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Olive Heffernan

lines on the record: 44
first: 2024-08-07
most recent: 2024-08-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Also, but if it wasn't, you know, that might seem like a better option. So, yeah, unfortunately, all of these things are probably viewed in isolation. That makes me a bit less optimistic than I'd like to be. But, yeah”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The expansion of new industries into the high seas, particularly things like all of the geoengineering that we talked about. To avoid a further collapse of global fisheries and to really stem the loss of biodiversity on the high seas in the global ocean in general. So we are running out of time and I suppose that dulls my optimism, you know, I think we've all seen treaties signed again and again and particularly a few followed the climate space. It can be a bit frustrating to see targets signed up to and then they get pushed out into the long grass. I just think it probably requires a whole scale change in how we view the ocean, but it's difficult, isn't it? Because, you know, when you think about any of these decisions, whether we should fish the twilight zone, for example, you know, from the perspective of individual nations, they might seem like perfectly rational decisions. They want to, you know, Norway wants to grow its salmon industry. This might seem like a less harmful thing to do than, you know, expanding oil and gas, which it's doing.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most of the high seas, therefore, it's not protected. And this would be a way of doing that. And I think one of the really optimistic and brilliant aspects of this treaty is that those marine protected areas, they could be created by majority vote. So they wouldn't need a consensus. So if you have nations that don't agree to those rules or those proposals, well, you know, they could be created without those. And that's really important because what we've seen in Antarctica over the last few years is proposals very grounded in science for new marine protected areas. They are discussed year after year after year and these large fishing nations China and Russia block these proposals every year. So we now have a way of creating marine protected areas in the high seas by majority rule. So that's amazing. And then the other thing it would do is slow or regulate.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think the UN High Seas Treaty, it is the most, I would say, important piece of ocean conservation law ever signed. It's really potentially revolutionary, but there are limitations. And I suppose, you know, I wanted in the book to show the things that I'm optimistic about, but also to be realistic about their limitations. So, I mean, the thing about the UN High Seas Treaty, I think, you know, one of the most important aspects of it is that it's the first legal instrument that would allow nations to create and enforce large marine protected areas on the high seas. So right now, just 1% of the high seas is off limits to extractive industry. And that is a large marine reserve mostly. It's a large marine reserve in the Ross Sea in Antarctica. So in these kind of ice-covered waters.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know what's Panama really going to do? They haven't done much in the past for anyone who has broken those environmental or human rights regulations. So there's a huge incentive for countries to be flagged to Panama. You can do it online in eight hours. You don't have to have any connection to Panama. Your boat needs, it doesn't even have to have ever visited Panamanian waters. So that's what I'm saying. There are structures that we have put in place that allow this to happen. And I don't see that changing anytime soon, although there's lots of other efforts underway to change the status quo on the high seas. We still have a sizable distant water fishing fleet that is flagged to a state other than that of its beneficial owner. That's a problem.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which they would use to relay their positions to other vessels. They've switched those off so that they cannot Right now there's probably about 100,000 ships that traverse the ocean and these are a mixture of cargo ships, you know, all sorts of not many of them are fishing vessels, but a portion of them are. But of those 100,000 vassals, 73% are basically registered to a flag state that is not the home of the beneficial owner of the ship. So Panama is the largest open register. It's also sometimes called a flag of convenience. You might say, why would anyone do that? Well, it basically allows you to operate on the high seas under much laxer regulations. No one owns the high seas, so you are answerable to your flag state. If someone falls overboard on your vessel, if you're found to be poaching or operating illegally or keeping slaves at sea, you're answerable to your flag state. But some flag states just don't enforce those rules.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has very tight margins, small profits to be made. So that tempts those fishers to basically use unscrupulous means to artificially boost their profits. And that includes things like using slave labor at sea and also fishing endangered species that are highly profitable, but illegally. So often you get all of this wrapped up in one. You have a fishing industry that provides a sort of a legitimate front for something that is actually illegal. So maybe they're doing some fishing that's legal. They're targeting some regulated species, but actually they're also targeting a lot of illegal species and they are using slave labor to catch those. And just to give you a kind of an idea of the prevalence of this, at any one point in time, about 20% of the high seas fishing fleet is off the radar. So what that means is that they have switched off their normal modes of communication.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is often called pirate fishing. The more technical term is illegal unregulation and underreported fishing or IUU fishing. And it sort of covers all manner of practices, things like misreporting the catch or maybe underreporting the catch or targeting endangered species, fishing within the boundaries of a marine reserve. This is all fairly commonplace on the high seas because it's so hard to scrutinize that area, but it's also an inroad into far more serious criminality. And the UN Office of Drugs and Crime has basically said that the high seas is a hotspot for transnational organized criminal gangs. Let me explain to you why. Okay, so if you think about the high seas, they're very hard to reach. These are long fishing trips and long fishing trips are expensive. They require big boats. They require a lot of fuels. And fishing is an industry that...”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those species that are not covered, they are basically being just targeted with escalating vigour by a very, in some cases a very aggressive high seas fishing fleet. Like if you take as an example in one part of the northwest Indian Ocean, the fishing pressure presence of the fishing fleet in a five-year period, I think it was from 2018 to 2013 to 2000, let me just say that again, in one part of the Northwest Indian Ocean, over a five-year period between 2013 and 2018, the presence of fishing boats targeting squid increased by 830%. So that just gives you an idea of the extent to which this is actually accelerating in the absence of regulation. So that's kind of all actually legal. It's just unregulated. But then there's a darker side to things, which is the illegal.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cover it the entire of the high seas, they only cover certain areas, but more importantly they only cover five percent of the species, the traverse, the high seas during their lives. So I think there's about 39 species that are actually covered by all of those regional fisheries management organizations. And basically they're tuna and tuna-like species like Billfish. Other species, those mesopelagic fish that I mentioned earlier from the twilight zone, they're not regulated by anyone. And if you take other species that we already eat, like squid, for example, squid fisheries are largely unregulated on the high seas. And what we've seen in recent years, particularly in the last decade, is an absolute boom of those fisheries. Like the squid fisheries are booming in this regulatory vacuum. So those portions of the high seas where there is no regional fisheries management organization or”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And people take advantage of that. So that's the issue. It's not that there are no laws. It's that they're hard to enforce far offshore. And there's many loopholes, structures that we have created that entire industries can take advantage of. Right now we have a situation where there's a sizable high seas fishing fleet. You know, it's mostly comprised of vessels from five nations. So China really dominates the high seas fishing fleet. You know, by its own estimates, it says it has approximately 3,000 vessels fishing the high seas, but independent estimates put it closer to 17,000. There's also other nations, Taiwan, Korea, Spain, Japan, fishing those waters. And what's interesting is that, you know, I mentioned there's 17 regional fisheries management organizations.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think, so just in a broad sense, I think it's important to say that the high seas, it's not a lawless place. Like there is a mishmash of organizations and codes of conduct and bodies that oversee various areas such as fishing on the high seas. Like when you think about fishing, there are 17 regional fisheries management organizations that cover different parts of the high seas and they are in practice, well in theory, they're supposed to be managing those for commercial enterprise. But in practice, you know, it's, I think the issue really with the high seas is that it is the least scrutinized part of our planet. And so, you know, it makes fishing hard to monitor, but it also makes any illegal opportunity, any illegal enterprise equally hard to scrutinize.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It could be a very sustainable industry where you explore the gene sequences of many diverse creatures and use them as basically a frontier for new drug discovery and for new product development. I mean, at the moment, there's a big focus on developing a new suite of antibiotics. And scientists are looking in places like deep sea mud from below the poles, you know, in places like the Antarctic and the Arctic and finding incredibly interesting new leads for drug discovery there. So I think there's a lot of untapped potential. And maybe in some of these areas, particularly extreme environments, if you think about hydrothermal ven systems,”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, we're in compounds have been used to develop biofuels, anti-aging creams. They've been used to develop and boost the omega-3 content of like of rapeseed. There's just a huge variety of applications. And I think what's interesting is that, you know, what's happening in practical terms is that scientists are basically sequencing the genomes of organisms that they're finding on the high seas and in the global ocean generally. Everything from whales to microbes. And once these genomes are sequenced, they can be basically put online as digital information. There's all of these, you know, hubs, places like Genbang, where scientists upload that information to these data repositories, and then anyone else can basically go and download that sequence information. And in many cases, they can then synthesize it. So there's no need to actually go back and harvest the creatures time and time again.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating because I think, you know, so far, about 34,000 marine compounds have been discovered that have potential commercial uses. And all the time, scientists are discovering new compounds, new gene sequences from the ocean that they think could be really useful for humans. So let me just give you some examples of the things that have already been developed from the ocean. In national waters in particular, there's been a lot of drug discovery for ocean creatures. Sea sponges, for example, there's a sea sponge that gave rise to the first ever treatment for HIV, which is called AZT. And that same sea sponge actually gave rise to the first ever approved treatment for COVID during the pandemic. It was called Remdesivir and it was a drug that basically shortened the hospital stay for patients who were extremely ill. There's so many other examples.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe that would be one positive side effect of that. You know, I think. Ocean fertilization is probably the most tested idea. There have been some fairly large-scale studies of that. The idea is that what you would add iron or mostly iron, but maybe things like phosphates to the ocean to enhance the production of plankton, phytoplankton. So then if you get an algal bloom, you have more fish that will come and feed on that. And they, having fed on it, would then, you know, at some point bring it down deeper in the ocean. But again, it's just not clear whether that actually stores carbon long term and keeps it out of the atmosphere. So I guess I would favor anything that is closest to nature.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I would start with these ideas that are closest to nature, that are sort of, you know, like there's one called marine biomass generation. And this idea is, you know, creating an artificial analogue of whale feces and fertilizing the ocean with that as a way of storing carbon. It would soak up carbon and bring it to the deep sea. So I think anything that, you know, when you think about it, anytime we leave nature alone, we are allowing more carbon to be stored in the ocean. If you think about all of the biomass that exists in the ocean from Wales down to Plankton, I think that stores something like 1.4 billion tonnes of carbon. You know, so arguably anytime we set up a marine protected area and actually enforce it properly, we are storing carbon in the ocean. So that's probably at the most extreme end if we just, you know, had more sensible management of the ocean.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Turn it into bales of seaweed and then deposit these from research vessels into deep waters. Now the crucial thing with all of these is that no one has really tested and shown you know I suppose shown power proven rigorously that the carbon would be stored long term. So that remains a huge question. And similarly with these ideas of how you would cool the surface of the planet there are a couple of things I explore in detail in the book. One is an idea called marine cloud brightening. So about 70 to 80% of clouds actually form over the ocean and the idea is if we spray”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Surface of the high seas as a way of regulating the climate much more immediately. So that could bring down global surface temperatures by a couple of degrees perhaps very quickly. So that's much more controversial because some would say, well, we could just continue to pollute and to release greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere and we would use technologies then to just bring the fever down. So I spoke to people who were interested in both of those. And it's interesting how there's such a broad array of proposals right now. I mean, I think there's 26 different ideas of how we might store carbon in the deep sea. Some of them are things like growing seaweed en masse, for example. We could, you know, maybe position huge seaweed farms on the high seas, grow the seaweed. But what's crucial is when do you harvest the seaweed and how do you make sure the carbon is stored? So some people are saying we could actually”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are now looking to the high seas because it is half the surface of our planet. It's unclaimed. And somewhat argue, well, you know, it's not as heavily used as land. you know fairly true right it's not that heavily used relatively speaking and so there's an opportunity now to do something with that space and so there's two you know broad brush proposals of how we might use it to help ameliorate climate change. One is that we would store vast quantities of carbon in the deep sea, taking that carbon out of the atmosphere. And that's a sort of a slow burner, a long-term solution. So, you know, it could, we would be reducing our emissions and moving to, you know, fossil-free economy over time, but we would still extract CO2 somehow from the atmosphere and store it in the deep sea. The other idea is that we would do something much quicker and more radical, which is physically cool.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I mean, I think geoengineering as a concept has been around for, you know, it's been discussed for decades, but it's shifted in focus, I think, in the last decade in particular. When I started reporting on climate change, just even going back 20 years, it was such a taboo. You know, it was seen in the scientific community if you were doing geoengineering research, it was seen as very controversial and it still is, but it's nothing as controversial as it was, I think, because people are realizing the fix that we're in, that we are now on track to surpass maybe 1.5 degrees Celsius of climate change, maybe two degrees Celsius of climate change, which are seen as pretty hard red lines in terms of catastrophic interference with the climate system. And what people are doing, researchers and entrepreneurs and philanthropists.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know the point is that we do not know at this point how much of that we could exploit commercially without interfering with this carbon removal service. And right now that is just so important to protect that carbon removal service. You know, just to give you a wider context for that, you know, the ocean absorbs 25% of our greenhouse gas emissions and it has absorbed 93% of the heat that we have generated as a result of burning fossil fuels, deforestation, all of that human activity that's contributing to climate change. So it's a huge buffer for us. It is our main buffer, really. The importance of protecting it is really coming into sharp focus, I think. And it's bringing into question the idea that we should start new fisheries on the high seas, particularly in that part of the ocean.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where they're kind of safe from harm. And, you know, having eaten at the surface, they then have taken in carbon. So anything that's a life form contains carbon. So when they return to the depth, either they are eaten themselves or maybe they die or maybe they excrete. And that carbon then basically makes its way down to the deep beyond the twilight zone, sometimes into the midnight zone and even deeper. That's important because it means that that carbon is then stored out of the atmosphere. So we now know that the twilight zone is the ocean's main conduit for taking carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in the deep sea. And, you know, by one estimate, I think, you know, if we fished the entire twilight zone of the ocean, it would raise ocean air temperature by about 12 degrees Celsius. Obviously, that's hugely speculative and it's just one estimate.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Twilight Zone is really interesting because many of the fish that live there that inhabit this lair, they undergo a daily migration. And it's actually the largest animal migration on Earth. It happens every day between the depths of the ocean.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really, much use for human consumption, but we could feed them to salmon and grow the salmon industry. And Norway has an ambition to actually increase salmon production fivefold by 2050, and it needs to find new sources of fish meal for that to happen. So these, they're called mesopelagic fish, sort of middle layer fish. And so they've been conducting sea trials since 2019 to see if they could commercially harvest enough of these to grow salmon. And what's interesting in terms of moral quandaries is the fact that, you know, while all of this research has been going on into how many fish, you know, the kind of volume of protein that's available there, there's been a kind of a simultaneous track looking at how this part of the ocean actually helps to store carbon from the atmosphere and bring it to the deep sea. So let me just explain a bit more about that.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“didn't really think that much lived there at all, if anything. But now we know that it is a huge untapped source of potential fish protein. And in 2014, there was a study carried out that suggested that there might be between 10 to 20 billion tons of fish untapped in this part of the ocean. It's mostly offshore on the high seas because of the depth, so mostly you find it far offshore in deep waters. And that's interesting because it means not only is it untapped, but it's unowned and it's unregulated. And Norway in particular has become very interested in the idea of harvesting fish from the ocean's twilight zone to actually increase salmon production in its coastal waters. Now, the reason we haven't fished the ocean's twilight zone previously is because these fish are tiny. Like on average, they're about a quarter of the size of a sardine. So they're not...”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think you've put that so well. I think, you know, a lot of the issues that I explore in the book are moral quanties. And, you know, I don't purport to have the answer for what we should do in all of those situations. But in relation to fisheries, you know, one of the issues that I explore is the question really of whether we should start to develop new fisheries on high seas. And in particular, in the oceans twilight zone. The oceans twilight zone is this layer between roughly, you know, 100 to 200 meters, depending on how you measure it, down to 1,000 meters. And it's this sort of gloomy midwater layer, you know, is a place where there is light is beginning to fade. And it's interesting that, you know, looking back, say, 150 years ago, scientists actually thought that, you know, it was equivalent to an oceanic desert.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Collection. And they went back and tested it again and again and again. So that's incredible. We're finding things out about this environment all the time that we never knew before, both in terms of how it works and what lives there.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For those to grow back. So conservationists are worried about those potential implications. And what's really interesting that more and more implications are coming to light all of the time. Just, I think yesterday or maybe the day before yesterday, a new study came out in the journal Nature Geoscience, which showed for the first time the bizarrely these rocks are actually producing oxygen on the deep ocean floor. I mean, that is an astounding discovery because, you know, it was previously thought that there was no oxygen generation in this environment and they think it might be some sort of electro geochemical reaction that's happening within the rocks that contain these minerals and metals. It's taken the scientists, I would say, 10 years of research to actually prove unequivocally that they are producing oxygen and that's happening. They thought it was an anomaly because it's such or you know some sort of error with their data.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Remembering. So these nodules, although they look like rocks, they're not rocks. They're actually organic and they form over millions of years. So typically one of these nodules starts its life as a discarded object like maybe a shark's tooth or a piece of shell that has fallen to the seafloor. And over millions of years, tiny grains of sand basically accrete around that node. And in building up these layers, minerals get entrapped in the sand grains. So can you imagine it takes, you know, maybe five million years for one of these to form, somewhere between a million and five million years. It's an incredibly long process. And so, you know, if you remove those nodules, you have changed the habitat irreversibly. Even if you found a way of dealing with the sediment disturbance, there really is no way of replacing the nodules immediately. It would just take time.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Environment by sending down mining machines. Just to explain about the mining machines, they sort of look like maybe the After collecting the nodules, the nodules would be sort of whooshed up to a surface vessel through a pipe. This vertical pipe, which is called a riser, you know, that has to extend 5,000 meters up to the sea surface. And the main worry is the sediment disturbance, actually. When you think about all of the kind of potential, you know, there's noise pollution, obviously there's potential for, you know, possibly light pollution with all of the equipment that has to be brought down. But the main issue really is the sediment because in wearing up this sediment, you know, it might not suffocate animals that live on the seabed, which are sedentary, but it might also clog the gills of sort of free swimming animals, whether they're fish or jellies, you know, and that the worry is that that might have implications for biodiversity generally, but also for maybe commercial fisheries. So there's that element. Also, I think it's worth...”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so this is an environment that we know relatively little about. What we do know is that it's a very extreme environment. If you think about the deep abyss of the Clarine Clipperton zone, for example, you know, it's an area where at 5,000 meters the pressure is incredible. So we're talking about a thousand bar of pressure at the bottom of the seafloor there. That's equivalent to having a couple of elephants standing on your big toe, you know, for every point of that size. So can you imagine the challenge of designing equipment that successfully mine the deep sea under those pressures, temperatures, often hover near a zero degrees? It's an incredibly quiet environment, so that means there's very little disturbance. I mean, sediment typically settles here at a rate of one centimeter every thousand years. So can you imagine the disturbance that might be caused to that in”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is called the Clarion Clepperton zone. And that's a vast abyssal plain, roughly as wide as the contiguous US. If you stretched it out, it would reach from New York to California and it's located between Hawaii and Mexico. Now there are trillions of these rocks or nodules in this area. And the idea is that they contain all sorts of valuable metals and minerals, things like cobalt, manganese, lithium, copper, things that could be extracted and used to make batteries for EVs or they could be used to make the components of solar panels or wind turbines. So hugely of interest right now.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And nations that are interested in mining the deep sea. And those contracts cover various locations on the high seas. And they cover collectively about a million square kilometres. And there's three types of deposit of minerals and metals on the high seas or in the deep sea in general. So the first is something called seafied massive sulfides and these are basically found in hydrothermal vents. Then there are cobalt crusts. These are mineral deposits that are found basically on seamounts which are extinct volcanoes in the deep sea. And the third type are these nodules that are referred to earlier. So they look like rocks. They are roughly the size of potatoes and their called either manganese nodules or polymetallic nodules. The main area that they are focused, well, located in and currently where the focus”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so let me start by saying that nobody has actually commercially mined the deep sea anywhere yet, but it has become a huge growing interest in the last few years. So the situation at the moment is that there is a regulator called the International Seabed Authority, and that is a body that was formed by the UN in 1994 when the Law of the Sea came into practice. Now, the Law of the Sea is kind of, you can think about it as a global constitution for the ocean. It set up this body and gave it the remit of sort of protecting the deep sea, but also helping to facilitate mining of the deep sea. So it's an authority with a very maybe interesting and conflicted mandate, but it has given out 30 contracts to contractors, which are a combination of individual companies.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sea cucumber which lives on the seafloor at around five thousand meters depth, and I was lucky enough last year to see some of these creatures that had come up from the deep abyss on a visit to London's natural history museum. They're just incredible things, you know, like alien life forms. So yeah, if you haven't seen them, I recommend you check them out. There's lots of pictures online.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ocean, which is deep abyss, and it's basically at around 5,000 meters deep. It's a large area called the Clarion Clipperton Zone, located between Hawaii and Mexico. It's particularly important right now because it's been earmarked for seabed mining. Scattered across the seafloor here are trillions of potato-sized, you know, what look like rocks, but they're actually nodules which hold precious metals and minerals. So scientists have been surveying this area because they want to know what lives there ahead of the potential for seabed mining to store it in the region. And what they're finding is that like 90% of the species that they recover on these surveys have never been seen before by anyone on Earth. They're completely new to science. There's just incredible life forms down there. One of my favorites is something called the gummy squirrel, which looks a bit like a cross between a shoe and a banana.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These sort of ultra-hidal trenches, which are typified by the Mariana Trench, which is the deepest part. So yeah, that's basically how the ocean is structured and how those layers are. But scientists are just finding all sorts of incredible things all the time, both geologically and biologically. You know, I just read last week, I think, that there's a seabed mapping project right now, which it aims to map the entire seafloor by 2030. And I think it won't hit that target. Right now we're at 26% has been mapped. But that just shows you how much of it has not been mapped in any detail. And, you know, just recently within the last few months, they discovered an entire mountain range far off the coast of Costa Rica that, you know, had just never been seen before during this mapping effort. But, you know, on a biological level, scientists are discovering new things all the time. There's one part of the...”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Organisms are beginning to find other ways of capturing food rather than just by sunlight. So that's the twilight zone. And that ends at a thousand meters. Beyond that, you have the midnight zone, which is properly dark, as the title suggests. And that basically goes down to about 6,000 meters. Beyond that, you have the Hadal Zone, which the ocean goes down in parts to...”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think most of us, when we think about the ocean, we are engaged with those coastal waters. And even when we think about the ocean further afield, we're probably thinking about that top, you know, 200 meters, which are sunlit. Those are the sunlit waters where there's a lot of life. You know, we have the growth of plankton and algae and seaweeds, certainly in the summer months. But, you know, once you get past 200 meters, light starts to peter out and you enter sort of a fairly nebulous, gloomy part of the ocean called the twilight zone. So that's not, you know, it's not completely dark, but it's also where”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of our planet as ocean belonging to nobody, and as you rightly said in the introduction, you know, we are beginning to encroach more on that space and to conceive of new agendas for that space. And at the same time, the importance of conserving some of that space has just never been more clear given everything that we're facing in terms of the climate and environmental problems that we have right now. So those were the reasons I wanted to write the book.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you also asked me why the high seats, why did I write a book about the high seas? Well, I started my career as a marine scientist. That was over 20 years ago. I was working as a fisheries scientist in the UK for the government. You know, a couple of years into that position as a postdoc fishery scientist, I decided that my real passion was communicating science. So I changed tech and I became a science journalist. And I've been covering oceans and climate change ever since, so for more than 20 years now. But a few years ago, probably back in 2018, I was writing a lot about ocean conservation, specifically for scientific American and for Nature magazine. And, you know, it's just the penny dropped, I suppose, that it was such a huge conversation that I didn't feel was being had and I didn't feel that most people were aware of us, that just this simple fact that half”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Planet in purely volumetric terms, ninety five percent are oceans beyond national borders. So, you know, this is incredibly important that they are beyond national borders because essentially that means that they're owned by nobody. And in the absence of ownership, they have become a free-for-all throughout human history. So it's a vast portion of our planet that's essentially unowned by anybody and unclaimed territory. And that's what I wanted to explore in the book.”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, okay, well, let me start by explaining what I mean by the high seas. So I think, you know, a lot of us think of the high seas as a sort of a remote frontier that we probably will never have the chance to visit and maybe some of us never have the desire to visit. It's somewhere that's out of sight and out of mind. And many of us think of it as a wild west of our planet. But it's actually also a legal definition. So the high seas are those waters that are beyond national borders. And they cover a huge portion of our planet. So in terms of surface area, the high seas are half the surface of our planet almost. They are two-thirds of the global ocean. And, you know, interestingly, the high seas also constitute 95% of Earth's available living space. That's because these waters are so deep. On average, they're 4,000 meters deep. So if you think about our”
2024-08-07 · Intelligence Squared · Power and Greed on the High Seas, with Olive Heffernan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT