 Hi, I'm Jay Fidel, you may not recognize me immediately, now you can recognize me. You're on ThinkTech, this is research in Manoa, a study of the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology within SOAS, the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. Our show today is called Submarine Research Discoverers in the Marianas, so I'm going to talk about explorations in the Earth's deepest places and submarine research and how much it has yielded new discoveries in the Marianas. If you want to ask a question or participate in a discussion, you can, you can tweet us at ThinkTechHI or call us at our new number, 808-437-2014, it's a good year. Our guest for the show is Dr. Patricia Friar of the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology at U-Edge, Manoa. Hi Dr. Friar. Hello Jay. Nice to be back. Nice to see you here. Good to see you. Okay, so she's going to tell us about the ship and going down to the bottom of the Marianas trench, is trench is the right word here? That is the correct word. We haven't been there, we have to know everything about it. That's right. Well, we actually, a couple of people have been there. Okay. Yeah. How do you get there? You get there in some sort of a submersible or you can use a robotic instrument, a robotic vehicle to go down to the deepest places on the Earth's surface. More and more it's robotics. It's not so risky and all that. Yeah, that's true. But if you remember in 2012, there was a particular individual who got a lot of press for building his own submarine and going to the Challenger Deep, which is the deepest part of the Marianas trench. And that was James Cameron, the director who's made Avatar and the Titanic and he dove right down to the bottom of the deepest part of the trench. Why would anybody want to go down? How far down are we talking about? We're talking almost 11,000 kilometers, 11,000 meters, I'm sorry. Okay. So what? 11 kilometers. Well, that's roughly 11,000. Well, it's deeper than Mount Everest is high by quite a bit. Okay. So nearly seven miles. Seven miles. Yeah. Why? Why? What you want to go there? For him, exploration is the key and he feels, as many people do, that the more we know about the oceans, the better off we're going to be because of a variety of very important reasons. Number one, of course, the oceans make up 70% of the planet's surface and the food that we have that we'd love to eat here, you know, comes from the oceans. The interaction between the atmosphere and the oceans and the land are so intimately interlinked that if we start to disturb tremendously any part of those systems, you know, we get ourselves in trouble. And so some of the things that we need to learn about are, for instance, how animals can survive at the kinds of pressures that you would experience if you were at the bottom of an American trench. We're talking about, you know, a very, very large elephant on a pogo stick sitting on your big toe. That hurts. Yes. I mean, but imagine that on every inch of your body, you know, and there are creatures down there, phenomenal creatures, in fact, that can actually survive under those kinds of pressures and nowhere else they can't survive if you try to sample them and bring them up. They explode. We kind of turned to jelly, which is, you know, pretty great. Not a good way to go. How about the temperature? How cold is it? It's just close to freezing, not quite, but even if you get down to just a few thousand meters, you begin to get into the realm of, you know, no light, very, very cold environments. So these are extreme environments for life. Some of the people that I've been working with who are in the biological community, which is not what I know about, but they're interested in the limits of life, the most extreme chemical limits, the most extreme physical limits, so cold. In fact, one of my colleagues at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography has been looking at animals that live only in the cold. And some of the wonderful things that they can accomplish is their ability to survive at these huge pressures is dependent on certain chemicals that they have within the tissues in their bodies that permit them to withstand that. And you know, biologists then take a look at how these creatures can survive, these kinds of conditions, and they find out all sorts of wonderful things, such as- We can use this information. Yes, we can. We use it to fight diseases like cancer, sponges that live at these kinds of depths. They never get cancer. The fish themselves that can withstand these high pressures with these particular chemicals in their tissues, this chemical is also one that has promise for treating Alzheimer's. And we don't know who's down there. We don't know how they live. And so all of the physical conditions that we can discover, the chemical conditions we can discover, and all of the microbiologists that I recently took part in an expedition with are looking at ways that the animals that are living there, the microbes and the megafauna, the larger animals, can survive under these conditions. One of the conditions is a pH, which is, if you have a piece of litmus paper and you stick it in vinegar, and it'll turn red, and it'll give you an indication that it's acidic. If you put it in soap, it'll give you an indication that it's not acidic, it's alkylic. Well, the highest pH that we see in sort of products that we use in the home is something like about 08 or so. And we found 12 and a half in some of the cold seeps that we've been exploring on the seafloor near the Mariana Trench. So it's a, may I say a laboratory, but it was going to ask you, well, so what's the difference? Why not go 6 feet down or 12 or 50 feet down? Why do you have to go 11,000 meters down? And the answer is you want to get the greatest differential between life near the surface or around the land and life down there, because it'll teach you more, am I right? Absolutely. You know, think about Mount Everest, and think about if you had a supercharged helicopter that could take you up to the top, you just, you know, fly up to the top, land on the top of Mount Everest and look around, okay, but it's night, and you have a flashlight. Maybe you have a supercharged flashlight. So you can see 30, 50 feet, wow, that's really cool, I got to the top of Mount Everest. You know, nothing about the Himalaya Mountains at all because I flew up there in the middle of the night. That's like, you know, diving down to the Challenger Deep and looking out with, you know, super wonderful capability, wonderful lights, wonderful cameras, and that's phenomenal. But we don't know how the animals change with depth and pressure. We don't know anything about, you know, currents that bring them in, bring them their food. You know, what's life like in these kinds of environments? So how do you get there? I mean, they have the A train or something, how do you get there? Ah, yes, you need, these days what we need is an autonomous underwater vehicle so something that can fly down or a tethered vehicle like a remotely operated vehicle is basically a robot that you can design to take you to these deepest places. So, you know, you need to be able to withstand the pressure and all of the instruments that you have need to be able to withstand the pressure or you can do what we did most recently which is you can go partway down and then you can drill to get yourself a little further down through the seafloor. And that's what I did over Christmas and New Year's. You went down in a bathysphere or something? No, no, no. I was on a ship that drilled down into the seafloor. We were sitting up on the ship all very comfortable being fed nicely. Mint, julep, what not, yeah? No, no drinking, but really good food. Okay, any seafood? Oh, for sure. Yeah, some of the crew were fishing off the ship. So what kind of instrument, you said these things had instruments and that's the critical piece and I'm always interested in instruments and sensors and what have you to learn to be your eyes and ears and all your senses. Yeah, that's the most important thing and you can put almost any kind of a sensor on one of these remotely operated vehicles. Obviously we have lights and cameras, but we can take temperature, we can collect samples with mechanical arms that can go out and perform all kinds of experiments, some of the microbiology folks that I've worked with have left attractive traps, they put substrates down in different areas around a spring on the seafloor to see what animals live close to the spring or a little bit further away. I had this vision of a lobster going into the trap. Oh, listen, on Cameron's cruise what they did was to put a chicken, a full fryer chicken from the galley into this mesh trap and they put a camera on a lander, which is just a device that you put an anchor on and you drop it through the water column and it hits the seafloor and just sits there, but it's still got a boom arm on it with this net with the chicken inside of it and there are these creatures that come, they're about this long and they look like a giant cockroach, only they're white and they clean that thing out in about five minutes. Really? Oh yeah, and the only thing that was brought up was the skeleton and a few of the critters that couldn't get out of the trap, so the scientists would get in. Would they eat a person the same way? You know, I used to think I might like to be buried at sea, I'm not so sure about it anymore. It's stuff of which you make a movie, that's why he was there. You know, I'm sure that that is going to influence the next Avatar movie, which I hope everybody will go see. It's going to be about the oceans. Ten thousand leagues under the sea, it reminds me. Yes, yes. So, but it's not only the biology, it's not only the creatures, it's the geophysics down there. Oh true, and a lot of the things that we're able to do these days, both with the remotely operated vehicles, with our robots is, you know, we can collect materials on the seafloor, but now that we're able to drill into the seafloor and insert metal pipes that are perforated so that fluids from the surrounding rocks beneath, say, these huge mud volcanoes that I've been working on, we can put instruments down those holes now and examine changes in the chemistry of the fluids. We could put seismometers in the holes to record, you know, what happens with these mud volcanoes that are active, that are erupting mud from the mantle of the earth if there's an earthquake nearby. And so we can get an idea of both the physical and the chemical conditions that might take place or change during a seismic event, an earthquake. It reminds me of, you know, the notion of the end of the world, the end of the internet, it's the bottom and it's right there near the mantle. We have, this is, I mean, it's another very interesting possibility to go down there and find, which you could not find anywhere else in the ocean bottom, proximity to the mantle. Very true. In fact, on Cameron's cruise, one of the landers, when it was being lowered through the water column, the chain that attached to the weight at the bottom of it twisted because the whole device kind of was rotating and it hit the seafloor and then as soon as it hit the seafloor, it was triggered to start taking pictures. And so the whole thing took a series of photos of the seafloor around it and it was right down close to the base of the trench. And so it was taking pictures of the inner trench slope and there were outcroppings, exposures of mantle rock all the way along. And some of those rocks had filaments on them that some of my colleagues at Scripps have looked at and they're microbiological. So even in the deepest part of the trench where you do see the mantle. It's amazing. Yeah, and these critters are growing right on the rocks. Is the mantle like hot? Is it like glowing? No, no, it's very cold. It's about the same temperature as the water around it. Because it's been exposed for quite a while down there. This is really interesting. Oh, it's fun. I mean, I'd rather know about it than go there, if you don't mind. OK. For now. For now. They change the technology soon. So after this break, Patty Fryer, we're going to see a clip. Yes. And we're going to see a bunch of photos that were taken by these devices. And I'm going to put on my special glasses. Me too. Oh, you can put yours on too. Oh, yeah. And we get a 3D just like in 1953. Yeah, there we go. It's Patty Fryer and me. You may not recognize this, but it's us. We'll be right back. Hello, everyone. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on Think Tech, Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 PM. And with the show's host, Martin Desbang, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 PM on Think Tech, Hawaii. Welcome to Sister Power. I'm your host, Sharon Thomas Yarbrough, where we motivate, educate, empower, and inspire all women. We are live here every other Thursday at 4 PM. And we welcome you to join us here at Sister Power. Aloha and thank you. OK, you've probably noticed that Patty Fryer and I have taken our glasses off. But we'll put them on later. You want to see the definition of some of these photos. But you'll also notice that we have some four rocks, all very different, which come from way down deep in the Mariana challenge. Oh, not all of them. In fact, these are just examples. This one actually is a toe of a lava flow. And it has a glassy, cooled rim on the outside and the inside is very fine-grained. Can't see very many crystals. We're going to try to get a close-up shot of that. It's too interesting not to. Oh, OK. And this one came from Luigi. So these two, this is subarial. In other words, this one erupted on the land surface. But this one erupted underneath the water. And a lot of the salt that is erupted under the water is cooled on the surface. So it forms this glassy margin. And the shape of the lava flow is like a whole bunch of throw pillows, or toothpaste tubes sometimes. So it gets oozed out and cooled on the surface and becomes round. And this is just a little toe. And you can still see the same glass around the margin. But now it's covered with deposits from the hydrothermal, the hot fluids that are coming out of the Luigi summit area. And these guys are two rocks that have the same composition chemically. But this one cooled more slowly. So crystals got bigger and bigger and bigger. You can see the crystals winking and blinking. Yeah, you can see them growing, sort of. And this one has got the same minerals, the black minerals of pyroxene and the white minerals are called feldspar. And these guys, you see the black and white in this one, too, same minerals. But this one cooled for a longer time. And so the crystals just grew bigger and bigger. It's got a red spot on it. Is that just a scientific market? Yes, this is how we catalog. Oh, that's the market. Yeah, we just catalog them. But when you take these kinds of rocks and let them be drawn down in a subduction zone, these minerals change. All of the constituents of the minerals sort of rearrange themselves so that they're more compact. And these guys turn into something like this. No, no, this is called an eclogite. We actually have some rocks exactly like this that were blown out of the punch bowl crater, teeny, tiny little pieces of it, but exactly the same thing. So this green and white sort of, I like to think of it as a Christmas rock. But you would find these way down deep. So if they blew out of a punch bowl crater, they came from way down deep. These things, these eclogite rocks are much more dense because the minerals have rearranged themselves. So this thing is basically like an anchor on that plate that dives down in the subduction zone. Subduction. Yeah, it's pulling the rest of the plate down, basically. So that's how this works. That's really exciting. It's, yeah. So it's a physical action that makes it hard that compresses the rock makes it more dense, rather than the weight of the water on top. Oh, yes. Is that two? That's correct. OK, and what functions does heat play in this process? Anything? Yes, heat is important because that permits the molecules to move faster and faster so that they can rearrange themselves. And make denser minerals. You wouldn't find any of these rocks on the Earth, I mean, over sea level? Yes, you would. Oh, you would? Yes. Ah, but they were there to begin with, and then they got turned up somehow. Yes, they did. That's right, in mountain building or places where the sea floor has ridden up over the edge of a land mass. So for instance, on Catalina Island, you can go and see lavas that have gone through an intermediate stage that turn into something we call blue schist. So you can see features like this. You can see the actual shape of the pillow lavas where the ocean has cut sea cliffs. And they're bright blue, like the color of your shirt. Or like the color of my shirt. OK. Similar, maybe? But I just wondered, I mean, can you date these? Yes. With some kind of carbon radioactive dating? There are a variety of different types of dating techniques that could be used to determine when the change took place. These, of course, you can date. These you can date as well to get when they crystallized. But once the rock has changed to something else, it resets the timing. And so you would get the date at which the transformation took place. But not the original elements of the rock. So what kind of time span are we talking? How long ago? That's a good question. And it may depend a great deal on how fast a given plate is being subducted. Really fast subduction. You could get something like this formed within somewhere between 10 and 15 million years. In slower subducting areas, it could take 30, 50 million years. Oh, wow. This goes back to the beginning of before Seinfeld. Oh, there. OK. Anyway, let's go to your clip now. We've got a few minutes left when we play your clip. OK. And so I'm going to put my glasses back on. Oh, well, not for the first one. The first one is, oh, where are we in the world? So is it driving through the material there? There's no, it's not. Yes, there's a little bit of debris from when we last pulled that pipe out of the hole that stuck to the pipe and then fell back down into the reentry cone. And the pipe has holes in it, and the holes are going to collect material there. Ah, no, what we're doing is we're going to drill down through whatever the material is below the seafloor. And inside this pipe, there's another pipe that has a plastic liner in it. And what we do is either we drill down and let that inner pipe fill up with material. So we're basically coring. And we bring that core pipe back up. So put it right up through the pipe. Right. And this film was made on January 10th of 2017. It was only a few months ago. That's right. We were out there over Christmas, New Year's, Chinese New Year's. What a way to celebrate. And Robbie Burns' night. OK. We're going to go through other clips now. So let's have a running discussion of them. OK, this is just putting the pipe down. What is that thing? What is that, a shark? No, these are tuna. And the diameter of that pipe is about 12 inches. So these are really big tuna. And we're at 681 meters below. That's like almost 1,000 feet. Why are the tuna there? Are they serious? They're interested in the pipe. They're interested in the fact that the ship has been sitting there for a long time. So we're kind of a fish attraction device, right? Yes, so. So there are a lot of fish underneath the ship. They're kind of cute, actually. They're amazing. And the way we're seeing this is we have a camera sled that clamps around the pipe. Now, in order to find out where we are in the seafloor, we put down a beacon that emits a little acoustic sound. And so we can maneuver ourselves. But we recall them by another acoustic signal. This one didn't behave itself. So we put down this grappling hook. And we were hoping we could catch this thing. Oh, oh, nice job. Yeah, it didn't take us all that long. This is a different type of fishing. Everybody's up on the deck watching us. Yeah, we're going, yay! We got it! Different type of fishing. What a fun time. It was very exciting. You go down there and see those incredible stuff. And it's like there are so many possibilities, so many issues, so many surprises, so many things to learn. That's right. Yeah. Let's see some of your other photographs. OK. We got a bunch of them. I'm going to get through at least some of them. Want to get to the ones where you can put your glasses on. Well, this is the area where we were working. So this is the Western Pacific and Japan's up at the top of the map. The little red box will show you the next image, which is close to the Mariana Trench. And see all those labels there? Those are all of the mud volcanoes that I've been working on since 1997. And we've collected samples from everything that has a name. But the ones in the middle there with the red boxes were the ones that we were drilling in over Christmas and New Year's. So big blue celestial and blue moon. And what's the scale we're talking about? Like, for example, there were a lot of these little seam outs there. Right. If you look in the lower left-hand corner of the map near the island of Guam, just below that, there's a scale that says 0 to 100 kilometers. Oh, kilometers. So from the red area, which is the volcanic arc, so some of those are above sea level, to the blue Mariana Trench, that's about 200 kilometers. That's a long way. Yeah. And some of those seamounts must be a couple of miles across. The largest of them is about 50 kilometers. And in fact, if we take a look at the next one, you're going to see celestial seamount. And here we go. Put my glasses on. Come on, Jay, we need to put these on here and take a look. So folks at home, if you have any of these kind of glasses, or if you can go to the drugstore and get some cellophane in red and blue, put red over your left eye, blue over your right eye, and you will see these images in 3D. So you can see the cones are popping out of the picture at you. And the top of it kind of looks as if it has a bit of a crater, right? Well, that area, we actually dove with a remotely operated vehicle and took a look at. So we knew that that was an interesting area to try to core. We had taken samples from that. This was as big as Oahu? Oh, no, the next one. This one, you can see the scale is five kilometers. There's a scale of five kilometers in the lower right. And on the next one, there's five kilometers scale on the lower right, but it's much, much smaller. So take a look at this one with your glasses, Jay. And add about. It's like a work of art in an Italian museum. I think it's gorgeous. OK, let's take our glasses off and take a look at the next one, which is just a regular bathymetry map that shows that same seamount. And the next one shows Oahu, superimposed on red on that. OK, we're going to go to the next one, and that'll show it? Yes, the next slide. OK, whoa. That's how big that seafloor mountain is. It's about 2 and 1 half kilometers, so more than 70,000 feet high above the seafloor surrounding it. That's higher than any place on Oahu. That's correct. That's right. Yeah, it's 3,000 feet up and about the poly. And it suggests that in the dynamic of the creation of the Earth and all the changes that our mountains could have been just like that. I mean, Oahu could have been one of those seamounts. Oh, not one of these, because this one was not formed by volcanic processes of the type we have here. It's not igneous. It's not lava. What it is is just a big pile of mud. And the way it forms is when the Pacific plate dives down below the Mariana region, the area above it gets fractured up, because as the Pacific plate goes down, it also moves back toward the east toward Hawaii. So it's sort of falling backward. And what happens above it is that, oh, the seafloor just opens up and a whole bunch of cracks. So all the fluids and broken up rock around the faults that are created, when the fluids are basically distilled or squeezed out of the sediments and distilled out of the rocks and rise up along those fractures, they bring the mud up with them and form these immense mud all over. They call that subduction also? No, subduction is the process of one plate's movement down into the interior of the earth, into the mantle. And what happens above it, there's basically a wedge of material in it. So this area in here is the overriding plate. And its mantle and its crust or the whole lithosphere, the rock sphere, gets broken up by this pulling. So it's just pulling the top surface of the overriding plate eastward so it fractures, breaks all up. And then anything that's coming up from below is going to go up those fractures and get to the seafloor and just erupt. And it's been doing it for, it looks like, 50 million years based on the ages that we've got underneath and near these kinds of materials. Well, I'm gratified in a way because it's, you know, and I guess it's one of the big takeaways of the show, that not everything is subduction. And they, in Silicon Valley, the subject of so much news these days, they're probably relieved to know that not everything in Silicon Valley is subduction either, those guys. Oh. Yeah. Thank you, Betty Fryer. It's been wonderful to talk to you. It was so much fun, Jay. Thank you for bringing your rock-style photographs, great maps, and my glasses. Oh, yeah. If you put yours on, we're going to say, say bye. Looks so nice. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Betty Fryer. Oh, you're quite welcome, Jay.