Her Deepness and her Daughter – Chatting with Sylvia Earle & Liz Taylor
From Pelicans to dolphins to deep sea mining - two women of the sea
Below is one of our ‘classic’ interviews from an earlier episode of ‘Rising Tide the Ocean Podcast’ in which we hear from National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, ‘Her Deepness’ Dr. Sylvia Earle and her daughter Liz Taylor, President of DOER Marine on everything from pet pelicans to an annoying dolphin to deep sea mining.
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RT - Welcome to Rising Tide, the Ocean Podcast. This is David Helvarg and my co-host is Vicki Nichols Goldstein. Today, we're honored to have as one of our guests, the widely acclaimed hero and voice of the seas Dr. Sylvia Earle. Her latest book is ‘Ocean, a Global Odyssey.’ We're also happy to be joined by her daughter Liz Taylor, the president of DOER Marine, which stands for Deep Ocean Exploration and Research.
Sylvia - Nice to be on board. Thank you.
Liz - Very nice to be here.
RT – It’s wonderful that the two of you, mother and daughter, have a close relationship. How did that relationship turn professional?
Sylvia - Well, Lizzie? Well, I think it's just sort of a natural, you know, evolution, just kind of taking it out to help others to get below the surface.
Liz - Yeah, well, she kind of had me pressing plants (seaweed samples) in the garage, you know, kind of practically before I could walk and sent me out to play with the sharks and things like that, you know. And like a giant squid, she inks off a lot, all the books and so forth. So, you know, it's been just kind of a lifelong endeavor and then traveling a lot, going into the field a lot as a kid, and then taking some time off to get back into school. But I was kind of on a pathway to leaning more towards sciences with marine ornithology, but then a return to help out more with the businesses that she had started, the technology businesses and really became very much involved in the special projects, which means the projects the company didn't really want to deal with, which was the science, the film, the export sales and things like that, that that kind of led to where we are today.
RT - You were saying pressing plants. You started with marine seaweeds and the like, Sylvia. And I guess, Liz, you got into seabirds?
Sylvia - Well, it's the ocean from the top to the bottom, looking at it as a living system. Now, Liz has been part of the action since she arrived on the scene as a little girl.
Liz - It's really a lot about the family as a whole system because early on, her work really did take her out into the field quite a bit, and so she'd be gone for long periods of time, and we didn't have cell phones and things, so we had to wait for postcards and then eventually maybe a ship to shore radio call, something like that. So, there was a lot of reliance on my grandmother as well, and she would bring in all kinds of birds from blue jays to pelicans to egrets and everything in between. So, it was really kind of a woman-led household and now it's evolved into a woman-led business.
RT – So did you have a pet pelican as a child?
Liz - We had a pelican for a long time. Well, we had several pelicans. We had, you know, typically what would happen is that they would arrive to us with their pouches slashed up by fishermen or entangled in fishing line or with a broken wing or something like that. And there weren't really very many wildlife rescue centers or any rescue centers at that time. So, my grandmother, who was also a nurse, she would, you know, mend these creatures. And I kind of learned alongside.
RT - And when did you first spawn Liz? Was this before or after you went underwater with the habitats and your fellow aquanauts?
Sylvia - Well, the first time I had a chance to live underwater was in 1970. And Liz was 10 years old. So, she shared the experience vicariously but Liz has been on lots of expeditions, and in Florida, we lived close to the water so she spent her early years, just getting acquainted with the ocean by being in, on, around and often under it but whenever I could on these trips away I’d scoop one or more… I have three children and occasionally all three of them would come on board. You remember, Liz, in 1978, you were a little bit older, but you still had that, what you do now, that lovely long golden hair. And we went to the Bahamas and met up with the dolphin, Sandy. He just loved your hair. He definitely did.
LIz - We were diving there on the reef and I was going along minding my own business and all of a sudden there was this terrific yank on my hair and I wheeled around getting ready to slug my brother who would normally be doing something like that. And here was this dolphin, he just had literally this ‘ha ha ha ha’ smile on his face, like he just really got away with something. And he came back and he was like flossing his teeth in my hair, you know, with my hair. He was really a pest. But he was a great animal and he just wanted to visit with people.
Sylvia - Right. And that sort of experience, over time those experiences stack up and make Liz the person she is. She actually, when you first learned to dive as a teenager, a little underage at the time to learn scuba diving, but you had a really tough instructor. Oh, my goodness. That was in the Bahamas when I was saturating in the hydro lab and you got to come down and bring us goodies once in a while as part of your dive training. A communications officer as a teenager with our buddy, Bob Wicklund. And I don't know, there's things that you can learn being out doing things that you don't learn in school. Liz has had, just growing up in a household that had the ethic of caring for all forms of life, land and sea, to appreciate how humans fit into nature and to watch as all of us have. I've been watching a little bit longer than Liz but the changes, how much we've learned in the last 50 years or so, and also how much we've lost. It’s about sharing that experience, that education, the looking, knowing why birds matter, why fish matter, why we are having an outsized impact on the systems that keep us alive... Liz has two boys who are growing up with the benefit of what their mom and dad have learned that get passed along to them in concentrated doses, but they too are out there, down there doing things, which is above and beyond what they learn in their more formal training.
RT - So Liz, are your two siblings also engaged in the ocean or are they stuck being part of that 29% of the planet that's more terrestrial?
Liz - Well, my brother had a very long and storied career as a warden with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and he just recently retired after being the longest serving warden in the history of Sonoma County. And he was on the Marine Enforcement Team. So, you know, real big part of his...
Sylvia - He was kind of widely known as the Red Ranger. And, you know, the poachers and stuff basically lived in fear of him for many, many years, the Red Abalone poachers.
Liz - Right. I had a police lieutenant come along one time and tell me just how impressed they were because they had been assigned to like a gang enforcement unit over in, I think in Vallejo, a pretty rough area. And they came through a scene where they saw this one guy, and he was completely surrounded by these really tough-looking gang members. They all had a knife or a weapon of some sort. And it was my brother right at the center of them checking all their fishing licenses as calm and cool as could be, but the police wanted nothing to do with these guys. And here he was just making sure they were all being compliant in their fishing activity on the side. And then my sister, she has more involvement in the arts and writes music and creates textiles of various kinds. So, she still has a connection to the ocean as well.
RT - And Sylvia, you went from a lot of technical exploration to building some of your own technology. And that's now the company that Liz is president of, DOER Marine.
Sylvia - Yeah, I started it, but Liz and her husband, Ian Griffith, really took it over. I started it after I left NOAA. I was a chief scientist of NOAA from 1990 for a couple of years, and when I left, I just started a little corporate shell around myself so that I could make a living. That morphed into what has become this phenomenon, Deep Ocean Exploration and Research. I really turned it all over to Liz and Ian. They've really made a thriving enterprise out of something that was more of a vision when I began it in 1997. Liz is really more of a founder of DOER than I am. When she and Ian got together, they really took the expertise that Ian had developed over many years of working again, in, on, around and under the ocean, diving in some places and under circumstances that make my heart quiver. I think of diving in tunnels and diving offshore and not so clear and wonderfully beautiful places, but as a commercial diver. And I mean, those are real divers in the sense that you really have to know what you're doing.
RT - I talked to a commercial diver who had been working pipelines 600 feet down
Sylvia - Yeah, that's right.
RT - In a habitat and I was telling him about some Navy SEAL I'd been interviewing and he said, ‘Yeah, Navy SEALs, they're great. They got 69 ways to kill you underwater, but hand them a wrench and they're lost.’ And I think it's a dangerous field, commercial diving. I think a lot of the technology that may make it safer is what you work on, Liz. So maybe just tell us a bit about what DOER does?
Liz - When we first started, Ian was indeed working as a commercial diver and one of his areas of expertise was doing very long distance pipeline penetrations. So, he would find himself, you know, crawling up very small diameter pipes, some as small as maybe 24 to 30 inches in diameter, going like a thousand feet up the pipe, you know. It was real dicey work. And he learned that he could actually turn his six foot plus frame around in a 30-inch pipeline and get out. Kind of making U-turn, he doesn't know how he did it, but he did it. That whole need to investigate and remediate infrastructure led to the drive to create remotely operated vehicles (ROV robot submarines) that could do these skinds of jobs, but without as much risk to the commercial divers. And it's what kind of led to the creation of small remotely operated vehicles not to replace divers because they're essential underwater, but to assist in the work around oil and gas platforms as well and other areas to kind of reduce or mitigate the risk to the humans in the sea. And so that's what really kind of led us into DOER to create tools that can go into extreme environments, to work alongside divers, to go deeper than divers can safely go, and to really bring back the host of information that we need in order to make better decisions about how we interact with the ocean.
Sylvia - One of the big headline issues environmentally of our time, one of the biggest land grabs on the planet is deep sea mining with the leases that have been permitted to a number of companies via countries who have the ability to get these long-term leases. And most of the people on the planet are simply unaware. And many who are aware don't think it is a big problem. Liz, Ian, and their engineering team have come up with a remotely operated system now owned by the University of Hawaii. It's being deployed out in the Clarion-Clipperton (proposed mining) zone to document and survey and show why this is really a bad idea.
Liz - The ROV Lu’ukai system that we built for the University of Hawaii is a 6,000 meter (depth) rated system, so it can go quite deep into the ocean. Most of the area that's being targeted for the mining of these, I guess you'd call them Manganese nodules of sorts. They're very slow growing. They're not like a dead rock. Like if you've got a mine on the land, you're taking out actual chunks of minerals, but these nodules are living systems. So, each one kind of forms around, typically around something like a fossil shark tooth or a whale's ear bone, something like that, something that's fallen from the surface and landed out there on the plain. And over tens of thousands of years, these microbial communities attract and fix these minerals, cobalt, manganese, and so forth, that are then accumulating in these nodules. And over literally tens of thousands of years, they get to be maybe the size of a potato. But the thought is that they could be hoovered up in some fashion, crushed up, and have the minerals extracted and then return the slurry to the bottom in some way. And typically, they're thinking about just pumping it off the side or trying to reintroduce it to the seabed or closer to the seabed. But what we found in the different surveys we've done with the ROV is that any kind of disturbance to the seabed out there is very long lasting. We revisited some test tracks of operations that were done out there in the 1960s, and the area, the test area, is not recovered in any way, shape, or form. You can still see where they trawled through the area and it's as disturbed now as it was then. And even just being very careful to come through and take some biological samples with the Lu’ukai, coming back a few hours later to the place we started the recovery, the sediment is still suspended in the water column. So, it's a very slow moving system, change happens incrementally there, and the thought of having very large trenching or picking vehicles developed to systematically go across the seabed and churn it up to take these nodules out is just, it's a gut-wrenching thought. It's unimaginable.
Sylvia - One of the most important aspects is to realize that, as Liz points out, these are living systems, living rocks, not dead stones. But more than that, it's a living system. Like coral reefs are not just about the coral, they're about the thousands of organisms that are associated with them. And it's true with manganese nodule formations as well. Octopuses gather as a nursery area, places where at times they've been observed - hundreds of octopuses sheltering their eggs. And there are sea cucumbers, but mostly we know enough to know that it's a diverse, complicated system that has taken not just tens of thousands of years, but millions of years to form. And it's arrogant on our part to think it doesn't matter, that it's okay because it's far away from where we actually live. Looking at Earth from space, nothing is far away from where we live. We're all tied together. And we're concerned about old growth systems that go back millions of years that we are proposing to tear up for short-term interest. And the rationale is, oh, now we need materials for batteries, for computers, for cell phones. And we do terrible things to the land. Let's go into the ocean where it really doesn't matter. It does matter. First of all, if we're going to extract minerals, take them out of the dump sites where we've already extracted the minerals and mine them as a first highly concentrated source, more than in the deep sea or on the land for lithium and cobalt and nickel, assuming that our purposes in the short term are worth the cost.
RT - I think, DOER Marine, along with ROV's remote operated subs, you also have some manned or, in this case, womaned submersibles?
Liz - Yeah, certainly the entire conflict mineral situation has really helped to accelerate the pace at which we're taking an approach of getting more humans into the sea so they can directly observe what is there and why it matters. And of course, the best way to do that is to do that with your own eyes. So, the human-occupied vehicles that we build, we've got a long history of dealing with submersibles, submersible vehicles for a host of reasons, for research, for tourism. We've built a number of them just for personal recreation, for use on some of these very large yachts as kind of a duality of having some science elements, but also some recreational elements. But, you know, Sylvia often talks about sort of the ability that Jane Goodall had of kind of spending quality time with chimpanzees and other great apes, and that over many years she was able to really have that gift of time with them to get to know them as individuals and so forth. But as divers, we're very constrained by the tank of air on our back and depth and cold and all these other factors that push against us. So, it makes it hard to really get to know animals and systems as individuals. So with the submersible, you could really get that gift of time to be able to observe and document, look at what the animals are doing, their relationship with one another, cooperative hunting, and especially to see, really witness the damage that's been done to some of these areas. Again, going back to the Lu’ukai ROV, we were going down on a mission and the vehicle had just come from a bunch of upgrades and so forth. So, we went out on a test dive and we got down to 4,000 meters and we turned on the lights and cameras and we were confronted with a Dasani water bottle. It was the very first thing that we saw. Who wants to see that? And in so many areas, we've got things like derelict fishing nets. We've got shipping containers. By the channel islands (of California), we've got hundreds of barrels of DDT laying around on the bottom. So, there's all these things that if we want politicians or policymakers to really be compelled to make positive change, we need to go, we need to show them this stuff and they need to see it directly.
RT - Sylvia, we know you've had some record dives. You spent a lot of time deep below the ocean. Back in 1960, Don Walsh and Jacque Picard were the first humans to actually get to the lowest point on the planet in the Marianas Trench, and then nothing happened for a long time. We spent hundreds of people out into space to look for signs of life like water, but it wasn't until 2014 that Jim Cameron went back down to the depths and now you have a fellow with a submersible that's taking a number of people down. Are you wanting to get down to the deepest point?
Sylvia - It was Victor Vescovo who I think did something pretty classy not only taking Kathy Sullivan, the sky-walking astronaut, to the deepest part of the ocean, but Victor scooped up Don Walsh's son, Kelly, and took him down to where his father was. You can pay big bucks to be taken down if you want to pay. But he's been very generous with scientists and with gestures such as with Kelly and Kathy so yeah, of course I'm going to go and we've had that vision. Certainly, Liz and Ian have, and they have the engineering skill to go beyond the conventional technology that you know, we've been able to go with materials that worked as long ago as 1960, but using innovative systems, glass, that really is the best material for not only being able to see through it, but to get stronger with increased pressure. But you've got to get your sums right. It has to be precisely right. And it also takes investment, not just to go booming off into space, but how about exploring our own blue planet from the inside out? Who wouldn't want to do that when you have the ways and means to go? I think we're truly on the edge of the greatest era of exploration ever.”