ever it starts with great intern. >> wow, along with these television companies support cspan2 as a public service. >> hello everyone welcome. i am absolutely delighted to be moderating today's session. this is underwater, climate change and me. if you are not interested in hearing about oceans and coral reef first i am sorry for you. [laughter] you may show yourself out of the room. we are going to be diving into 45 minutes of conversation about our oceans. we are going to start an sun dress in shallow waters with coral reef and make our way down into the darker more mysterious adapts. what i am excited about is to be joined by two incredible marine scientists and authors joining us today we have the author of the life on the rocks building a future for coral reef. doctor julie. [applause] as well as an intrepid explorer research scientist and author of below the edges darkness. a memoir of exploring light in life in the deep sea. doctor edith witter. [applause] we would like to thank the national endowment of the arts and our plan for our time today is to explore both of these books which explore ocean science while that's never came tistruggling despairing forward. my own career path start and ocean conservation so it's a personal joy to explore these things. and i am so excited to get into this together. so our plan is i'm going to ask each of them to make a provocative statement or ask a question to get all of you thinking. in the final 15 mins of the session today we will take questions from5 you. look at those brains thinking i'm going to turn the show over to them and turn to talk about their books and will talk for 15 minutes or so before he died in it. at the end of the time today you will be able to get books signed by your two t authors. so provocative statements for questions. julie let's start with you. >> the story of the coral reef is one of struggle. think we all knowra that. and so my question is currently predictions are that by 2050, 99% of the coral reef will be lost on our planet. and if that is the case, what can we as terrestrial people, terrestrial beings, people live appear in land do to make what's beneath the waves less invisible to us? >> so in 2011 or 2012 we got the first video of a giant squid in the deep sea. the first time we were able to record this creature in its own environment. 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 deep sea that we do not even know about? giant squid happen to float when they die. we had aha dead specimen so we knew they existed what about the stuff that doesn't float? >> are right so on that note let's talk a little bit about your books and high level takeaways people need to understand as they approach these questions. >> okay, i'm going to forward to a slide. this is a coral reef. the coral reef take up less than a 1% of the oceans area. they are quite small in terms of the space they take out. they have a disproportionate effect on marine life it's estimated a quarter of all marine species depend on coral reefs at some point in their life. coral reefs are these incredibly vibrant abundant placess a rich, rich, rich and marine life. but coral have a problem there bumping up against climate change. the reason why coral are first of all animals for their kind michael segan enemies that livee in colonies. most of them are about the size of a pencil eraser. in their superpower is in their tissues and you can see in that number one the little green jobs are algae. and the algae photosynthesize and feed in 90% of the sugar they make to the coral. that is so much energy that the coral can actually make the limestone skeleton that they live inside of it. that creates the architecture of a reef. but when temperatures rise we do not know exactly who starts it, either the coral kings of the algae or the algae abandons the coral. and takes with it its color and also it sugar birds are suddenly the corals on starvation rations. it's bleach is published at that point. if the temperature falls the sim biosis can be reestablished. but if it doesn't, the coral die. in aa bleached reef looks like skeleton and bone and a graveyard and that is ultimately what itt is. and this is a true reality for corall reef around the world its estimated already half the reef have a bleached. mica said the projections for 2050 are really bad but the book is not an obituary. our people around the world doing things that are bolsterine the help of the coral reef. so as they come into this period of stress as we warm our oceans and our planets, there are things we can do. so i wanted to tell some of those stories produces a reef in indonesia. you can see the rubble beneath those bars. those structures are called reef stars. they're made out of rebar and network together into a galaxy of reef stars. and what happens is the reef has resiliency and after about 18 months the coral has grown you have a reef that is completely restored. there is a lot of work being done to protect the coral reef and all the life they support. but is also a precarious time for them. >> it was coral reef they got me hooked on marine biology. i was smitten, your words sorry. [applause] when i saw my first coral reef 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 deep-sea biologist. my first deep-sea expedition was in 1982 on a little chivalry went out and pulled net behind the ship. this is the primary way we know about life in the deep ocean we drag net behind ships. but we were actually were able to bring them up alive would put them in a container that kept them cold. when we dumped them out, everything glowed it was .ncredible they were pulsating plankton and growing krill. flashes from mangled jellyfish. i plunged my arm into the bucket, icy icy cold water, pulled out a red shrimp the size of a hamster. ed had nozzles on either side of its mouth that were spewing out sapphire blue light that pools in the palm of my hand. dropped back into the trial bucket and went on glowing. everything lit up. these animals had lures, they had all kinds of contraptions to make light to find food, to track mates against predators but i wanted to note that world look like. and i got an opportunity in 1984 when the gods with a group of scientists who were testing a new tool for exploring what was then and still is the largest least explored habitat on our planet, the mid water. it was wass was on ackerman assembly look like the insects. it has kind of a yellow body, bulbous head, michelin man arms of pinchers on the end of it. it's developed for diving and oil rings down to 2000 feet. i trained in the tank and my first open ocean drive was in the barbara channel. the first dive they just put us in one in after the other, dropped us to 800 feet to make sure we were not going to have a claustrophobic meltdown. i didn't because i was so intrigued by what i was seeing. i b saved that for the next div. [laughter] i went out 800 feet and i turned on the lights. i was a blown away by what i saw part of the time there were no cameras that could record this. but this is what it looks like. it looked like a fireworks display. later it was interviewed by local newspaper they asked me what it is like down there? i have blurted out it's like the fourth of july. which of course they used as a headline i took a tremendous ribbing for my colleagues for such a nonscientific statement. but i've lost track of the number of times over the number of years i've taken people down for the 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. i might have these for julie for her book of finalists. you see it on the left in the light. it on the right on its own bioluminescence. it was longer than this room. i brushed up against it with the wasp and it lit up, propagated down and everything that's inside the suit lit up. i read all the dials engages inside the seat without a flashlight just by the bioluminescence i was seeing. this is a colony sort of like a coral. it is just a really bizarre creature. what an astonishing amount of light. and then some ofg these jellyfh produce different kinds of displays depending on how they were stimulated with the comb jelly or sitting in the light on the left to see that rainbow color that's because it isn't being illuminated. is not bioluminescence for thees bioluminescence of cold living light this creature it makes, it can make it intrinsically as you can see in the middle image, or extrinsically it releases it as a cloud of particles. udjust await the octopus or squd can have it in cloud a tremendous amount can release their temporary blinding them allowing them to make an escape. it was the jellyfish that intrigued me the most. they do not haveis eyes. so who were these displays been directed at? and why were there different displays in the same jellyfish? and so i developed an electronic jellyfish that imitated certain kinds of displays. and it turned out that was enormously attracted to squid which is what led to the giant squid hunt. >> elect to turn question to the audience. raise your hand if you ever been in the ocean. keep them raise have you snorkeled? do we have scuba divers in the room? so we have a lot of people who have been an oceans. in these books we are traveling from location near here in the florida keys for example, to the opposite side of the planet. and we cover a swath of time from early in your career all the way up to the pandemic. incredible intellectual and emotional challenge. this is a book festival lesser of the process of writing ag book. i am curious about tapping into your memories and what motivated you to write these books ated ts point? to both of you. >> i will go first. >> never intended in my life to write a memoir. i was contacted by a literary agent saw an article about my research in the "new yorkk times". he asked if i ever thought about writing a memoir and i said no, idgo 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. he contacted me again this time he had a whole speech prepared about how i had seen things that nobody had ever seen. and it should be willing to share them with the world. i said i don't know how i am a scientist but we do not write in the first person. i counted and from that time there were 40 e-mails from him. [laughter] they weren't pushy but have you read this memoir? have you thought about this? and finally i just decided okay, i'll give it a shot part one christmas i just took some time and started trying to write in the first person. i had kept first-person memoirs, diaries especially of my expeditions and actually i ended up having fun writing the book. it was so freeing compared to writing science papers i had a blast. i was very much benefited from thero pandemic. i run a not-for-profit that takes a lot of my time with the pandemic i got a a little exerce for the rewrite of the book. i know is unexpected in every possible way. carson geiger agent was persistent. you can feel the phone this being how you enjoy dismissing the footnotes. this is where the humor comes across there, and julie what about you? >> is a little more intentional in my decision to write in the first person. i was in the scientist the off the scientists path. and then i was actually -- i got a little bit of a gig there was a photographer who liked what i was writing asked me too write a text for one of his books. i was like i'm a huge reader. mike i read everything. the idea could be an author was something i had there to imagine before the photographer asked me too write the text for his book. the first chapter was about coral. i wrote my heart out. and the then i did not hear back from him. he asked what happened and i was like sorry he's not going to go with you. it understood i could not do fr someone else. i needed to do it for myself. need to find my voice. i would finish her in those books and put them on my nightstand and i be oh my gosh i could never write a book like that. and then one day put that book on my nightstand i could never write a book like that. >> that's when i realized if you combine kind how i have been writing ever since. i have some very vibrant memories. but i did not keep journals of all. i just have to rely on my memories. now i am intentional about i keep journals like crazy. doctor every day and every interview. so that's really, really helpful. cooks of already touched briefly on the fact that you have your fence andr is quite different. science is perpetually iterating and building on you have to stop reading, stop b researching. i'm doing this for you. is there anything new? anything you have learned since the publication of the book on the status of the coral reef's quarries are still being discoveredg. to provide the algae living inside their tissue with enough light to photosynthesize. near the surface have that photo synthesis that gives them all their. and yet since the book was published as a deepwater one found near tahiti. as long been considered to coral to be there. and at the mouth of were all of these banana plantations were built in and the fertilizer has been running in the water there for a century. until people thought there was just too much fertilizer and sediment for coral to survive it. these are really healthy briefs. the question is what is the reef of the future going to look like? and are these the forbearers of these future reeves because they are really quick questions we do not know the answers to right now. >> i have a follow-up question for you too.sh but bleaching looks like you mentioned briefly how dire the circumstances are. feels to me in your book your during this important reality of the threats to coral reefs the damage they have undergone paired with this unwavering hope in the future. specifically looking for data, looking for evidence, looking for case studies that give us a foundation for having that hope rather than just closing eyes to it. can you talk about your own feelings about the future of coral reef jet you wrote the book? >> that starts with the meeting i went to in florida called reef futures. in 2018 and december the end of 2018. expecting a bunch of scientists to be there. and people would be reporting in on these massive bleaching's around the world which are happening. but what i discovered were all of these people who were doing the kind of restoration i showed you in this life. and also doing the incredible are great at hybridizing. at the very fluid sort of thing. there is just a paper published last week that coral seemed to be able to integrate mutations from the somatic cells. the selves and their body and the reproductive line from take mutations from their body and put them into their genetic line and pass them onto their offspring. that should not happen in animals. but there are people doing -- making sperm banks of coral. making embryo bags of coral. freezing embryos doing all kinds ofg amazing projects to boost court reproduction for survival. it's definitely not game over. these two things are happening oceans are warming, the warming at an alarming rate. 93% of w the heat that the atmosphere holds goes into the ocean. the only have one -- 2 degrees of a buffer before they start bleaching. they seem to be they try to use this incredible genetic flexibility they have offered them as the people around the world that are trying to bolster that i did try to walk this line. the story is not overr on this it's an active story. >> in reading these books listen incredible broadening. as you really have to stretch your mind to think about what's happening on a globalur scale. her tongue but genetic adaptation. return about heroic efforts to create arcs for genetic material. one of the things, i want to switch to ed. it's hard for us to imagine the true expanse of these ecosystems we are talking about. he mentioned briefly in passing that mid water is the ecosystem 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've actually explored. the number you here sometime it's only explored 5%, that number is not rage. that was based on a mapping from a remote sensing device at the surface of the ocean. it's not actually visiting the place. were up to closer to 30% now on that. but if you are talking about actually visiting just the bottom of the ocean i'm not even but the huge volume above it, we've only visited .05% of it. and our usual protocol as humans is to explore a place and then exploit it. but in the ocean we reverse that. we are exploiting it before we have exploredwe it. cannot hold the jumbo jets through the oceans to decimate the fish population and driving across the bottom that turned unbelievable gardens of eden. they will not sustain life for hundreds of years. all this is going on and says out of sight out of mind. we are introducing our toxinss and pollutants into the environment as we are taking out every last fish in form of marine life there is. when ocean planet. look for life on other planets we look for oceans. and yet we do not know how our ocean world works. i think that the artemis go off does anyone know? it was supposed to go off today. it is a moon shots. no it didn't? okay $40 billion we have spent so far. and they still would not got it off the ground. it's going to be $90 billion and we are not spending anything like that on her own planet. it does not make any sense. [applause] [applause] won the 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 -- paint a picture for us as you drop into the depths. >> every time i dive into a submersible of the opportunity to see something possibly a species never seen before. certainly a behavior, certainly something no one has ever seen before. and that excitement of discovery is so incredible it has to be baked into our dna. we are all explorers. stories of explorationom is what excite us from childhood. a secret garden, going down the hole into a wonderland, finding an ancient kyiv. these are all of the things that excite us. we are explorers. and i think we really need to be tapping into that right now. that is how we learn to survive on this planet, exploring it, figure out what saved what is not. what we need to survive. that's we need to be doing right now. >> one of the parts that really struck me, it's actually reflected in the title of the book. the edge of darkness. so as you're dropping to the water column you talk about how spectacular blue and strange to both bright dark at the same time. and in that zone that shadow zone shifts over the course of the day. it's high in the sky as the sun starts to sets. that's an incredible biological phenomenon during talk about it? >> the edge of darkness is a shifting place in the ocean. there are so many animals out there they are paying attention to where the edge of darkness is. so during the day they go hide below the edge of darkness because there is no hiding places. there's no trees or bushes for animals to hide behind. so they hide in the dark depths during the day and the feet in the food rich waters under cover of darkness. it's most massive animal migration pattern on the plan and it happens every single day in the ocean. different animals handle it in different ways. there is a lot of activity going on. i have hung there in submersibles and watched this traffic of animals going up at night to feed. it is all being driven by lights it. and so many of these animals are living at the edge of darkness, below the average of darkness sometimes never seeing at all. they have eyes because of bioluminescence. because approximately 75% of the animals in the open ocean environment make light. it could be claimed that maybe the most common form of communication on the planets. which means you probably ought to know a little bit more about it. >> one of the things i really enjoyed open your slides we didn't have cameras that are sensitive enough to detect the light you are seeing. i love the stories about creating mechanical's tools the equipment that you need. do you have a favorite story or piece of equipment that's near and dear to your heart? >> i spent all this time in submersibles wondering about how many animals theypi were just beyond the range of my life that could see me and i could not see you then. how was i ever going to be able to see them and observe them? i wanted to have a camera system that i needed to be unobtrusive. i wanted to use a red light that is invisible to the animals, that turned out to be tricky. and thenhe i did not want to jut leave bait on the bottom because that attracts scavengers pretty went an optical allure that's with the electronic jellyfish came in. i could not get this funded. i went to a funding agency and they would always say the same thing. but what would you discover? [laughter] that's 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 to the gulf of mexico were up at the camera system on the bottom with the optical lower. at about four hours of video i was in my window into the deep sea i could see these animals moving around. i could tell for sure this time they were not being by the lights i'd seen in the past. and then four hours inch of the deployment we had programmed the electronic jellyfish to come on for the very first time with its pinball display i thought was a type of display that would attract live a project i swear 86 seconds after it came on for the first time recorded a squid over 6 feet long completely new to science. i could not have asked for better proof of concept. [applause] back the national science foundation and i said this is what we will discover. and that gave me a half a million dollars to do it right. [applause] >> i remember as you describe the camera find that horrible sinking feeling you had and you had a teammate is that anybody can do if plan a pretty tight you cope with plan b that defines you. it really struck me throughout your book. the biology what we collectively need our teams and high functioning teams. and julie, you were talking about how hobbyists and research scientists are sort of operating in parallel it's like a huge coral world appear on lands. these coral who raise coral and acquiree in their garages, their basements, their living rooms. they actually have developed a lot of tools that are now being shifted for coral restoration. one of the things and create what they call a frag. it grows as much is five times faster than a regular coral. and so you can expand, you can grow coral a lot faster. discern the farm coral this is a really important technique. this is what they do to create new pieces of coral that they sell or give toer other people o are hobbyists. and now the scientists are taking these techniques and use them to propagate core which when they will replant on the reefs out in the ocean. they had the equipment put coral on iraq should grow them on they all came from the aquarium hobby. and yet the hobbyists and their own names for coral that are not scientific names for this scientists have scientific names and they really have not spoken to them that much. you are right it's changing is a really horrible disease going to the caribbean right now called stony coral tissue loss disease. about 22 species of coral in the tissue just kind of melts off the coral. and so with the scientists are doing is going out in front of the infection front and collecting healthy coral. and they are putting it in aquaria who have been part of the hobby but the professionals that do this as well. they are actually holding coral and safety appear on land while this is terrible disease. >> will i acedia similar question about science and projects that excite you, i would like to welcome most of w you in the audience who have questions come to the front and stand in front of a microphone so that we can take your questions for the final ten minutes of the session. so in terms of teamwork, collaboration, exciting science projects that you are keeping an eye on right now, doing to mention any of them in particular? it's pretty exciting but have to sign have national geographic. at the best abiola since film anywhere. the new camera systems are amazing. i'm also work with a colleague on some newer types of cameras that are smaller, cheaper, easier to deploy. want to get as many that i can do more opportunities foron observation the more discoveries we will make it. >> i can see we have a lot of people in just a little bit of time. so please keep your questions concise and let us know who k yu would like to answer. >> like to thank you guys for coming. my question is about communication i was biologist and undergrad and moving it toward policy realm. in the modern era. >> i have been trying to emphasize what we have to gain. when we emphasize what we have toulouse comment too many people shut down. it has been said that trayvon martin luther king did not mobilize a civil rights movement by preaching i have a nightmare. but that is with the environmental community keeps doing and wondering why nobody wants to listen. >> thank you. it's about what we have twoic treasures here on the planet. which is so mention way more than we know. there is a mine on land but it has been disposing of all of the mind tailings in the deep sea by just a piping wayay out. do you know of any studies on how bad this is going to be? and then the second question is, how much danger are we in from people who want to start doing mining on the ocean floor? >> i am just horrified out with the mining on the ocean floor thing. liwe've already been seen trawling's. they're talking about mining event sites. these incorruptible hotbeds of biodiversity. they just want to scrape them. it is going to be horrific and once again out of sight and out of mind. and that jumping on the bottom, nobody is looking at that. in the art of i us in the air, e cannot spend any money to go downo and look at what the dumping is on the bottom of the ocean. >> it sounds to me this needs to get better with the previous question as well. it's just mud as part of the problem these are like international waters? making agreements and failing for years now have big and complicated question as a student in my last year o of college related to environmental policy. but i spend so much time overwhelmed by the amount of change that needs to happen. feeling hopeless what advice would youut give to someone who wants too contribute and make a change but feel like individual contributions could never outweigh thein insurmountable effects of this disconnect that's really problematic. my own backyard i have seen it our organization we train rigorously we are doing a real science that expanding our understanding of localur environment. it creates environmental stewards, and it creates a sense of community. all of which has beenmi missing. i am a big advocate for high quality citizen science. >> thank you. >> hi my question is for julie. you showed some pictures of the bleached coral reef and the revitalized restored coral reef in the same indonesia reef there. you mentioned the rebar -- the restarts i believe were used. i guess, if it takes one -- 2 degrees of temperature change to bleach the coral, how much more does it take to restore the coral? i am interested in how it restored in the same area. >> the bleach -- the reef that was restored was a bombed out reefer. there's a thing called black fishing which is common around coral reefs unfortunately. that would have been blackfish too. unless they put those starsn place, that rubble would roll around and reef could not reestablish itself there. that reef had been bombed 30 years ago. you see the sort of similar crumbling in a bleached reef. i should be clear that they were not the same places. they weren't the same places. t what was the question? >> how could restore agree streets? that project has been used on over ten but it's the largest restoration that exists right now. will that work and other places around the world? that's still to be seen. they done installations in australia and mexico but hasn't been long enough to see if it will come back. >> i apologize but we only have fresh time for one question. >> what advice do you have for hothose of us who are not scientists but would love to conjure to conservation? >> i think one way to call congress people all the time tell them y you care and we need toha be worried about climate change in a way that's more serious than the way we have been s' that is one thing to put on your reminder every month to call your congress people but i also have a sense as we bring art and science closer together we have more impact because people tend to have action when they feel something in the brain we don't always take action based on that but when we feel something, that's when we act, connecting science and art is important. >> we've had a special from the organizers for one final -- >> what can my school community do to help the ocean? >> you can write to politicians, to. [laughter] >> okay. >> i'm surprised how much they listen. >> thank you to everyone who cares enough to ask how much you can do. the answer is there is more and you might think and there's reason for hope. thank you so much. [applause] joinin us downstairs. >> book tv every sunday on c-span2 features leading authors present their latest nonfiction books. 8:00 p.m. eastern massachusetts republican governor charlie baker shares his book, results e offers thoughts on how to use past politics and get things done. 10:00 p.m. eastern on "afterwards", sociologist beth looking at the future of retirement and whether working longer provoked financial security in her book, overtime interviewed by college economics professor courtney coyle. watch tv every sunday on c-sn2 and find a full schedule on your program guide for watch online anytime at book tv don't work. >> weekends on c-span2 every saturday american history tv documents american stories. sunday's book to be brings the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2

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