Today, we’re hearing from an explorer's explorer, Victor Vescovo. His Five Deeps Expedition made him the first person to reach the deepest point of the Atlantic, Southern Ocean, and set a depth record in the Mariana Trench at 35,853 ft. He was the first person to reach the Mollow Deep in the Arctic Ocean, and thus has been to the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd deepest points in the ocean.
Today, we’re hearing from an explorer's explorer, Victor Vescovo. His Five Deeps Expedition made him the first person to reach the deepest point of the Atlantic, Southern Ocean, and set a depth record in the Mariana Trench at 35,853 ft. He was the first person to reach the Mollow Deep in the Arctic Ocean, and thus has been to the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd deepest points in the ocean.
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/the-explorers-club-an-interview-with-victor-vescovo
CALLI: Nate, if you had to guess, how much of the surface of Earth is ocean, and how much is land?
NATE: If I had to guess… 50/50. Half land, half sea.
CALLI: That’s a good guess, but no. I spoke with explorer Victor Vescovo recently and he told me that SEVENTY percent, aka most of the planet, is ocean. And that’s not all.
VICTOR: Of that, at least 80% is completely unexplored. So if you do the math, more than 56% of our entire planet is completely unexplored and unmapped, which is an extraordinary figure.
NATE: Wait, 56% of the entire planet hasn’t been touched? That’s kind of amazing to think about.
CALLI: It is, and it’s stats like that that inspire Victor to go out into the world as an explorer, constantly searching for new frontiers. We’ve heard from a lot of explorers on the show so far searching in space, but Victor’s dream destinations for his adventures were a little closer to home.
VICTOR: It shocked me that in the year 2014, when I first started thinking about this mission, that no human being had been to the bottom of four of our world's oceans, and yet we were exploring Mars. There was a disconnect there. I come from a culture in Texas and other places where we kind of ask a question, well, if if not me, who? One can't always just depend on government or other people to do things that you think need to be done. And I had been mountain climbing pretty seriously for about 25 years and was looking for a bit of a different challenge. I was previously in the Navy, so I had a bit of a connection to the oceans. And so I wondered just what would it take to put together the technology, the crew, all the logistics to actually go to all five of the world's oceans, which had never been done before?
NATE: Hmmm, something that had never been done before? Sounds like a job for…
CALLI: An explorer! And today on the show… if you’re a longtime listener, you already know where this is going. And if you’re new, buckle in - take it away, Nate!
[SFX: Intro Music]
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back! We are continuing our Explorers Club series today with a very special guest, Victor Vescovo. Victor is truly an explorer's explorer. His Five Deeps Expedition made him the first person to reach the deepest point of the Atlantic, Southern Ocean, and set a depth record in the Mariana Trench at nearly thirty six thousand feet deep. He was the first person to reach the Mollow Deep in the Arctic Ocean, which means he’s been to the three deepest points in the entire ocean.
NATE: As if that wasn’t impressive enough, he has completed the Explorers Grand Slam, an adventurer goal to reach the North Pole, South Pole, and the highest points on each continent. Less than 100 people on planet earth, population 7.1 billion, have ever achieved this. Go Victor! But if you’re thinking of chasing the Grand Slam, Victor has a warning.
VICTOR: It's basically punishment. It basically involves subjecting yourself, unlike deep sea exploration, to being physically assaulted by everything that nature seems to be able to throw to you, whether it's freezing temperatures, howling winds, water near the North Pole, all these wonderful things. But it was a great journey over the course of two decades to try and climb all the highest mountain ends on each continent and then to try to ski to both poles. So it was a great, wonderful experience on many levels. Yeah, physical, emotional, even spiritual. Just to see the four corners of the earth on the on the land anyway.
CALLI: So where do you think your obsession with exploration comes from?
VICTOR: I think part of it is genetic. At least that's what some doctors have theorized, is that some people have more of a proclivity to be very curious. And when you combine that with the maybe a little bit of a more risk, uh, perverse attitude that you end up with people that do what I do. And while it may appear risky, one thing I prided myself on, whether it be in mountaineering or deep sea exploration or anything, really, is that one can do very risky activities, but do them in a safe manner or as safe as you can make it in much the same way that a stuntman will do something like that that looks very, very dangerous on film. But they've planned it out days or weeks in advance, tried to work out every variable so they can do it safely. We do the same thing with our expeditions. And so I think it's possible for human beings to push the boundaries of what? We are able to do in extreme environments, but do them in a safe way.
CALLI: So what you're saying is basically, yes, you can do reckless things, but do it with caution.
VICTOR: Well, they appear reckless, perhaps, but at the end of the day, it's just like launching a rocket or doing another extreme thing. I mean, basically, a rocket is a big pipe filled with explosives that you're putting people on top of. And yet they've made it relatively safe and now they can even land them on barges at sea, which is extraordinary. So it sure looks risky, maybe even reckless. But no, it's all math and it's all calculated. And whether it's space exploration or deep ocean exploration, the same principles apply here.
NATE: So, back to Victor’s original question at the top of the episode: Just what would it take to go to the bottom of every ocean on Earth? If you don’t know a lot about the ocean this may sound pretty straightforward - take a boat out and dive. But there’s this little thing called water pressure, which at the bottom of the ocean is… well, I’ll let Victor tell you.
VICTOR: It is 16,000 lbs per square inch at full ocean, which means every component of the submersible that's exposed to the outside environment has the weight of eight average sized cars on the size of your fingernail.
CALLI: There must have been some incredible technical breakthroughs to get you to those depths, how different the submersibles you're piloting from goes from just like ten years ago.
VICTOR: I think my team and I consider the limiting factor of the Deepsea submersible that we designed and built as third generation full ocean depth submersible. The first, of course, was the Trieste in 1960, piloted by Jacques Picard and Don Walsh. That took it down to the bottom. They were only there for 15 minutes, and then they came back up. James Cameron went down in 2012 and his vehicle, the Deepsea Challenger, but he never went back there. And it was a great piece of technology that was more second generation. And it used syntactic foam, which is a substance that doesn't really compress under pressure, but is actually buoyant. So we use that material. And then we made other enhancements in our third generation design, which allowed us for the first time to do multiple dives at Challenger deep and very short time intervals. In fact, we did four dives at full ocean depth in about ten days, which had never been done before. And so it was also commercially certified, which meant it's as safe as an airliner or anything else that's commercially certified. So what we think we have done is built a piece of technology that allows human beings for the very first time to go down to any point on the seafloor repeatedly, safely, and with the passenger having no training or physical, you know, extreme capabilities whatsoever.
CALLI: So you could just bring the passenger down with you.
VICTOR: Yes. And there's no decompression stops. There's nothing like that. Anyone can go in the submersible if they can, through the hatch. Wow.
CALLI: Okay. You're just going to get me saying, wow, this is I am obsessed with the ocean, so this is just fantastic. Since I don’t have access to any compression-withstanding submersibles my visiting the ocean floor may not happen anytime soon… So I asked Victor what he found down there.
VICTOR: I think the best analogy to make is that the deep ocean trenches, you know, below 6000 meters, they're like the deserts of the ocean. One can imagine that they're desert, but they're actually not. They're like the deserts that they have very specialized life. And just like all the different deserts of the landmasses, there are slightly different. And after diving. Oh, wow. I guess maybe more than 12 or 13 at this point, they all seem to have their slightly unique character. The Philippine Trench, which we just drove last year, was very soft and undulating, very gentle. The Tonga Trench was like going into a complete riot of rock and gravel and sand because it's so volcanically active and then other trenches are somewhere in between. So each one has its own unique character and they also have somewhat unique life associated with them, because these are places in the ocean that are completely isolated from each other and therefore they've developed different species evolutionarily, as you would expect.
NATE: But Victor also saw something that worried him.
VICTOR: I did see a piece of human contamination at the bottom of Challenger, deep on my very first dove there. It's unclear to me if it was plastic, it probably was. It could have been something else. But it definitely was human contamination, which was. Just a bit of a gut punch to see it there within 15 minutes of landing on the bottom in one of the most remote places on the planet.
CALLI: That’s devastating. I mean, we hear so much about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch but it’s difficult to hear that this kind of debris makes its way somewhere so inaccessible. These last few weeks we’ve heard from explorers leaving Earth and going to outer space to find out what discoveries are waiting for us out there. Those explorations are fascinating and necessary for better understanding human life, but I’d like to thank Victor for this reminder that Earth is our home for the foreseeable future.
NATE: We need to take good care of it so that future explorers can continue to enjoy and explore our beautiful home. I think there are a lot of them out there.
CALLI: What, if any, advice you could give to a future explorer? What would it be?
VICTOR: Push your boundaries as much as humanly possible. If there's one thing that I think I have noticed among almost all people is that they constantly sell themselves short. They're capable of so much more than even they can imagine. And we typically only see this extraordinary potential in ourselves when we're put into extremely adverse conditions. But it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. We can just set higher and higher goals for ourselves in our communities. And fortunately, I think that we can often rise to those occasions.
CALLI: And rise Victor did. Just three years after he asked himself what it would take to explore the planet’s depths, he finally achieved his goal of going to the bottom of all of the world’s oceans. And was it worth it?
VICTOR: Of course it was worth it. When you have the ability to go to a place no human being has ever been on multiple occasions, while also contributing to scientific knowledge, technological advancement, and doing all the different things that we've done on the expedition. Absolutely. It's worthwhile. I can think of nothing more worthwhile.
[SFX: Whoosh]
NATE: Thank you once again to the incredible Victor Vescovo for joining us today.
CALLI: I’m so inspired by his story, I think I’m going to go get my SCUBA certification and take a look around myself.
NATE: Calli, there isn’t an ocean where you live.
CALLI: Let me live, Nate!
NATE: We will be back next week with some new episodes of Curiosity and another great conversation with an influential explorer from the Explorer’s Club.
[SFX: Whoosh]
NATALIE: I guess I simply had a curiosity, and so I just started to do my own research. You know, who studies snow leopards? What do we know about snow leopards? How can I get involved? And so I started to read lots of scientific papers and I found a gap in snow leopard research. So one of the issues as a conservation geneticist, when you go out and you collect fecal samples from an animal like snow leopards, if you can imagine, like with the terrain that they live in, you end up walking for like three weeks, four weeks or up in the mountains to try and find these samples. And then the traditional way of identifying those samples, because you don't necessarily know they're from a snow leopard, is to send them to a lab. But the problem is most of those samples end up being from another species. So you need a way to be able to identify those samples on the spot, which is actually what I'm doing now. I'm I'm I'm developing a species detection technology that can be used by everyday people, so you don't need to be a scientist to use it. And I was inspired. I mean, this is a bit of a Segway, but I was inspired by the communities that I was working with in Nepal because they need to be able to identify so animals can come in, predators can come in and take their livestock, kill their livestock, and that is their livelihood. Often the snow leopard gets the blame and often, um, people retaliate or yeah. Which is not good for, good for the snow leopards, obviously. So they need a way to identify what animal killed their livestock from the saliva marker left over on the bite, on the bite mark. So they then have evidence that they can present to government in order to get compensation.
CALLI: Wow. That’s fascinating.
NATALIE: So it but there is, you know, many other applications to this type of technology. I mean, kids can use it again. You sort of go back to curiosity. Kids can use it to find out what animals are in their backyard just from the remains that they leave behind.
CALLI: Until next time, stay curious!