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 you know, 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 like 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 minds.

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.

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 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 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, wouldn't it be interesting to like,

look at some of the old copper mines

that were important during the Bronze Age

and see how many of those really were ancient hydrothermal

vents.

So I started in the Egyptian new 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 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 Megado,

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 then 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.

And 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.

Some of them looked like snails.

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 tubeworm.

These massive tubeworms, 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 tubeworms on the Especific Rise

looked almost identical to the fossils in Cyprus.

And so they're like, oh, this is,

profusitive, 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 and the Middle East.

And we found Ophiolites and Turkey

and Ophiolites and 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 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 about to take a break.

Yeah, exactly.

Only 500 million years, but it'll eventually get there, right?

Yeah.

So Cyprus is a funny idea.

Yeah.

Cyprus has been incredibly important throughout human history.

It's a major source of copper.

It was a driver of the Bronze Age.

It was a major cultural landmark.

Cyprus has a few very funny animals associated with.

And one of this is they had a pygmy elephant.

So on the island of Cyprus, and this is long before humans

like, 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?

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.

OK.

So they sort of look like one big eye socket

in the middle of the skull.

Like a little bit of a figure eight,

but like one big eye socket.

So these pygmy elephant skulls, Greek explorers,

are sailing across the Greek islands.

They're landing in Cyprus.

They're going into caves in Cyprus

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 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.

OK.

Yeah, so Cyprus 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 Cyprus.

And they were domesticated to keep rats out of their copper

mines.

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 is the origin of cats?

Where are they domesticated from?

Were they smaller felines?

Small wild cats.

Yeah, interesting.

That's so cool.

So can you say any mining area that's on an island

or that's fairly new in terms of the last 100 to 500 million

years was it essentially created in the deep sea?

So all of these heavy metal mines are

produced by hydrothermalism 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,

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, OK.

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 ultromethic 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.

I know Baltimore is a bit in, 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.

Yeah.

So we are, I mean, that is how you get heavy metals is.

You dissolve it in sea water.

And then you put it under enormous pressure.

And then you boil that sea water

to the point where it goes through a phase transition.

And then all those metals fall out of solution

and are deposited on the sea floor.

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 were more patient.

Let's just say we waited until generations and generations

are good 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.

So how do you find 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 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?

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.

Outside of a few people who are 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 like telecommunications tables, telecommunications cables.

Telecommunications cables.

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.

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.

So we're talking a lot about misuse as well.

But 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 drop a spacecraft

on the plane.

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 deep ocean

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 they're 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.

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 triathlete 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.

Yeah, for sure.

You're not going to be a part of it.

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.

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

and turned back into hydrocarbons,

then spewed back out.

But, you know, I would hesitate to guess

that the vast majority of humans footprint on the planet

will be gone 100 million years.

Yeah, that's true.

That's true.

We may leave some fossils behind,

then there may be a few remnants,

but species rarely persist that long.

No, true, true.

It'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.

That, maybe.

So, 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, we can do too.

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 we'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 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 one.

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

where like, hey, maybe we should record a podcast

while we talk to each other.

And 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.

At SpeakUpForBlue.com, forward slash feedback.

SpeakUpForBlue.com, forward slash feedback.

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

You can leave a voicemail or you can write it down.

I just want to get some, 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 link.

So SpeakUpForBlue.com, forward slash feedback.

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

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So you get to hear next week's episode.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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