Five Glimpses Beneath the Surface of the Ocean
Oceanographer and 2006 MacArthur Fellow Edith Widder knows there aren’t really dragons, or does she? When Medieval map-makers drew unexplored territory, they’d declare “here be dragons.” In her 2013 CIW Talk, Widder discusses the vast unknown that our deep seas still represent.
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1. What we have explored: virtually nothing.
“If you think in terms of volume, the living space where animals can live— which is what interests me the most— it’s actually more than 99 percent [ocean]. It’s an incomprehensibly vast volume that we’ve explored maybe less than 5 percent of.”
2. Finally, we know the answer to if a tree falls in a forest…
“Most of the animals you bring up in a net make light. I wanted to know: Did these animals make light when we’re not down there trying to measure it?… When I [dove down], I saw nothing. Total blackness. Not a flash, not a glow.”
3. Stop worrying about Godzilla. Start worrying about giant squids.
“Imagine…an animal [that if] had its tentacles fully extended, it would have been as tall as a two-story house. Giant squid can get taller than a four-story house. There’s something that big living in the depths of our ocean that nobody had ever seen before alive.”
4. Jellyfish have bioluminescent burglar alarms.
“The idea behind this display is the jellyfish only does this if it’s caught in the clutches of a predator [and] has no hope for escape on its own, but might be able to attract the attention of something bigger that will attack the fish or whatever it is that’s attacking it.”
5. What’s at the edge of the map? To find out, we’ll have to toss aside our fear of dragons.
“We’ve been having [high schools students] help us create these pollution maps…. It’s had a wonderful, wonderful impact. And I hope a lot of these kids are going to go on to be explorers, because we need explorers. We need people that can push the boundaries of our intellectual and physical frontiers, who aren’t afraid at the dragons at the edge of the map, but are drawn to them.”
