Do you ever get the creeps thinking about how deep the ocean is — or even at the deep end of a pool? I do! Deep water is awe-inspiring, in a spooky sort of way. Join me to explore some wonders of the depths.
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Music: Jens East — Daybreak (ft. Henk): www.soundcloud.com/jenseast
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution V4.0
Transcription (remember, this is a direct transcription of what I said and is not actually how I write!):
Welcome to 9 Minutes of Wonder. I’m Betsy Hedberg. I hope this podcast will help you rekindle your sense of wonder for this awe-inspiring world. If you like what you hear in the next few minutes, please subscribe and share.
Take a moment and think about the last time that you drove or bicycled or walked about 11 kilometers or 7 miles. And imagine this distance from your home or from wherever you are now.
You can kind of wrap your head around that, right? But now, imagine that distance down from the ocean surface to the bottom of the deepest water on Earth. This is the location of the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, which is in the western Pacific Ocean.
This is a scale that is totally normal above ground, right? Many of us do this every day. But it’s almost incomprehensible when I think of going this deep underwater, which a handful of people actually have. Down that deep, the pressure is like having 50 jumbo jets on top of you. Yeah, that’s hard to believe too, or hard to fathom.
Fortunately, there are various microbial life forms down there and a few sea creatures, but probably no fish because the pressure would be too great for their skeletons. And there are likely thousands of other undiscovered species. There’s just a lot that we don’t know about this place, this part of the Earth.
And unfortunately, there’s also some plastic junk and chemical pollutants that have fallen down to those depths. But I don’t know about you. I find this depth and vastness totally, totally awe-inspiring. And I have for my whole life.
So today I want to dive into this topic a little bit, of depths and how awe-inspiring and how wonderful depths can be.
In 2023, when the Titan submersible imploded, many people complained that the media bonanza was because they were rich people and the media was paying attention to them just because they are filthy rich.
There’s probably something to that. But I think it’s also maybe primarily because people are fascinated with deep-ocean exploration. There’s something that triggers our sense of awe in the idea that anything can be so deep, and especially that anybody or any technology can go that deep, especially when there are people sitting in this little capsule. Even if deep-ocean tourism is not exactly the same as deep-ocean exploration, and it’s definitely not science, it still inspires awe in people, even in whatever we think of the motivations behind the endeavor.
Again, I’ve been thinking about deep water and finding it fascinating for my whole life, really. I just recently watched the Netflix series called The Deepest Breath. And this is about free diving. It’s beautifully filmed, but I think it glorifies a dangerous and self-indulgent sport — but that’s another story. I still couldn’t stop watching it. Not so much because of the story that it tells, but because of the footage of people diving 100 meters into blue holes, where it gets really cold, really dark, and highly pressurized, all in one breath. And they’re not just diving down, they have to come up. And coming up is the slowest and hardest part.
So this is amazing to me, this sport of free diving, which has been around for a pretty long time, not just as a sport but as a way that people in certain cultures have gone fishing, for example, and done other things like that. The current free-diving record is 253 meters, or 830 feet, by a man who can hold his breath for more than nine minutes. His name is Herbert Nitsch.
So take a moment, contemplate that nine minutes. Can you hold your breath for nine minutes? Yeah, I cannot. I’m not sure if I can do it for a minute.
And as you know, awe often involves an element of fear. And doesn’t this give you the creeps thinking about diving down to 830 feet or 253 meters and holding your breath, or trying to hold your breath for nine minutes? I even get the creeps at the deep end of a swimming pool. Even though I’m a good swimmer, there’s something about the deep end that intrigues me and gives me the creeps in a way that I kind of love and kind of hate.
And I feel that way if I’m in a boat or if I’m swimming in the ocean and it’s not even very deep, but I can’t stand up. I had similar feelings as a child when I was reading one of my favorite childhood books. It’s called The How and Why Wonder Book of Oceanography.
You can still get these books on eBay, and they’re so cool. My favorite page was the abyss. And on that page, there was a picture of a man getting into a bathysphere to go explore the deep ocean. I thought that sounded more exciting than exploring outer space.
A bathysphere, by the way, was actually a very small ball attached to cables that went down to 923 meters or about 3,028 feet. So it wasn’t even that deep by today’s standards.
But if you look it up, you can see a picture of the bathysphere. It looks tiny, and somebody had to sit in this little sphere for quite a while. Pretty creepy.
This is obviously not for everybody. And actually, there’s a term for phobia of large bodies of water. So some people are really freaked out.
It’s not just awe, it’s freak-out. And the term for a phobia of large bodies of water, including deep bodies of water, is thalassophobia. T-H-A-L-A-S-S-O phobia. I think I’ve pronounced that correctly.
I don’t have a phobia of deep water, but it does give me the creeps. And if you search Mariana Trench on YouTube, you’ll see a lot of videos with names like “15 Mariana Trench creatures that are scarier than Megalodon” or “The most horrifying places in the ocean: 11,034 meters below sea level and death in the trench.”
And then there are also movies like The Abyss, and of course Jaws, that are intended to scare the crap out of us because we typically have a fear and a reverence and an awe for deep water. It’s not just spooky, it’s awe-inspiring.
And of course, the two go together. So right now, take a moment to contemplate just how cool it is that there are these deep places on earth that are as inaccessible as outer space and that you will never be able to see with your own eyes, even if you have zillions of dollars or zillions of euros. And these places likely have many unknown animal species.
And none of those animals down there could care less about all the silly things that we complain about or anything else in our lives. They’re just going about their business down in the trenches of the deep sea. I think that’s awesome.
Now, imagine holding your breath for three minutes or five minutes or nine minutes, maybe even one minute. But if you can hold your breath for three minutes, maybe you can dive down a hundred meters or more. And then of course you have to turn around and come back up.
And if you’re so inclined, watch that Netflix film or look up some videos of free divers, and you will be amazed and full of wonder that they could possibly do that. If you live near the ocean or another big body of water, go there and contemplate how vast and deep it is. Do you know how deep it is right off the shore? It may be that you don’t have to go very far to notice the depths and that you’re looking at the depths right from the shore or right from the beach. Do you know if there are any undersea canyons or other deep worlds right near the shore? Find out and get into that mystery.
If you don’t live near the ocean, you can watch some videos of deep diving or the ocean’s trenches or even the waves crashing onto the shore and just contemplate how vast it is and how awe-inspiring and wonder-inspiring it can be to know that there are these places that are so deep.
That is all I’m going to say about this topic, and I look forward to talking more about something else next time.
Take care.