storyteller.

I love listening to everything he says about,

not only the deep sea, but just science in general

and the ocean in general.

And it's great to have him on every time he's on.

He's been on a lot.

And there's a reason for that,

because he can really tell stories very well.

And I love to hear it.

And we get to chat before and after.

A lot of the times, it's one of those times

where I'm on with a guest, and it's one of those times,

we're like, hey, maybe we should record a podcast

while we talk to each other.

That tends to happen.

So it's great to have him on.

I hope you enjoyed listening to this.

Let me know what you think about this episode,

what you thought of the story.

Hit me up at SpeakUpForBlue.feedback.

That speakupforblue.com,

forward slash feedback.

Speakupforblue.com, forward slash feedback.

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

You can leave a voice mail or you can write it down.

I just want to get feedback,

and I want to interact with you.

That's the whole point of this podcast.

We start the conversation on the podcast,

and then you continue it through that feedback links.

That speakupforblue.com, forward slash feedback.

And of course, don't forget, if you want to hear

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these types, anything about the ocean,

hit that follow button,

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We're going to start Monday,

and we go Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

So I want to thank you so much for joining me on today's episode

of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast.

Have a great day.

We'll talk to you on Monday, and happy conservation.