Blue Humanities
New approaches to humanities and arts disciplines, exploring the relationship between humankind and the oceans. From the Humanities Institute of Arizona State University, hosted by Professor Jonathan Bate.
Blue Humanities
The Blue Machine
How do the oceans work? And how have they influenced human history? In this episode of the Blue Humanities podcast of the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University, Jonathan Bate interview Helen Czerski - Professor of Mechanical Engineering at University College London, presenter of TV science documentaries, and author of Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes our World (subtitle of US edition: How the Ocean Works). Listen for an array of fascinating stories: why did Antony and Cleopatra lose the world-changing battle of Actium that heralded the rise of the Roman empire? What does the earwax of whales tell us about their stress levels during the Second World War? How do you build a ship to withstand the crushing weight of ice in the Arctic?
You can listen to Helen's Ocean Matters podcast here and follow her on any of these platforms:
Mastodon: @helenczerski@fediscience.org
BlueSky: @helenczerski.bsky.social
Instagram: helen_czerski https://www.instagram.com/helen_czerski/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-czerski-045b956/
Threads: @helen_czerski
You can follow Jonathan on Twitter/X here and the Humanities Institute here.
For more on ASU's Blue Humanities Initiative, follow this link.
New episodes featuring leading scholars will be uploaded regularly.
This episode was edited by Dave Waugh at Scrubcast.
Music: from Claude Debussy, La Mer (rights-free recording).
Welcome to the Blue Humanities Podcast of the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University. My name is Jonathan Bate, and I'm the Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities here at Arizona State. Environmental Humanities, exploring how the disciplines of the humanities, literary and cultural studies, history, philosophy, religious studies, can help us to address the great environmental crises of our time. Blue Humanities is a thriving but new subfield of environmental humanities in which we explore the oceans, the oceans which occupy 70% of the surface of the earth and which are so crucial to the sustainability of life on Earth. In these podcasts, I talk to a variety of scholars who have done innovative work in the broad field of humanistic ocean studies or blue humanities. So welcome to this episode of the Arizona State University Humanities Institute Blue Humanities podcast. Mostly in this series, I'm interviewing humanist humanities scholars. But if we're to really understand how humankind cultures through the ages relate to the oceans, we also need to know a bit about the science of the oceans. And to find out about that, there is nobody better for me to speak to than Professor Helen Chersky. She's a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at University College London. She's also been a great TV presenter of science documentaries. She's had her own podcast called Ocean Matters, bringing people up to date on all aspects of marine science. And we'll put a link in to that podcast. And most recently, she's written a fantastic book. I can honestly say I've learned more from this book about the oceans, the science of the oceans, than really from any other book. It's called Blue Machine, How the Ocean Shapes Our World. And I'm delighted that Helen is joining me today to talk about some aspects of it. So, Helen, welcome. And first of all, where are you at the moment as we speak?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I'm currently in Hawaii, which is perhaps not expected for someone with a British accent, but the weather is better here, I can safely say that.
SPEAKER_01:I bet it is. Well, lucky you, and we'll talk about Hawaii a little bit later because it features very interestingly in your book. But maybe if we just start with the title of your book, Blue Machine, and this is the Blue Humanities podcast, and Blue Humanities is this kind of subfield of environmental humanities where we think about how cultures have related to the oceans. But of course, when I had my childhood holidays by the sea on the English coast, the sea wasn't blue, it was mostly pretty grey. And of course, uh, when I went with my bucket to pick up seawater to go to the rock pools, it wasn't any colour at all. You say in your book that our society has agreed on the unspoken convention that water is blue, even though it mostly isn't. But then you startle us by saying in the next paragraph, blue really is the true colour of water. So tell us about blue.
SPEAKER_00:Well, it's interesting, isn't it? Because if you say the word blue and you ask for an association, the ocean is probably the first thing that comes to mind. And it is right scientifically that water is both blue and not blue, because obviously, if you saw blue liquid coming out of your tap in your kitchen, you know, you would call the public health people. So basically, water is only blue when there's lots of it altogether and it's very pure. So when there is very little of it, so you know, what's coming out of your tap is not a huge amount of water, there's not enough of it to absorb any colours of the rainbow. Everything basically just goes straight through it, so it doesn't have a colour. But as you add more and more water, then what happens is that inside the water, colours start to get bounced around, they get scattered, and the blue gets bounced around most, and so it gets bounced around and comes back out into your eyes. And so, for example, I've done quite a lot of work in the Arctic, and if you go up to the North Pole or glaciers on Greenland, you can see ponds of melt water on top. So these this is very, very pure water that's been snow, and it's the summer sun has come along, it's melted the top, and it's really pure water. There's nothing living on it, and it is bright blue. It looks like someone cheated and added food dye. But that is the true colour of water, but you need lots of water altogether in order to be able to detect that colour. So that's why the ocean really is blue and this really is a blue planet, but we don't see it when the water comes out of our tap. And in a way, there's there's possibly an analogy there for the way we think or don't think about water. We think we know it, but actually we don't really look at it because we can't see it on a big enough scale. And I hadn't quite thought about it before, but but that's kind of that's sort of what the book seeks to unwrap, right? When you look at it on a big enough scale, it looks different and you suddenly see things you hadn't seen before. And so the ocean really is blue, but that's not the only thing about it that we don't see when we look at water coming out of our tap or the buckets at the beach.
SPEAKER_01:That's a fantastic explanation, and it it it also introduces the one of the key ideas in your book, which is to do with perspective. That in some ways you what what you keep coming back to is this idea that we don't fully understand the oceans because, in terms of of scale, of sight, of sound, and of of speed against slowness, it gives us a sort of different perspective from what we're used to as creatures of the land.
SPEAKER_00:Well, the thing about humans is we are terribly arrogant and self-absorbed quite a lot of the time. And so we operate on a certain time scale and a certain size scale. You know, we we are interested in things that are around a meter in size, perhaps down to the size of our human hair is often used as the sort of that's the thing that might be the smallest or thinnest thing we can see. And so we're interested in things of that size scale, and we're interested in things in our time scale, so things that take a few days or a few weeks to happen, or a few seconds perhaps. And we tend to ignore everything that happens outside that as though it doesn't matter. And the reason that doesn't work in the ocean is the ocean, this big engine of water, is doing things in many, many different ways on many, many different time and size scales. And so I think of it as being there's that ancient story of the three blind men and the elephant, and three blind men somehow come across an elephant, and one reaches out his hand and touches the leg and says, Oh, an elephant is like a tree, and one reaches out his hand and touches the trunk and says, Oh, an elephant is like a snake. And that's the way to see the ocean, is to see it, and they're all true, right? That's the point, is that all these different perspectives are true. And an elephant is simultaneously like a snake and like a tree and like all the other things. But the problem with the ocean is that you need that same kind of breadth of ideas to really see the whole thing. But because we are so focused on our time scales and our size scales, we just miss the rest. And so we're missing the bigger picture here because we can't see it directly. But of course, science now gives us the tools to take both a global view and a microscopic view and to look on timescales and size scales that we can't perceive directly. And now we can see what the ocean really is. And this is, of course, why the humanities matters, one of the many reasons it matters for how we look at the ocean is because we pay attention when there are stories that mean something to us. And there are stories that we can tell because we can imagine things. Like I can write a story about a tiny sea creature that's too small to see, or an ocean current that's too big to see, and we can imagine it. And suddenly the combination of science and stories that help the science make sense let us see all these perspectives on what the ocean really is, and then we have an idea. And then we can see the whole thing, right? You sort of have to hold this multiplicity of perspectives that are all true at the same time. And once you can hold all those in your head, then you have an idea of what the ocean is. And that's what we haven't been very good at doing, just because we tend to focus on what can I see, what can I touch, and how does it affect me today.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's fantastic. And um, just thinking, following through on that, thinking about the the other half of your title, this this metaphor of a of a machine. I suppose the thing about a machine is it's a big whole, but it has many, many parts. And what I think you do so wonderfully in your book is that you you shuttle between analysing the parts, analysing the whole, and always using narrative as a way of doing that.
SPEAKER_00:Well, the thing that's interesting about so the subtitle in uh uh for the American edition is is how the ocean works. And the most common reaction to that subtitle was, I didn't know the ocean worked. Which is, you know, we do have this picture of the ocean as being this sort of blue filler with the fish in it. And and we speak of this as though the only things that matter about the ocean are the things in it, you know, the fish and the whales and the pollution and the ships. Sure, those are all important, but it's the water itself where the big story is. So when I talk about it as an engine, it's it's actually not a metaphor, it's a scientifically correct statement because the definition of an engine is something that turns heat energy into movement. That's what an engine is, and that is exactly what the ocean does. It takes energy from the sun, heats up the surface, and that drives an engine. It drives a three-dimensional engine, a machine that surrounds our planet, kind of blankets our planet, and it completely sets the context for everything else that happens on Earth. So I sometimes get some pushback to the idea of referring to it as a machine, as though I'm saying it's oh it's it's only a piece of clockwork that doesn't have any soul. But of course, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm trying to do is include a different perspective in the view of what the ocean is. And this is a really important one, because even if when we go to a doctor, right, you would hope that most doctors see a human as more than the sum of their parts, as you said. But when you have a surgeon who needs to fix a heart valve, you need them to see the heart as a pump. You need them to see its mechanical properties and its mechanical characteristics in order to be able to fix it, and in order to be able to see why it's important. And of course, the mechanical aspect is only one part of what a human being is, but it's quite an important part if you want the whole thing to keep going. So this idea of a machine is firstly literally true, but also I want to give the idea that the ocean is doing something. It's not just sitting there, it's not this homogenous sort of mass that is just kind of colouring in the blue crayon in between everything else. It is doing the things that that make everything else on earth make sense. And so, and we don't talk about it like that. And yet, once people hear that idea, they're like, okay, I get it. And then they know to look. And it's that, it's that interesting change of perspective where once you know how to look, you sort of change how you arrange things you learn in your head and you see it, you know, you put them together in a different way, and suddenly you see something different. And so I think that this is an incredibly important concept that the ocean is doing things, and it is doing things that affect us all the time, and that the signatures of that are written through our history and our culture and the animals we see around us and what we eat and all kinds of other things. It's fascinating. It's kind of amazing we've missed it for so long. It does make me quite indignant that sometimes that there's this thing that we talk about ourselves as a blue planet, and yet we've spent 50 years describing ourselves as a blue planet ever since the Apollo missions, and yet we don't talk about the blue. How daft are we? You know, it's quite a bigger mission once you look at it like that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, absolutely. Let's get down to some of the parts. You you mentioned earlier you've done quite a lot of your work in the polar regions and in the Arctic, and there's a story that you recur that you come back to several times in the book about this extraordinary ship called the Fram and its voyage to the north. And so, sort of twin questions. Can you tell us a bit about the Fram and why that was an important moment in the history of the growth of our knowledge about the oceans? And relatedly, why are the polar regions especially important to the blue machine?
SPEAKER_00:So I like, I love the story of Fram because of its audacity. So imagine yourself back in sort of the late 1800s, and what humans know about the about physical geography is quite limited, but everyone is desperate to reach the poles, even back then, and and then it's because they're inaccessible. It's seen as the ultimate challenge to get to the North and South Poles. And people know it's difficult because they've tried and failed. And there's this extraordinary observation that a particular ship had broken up on the Russian side of the Arctic, and bits of it three years later had appeared on the Canadian side. And they knew, you know, they knew the globe was spherical. The Arctic appeared to be a completely frozen ocean. It was very difficult to get into the middle of the North Pole because sea ice moves. It's like the shifting shell. So the problem is while you're walking across the ice, the ice is moving somewhere else, and then you've got to get across the gaps between the ice. It's really difficult. And so people had no idea how to get into the middle of the Arctic because this ice is moving around, it melts, and it thaws, and it crushes things. When the ice starts to press together, it will just crush a ship like the matchsticks. And so this guy, Friedhof Nansen, said, well, maybe there's a current. Maybe the reason that bits of this ship, this crushed ship, started on the Russian side and ended up on the Canadian side is that there's a current that goes all the way across the top. And if that current goes all the way across the top of the world, perhaps instead of all this trekking and hard work and all of that, perhaps what we need to do is just get a ship that can survive the ice, freeze into the ice on the Russian side and wait to be carried across the top of the North Pole. And he was a scientist, he didn't see this as some kind of easy route to the North Pole, but he understood that if this current existed, it gave humans access to a part of the world where they'd never been before. And so, in order to do this, in order to make this bonkers idea work, because people thought he was crazy, you have to make a ship that can withstand the crushing of the ice, because when ice is shunting around, if two parts of it are being pushed together, ships just couldn't withstand that. It just squeezes them to bits. So the brilliance of the Fram is that it was designed specifically in order to get across that problem. And so it's designed like a basically a big wooden fruit bowl, really. It's made of oak, the front and the back, especially at the front, it's got these huge buttresses on the inside. The oak is up to a meter thick on the front of this ship. And it's got this really rounded bottom, it really is like a bowl. So the idea was that imagine if you've got an apple pit between your fingers and you squeeze it, the apple pit will sort of pop upwards. And that's what the Fram was designed to do, that when the ice started to squeeze in from the sides, this rounded hull would just mean it popped up and sat on top of the ice. And then it'd be carried along on the top, carried along by nature to see where it went. And not only did he have this idea, he built it. He found a Scottish shipbuilder who was up for the challenge, and they built this extraordinary ship and they tried it. They froze in on the Russian side. They spent most of three years, it's a whole great adventure story. You know, they kind of went backwards and forwards a bit and round and round. They didn't quite, Fram didn't take them all the way to the North Pole. Uh, Nansen and one other crew member set off to try and reach the North Pole. They didn't quite get there, and then everybody popped out of the ice on the other side three years later and met up again in the north of Norway and then sort of proceeded to Oslo. But the point was they were right. This current had taken them all the way across the top of the world. And they'd made all kinds of scientific measurements that had never been made before. And so the thing I like about Fram more than anything else is that Nansen looked at nature and said, How do we work with this rather than against it? And humanity had spent so long, especially in the sort of the great industrial age, the Victorian era, sort of dismissing nature. Oh, well, we're just human. We can do whatever we want. We've got steam power, we will break it, bash it, go through it, we're gonna do whatever we want to do. And he looked at it and said, There's this massive, great big engine here. How do we follow along with what it's already doing? So, so that the story of the Fram is a great story, and it's still in Oslo now. You can go and visit it, it's up on dry land. It's a really extraordinary ship. If you're in Oslo, if any of your listeners are in Oslo, I strongly encourage you to go. But it matters because the poles matter. And the poles matter not just because they are different, although they are very different at the sort of top and bottom of the world. It's colder, so you have solid ice and you you cover over the ocean with ice. And of course, the poles are very different. The Arctic is an ocean surrounded by land, and Antarctica is land surrounded by ocean. But they're important because they drive the ocean engine. And a lot of the way water moves around the ocean, most some of the most important bits are to do with water sinking and rising, because generally water kind of sits at whatever level its density gives it. So warmer, fresher water will float on top, colder, saltier water will go beneath. But if you can change the temperature or the salinity, you drive the engine round because things have to move to readjust depending on their density. And so the poles are important because they're drivers of the engine. That because they're cold and water loses heat on its way there, and that the process of ice formation makes water saltier because sea ice freezes fresh, it leaves salt behind. So it makes the water underneath saltier. You've got the stimulus for an engine. And so the poles are disproportionately important. I think the Arctic Ocean is 1.3% of the global ocean or something. It's tiny, really, really tiny, but it matters so much because it can do something the rest of the ocean can't do, which is drive sinking water that will then start the ocean engine turning. So although that wasn't understood when Nansen voyaged across the polar regions in the FRAM, it matters very much for us now because the poles are not just another place. They are carrying out a very specific function in this global engine. And if they change how they do it or they stop doing it in some way, that's got really big implications for how the rest of the global ocean functions. So FRAM was able, you know, that that ship enabled people to make measurements in the Arctic before really it was affected by climate change, but it also let humans see what the Arctic was, which they had not seen before. And so, no, it's it's a brilliant story, and he was a brilliant man for Jeff Nansen.
SPEAKER_01:Now, the Fram actually cropped up again at a surprising point in your book, a point where I particularly pricked up my ears because I'm by training a Shakespeare scholar. And one of my favourite plays is Antony and Cleopatra. And in that play, play about kind of crucial moment in world history, the end of the Roman Republic, the beginning of the imperial era, there's a sea battle. And Mark Antony and his lover Cleopatra, they they lose it. And you get you go into this account of the Battle of Actium, it's called 2,000 years ago. And I got really interested in this. And then you ask this question: why did Mark Antony lose the sea battle? And the Fram was part of your answer to it. Can you tell our listeners about that? Because I think this is just amazing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, well, I mean, it's interesting because I spent a large part of the time I was writing the book terrified of historians, because I'm not a historian, and I was writing about these stories of history, and I thought someone's going to come along and poke sticks at this. You haven't poked any sticks yet. Do let me know if there are sticks to poke. So, yes, there's this setup, this critical battle in history, and it went wrong for Antony and Cleopatra, and no one ever really understood why. But what happened was that these two fleets, the Octavian's fleet and Antony and Cleopatra, he became Augustus later, right? He was Octavian to start with. I think is that right?
SPEAKER_01:I think Cleopatra, yeah, yeah. He was he was Octavian and then became Augustus after he defeated Antony.
SPEAKER_00:So there was a sort of a gulf in the Mediterranean, yeah. Kind of a river running into like a little not quite sea that ran out into the Mediterranean. And it sort of made this kind of V shape almost. So Marcanty and Cleopatra, so their ships were arrayed kind of pointing outwards of that V shape, pointing out at the rest of the ocean. And Octavian's ships were arranged in a semicircle around that, kind of looking, kind of hemming them in. And so everyone is set up for battle. The rules of battle at the time were typically you'd expect to start in the morning. Everyone kind of get ready and get going when the sun came up. And the sun came up, and Mark Antony and Cleopatra's ships did not move. That mattered quite a lot because these ships were designed as battering rams. They've got these massive bronze sort of battering rams attached to the front of the ships, and they're designed to be rowed very fast through the water, and then they just kind of thunk into the enemy's ships and break them apart. That was what these ships were designed to do. So they need speed in order to make that happen. So the sun rises, everyone's ready to go, and the ships don't move. The battering ram ships don't move. And so everyone waits and waits. And sometime around lunchtime, according to the observers on the hill, these ships finally start to move, but they move really slowly. And then it becomes apparent that they're fighting through slingshots and throwing things, they're not using the battering ram capability. And so it seems that something slowed the ships down. So they couldn't get up to speed, they couldn't do this battery. Ram job. And there were various ideas at the time. The ancient uh storytellers thought, well, maybe there were remoras, the kind of sucker fish that were sort of suckered onto the side of the ship and it was acting as drag, so they they couldn't go forward. But no one has ever really understood it. And basically, because the ships didn't move and they couldn't use their full potential, this battle was lost. So Octavian could easily, he had smaller, more maneuverable ships. If this if the battle was on his terms, he was going to win. And he did. So this has remained a mystery for 2,000 years. And then more recently, there's this proposal has come along, which stacks up scientifically. And of course, we can't prove what did or didn't happen 2,000 years ago, but all the pieces look like they match. And it starts with Nansen, because around the time Nansen was sort of exploring, going up the coast of Norway and the Fram, he was going in and out of fjords. And he noticed something in a fjord in Norway, which is that in some conditions his ship would kind of stop. It just wouldn't go anywhere. And this became known as dead water, that a ship just sort of wouldn't move. And land lovers thought the sailors were making it up. They thought, oh, well, you know, you're off, you're sort of, you've you've been at sea too long, you're inventing things, you don't know what's going on, you're just making this up. And sailors would say, no, no, there's this weird thing, it happens. Anyway, so it was discovered that dead water is a real phenomenon. And the what was happening in the fjords when it happened to Nansen was that so fjords are places where you've got ocean water underneath, but then you've got meltwater coming down from the glaciers, and meltwater is fresh. And that means it will float on the surface of the fjord in quite a separate layer. It's like those layered cocktails you sometimes see. It really will just stay as a separate layer. And it turns out that this matters because when a ship goes through the water normally, we're all used to seeing a wake that sort of streams out behind the ship, that as the ship goes forward, it makes waves on the surface behind it. And of course, some energy needs to go into those waves. Well, it turns out that if you've got layers in the water and the depth of the layer is just right compared with the length of your ship, when your ship moves, you also have to make a wake on the boundary between those layers. So it's not just the waves at the surface you have to worry about. You also have to make waves in the boundary between the layers. So if you imagine oil floating on top of water, you can see an interface between them. And if you make a jar with oil and water and you kind of swirl it around, you'll see that the boundary between the oil and the water swirls a bit differently. It's doing its own thing. So it turns out that what dead water is, is that when everything is exactly the right size and the layers are the right thickness, when you try to move your ship, the only way to move it is to make a wake underneath the surface as well as on top. And the energy needed to do that is so great that basically you can't move anywhere. So that's what was holding back Nansen's ships in the fjord. And that became relatively well established scientifically. And then relatively recently, a team in France looked again at this and they said, ah, but if we look at the location of the Battle of Actium, it was also a place where rivers were running out or running off the land, and it generates, even today, it generates layers in the water. There's a layer of fresher water that sits on top of the ocean. And maybe what happened is that the size of the ships and the thickness of that layer was just right, that you got the dead water phenomenon, and that's what stopped those battering ram ships moving. And of course, Octavian ships were smaller and more maneuverable, so they weren't the right size to have this problem. And the physics, it seems, the physics of this stacks up. The geography, this happens there today. You can see the layers in the water on the right kind of day, you can see that the conditions in the ocean can could do this. And so maybe that is why this historical battle was lost. It's because of something that was happening in the ocean, that there's internal waves, that's what they're called, inside the ocean. And the layering that we can't, no one from the surface would have been able to see that or know it was there. But those layers and the way that they were behaving directly affected an enormous, an enormously pivotal moment in human history. The point is that this kind of thing is happening all of the time, whether or not it happened at the Battle of Actium, and I think it's quite a robust explanation. It matches up, the physics stacks up, it works out. You can look at the size of the ships they have and the sort of layers you get, and it looks like this is a reasonable explanation. But the point is, this is exactly what's happening all the time. That humans think they're in control of what's going on, they just have to go about their business. But actually, the ocean is affecting their environment all the time in a three-dimensional way. Because we only see the surface, we don't really see that. This type of thing where the way the ocean engine turns affects humans is written through our history.
SPEAKER_01:You're listening to the Blue Humanities podcast of the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University with me, Jonathan Bate. And in this episode, I'm speaking to Dr. Helen Chersky, author of Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes Our World. Yeah, absolutely. It's a fantastic example. And actually, just sort of sticking with war, there were two other moments in the book where I thought you wrote fascinatingly about this interdependence of the human activity of warfare and the blue machine. I had a note at one point where I put D-Day swell forecasts. And at another point, I put whale ear wax and the second world war. Do you want to talk about those two incidents?
SPEAKER_00:So, yeah, D-Day. So the D D-Day is possibly the slightly better known story. So D-Day is the day we're going back to the Second World War. There is the channel, it is the great boundary. The Germans have not crossed the channel, the British are not doing very well. There's a sort of critical.
SPEAKER_01:The Americans have come over, they're all waiting for so called the opening of the second front, the landing to start driving the Germans out. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. They're lined up for the day. When's the day when they can take a huge flotilla of ships across, drop off a load of men, and as you say, open this second front? So the thing it all hinged on was, well, I mean, obviously, you know, Eisenhower, who's making these decisions, has a whole load of different considerations, right? He wants it to be on a moonless night so that no one can see them coming. He's it's got to be the right time, you know, the geopolitics have got to be right. He's got all these considerations. And then one of the things that people were aware of, what was just considered chance, is that it was possible that these landing craft, which were very specific, they're not really designed for sailing, they're designed for dropping men off at the coast in order to go and fight, they are not very good when there are very high waves. And basically, every time they'd been used, and they had been used earlier in the Second World War, especially off the coast of Africa, if it turned out to be a day with loads of swell, with loads of waves coming in from the sea, it would all just go wrong. And basically it was like tossing a coin that maybe it'll be a bad day and it won't work, and no one really knew. But earlier, before D-Day, an oceanographer called Walter Monk, he was living in America at the time. I think he might have been an American citizen by then. He had noticed that it was all going wrong. He'd noticed that these waves were causing problems, that they were causing enormous casualties before troops had even got to the coastline. And he said, Well, maybe we can see whether the waves are coming. Maybe we can look at where waves come from and actually predict whether or not there are going to be any on the coast on that day. And so he was doing some work for the US Navy. He persuaded them that this was a topic worthy of interest. And so he started looking at how swell forms. There's two types of waves on the ocean. One of them is that when you have a big storm, the wind immediately is pushing up waves and they're kind of short and choppy when you get lots of breaking waves and it's all quite violent. And so this is windsea. But then after the wind has gone away, you've still got all those waves. They've still got to go somewhere. Waves have to travel. And so they just travel outwards. And as they go further and further, the small waves get sort of, you know, the energy gets absorbed. But these long waves can go a long, long way. They can just travel across oceans. And so basically, if you have a massive storm somewhere in the ocean, three days later, because that's how long it takes the waves to travel, you'll get very big swell somewhere a few thousand miles away. And Walter Monk realized that the key to working this out lay in two things. It lay in knowing the weather forecast. So you have to know where the storms are that are generating the swell. You have to know how the waves are going to travel across the ocean. And then you need to know something about the shape of the beach, where they're going to land. And if you know those three things, then you've got a chance of predicting from a weather forecast where the swell, where the big days of swell are going to appear. So he'd already sort of worked on this a little bit. And then D-Day came and he was asked for forecasts. And actually, so was there was also some people at the Met office in Britain were doing something similar on a slightly different scale. And they were asked to provide swell forecasts for the day of D-Day, which I think was meant to be June the 5th. And they said, look, if you go on that day, there's been this storm out at sea, you are going to have a huge amount of swell and it's all just going to fail. Everyone is going to be dead before they reach the beaches. But they said the next day, most of it will have died away. So they recommended that they provided the forecast. You know, no one will ever know exactly what went through Eisenhower's head. However, he did decide to delay D-Day by one day because that was all he had before the moon and all the, you know, the tides and all the other things were unfavorable. And by delaying by a day, he basically made the decision that stopped the whole thing being a disaster. Because on the 5th, as forecast, these huge swell waves rolled through, it would have been a washout. Huge numbers of men would have died before they'd even reached the beach. But by the following day, the sixth, which was when D-Day actually happened, most of that had died away. And so we know what happened next, right? We know the history that followed. And so something that the weather does stuff, just shrug your shoulders and hope for the best. Suddenly became, because we understood the ocean, we could work around it and it became an ally on the field of battle, at least for the for the allies, rather than a fearsome monster that could have just ruined the whole thing just by chance.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, no, extraordinary. The other story, the whale earwax, a less happy story, perhaps.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, and then the whale earwax. Well, yeah, I mean, the thing, the first question with whale earwax is why do whales have earwax? Since at least from the outside, they don't appear to have ears. And the thing is, they evolved from creatures that did have ears. Whales and dolphins evolved from land mammals, something about the size of a small dog 65 million years ago that ran around on land. And it had anatomy pretty similar to ours. It had four legs and it had ears that worked like ours and eyes and all the rest of it. And this creature began to take on a more aquatic lifestyle. And it as evolution helped it adapt to that, to a more aquatic lifestyle. And so whales and you know, the precursors of whales and dolphins started to live fully in the ocean. And one of the things that is important if you're in the ocean is that you want to minimize drag. Basically, swimming takes effort, water is heavy, dense, you want and viscous, you want to minimize the amount of effort it takes to swim through it. So sticky out things like ears are very inconvenient. So whales' ears, it just became advantageous for them to be the outer bit I'm talking about, the sticky out bit, that became smaller and smaller. But of course, that's only part of our ear. So our ear has three parts the outer ear, which is the outside bit we think of as our ear, and then the middle ear, and then the inner ear, which is where hearing actually occurs. And there's a tube that joins the inner ear to the outer bit. And so whales' outside ears, the outer ear, got smaller and smaller. But that didn't matter because the whales weren't hearing through their ears anyway at that point. And this happens to us as well. If you stick your head underneath the water at a swimming pool, things sound different. And it's not just because the actual sound underwater is different, although it is, it's that you're hearing it through your jaw. So because the middle part of your ear is designed to translate sound in air into sound in water. But of course, if your head's underwater, that's no use to you. But sound can travel through the water directly into the bones of your skull and particularly your jaw, travel up your jawbone and reach the inner ear that way. So whales were hearing through their jaws, so they didn't need that out a bit. So not only did they lose the outer part of their ear, they also the the the sort of the hole, if you like, was just sealed over with skin. But evolution is very messy, that it stopped there. So the tube kind of stayed, and the mechanisms that produce earwax stayed. And so whales kept producing earwax, except now there's that kind of skin covering over the top, so it can't fall out. So now it just builds up, basically like toothpaste squeezed up a tube. Whales' ears just fill up with earwax, kind of layer by layer as the years go on. And then in a mature whale, you've got this plug of earwax, which is about the size of your thumb, and it's got stripes on it, and those stripes that's time passing for the whale. So within the earwax is stored a chemical signature that represents the whale's life. And that's clever enough all by itself. But then a group of curators at London's Museum of Natural History and the American Museum of Natural History worked out that between them, people had been collecting these whale earplugs for quite a long time because they looked like tree rings, right? They looked like they might be useful. You might be able to work out how old the whale was or something. So curators have been collecting them and they knew the dates the whales had died. And those went back 150 years. So between the two museums, they could collect all the whale earwax plugs for baleen whales, fin whales, and blue whales and say, and line them up in order so that they had a continuous 150-year record of global whale, which is just a brilliant idea. They basically got earwax continuously from whales for 150 years. So what do you do with that once you've got it? And they looked for stress hormones, cortisol. Now, if you were going to have a think about what might be stressful for a whale being killed, that's pretty stressful. And so the first thing they did was they plotted the number of whales that were being killed from industrial whaling against the stress of global whales. And they line up really nicely. You see this huge peak in the 1960s, just before industrial whaling is banned. You see these other peaks and troughs, the economy comes and goes. So basically, as whaling, industrial whaling goes up, whale stress goes up. So that so far so good, but although not for the whales. But there's this one place where it doesn't work, where this relationship doesn't hold, and it's during the Second World War. And during the Second World War, of course, humans are very busy killing each other. They're not they're not killing whales. So whaling goes right down, but whale stress goes right up. And the explanation is that it's the noise: guns, bombs, ships, destroyers, all of these fantastically noisy things that are radiating sound out into the ocean, even though the humans don't intend to. But the whales of are audio creatures, right? They use sound to make sense of their world. It's just like a foggy day for us, and we can't really see what's going on. It's it's stressful. We can't find people, we don't know where we're going, we can't do what we want to do. If you fill the ocean with sound, it stresses the whales out because their lives are disrupted, and you can see it in this record of whale earwax, which is quite extraordinary because humans couldn't really deliberately make sound in water very well. But doing it accidentally absolutely was having an effect. And it is written in the natural record, which is quite extraordinary.
SPEAKER_01:It is astonishing. It is indeed. Just following up on that, I mean, that this sense of sound underwater, one of the very good points you make is that if we think of when an understanding of the world under the oceans, in the oceans, really sort of began to come into popular consciousness, we'd probably date it to Jacques Cousteau's famous underwater filming going back to the 1950s. And you point out, though, that his first film, which was very influential, I think it won the best documentary at the Cannes Film Festival, 1956, it was called The Silent World. But you write wonderfully about how the oceans are not a silent world. There's all sorts of noises. I particularly like the knocking haddock, I have to say.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, I've got a right beer in my bonnet about that. I I fully appreciate that Jacques Cousteau was an extremely influential and important filmmaker, although I will say that that film, The Silent World, has not aged well. I'd read the book years ago, but I hadn't watched the film until I wrote my book. And it's absolutely shocking. If you need some hope, perhaps, that humans can get better and get and change, watch that film because in 1956, basically almost everything he did in that film would be illegal today. So it's actually a really interesting example of how culture has changed and cultural attitudes has changed because they they bombed reefs, they rowed turtles, they ate everything they found in the ocean, they killed a well by running it over and then filmed it. It's a kind of long list of things not to do in the ocean. And I think later on his attitude did change, but it's very telling of its day. Anyway, he was a freediver before he was a scuba diver. So Jacques Cousteau had helped invent the aqualung, the early form of scuba diving, and then also was involved in the underwater cameras that then he could film what he saw, and that's what became that's what set his career as a filmmaker off. But he must have known because he was a so when you're scuba diving, there's bubbles and it's very noisy, so you can't always hear. But he was a free diver. And when you're free diving, you don't have any bubbles. You can hear, he would have been able to hear the great sounds of the ocean, the enormous variety of sounds that there were for filmmaking reasons, partly because of his equipment, partly because of the drama of it, he called it the silent world. And so the world was introduced to the ocean in this incredibly dramatic way, very visual way, at the same time as completely underplaying its most important messenger, sound. And so we started off with this massive misconception that the ocean is silent. And it isn't. Sound is far more important in the ocean than light is, because sound can travel a lot, you know, on land, light is our long-distance messenger. We can see mountains a long way away, we can see the moon, but we totally accept we can't hear what's going on on top of a mountain because sound doesn't travel very far in air. But in the ocean, it's the other way around. Light doesn't travel very far, but sound can travel a long way. So he basically set the world off, you know, with entirely the wrong mental picture, which really bugs me. It seems unnecessary. Anyway, there we are. Better, we can fix it, better late than never.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely, yeah. Now, communities that were were not late, but actually very early to living with the ocean were, of course, those of the Pacific Islands. And you're in Hawaii at the moment, you've done a lot of work in Hawaii. You say quite early in your book that knowledge feeds into culture and myths and stories are used to explain the patterns and provide a foundation for thinking about the ocean. Attitudes to the ocean also fed back into the culture on land. And every culture's attitude to the ocean is partly geographical accident. In a way, the the kind of beautiful accident of Hawaii is that because in those indigenous cultures, there's almost a sense that there isn't a division between land and ocean, that on a surfboard or in a canoe, one's almost as at home on the ocean as on the land. And I sort of sensed from the book that learning from Hawaiian ways as well as doing research in the Pacific has been very important to you.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so I paddle Outrigger canoes, which are the smaller boats in Polynesian culture. So it's a sort of long, thin canoe, and then there's a kind of extra float out to one side that's usually connected by two sort of sticks, if you like, that go out, and then there's this extra float. So you've got a double hull. Today these are raced and just used for recreation, and they're usually it's one or two or six people in one of these outrigger canoes. I think I came to it as a sport, basically, in London, actually. I thought anyone who was daft enough to paddle Hawaiian canoes in London must be interesting.
SPEAKER_01:Just to interject for a moment, especially on the polluted Thames, where recently we've had this issue of the boat race being interrupted. On the Thames, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Well, it's not as polluted as everyone thinks, actually. A bit more recently. It's it's cleaner than it was, but it's going downhill again. But yes, anyway, it's cold.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's another story in your book, The Story of London Sewage, but I don't think we've got time for that one.
SPEAKER_00:But the interesting thing about the canoes is that it's a very useful vehicle for thinking about life, and that's how the Polynesians use it, is that they do think about land and ocean being having their separate roles. But because they are surrounded by ocean, they can't kind of ignore it in the way that we tend to in Western Europe. Oh, the ocean's over there, and I I only have to think about it if I choose to. Whereas out here, you definitely have to think about it whether you choose to or not. But also, the ocean is directly useful that where there are small islands that are close together, island chains, it was common a few hundred years ago for there to be a better connection between two villages that could see each other across a stretch of water than one of those villages with another village around the other side of its same island, because water connects people. And so the attitude to the ocean here is definitely one of respect. They have to observe it, they have to pay attention to it because it's all around them and it it can be vicious. So it can help you along if you know how to navigate and how to paddle and how to use the waves. And they're very aware of that that you without skill and observation, you Are likely to become a cropper. But if you are skilled and you do observe, then you are likely to do much better. And the canoe is an interesting sort of metaphor for how to think about life because it's like an there's a saying that a canoe is like an island and an island is like a canoe. Because when you're in a canoe, you've got a small group of people, you're in this harsh environment all around you. You've all got to work together to get anything done. So you need skill. You also need to be friends with each other to some extent, because if you're fighting, you're definitely not going anywhere. And if you have a fight in the canoe, there's nowhere for it to go, right? You're kind of stuck with that. If you generate bad feeling, you're kind of stuck with it. And that's really like living on an island. You've got a limited number of people, you're probably going to bump into them again. So if you're rude to someone or unhelpful, that's they're going to remember that. It doesn't just get lost in the way it does in Western society. You know, you've got to work together to deal with this harsh environment, to survive this harsh environment around you. So the canoe is an interesting way. So they use it as a way to think about life. And of course, it's very easy to then look at that and from my point of view and just say, well, obviously, Earth is a canoe. We should also think about planet Earth like this. So I think there's a lot to be said for small, some small island thinking and these cultural ways of thinking about how to be in a community and how to spend time with other people and how to get things done. We've slid away from them in Western society because we live in big cities which are anonymous and we can behave badly, and there's no repercussion. If you're rude to someone in a supermarket in another city, no one's ever going to find you again. No one's ever going to remember that you were the rude person. But if you do that on an island village shop, they will definitely remember. As well as so they they sort of talk about culture while they're paddling and they talk about paddling in the rest of their culture, and the whole thing is woven together as quite a productive way to think about our relationship with nature and our relationship with ourselves.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's a very it's a very powerful thought. And you have a phrase when you towards the end of your book, you you talk about the extraordinary uh sailing ship, the cutty sark, and then how soon after its it its voyage along came steamships, and you say that this is a kind of transitional moment because whereas a sailing ship, and this would be like a canoe, is voyaging with nature, a steamship is voyaging despite nature. And in a way that chimes with a lot of environmental thinking about the way that since the advent of steam power, coal power, industrialization, obviously on land, but also the via the steamship, this this sort of sense of a loss of a respect of the need for a reciprocal relationship between humankind and nature.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think that's right. And it does come along, and it's very pertinent at the moment, just because basically what came along was effectively infinite energy for in the short term. And infinite energy allows you to be a god. This is what the steam age did, right? It took away the boundaries, and firstly coal and then oil was so cheap that you could squander energy, you could do anything you want, you were god of all you surveyed. It brings about this feeling of invulnerability. You know, you're you're nothing can touch you because you have the power to do whatever you want. And of course, we're now discovering that when you live on a finite planet, energy isn't infinite, and this is extraordinarily wasteful. And so not only are you damaging the engine of Earth, not just of the ocean, but you're damaging the engine of Earth. You're also wasting your resources to an extraordinary degree. And actually, I will plug somebody else's book here because there is an absolutely brilliant book which has just come out called Fire Weather by John Valent. And it sets out this relationship between energy and human civilization as, you know, as part of the story of the book. It's it's an extraordinary book. I think everybody should read it. But it really is, you know, this is where the disconnect starts with steamships is that you don't have to be humble anymore. There's no place for humility. Absolute arrogance is rewarded. And you have the means to do it. So humans go ahead and they they get used to being quite arrogant. And of course, on a finite planet, the engine is still turning according to its own rules. And if humans waste things or damage things, well, all that is coming back to bite them later, and of course, that's what's happening now. So it is an anomaly. I I mean, I think, well, I'm not sure about that actually. I think there are plenty of early societies which you know had lifestyles which involve moving on, you know, and because there were small numbers of them, they could use a small area and then move on, and and the first area had enough time to recover. But but that doesn't work when you've got a lot of people. And so I think we're now discovering the folly of our ways. But this this break that we chose because we were given the opportunity to do whatever we could do just because we could. And it was seen almost as a moral obligation, especially by the Victorians, this moral obligation to reform the world as we wanted it to be. And of course, the planet is bigger than us, so it doesn't really work.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in the final chapter of your book, you talk about ocean acidification and all the other threats of devastation of the oceans. But I sensed hope more than despair at the end of your book. And the sense of adventure, community, and sheer wonder that you put across in the book uh certainly left me feeling that there is hope, but hope has to come through education, I guess.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and no, I think it is hopeful. And really, it was it was rubbish to write that final chapter. I mean, the first thing about it is we talk about the things that are going wrong without understanding why they're bad. If a doctor comes to you and says you've got some disease you've never heard of, you say, Oh, well, that sounds quite bad, but I don't know what I do with that information, right? I mean, does it mean I just never I can never eat broccoli ever again or I'm gonna die tomorrow? And the problem is that when people tell us things are wrong with the ocean, that's what it's like. Oh, there's no krill in the Southern Ocean. Is that sounds bad? What do we do about that, right? What do I do with that piece of information? The reason I wrote the book was to showcase this amazing, beautiful engine that is still working, it's still running. I mean, it's damaged a bit by us, but it is still working and there is still a huge amount to celebrate. And as we learn more about it and as we talk about it more, we change our perspective on it and we change our perspective about our relationship to it. Once you've got a view of what the ocean is, you don't need to be told very much about the lack of krill in the southern ocean or ocean acidification to see for yourself why it's wrong. I feel a lot of the time people say, oh, this is bad and beat you over the head with how bad it is. But if someone understands how the system works, you don't actually have to say very much and they're like, oh, I get it. I get why that's a problem. Let's do something about it. And so with knowledge comes agency. And that is the critical thing that the more we talk about the ocean and the more we talk about how it functions, and the more we look at it for what it really is, the easier it is to do the thing that's gonna work out in the long term because we have choices. At the moment, sometimes those choices are hard to make because it's panic stations. Oh, it's all gone wrong. What do we do? And actually, if we see the world around us differently, and certainly if we see the ocean differently and talk about it differently and appreciate that it's already doing things before we put anything in it, it's not worthless space. There's this terrible human assumption that the ocean is a void that is just there for us to fill up because it, by definition, because humans said so, it's worthless because it hasn't got a human in it, right? That is the default assumption, which is horrendous. So the more we show the perspective, we paint all these pieces of the elephant and say, well, here are all different ways of looking at the ocean. Now we can see what it is. Now it becomes much easier to see which of our actions are going to have very severe negative consequences and which are the places where we can work with what the ocean is already doing, it's gonna be much better in the long term. And so I think there is a message of hope. And I want there to be a message of hope because the ocean is still a wonderful, brilliant, amazing engine, and it is still keeping our life support system going. But it's time for us to see it. It's time for us to look at it. Next time, when humans go back to the moon on the Artemis missions in whenever NASA get it to work, humans are once again going to be far enough away from the world to see it, see the whole thing for the first time since the Apollo missions, and that will be a seminal moment. And this time we have to look at the blue planet. We have to see that this is our signature on the universe, and it sends this message. And the message that the rest of the universe sees when it looks at us, and that we have to see is we are ocean. And that is a hopeful message.
SPEAKER_01:Indeed, it is. Fantastic. Helen Chesky, thank you so much. Heartily recommend Blue Machine. Wonderful read. I wish we'd had time to talk about uh many other things. William Bebe's book Half Mile Down, Ortelius' Discovery of Continental Drift in 1596, not to mention whale poo and krill. You must read the book to get all those stories and a huge amount of knowledge and a huge amount of hope. Thank you everybody for listening to the Blue Humanities podcast. And please join me again for our next episode when I'm going to be talking to Richard J. King, a lifelong sailor and author of wonderful books, including Ahab's Rolling Sea, an account of Helman Melville's great novel Moby Dick, and all it tells us about the oceans, of a book called Sailing Alone, another called Ocean Bestiary, and even a book about why the Cormorant was known as the Devil's Bird. Thank you for listening.