Natural Science | Southern Fried Science

The Glomar Explorer: what we can confirm and deny about “vast government conspiracies” from Project Azorian.

The following is the transcript of a talk I gave at DC Nerd Nite on September 16, 2023. Enjoy!

I need to begin with a disclaimer: It is impossible to talk about Project Azorian and the Glomar Explorer without sounding like you’ve gone deep into Dale Gribble territory. Azorian has everything a conspiracy theorist could ever want: Cold War espionage, a government coverup, a shady partnership with a celebrity entrepreneur, military contractors with their own plots for profiteering, and, in the middle of it all, there is a very big boat.

You’re going to get some cameos from Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, as well as the guy who stole J. Edgar Hoover’s underwear.

Azorian was the OG Vast Government Conspiracy.

*Slide showing a page from the Azorian report*.

Even if you’ve never heard of the Glomar Explorer, these story beats are going to feel very familiar to you. There’s a good reason for that. Project Azorian was, and likely still is, the largest and most expensive covert operation in US history, but in its declassification, it also became the model for a generation of paranoid storytellers, from the X-files to Alex Jones.

Because of that, we can learn a little bit about how conspiracy theories work by looking at the foundation upon which many of them were built.

I have a link for you: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0005301269.pdf

It’s the declassified report from the CIA describing the broad strokes of the operation (you can also find it by just searching for project azorian pdf). It is heavily redacted, but this was cleared for release in 2010 and you are allowed to read it and share it and store this document in your bathroom until your valet accidentally drains your pool into it.

It is entirely possible that there are parts of this mission that remain completely classified, and that some of the narrative has been changed to hide other objectives, so the only assurance I can give you tonight is that everything about this story that is true, is true.

Oh Hell No: Ten Years of SharkNado

Posted on August 16 by David Shiffman

Summer 2023 marks an important cultural milestone. That’s right, it has now been ten years since the release of SharkNado, which became a full-blown franchise with six movies, tens of millions in ad revenue and merchandise sales, real-world references in the floor of Congress, and near-universal awareness- all things that are otherwise unheard of for made-for-tv SyFy channel movies.

Me attending the tenth anniversary theaterical re-release, August 2023

“It’s been incredible gift to be able to share something this fun and silly with so many people over all this time,” Thunder Levin, the writer of the SharkNado franchise, told me in an interview. “It’s been extraordinary how many different people seem to have embraced it. I get to interact with fans who come from all walks of life, I even get to argue with shark scientists!”

SharkNado has always had it’s thumb on the pulse of pop culture

The Bad Shark Movies genre is rich and storied, but none of the others have had anywhere near the cultural impact or legacy of SharkNado. I’d like to try and explain what made the SharkNado movies special, and explore what that means for cinema, for sharks, and for me.

My comments on New York’s proposed new shark fishing regulations

Posted on August 14 by David Shiffman

Following a growing problem of mishandling of species of conservation concern, New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation is proposing some new shark fishing regulations. Here is the text of the letter I sent them supporting some of those proposed regulations, and proposing additional regulations.

A dead sand tiger shark washed up on a New York beach with recreational fishing gear in its mouth. Photo Vincent Cavaleri, via the DEC website.

Dear Commissioner Seggos, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation,

As a marine biologist with expertise in the conservation impacts of recreational fisheries on threatened shark species, I write in support of several proposed changes to New York State’s land-based shark fishing regulations. Additionally, while I am not a New York resident, I and my family have vacationed in your beautiful state every summer of my life. I learned to fish in New York from my grandfather, and those experiences contributed to my lifelong love of underwater life.

I studied Florida’s recreational shark fishery and its conservation impacts as part of my Ph.D. at the University of Miami’s Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy. That work contributed to Florida changing their land-based fishing regulations.

One Mining Code to Rule Them All: The poison pill at the heart of the Deep-Sea Mining negotiations.

Posted on July 19 by Andrew Thaler

The International Seabed Authority is once again gathered in Kingston, Jamaica to continue negotiations on a set of rules and regulations to govern seafloor mining in the high seas, beyond any nation’s borders.

At stake is access to vast fields of polymetallic nodules spread across the abyssal plains. These nodules are rich in nickel and cobalt, essential elements in the current batteries needed to electrify the world’s automotive fleets. Deep-sea mining for polymetallic nodules is presented as a means of breaking the world free of fossil fuel production that has the potential to be less harmful to the environment than current terrestrial cobalt and nickel mines.

And that might be right. As I said in the last talk I gave on deep-sea mining:

“I remain undecided. I do believe that there is a version of polymetallic nodule mining that has the potential to produce the metals we need for the electrification of the world’s automotive fleet in a way that represents a responsible compromise between the direct impacts of nodule extraction and the existential threat of failing to get emissions under control before the worst predictions of the International Panel on Climate Change become inevitable. I think it’s very hard to argue that polymetallic nodule mining is worse for the world than strip mining Indonesia’s remaining rainforests for nickel or having the children of Congo dig for cobalt.”
Deep-Sea Mining: A whirlwind tour of the state of the industry and current policy regimes

Polymetallic nodule mining is not the only form of deep-sea mining. The ISA is tasked with governing mineral resources on the deep-seabed. This includes nodules, but also cobalt-rich ferromanganese crusts (seamounts containing cobalt ore) and seafloor massive sulphides (deep-sea hydrothermal vents). These three deposits are mined in wildly different ways and come with dramatically different environmental risks. I frequently argue that they comprise three entirely different industries.

New paper: What happened to the world’s first certified sustainable shark fishery?

Posted on June 26 by David Shiffman

In 2011, the world’s first fishery for sharks was certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council*. The British Columbia spiny dogfish fishery made major news in fisheries management and ocean conservation world, where the possible existence of sustainable shark fisheries has been debated intensely. A few years later, the fishery voluntarily withdrew their certification, and never publicly said why.

I wanted to know what happened with this scientific mystery. So, with the help of Chuck Bangley and Catherine Macdonald and funding support from the Liber Ero Postdoctoral Fellowship program, I organized a research expedition to find out. The results of our expedition can be found in our new paper (LINK,) (OPEN ACCESS AUTHOR COPY) but in this blog post, I’d like to explain what we did, what we found, and why we think it’s important.

One year of “Why Sharks Matter:” What’s different in shark science and conservation now?

Posted on May 24 by David Shiffman

One year ago today, my book “Why Sharks Matter: A Deep Dive with the World’s Most Misunderstood Predator” was released. Science moves (relatively) rapidly and changes often, with new discoveries every day, and the conservation landscape is similar. This means that it is impossible for anything written about these topics at a discrete moment in time to remain accurate forever.

So, in the interest of accountability, in the interest of continuing to make my book useful for public education about shark science and conservation even as the science and policy landscape changes, and in the interest of keeping notes for myself for any future updated versions of the book, I have been keeping track of things that I wrote at the time that are no longer true, or weren’t quite right at the time. (Please note that some of these facts and figures were already out of date at the time the book was pubished, but that was well after the final text was turned in).

No, the deep-sea mining debate is not “gone”

Posted on April 20 by Andrew Thaler

Earlier this month, Mining.com published an article on the next steps in the development of deep-sea mining which featured a pretty surprising statement from the CEO of The Metals Company:

“People think we are debating if this (deep sea mining) should happen or not, and that’s gone. It’s happening.”
Gerard Barron/Mining.com

One of the interesting things about deep-sea mining is that most of the people involved in the industry are environmentally motivated: the folks leading the charge for deep-sea mining and the folks urging caution have much more shared environmental values than coverage of the deep-sea mining negotiations would suggest. Which is why this quote caught me off-guard. Though an unapologetic proponent for the potential of deep-sea mining, Barron is usually much more diplomatic in his media statements. To declare that the debate is done seems reckless.

The deep-sea mining debate is most certainly not “gone”. It is, at the moment, more fiercely discussed that at any previous point in the industry’s 50 year history. While mining contractors have overcome significant political and technological hurdles to reach a point where they are on the cusp of the first commercial trials, the call for a moratorium on the development of the industry has more support, both within the International Seabed Authority, and without, than ever before. The invocation of the 2-year-trigger in 2021 jumpstarted the debate and forced the ISA to meet a deadline for finalization of the Mining Code, the legal structure that will determine when and how mining will proceed in the high seas.

We need to know more about microplastics in the deep sea.

Posted on March 28 by Andrew Thaler

Establishing a baseline for microplastic accumulation in deep-sea animals using an historical sample archive: https://experiment.com/projects/establishing-a-baseline-for-microplastic-accumulation-in-deep-sea-animals-using-an-historical-sample-archive

Most of the plastic that enters our oceans in unaccounted for. While large, charismatic macroplastics float on or just beneath the surface, making for dramatic scenes of vast swaths of garbage littering the sea, the bulk of the plastic in the ocean exists as tiny particles of degraded plastics that sink to the bottom, enter food chains, and accumulate not just in the ecosystem, but within the tissue of marine animals.

The deep sea is a hotspot for microplastic accumulation. While we are just beginning to understand how microplastics accumulate in deep ocean sediments, precious few studies have investigated microplastic accumulation within organisms at vents and seeps.

Microplastic sink that cannot be ignored in chemosynthetic organisms

Microplastics are now ubiquitous in the world’s oceans. Though they have been found in the tissues of shallow water species and isolated from deep-sea sediment, only a few studies have investigated the extent to which microplastics have accumulated in the tissues of deep sea macrofauna, especially those associated with hydrothermal vents and methane seeps. These ecosystems are not only deep, dark, and diverse, but rely on chemosynthesis for primary production.

If you’ve been following along with my adventures across social media, you may have seen that I recently inherited a massive collection of biological specimens from the deep sea. In addition to all the samples from my PhD work, I now have an archive that covers hydrothermal vents and methane seeps around the world collected over the last 20 years. This unique archive of biological samples provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity to establish a baseline for microplastic accumulation in hydrothermal vent and methane seep species.

So that’s what I’m doing. But! I need your help.

Today, I launched Establishing a baseline for microplastic accumulation in deep-sea animals using an historical sample archive on Experiment, a crowdfunding platform for scientific research.

My objective is to establish a baseline for microplastic accumulation in deep-sea macrofauna from hydrothermal vents and methane seeps. This baseline will allow us to address key questions about the accumulation of microplastics in the deep sea.

Do microplastics accumulate in species that derive their food from the chemical energy in the plume of a hydrothermal vent? Does microplastic accumulation differ among non-chemosynthetic species associated with vents and seeps? Do patterns of microplastic accumulation vary among distinct deep-sea ecosystems and the general abyssal plane?

Consider heading over to Experiment and contributing a few dollars towards helping us better understand how human impacts are impacting some of the rarest and least understood ecosystems on the planet.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing with you some of the weird and wonderful creatures that are part of this collection, including, of course, the iconic Giant Deep-sea Isopod (don’t worry, this particular specimen is staying on display).

Giant Deep-sea Isopod, *Bathynomus giganteus*

Hey, Andrew, don’t you have a Patreon? Yes, yes I do. And I realize it’s super confusing to have two different fundraising platforms running simultaneously. Patreon supports this website, OpenCTD development, and my other weird projects. Experiment will be used to fund this microplastics study, exclusively. And, just to make things more confusing, everything I raise from Patreon this month will also go toward the Experiment microplastic project.

The Last of Us zombie fungus has nothing on the brain-eating, sex-changing, Sacculina barnacle.

Posted on January 23 by Andrew Thaler

In the Last of Us, the most gruesome live-action adaptation of a video game about people being turned into fungus since 1993’s Super Mario Bros, a mutated species of Cordyceps destroys society by converting humans into mindless, sporulating mushroom people.

Cordyceps, a fungus that most commonly parasitizes ants, is real. It really does hijack its host’s nervous system, alter its behavior, and turn it into a spore-producing zombie. The outcome is strangely beautiful.

Though the current darling of gritty, realistic, science-based zombie fiction, Cordyceps is such a lightweight in the world of brain-breaking parasites that tech bros brew it into their adaptogenic coffee.

If you want to meet a truly unsettling zombie-making parasite, allow me to introduce you to Sacculina.

Sacculina is a genus of barnacle that parasitizes crabs. While most parasitic barnacles are perfectly happy growing on the carapace of a crab, Sacculina takes this partnership to the extreme.

Female Sacculina larvae drift through the ocean, until they encounter a crab. The larva then settles on the crab and searches for a joint in the crab’s carapace. Once it finds a gap in the arthropod’s armor, it transforms into a kentrogon, a specialized phase of the barnacle life cycle that possess a stylet–an organic syringe-like structure–which allows Sacculina to inject itself into the crab, and not much else. At this point, the hard shell attached to the crab’s carapace falls off and the barnacle continues to grown within its host.

It gets so much weirder from here.

It’s science fiction, until it isn’t.

Posted on January 17 by Andrew Thaler

This piece originally appeared in the farewell issue of the Deep-sea Mining Observer.

Four years ago, I took over the Deep-sea Mining Observer from my predecessor, Arlo Hemphill. Conceived by the Pew Charitable Trust in 2016, The DSM Observer was created to be an online trade journal for the emerging industry as the International Seabed Authority navigated through the creation of an Exploitation Code for Seabed Minerals in the Area. Originally envisioned to run for two years, we continued to cover and report on critical developments into 2022.

After six years, the Deep-sea Mining Observer is coming to close.

During my tenure here, I tried to capture the full breadth of issues surrounding deep-sea mining. We covered the first species to be IUCN Red Listed due to the potential threat of mining. We examined the rise and fall of Nautilus Minerals. We reported the launch of the Patania II nodule collector test vehicle. We investigated how bioprospecting, often put forward as an industry in potential conflict with deep-sea mining, works in practice. We explored the complex political and geologic history of the Rio Grande Rise. We looked at how new technologies may change the financial landscape for seabed mining. We tracked a semi-mysterious cache of polymetallic nodules from the CCZ offered for sale. And we looked at how other industries intersect with deep-sea mining.