(Hiccup sound) Ah (Belching)
My goodness. Good Morning John,
So I’ve noticed that the last few videos,
you are basically doing, just, whatever I am doing.
I did low budget Bo Burnham, you did low budget Bo Burnham.
I did a google auto fill thing You did a Google auto fill thing.
I think this is just cheating. Or at least lazy.
And so I am gonna make it hard for you by taking you behind the scenes
to one of the most advanced aquarium exhibits in the whole world.
I actually got to tour this exhibit before it actually existed
to see the complexity of what makes it all come together.
Because you’d think, ok, an aquarium on the coast,
that can’t be that complicated.
Pump sea water in, put fish in the sea water and it’s beautiful.
Well it is more complicated than that, and three years ago
I actually made a whole video about it and you can watch it.
But not all ocean is the same. In particular it’s very different
at different depths
and there are animals in the deep sea that basically no one gets to see.
It’s extremely hard to go down there It’s also hard to get the animals to the surface
And once they're at the surface the sea water is so different
from the water of the deep sea that they cannot survive in it.
But at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, they wanted people to be able to walk amongst
the animals of the deep sea. Just to exist in the same space as them.
And if you go to that exhibit, which I have not been able to do yet,
You can do just that. You are in the dark,
Walking through halls, surrounded by animals
that typically inhabit the most difficult to visit place on earth.
And it was designed to appear to the people walking through the exhibit
that that’s all fairly effortless. It’s just something for you to enjoy.
Not for you to understand the engineering behind how it is possible.
But before the exhibit opened,
I got to see how that seemingly effortless cohabitation between humans and deep sea animals
is actually extremely complicated and fairly precarious
So when I walked into this I thought the hardest part of this process
Was going to be pressurizing the water to the same pressures as the deep sea
Because water is very heavy And down at the bottom of the ocean
There is a lot of water on top of you Enough pressure to very easily kill you.
But I, you know, I need to exist at a certain pressure
of atmosphere pressure in order to exist.
And the difference between the ocean pressure at the bottom of the sea
and the ocean pressure at the top of the sea ,
is bigger than the difference between air pressure at sea level and space!
But many deep sea creatures don’t have very much gas inside of them
so if you bring them up slowly enough they’ll be fine.
So if you don’t have to pressurize the water,
what's the concern? The trouble is that the
sea water itself is different. It has higher salinity,
very consistent low temperature, and really consistent gas concentrations
that are very different from surface level water. And so, behind every wall at Into The Deep
There are systems that take water from Monterey Bay
And turn it into a simulation of deep sea water And it turns out, the hardest part of this
Is removing the perfect amount of oxygen. Oxygen is great,
but it is also a super reactive molecule and these animals are used to an environment
with a super low oxygen concentration. The oxygen of surface sea level would absolutely
kill many of them and so, all of this water in the aquarium
Must be run through equipment that was designed, I’m not kidding,
for semiconductor and pharmaceutical manufacturing Among other things.
Situations where they really need to control
the amount of different chemicals present in a system.
By running the water over tons of tiny thin membrane straws with very low pressure inside,
the oxygen basically gets sucked out of the water
Flowing into the area of lower oxygen. But of course, they can’t take out too much
Or the animals will asphyxiate. It has to be personally balanced,
every hour, of every day.
I cannot go to the deep sea, And I probably shouldn’t.
I should leave that to the researchers who are dedicated to understanding and protecting it.
But the people of the Monterey Bay Aquarium and places like them have worked extremely hard to
bring those environments, those other worlds within our own to as many of us as they can.
To inspire wonder and joy and awe at the marvels of our planet.
And the curiosity and ingenuity of the people who inhabit it.
John, I’ll see you on Tuesday.