The world has changed. Today fast reliable Internet Connection is something no one can live without so why was there for our customers with speed, reliability, value and choice. Now more than ever it all starts with great internet. While supports cspan2 as a public service. Hello everyone, welcome. Im absolutely elated to the moderating todays session. This is underwater, Climate Change and me and if you are not interested in hearing about oceans and coral reefs first im sorry for you and also you may help yourself out of the room. We are going to be diving into 45 minutes of conversation about our oceans. We will start in sundrenched shallow waters of coral reefs and make our way down into darker moremysterious depths. Im excited about is to be joined by two incredible marine scientist and authors and joining us today we have the author of life onthe rocks , building a future for the coral reefs doctor juli berwald as well as an intrepid explorer and author of below the edge of darkness, and the more of life in the deepsea, doctor edith whittier. I planned for our time today to explore both of these books which explore Ocean Science as well as personal stories. Juli and ed both take us on personal journeys whether thats navigating medical history or troubling times despairing before pushing forward. My own career path started in Ocean Conservation so its a personal joy to explore these things and im so excited to get into this together. And our plan is im going to ask each of them to make a provocative statement or ask a question to get all of you thinking because in the final 15 minutes of the discussion we will take questions from you so get those brains thinking. Im going to hand the floor over to both juli and ed in turn to talk about their books and we will talk for 15 minutes before we dive in. At the end of the time today youll be able to get books signed by our 2 authors. So provocative abtreatments or questions, juli, ill start with you. The story of a coral reef is one of struggle. I think we all know that and so my question is currently predictions are that by 2050, 99 percent of the coral reefs will be lost on our planet. And if thats the case, what can we as terrestrial people, terrestrial beings, people who live on land due to make whats beneath the links less invisible to us. So in 2011, we got or 2012 we got the first video of a giant squid in the deepsea. The first time we were able to record this creature in its ownenvironment. And i maintain the reason it took so long to do that is that we were doing it wrong. We were scaring them away. If it took that long to record an animal over four stories tall, how many other creatures are there in the deepsea we dont even know about . Giant squid happen to flow when they die so we had dead specimens so we knew they existed. What about the stuff that doesnt float . So on that note, lets talk a little bit about your books and highlevel takeaways. People need to understand as they approach these questions. So im going to forward to the side. This is the coral reef and the coral reefs take up less than one percent of the oceans area so they are quite small in terms of the space they take up but have a disproportionate effect on marine life. Its estimated a quarter of all marine species depend on coral reefs and coral reefs are these incredibly vibrant, abundant places, rich in marine life. But coral have a problem. Theyre bumping up against Climate Change. The reason why coral are first of all animals. Theyre kind of like little secret anemones that live in colonies. Most of them are about the size of a pencil eraser. And their superpower is that in their tissues and you can see in that number one for little green dots are algae. And this county photo synthesizes and fees 90 percent of the sugar they make to the coral and then its so much energy at the coral can make stone. They make the limestone skeleton that they live inside of and that creates the uarchitecture of the lake. But when temperatures rise, we dont know exactly who started either the coral kicks out the alley algae or the algae abandons the coral and takes with its color and also t its sugar so suddenly the coral is on starvation rations and its bleached, its called bleached at that point. If the temperature doesnt fall, if the temperature falls this symbiosis can be established but if it doesnt , but coral dies. And then a bleached reef looks like skeleton, a bone in a graveyard that ultimately what it is. But this is a true reality for our coral reefs around theworld. Its that already have to reef has bleached. Like i said the projections for 2050 arereally bad. But the book isnt completely, its not an obituary. There are people around the world doing better, bolstering the health of the coral reef and as they come into this period of stress as we warm our oceans and our planet, there are things we can do. I wanted to tell some of those stories. This is a reef in indonesia. You can see the rubble many those bars. Thats a dead reef. Those structures are called reef stars, theyre made out of rebar and theyre kind of networked together into a galaxy of reef stars. And what happens is the reef has resiliency and after about 18 months, but coral has grown and after three years ryou have a reef that is completely restored. So there is a lot of work being done to protect the coral reefs and also the life support. But it is also precarious. It was coral reefs that got me hooked on marine buyout biology. I was smitten, your word when i saw my first coral reef i was 11 years old and i got to explore this reef and decided i wanted to be a marine biologist but instead of becoming a coral reef biologist i became a deepsea biologist and my first deepsea expedition was in 1982 on a little ship where we went out and trawled the ship and this is the primary way we know about life in the deep ocean, we drank ships but we were actually able to bring the animals alive because we kept them in a container that kept them cold and when we dump them out everything froze, it was incredible. There were pulsating plankton and flashes from mango jellyfish, like i plunged my arm into the troll bucket, icy cold water, pulled out a red shrimp thesize of a hamster. And it had nozzles on either side of its mouth that were spewing out sapphire blue light that pulled them apart, my hand, dripped between my fingers, back into the bucket and went on glowing. Everything lit up. These animals have photo cores, they had lawyers, they had all kinds of contractions for being able to make life and find food, attract mates and defend against predators and i want to know what that world look like and i got an opportunity in 1984 when i got to be with a group of scientists testing a new tool for exploring what was then the largest lease explored how habitat on our planet,the main water. It was a diving suit, thats not an acronym, its just somebody but it looks like the insect. It had kind of a yellow body, bulbous head. Michelin man arms with fences on the end of it and it was developed for the offshore oil industry for diving on oil reefs under2000 feet. I trained an attack and my first open ocean died was in the santa barbarachannel , first dive they didnt put us with one after the other, drop us 100 feet to make sure we were going to have a claustrophobicotmeltdown. I did because i was so intrigued by what i was seeing. I saved that for the next dive. But i went down 800 feet and i turned off the lights. And i just was blown away by what i saw. At the time there were no cameras that could record this but this iswhat it looks like. It looked like a fireworks display and in fact later when i was interviewed by our newspaper they asked me whats it like down there and i blurted out its like the fourth of july which of course they use as a headline and i took a tremendous ribbing from my colleagues for such a nonscientific statement that i had lost track of the number of times over the years i had taking people down to their first dive and have them describe it as being like the fourth of july. It was incredible. I saw jellyfish that just blew my mind and i included these for as a book finalist so this is the chain. You see it on the left in life and on the right by its own bioluminescence. It was longer than his room. I brushed up against it and it lit up, propagated down and everything inside the lid off. I could read all the dials and gauges inside the chute without a flashlight just by thebioluminescence i was seeing. Juthis was a colony, sort of like coral. Its just a really bizarre creature but what an astonishing amount of light. Then some of these jellyfish produced displays depending how they were stimulated so the jelly youre seeing in the light on the left when you see that rainbow color thats because its being eliminated, thats not bioluminescence but the bioluminescence, the living light that the creature make can make it intrinsically as you see in the mental image or extrinsically where it releases it as a cloud of particles just the way an octopus or squid can release an ink cloud in the face of a predator, tremendous times these animals can release their bioluminescent chemicals into the face of predators blinding them allowing them to make an escape. And it was the jellyfish that intrigued me the most. They dont have eyes. So who were these displays being directed at and why were there displays in the same jellyfish. And so i developed an electronic jellyfish that imitated certain kinds of displays and it turned out that was inordinately attractive to squid which is what led to the giant squid hunt. I like to turn the question to the audience. Hands up if youve been in the ocean. Keep them raised. Do we have scuba divers in the room . So we have a lot of people who been in oceans. In these books we are traveling from locations near here in the florida keys for example to the opposite side , of the panhandle and Recovery Time from early in your career all the way up to the beginning of the pandemic. I know that writing books science and memoir is an incredible intellectual and emotional challenge. The book festival starts with the process of writing the book. Im curious about tapping into your memories and what motivated you to read these books, this is for both of you. Ill go first. So never intended in my life to write a memoir. I was contacted by a literary agent. And saw an article about my research in the New York Times and he asked me if id ever thought of writing a memoir and i said go away. And then we got the first video of the giant squid using the electronic jellyfish, that also got written up in a lot of places and he contacted me again, this time he had all speech prepared about how i had seen things nobody had ever seen and i should be willing to share them with the world and i said i dont know how, im a scientist, we dont write in the firstperson. And i counted and from that time there were 40 emails from him, they werent pushy but he just kept, have you read this memoir, thought about this and finally i just decided okay, ill give it a shot and one christmas i just took some time and started trying to write in the first person andi had kept first person memoirs , diaries especially of my expeditions of what i saw on these dives for example. And actually i ended up having fun writing the book. I just was so it was so freeing compared to writing science papers i had a blast. And i was very much benefited from the pandemic because i run a notforprofit that takes a lot of my time and the pandemic i got a little extra time for the rewrite of the book and anyways, it was unexpected in every possible way. Im glad your regions was that persistent. You can feel the fun as being had especially in the footnotes. Thats where it comes across there and julia, what about you . I was a little more intentional in my decision to write in the first person. I was a scientist and then i fell off the scientist path and started writing textbooks. And then i was actually, i got a little bit of a gig writing some short articles for National Geographic which is really cool and there was a photographer who liked what i was writing and he asked me to write a text for one of his books and i was like, im a huge reader. Like i Read Everything and i think the idea that i can actually be an author was something i had dared to imagine before that this photographer asked me to write the text for his book and actually, it was about the first chapter was about coral and i wrote my heart out and then i didnt hear back from him and i didnt hear back from him and i call the editor ofthe book and i said whats happened. He was like sorry, hes not going to go with you. And it was in that moment i was like i really want to be an author but i understood i needed, i couldnt do it for someone else, i needed to do it for myself and i need to just find my voice and then i started reading a ton of Popular Science and i would finish reading those books and put them on my nightstand and id be like i could never write a book like that. I could never write a book like that and one day i looked at the book on my nightstand and i said i could not write a book like that because i can only write a book in my own voice. And thats when i realized i could only write a book if i combined memoir with the science. That was just the way it was going to come out for me and thats kind of the way ive been writing. In terms of memories its interesting because i have some very vibrant memories but i also didnt keep journals of all that. So i just have to rely on my memories now that i am intentional about going out and traveling and telling the stories. About what im doing, what the information is so i keep journals like crazy and i do journal after every day after every interview so thats been really helpful. Weve already touched briefly on the fact that the way we write in science publication is very formulaic. Its technical. You remove your technicality and sense of humor from that and what youve done in these books is different another of the hard things is science is actually iterating and uibuilding on a body of knowledge and when you write a book like this you have to stop reading, stop researching and publishing some point. So im trying to think for you, is there anything new . Anything that you learn sense the publication of the book about coral reefs or the health of the ocean you wanted to update us on. Whats amazing is that coral reefs are still being discovered and to me thats, it blows my mind because coral has to live shallow in order to survive the algae that lives inside are tissue with enough light for them to photosynthesize so as we know the ocean is too dark for that to happen so algae, coral have to live in clear enough water that they can have that photosynthesis. And yet, in the last since the book was published ive learned of three coral reefs that we didnt know of four there was a deepwater one found near tce, one found at the mouth of the Anderson River which is has long been considered to 74 coral to be there and then theres one in honduras and at the mouth of where all these banana plantations were built and the fertilizer has been running in water there for a century and so people thought there was just too much fertilizer and sediment for coral to survive and these are the reefs. So yes, i mean the question is what is the refund the future going to look like and are these four bearers of these future reefs, these are really questions that we dont know the answer to right now. I have a followup question for you too, you show that what bleaching looks like, you mentioned briefly how dire the circumstances are. Tit feels to me in your book you have this important balancing act between confronting the brutal reality of the threats to coral reefs against the dangers theyve already undergone while maintaining some of this unwavering hope in the future and simply looking for data, looking for evidence, looking for studies that give us a foundation for having that hope rather than just closing our eyes to it. Can you talk about your own feelings as about the future of coral reefs as you wrote this book. The book start that starts at this meeting i went to in florida called reef futures. It was in the 2018 and i went to this meeting expecting just a bunch of really depressed scientists there and that people would be reporting on these mass bleachings around the world which arehappening. But what i discovered were allthese people who were doing the kind of restoration i showed you in the slides. And also looking at the incredible schematic flex ability of coral. Coral are great athybridizing. The idea it for coral is a fluid sort of thing. Were actually theres a paper published last week that coral seem to be able to integrate mutations from their cells and their body, not in their reproductive lines. They can take mutations from their body and put them in their genetic line and pass them off offering which is crazy and that shouldnt happen in animals but there are people doing, making firm base of coral, making embryo banks of corals, really freezing them, freezing embryos. There are all kinds of amazing projects to boost coral reproduction, to boost coral survival and its definitely not game over. So these two things are happening. Our oceans arewarming at an alarming rate. 93 percent of the heat that Carbon Dioxide in our this fear holds is in the ocean. Coral, they only have one to three degrees of a buffer before they start bleaching but they seem to be trying to yeah. Use this incredible genetic civility they have and theres people around the world trying to bolster that. Though i did try to walk this line and im glad it came off that way because this is not, the story isnt over on this. Its really an active story. In reading these books theres an incredible broadening. As a reader you have to stretch her mind to think about what is going on a global scale. Were talking about emetic adaptation, talking about heroic efforts to create marks for genetic material and i think one of the things is its hard for us to imagine the true expanse of some of these ecosystems were talking about so you mentioned briefly that the main water is one of the largest systems on the planet. Can you help us really understand what that means . The most incredible thing to me is how little of the ocean we have actually explored. The number you hear sometimes is its only 4 to 5 percent, that number is not right. That was based on mapping but from a Remote Sensing device at the surface of the ocean not actually visiting the place. Were up closer to 30 percent now on that but if youre talking about actually visiting just the bottom of the ocean, not even talking about that huge volume weve only visited about. 05 percent. And our usual call as humans is to explore a place and then exploit it. But in the ocean they reversed back. Where exploiting it before weve explored. So dragging that stick and hold jumbo jets through the oceans to just decimate the fish population and driving across the bottom that turn unbelievable gardens of eden into a moonscape that wont sustain life for hundreds of years. All this is going on and its out of sight, out of mind. Where introducing toxins and pollutants into the environment as were taking out every last fish and form of marine life there is. And as i said, you dont know how the system works. Where an ocean planet. When we look for life on other planets we look for oceans. And yet we dont know how our ocean world works. And did the artemis go off . It was supposed to go off today. Its a moonshot. It didnt . Okay. 40 billion we spent so far and they still havent got it off the ground and its going to be 90 e billion and were not spending anything like thaton our own planet. Itdoesnt make any sense. [applause] so your one of the relatively small number of people who have done some of this exploring of our ocean depths. Can you talk about what it feels like, what do you see, how long does it take to paint a picture for r us as you talk. Every time i dive into a submersible i have the opportunity to see something, possibly some species ive never seen before. Certainly ithey hear, something nobodys ever seen before and that excitement of discovery is so incredible, i think it has to be taken into our dna. It is how we have learned to survive on this planet where all explorers. And. Stories about exploration are what excite us from childhood. A star going down hole into a wonderland, finding an ancient cave. These are all the things that mexcite us. We are explorers. And i think we really need to be tapping into that right now because that is how we have learned to survive on this planet, exploring it, figuring out what state, whats not, what we need todo to survive, thats what we need to be doing right now. One of the parts that struck me, actually is reflected in the title of the book. The age of darkness. As youre dropping through the water column you talk about how its spectacularly blue and then strangely both light and dark at the same time. Then that zone, that shadow zone ships over the course of the day and as the sun starts to set thats an incredible biological phenomenon, you want to talkabout . The edge of darkness is an important ishifting place in the ocean because theres so many animals out there using vision and they are paying attention to where that edge ofdarkness is. So during the day they go down and hide below the edge of darkness because theres no hiding places, no trees or bushes for animals tied behind so they hide in the dark depths during the day and, and the and the food rich surface waters under cover of darkness and that is the most massive animal migration pattern on the planet and it happens every single day in the ocean. But different animals handle it in different ways. Theres a lot of activity going on in the diving suit lost for submersibles and ive watched this traffic of animals going up at night to feed. And its all being driven by light and so many of these animals are living at the edge of darkness below the heedge of darkness sometimes never seen sunlight at all but they have eyes because of bioluminescence, because maximally 75 percent of the animals in the open ocean environment make light. So its good be claimed as the most common form of atcommunication on the planet which means we probably want to know alittle bit more about it. One of the things i enjoy about your book and talking about the scientific process is you open your slides by saying we didnt used to have cameras that were sensitive enough to detect the light we were seeing. I love the story about creating mechanical tools, the equipment that you need. Do you have a favorite story or piece of equipment . I spent all this time in submersibles wondering about how many animals there were beyond the range of my life back and see me and i wasnt going to see them. How was i going to see them and observe them so i wanted to a camera system i could read on the bottom but i needed to be unobtrusive so i wanted to use red light that was invisible to the animals that turned out to be tricky. And then i wanted to have, i didnt want to leave debate on the bottom because that tracks scavengers. I want to allure so thats where the electronicjellyfish came in. I went to this major Funding Agency and they would always say thesame thing. But what will you discover . Thats the point. So i had a series of mishaps i described in the book including having the camera flood at one point on national television. And having to scrounge money to be able to make it work and finally getting everything operational for an expedition to the gulf of mexico in 2004 where i put the camera system on the bottom with the optical lure. I had four hours of video i was observing and i was so excited because i had my window into the deepsea. I could see these animals moving around and i could tell they were being disturbed by the light the way ive seen in the past and then four hours into the deployment i had programmed the electronic jellyfish to come on to it for the first time with this and well display that i thought was a type of display that would attract large predators. I swear this is true. 86 seconds after it came on for the first time we recorded a squid over six feet long completely new to science. I could not have asked for a better proof of concept. [applause] i went back to the National Science foundation and saidthis is what we will discover and they gave me half 1 million to do it right. [applause] i remember as you describe that camera flooding thinking you had a teammate who said anybody can deal with plan a. Its how you cope with plan b that defines you and it struck me, this touches on yours as well that the technology is incredible. The biology, its an amazing book. What we collectively need our high functioning teams and julie, you were talking about how hobbyists and Research Scientists are operating in parallel and thats the incredible wealth of knowledge thatcould be useful but theyre not collaborating. Theres like a huge coral world appear on land. These coral aquarists and they actually have developed a lot of tools that are now being shifted to coral restoration and theres one of the things these coral people have discovered is if you cut a coral, if you saw it and create this number in which they call of frank it grows as much is five times faster than a regular coral so you can expand. You can grow coral a lot faster and as their starting to form coral this is an important technique and they have known them for decades. This is what they do eyto create new pieces of coral that they sell ceor give to other people who are hobbyists and now the scientists are taking these techniques and using them to propagate coral which then they can meet plants out on the ocean. Ieaand a lot of these people, they just came from the aquarium hobby. The hobbyists have their own name for coral that are a scientific name and they havent spoken to each other that much except its changing and that theres a horrible disease going through the caribbean called stony coral tissue disease and it infects about 22 species of coral. And so what the scientists are doing is going out in front of the infection front and collecting healthy coral and then theyre putting them in aquaria appear on land. Its been part of this hobbyists, not just hobbyists but theyre actually holding coral in safety on land through the caribbean. Ask question about science, i think i will give me those of you in the audience to stand in front of the microphones so that we can take your questions the final 10 minutes of the session. Youre keeping an ion, do you want to mention any of themin particular . Ive been involved in a couple recently that are exciting. I had to sign an nda if youre watching National Geographic next year but its the best bioluminescence ever filmed anywhere. The new camera systems are amazing and working with a colleague on some of those lower typesof cameras. Theyre smaller, cheaper, easier to deploy and i want to get as many of them out there as i can. Theres more opportunity for observation and the more discoveries they will make. Please keep your questions concise and let us know who youd like answer, we will start on the side and go back. Id like to thank you guys for coming to the sign Language Interpreter as well. My question is about medications and getting the word out. I was a biologist and move more in towards sort of the policy realm. Im interested to know how you can indicate the dangers ni of oceans and Climate Change in the modern era and theres a degree about what we have to lose or the storyabout what we have to gain. Ive been trying to emphasize what we have to gain. I think when we emphasize what we have tolose , too many people shut down. Its been said Martin Luther king did not mobilize the Civil Rights Movement by treating i have a nightmare. But thats what the Environmental Community keeps doing and wondering whynobody wants to listen. I agree also. I think its about what we have to treasure her on this planet which is so much and its way more than we even know. More than sending rockets. I used to live in uptown new guinea and in that aarea, there is a mine on land but it has been disposing of all its mine feelings in the deepsea by just typing its way out. It, do you know of any studies on like how bad is it . How that is going to be and then a second question is how much danger are we in from people that want to start doing mining on the ocean floor. Im just horrified by the mining on the ocean floor. Weve already been seeing trawling but theyre talking mining event sites, these incredible hotbeds of biodiversity and how they want to scrape them and its going to be horrific and once again out of sight and out of mind. And that jumping on the bottom, nobodys looking at that. Where putting the artemis in the air before you even know, we cant spend any money to go down and look at what all this dumping has done to the bottom of the ocean. It seems like this weaves fetogether the previousquestion as well. Assumptions are made the ocean is empty and lifeless and its just mud with nothing in it and what we know is everywhere we look we find incredible richness of the sites. Is part of the problem that there are these are International Waters and is there Something Like an international agreementthat has to be made . Been trying to make agreements and failing for years now. This is a big and complicated question and i think it is to be continued. Again for speaking, i really enjoyed this. As a student in my last year of college e, im getting a degree related to environmental policy but i spend so much time overwhelmed by the amount of change and feeling hopeless about the future so what advice would you give to someone who wants to e contribute and make a change but feel like individual contributions could never outweigh theinsurmountable effects of Climate Change . I feel like weve got this disconnect from the Natural World that is really problematic and in my own backyard, ive seen real change with Citizen Science. We have a Citizen Science team at orca, our organization we train rigorously so theyre doing real science thats expanding our understanding of our local environment and it creates environmental stewards. It enhances understanding of science. And it creates a sense of humanity. All of which is has been missing so im a big advocate for high quality Citizen Science. My question is for julie. You showed some pictures of the bleached coral reef and the revitalized same indonesian reef there and you mentioned the rebar restore i believe. I guess if it takes 1 to 2 degrees of temperature change to bleach the coral how much more does it take to restore that coral tabecause im interested in how that restored in that same area. The bleach reef, the reef that was restored was a bombed out reef so theres a thing called blast fishing which is common around coral reefs so that one had been blast fishing and unless they put those reef s rebar and place it would move around and the reef couldnt establish its cellular wall. That reef had been bombed 30 years ago so where the rebar was. But you do see a similar crumbling in a bleached out reef. I should be clear they were the same places. And what was the question, sorry . How could you restorebleached reef. Thats project has been only use but that is the largest restoration that exists right now. The question is will that work in other places around the world and so if thats still to be seen. They just done some installations in australia at the Great Barrier reef and also in mexico but it hasnt been long enough to see if they will come back. I apologize but we only have time for one final question. What advice do you have for those of us who are not scientists but would love to contributeto conservation , how can we be part of this team, how can we have enough impact . I think one way is to really the easy way is to call your congresspeople all the time and tell them you care and that we need to be worried about Climate Change in a way that is more serious than the way we have been. Thats one thing you can do, just put on your reminder Everyone Wants to call your congressman rolled. I also have a sense that it matters a lot. As we bring art and science closer together we have more impact because people tend to work on, half action when they feel something. And we can know something in our brain but we dont always take action but when we feel something thats when we act. So connecting science and art is really important. Weve had a special dispensation from the organizers of the festival for one final. Went to my School Community do to help the ocean. You can write to politicians to. [applause] thank you. Youd be surprised how much theylisten. You to everyone who cares enough to ask that question of what can we do. The answer is more than we might think and theres certainly reason nsfor hope in this whole vast ocean to care for in our own particular way. Thank you so much juli and doctor widder. You can join us for the book signing downstairs. Book tv every sunday features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. 8 pm eastern massachusetts republican Governor Charlie Baker shares his book results very often offers his thoughts ohoto move past politics and get things done. Then at 10 pm eaon after words Beth Trousdale on the future of retirement and whether working longer provide better Financial Security herbal overtime. Shes interviewed by economics professor courtney coyle. Watch book tv every sunday on cspan2 and find a full schedule on your Program Guide or watch online anytime at booktv. Org. 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