Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/i-can-t-create-a-meaningful-slug-from-that-title-alone-since-youtube-video-transcript/ Explores the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a 16,000 km underwater mountain chain, and a 2023 NOAA ROV discovery of mysterious aligned holes in the deep-sea floor near the Azores. ## Key Takeaways - The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is the longest mountain range on Earth and is still actively creating new ocean floor. - The deep ocean remains poorly explored, with less detailed mapping than parts of Mars. - A 2023 ROV discovery of aligned seafloor holes near the Azores remains unexplained. - Long-term observation, not brief visits, is needed to understand deep-sea phenomena like these. ## What the video covers - Introduces the Mid-Atlantic Ridge as the longest mountain chain on Earth, running ~16,000 km mostly 2,000-3,000 m below the ocean surface. - Explains the ridge's formation through plate tectonics, as the North American and Eurasian plates (and South American and African plates) separate at roughly 2.5 cm per year. - Notes Iceland and the Azores as places where the ridge breaches the surface. - Describes the extreme deep-sea conditions: near-freezing temperatures, about 300 atmospheres of pressure, and total darkness. - Highlights how little of the deep ocean floor has been mapped at useful resolution, comparing it unfavorably to Mars. - Recounts a 2023 NOAA Okeanos Explorer ROV dive near the Azores that found a line of regularly spaced, circular holes 5-10 cm across in soft sediment, with raised rims. - Discusses hypotheses for the holes, including biological activity (burrowing or feeding) and micro-seepage of volcanic gas, while noting that equipment artifacts seem unlikely. - Points out that no dedicated follow-up expedition was organized, and that the holes may no longer exist. - Suggests that long-term camera monitoring of the site could resolve the question. - Includes channel calls to subscribe and like, framing the video as a quiet, atmospheric storytelling piece. ## Chapters 1. 00:00 Introduction: A Hidden Mountain Range 2. 10:40 Scale and Formation of the Ridge 3. 25:00 Conditions of the Deep Ocean 4. 35:00 The 2023 Discovery Near the Azores 5. 51:40 Possible Explanations 6. 70:00 Public Response and Scientific Caution 7. 86:40 Why Long-Term Monitoring Matters Answers ## Questions about this video What is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge? It is an underwater mountain chain running roughly 16,000 km down the center of the Atlantic Ocean, created where tectonic plates pull apart. Most of it lies 2,000-3,000 m below the surface, with Iceland and the Azores breaching the waterline. What did the 2023 NOAA dive find? An ROV found a line of roughly circular holes, 5-10 cm across, in soft seafloor sediment near the Azores. The holes were regularly spaced and had slightly raised rims, which made their origin puzzling. What explanations were proposed for the holes? The video considers biological causes such as burrowing or feeding activity, and geological causes such as micro-seepage of volcanic gas along a fracture. Equipment artifacts are considered less likely because of the sediment displacement pattern. ## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown 00:01 Speaker A Hello there, and welcome to Life Beyond Scene, where the quietest places on Earth often turn out to hold the strangest stories. 00:10 Speaker A Imagine for a moment a mountain range, not the kind you can drive through or hike on a weekend. 00:25 Speaker A Not the Rockies or the Alps, with their visible peaks and tourist trails and little towns nestled in the valleys. 00:37 Speaker A Imagine a mountain range that runs for 16,000 km, from the waters just south of Iceland all the way down toward the cold, lonely tip of the South Atlantic. 00:54 Speaker A A chain of ridges and valleys and volcanic peaks, so vast that it makes every mountain range on land look like a footnote. 01:14 Speaker A Now, imagine that almost all of it, nearly every kilometer of it, sits between 2 and 3,000 m below the surface of the ocean. 01:27 Speaker A Completely dark, near freezing, under pressure so intense that a human body, unprotected, would not survive for a second. 01:40 Speaker A And imagine that most people on Earth have never once thought about it. 01:54 Speaker A That is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and tonight, that is where we are going. 02:12 Speaker A Before we do, I want to ask you something simple. 02:25 Speaker A Where are you right now? 02:43 Speaker A Are you in bed, the room dark and quiet? 02:58 Speaker A The kind of quiet where you can just barely hear the house settling. 03:12 Speaker A Maybe you're on a couch with something warm, the window showing a late evening sky. 03:31 Speaker A Maybe you're somewhere unexpected, earbuds in, the world around you busy, but your mind somewhere else entirely. 03:46 Speaker A Whatever the answer is, I am glad you're here. 04:02 Speaker A And I want you to know that wherever you are listening from, the Atlantic Ocean is out there. 04:18 Speaker A The surface of it, at least. 04:33 Speaker A Ordinary and unremarkable to the ships crossing it every day. 04:49 Speaker A But underneath, far underneath, there are things happening that no one fully understands. 05:05 Speaker A And recently, something was found down there that even the scientists who study this ridge for a living could not explain. 05:20 Speaker A If you enjoy this kind of storytelling, the kind that takes you somewhere quiet and strange and real, please consider subscribing to Life Beyond Scene. 05:32 Speaker A It costs nothing, and it helps us keep making these. 05:40 Speaker A And if tonight's story stays with you, a like goes a long way. 05:55 Speaker A Thank you, genuinely. 06:12 Speaker A Now, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. 06:22 Speaker A The first thing to understand about it is the scale, because the scale is almost impossible to hold in your mind all at once. 06:38 Speaker A 16,000 km. 06:55 Speaker A To give you a sense of what that means, the distance from New York City to Los Angeles is roughly 4,000 km. 07:13 Speaker A So, you could lay that cross-country trip end to end four times and still not cover the full length of the ridge. 07:30 Speaker A It is the longest mountain chain on Earth by a significant margin, and it runs almost perfectly down the center of the Atlantic Ocean like a seam on a baseball, or like the spine of some enormous creature that has been lying on the ocean floor since before humans existed. 07:45 Speaker A Most of it sits between 2,000 and 3,000 m below the surface. 08:01 Speaker A Some sections dip deeper. 08:15 Speaker A A few places, like Iceland, actually breach the surface, which is why Iceland exists at all, geologically speaking. 08:31 Speaker A Iceland is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge sticking its head above water, the one place where you can stand on this mountain range and feel the wind on your face. 08:47 Speaker A But for almost its entire length, the ridge is hidden, submerged, invisible to anyone not specifically looking for it. 09:04 Speaker A And yet it is the most geologically active place on the planet. 09:19 Speaker A The ridge exists because of plate tectonics, specifically because of what happens when two enormous plates of Earth's crust pull apart from each other. 09:34 Speaker A Along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the North American plate is slowly separating from the Eurasian plate in the north, and the South American plate from the African plate in the south. 09:51 Speaker A Slowly is almost an understatement. 10:06 Speaker A The rate of separation is roughly 2.5 cm per year. 10:24 Speaker A That is about the speed at which your fingernails grow. 10:38 Speaker A But over millions of years, that small annual movement has opened the entire Atlantic Ocean. 10:48 Speaker A The ocean floor here is not ancient. 11:03 Speaker A It is geologically young, constantly being renewed as magma wells up through the rift valley at the center of the ridge, solidifies into new rock, and gets pushed outward to either side. 11:14 Speaker A The Atlantic Ocean is, in the most literal sense, still being made, and almost no one thinks about it on a daily basis. 11:27 Speaker A There is something quietly strange about that. 11:46 Speaker A We talk about space exploration and distant galaxies and the surfaces of other planets with a kind of natural wonder, and rightly so. 11:59 Speaker A But right here on our own planet, there is a mountain range the length of a continent sitting in total darkness under the sea, actively reshaping the Earth, and it barely comes up in conversation. 12:13 Speaker A The deep ocean is in many ways a less explored environment than the surface of Mars. 12:20 Speaker A We have higher resolution maps of Mars than we do of most of the ocean floor. 12:38 Speaker A That is not a metaphor or an exaggeration. 12:53 Speaker A It is simply true. 13:08 Speaker A The conditions down there are not hospitable to human curiosity. 13:26 Speaker A Near the seafloor at 3,000 m depth, the water temperature hovers somewhere between 2 and 4°. 13:41 Speaker A Not quite freezing, but close enough that it would kill a person in minutes. 13:49 Speaker A The pressure at that depth is approximately 300 atmospheres, which means the weight of 300 times the atmosphere we're sitting in right now, pressing down on every square centimeter of anything that goes there. 14:07 Speaker A The darkness is total. 14:18 Speaker A Not the darkness of a room with the curtains closed, or even a cave with the lights off, but total darkness, the kind that has existed in that place for millions of years without interruption. 14:34 Speaker A No sunlight has ever reached those depths. 14:50 Speaker A None ever will. 15:06 Speaker A And yet things live there. 15:17 Speaker A That is one of the most remarkable facts about the deep ocean. 15:32 Speaker A Life has found ways into every part of it. 15:49 Speaker A But we will come to that. 16:05 Speaker A For now, what matters is the picture: a cold, dark, pressurized world of slow-moving water and volcanic rock and soft sediment, stretching for thousands of kilometers, largely unmapped at any useful resolution, visited only occasionally by remotely operated vehicles that spend a few hours or days in a particular location before being brought back to the surface. 16:18 Speaker A Scientists have explored fragments of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in real detail. 16:37 Speaker A Specific vent fields, specific sections of the rift valley, specific geological features. 16:56 Speaker A But taken as a whole, the ridge is still mostly unknown. 17:13 Speaker A Most of what we know about it comes from sonar mapping, which gives us shape and depth but not texture, not biology, not the small-scale details that only a camera can capture. 17:28 Speaker A Which is why, when a camera does go down there, what it finds sometimes surprises everyone. 17:51 Speaker A In 2023, NOAA's research vessel Okeanos Explorer was conducting a series of remotely operated vehicle dives along a section of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge near the Azores. 18:08 Speaker A The Azores are a group of Portuguese islands sitting roughly in the middle of the Atlantic, directly on top of the ridge. 18:16 Speaker A They are, like Iceland, one of the places where the ridge is visible above the waterline. 18:32 Speaker A The ROV dives were going to depths between 2,500 and 3,000 m, mapping and observing a section of seafloor that had not been closely examined before. 18:50 Speaker A And the cameras found something that nobody expected. 19:07 Speaker A A series of holes, small, roughly circular holes punched into the soft sediment of the seafloor. 19:21 Speaker A Each one somewhere between 5 and 10 cm across. 19:38 Speaker A And they were arranged in a nearly straight line, not scattered randomly across the sediment the way animal burrows or geological features tend to be, but lined up one after another with a regularity that immediately caught the attention of the scientists watching the footage from the ship above. 19:55 Speaker A The sediment around the holes was slightly raised at the edges, not collapsed inward, but pushed outward, as if something had displaced the material from inside. 20:05 Speaker A The scientists on the ship were puzzled. 20:13 Speaker A NOAA, to their credit, posted the footage publicly and asked for help. 20:20 Speaker A Not in a dramatic way, not with breathless language about mysteries of the deep, just honestly. 20:35 Speaker A Here is what we found, and we are not sure what made it. 20:54 Speaker A The 2004 observation had been noted and discussed among marine scientists, but no definitive explanation had been reached. The fact that the same type of feature appeared in the same general area nearly two decades later suggested that whatever was making them was not a 21:11 Speaker A one-time event. It was either a recurring process or a persistent one. That distinction matters. A one-time event could be a coincidence, a single unusual organism, a single geological episode. A recurring pattern suggests something more systematic. The geological explanation was also taken 21:33 Speaker A seriously. The mid-Atlantic ridge is volcanically active. Magma moves through the crust beneath it constantly. 21:42 Speaker A Hydrothermal fluids circulate through fractures in the rock, heated by that magma, and eventually find their way to the seafloor. 21:50 Speaker A In some places, this produces the dramatic black smoker chimneys that have become iconic images of the deep ocean. 21:59 Speaker A In other places, it produces more subtle seepage, small amounts of warm fluid or gas escaping through the sediment without any visible chimney or vent structure. 22:10 Speaker A Pock marks are one well doumented result of this kind of seepage. They form when gas or fluid escaping from below displaces sediment creating a depression in the seafloor. Pock marks have been found across large areas of the Atlantic 22:24 Speaker A seafloor and some of them are quite dramatic in scale tens or even hundreds of meters across. But pock marks are not what was found here. The 2023 holes are centime scale, not meter scale. They are in a line, not scattered across the 22:41 Speaker A sediment the way pockm marks tend to be, and their raised edges are not characteristic of the way pockm marks typically form. A pockmark tends to have sloped or irregular walls, not a clean raised rim. The geological explanation, like the biological one, can account for 22:58 Speaker A holes in the sediment in a general sense. It struggles to account for these specific holes. The human-made explanation was considered and largely set aside, though not entirely. 23:10 Speaker A The Okanos explorer's own ROV thrusters can disturb sediment, and it is not impossible for equipment to leave marks on the seafloor during a dive, but the scientists on the ship noted that the holes were observed before the ROV had 23:25 Speaker A passed over that section of the seafloor. They had not been made by the vehicle currently filming them, and no previous expedition had operated in that specific location with equipment that could have produced that pattern. The broader history of human impact on the deep 23:41 Speaker A ocean floor is real and worth acknowledging. Trollling nets dragged across the seafloor by fishing vessels leave long parallel furrows in the sediment. 23:51 Speaker A Anchors dropped in deep water leave impact craters. Submarine cables, some of which have crossed the Atlantic since the 1860s when the first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid, leave linear marks where they have been dragged or shifted. These human signatures are 24:07 Speaker A documented and recognizable. The 2023 holes did not match any of them particularly well. So, by the end of the initial analysis, scientists were left with three explanations that each partially worked and none of which fully worked. Biology could explain holes, but 24:24 Speaker A not this regularity. Geology could explain fluid escape, but not this scale or pattern. Human activity could explain some seafloor disturbance, but not this specific signature. The honest scientific position, the one Noah's team recorded in their official expedition log, was 24:42 Speaker A that the holes were of unknown origin. That is not a dramatic statement. It is just accurate and it is in its quiet way more interesting than any of the confident explanations that circulated on the internet in the days after the 24:58 Speaker A footage was posted. Because unknown origin means the question is still open. It means the answer is still out there somewhere below 3,000 m of cold Atlantic water in the soft sediment of the mid-Atlantic ridge. To understand why finding that answer is so difficult, it 25:16 Speaker A helps to understand what the environment itself is actually like in more detail. Not just the temperature and the pressure, which we have touched on, but the texture of the place, what the seafloor looks like up close, what scientists typically find there, and why 25:30 Speaker A these holes stood out so sharply against everything else the cameras were seeing. That is what we need to look at next. 25:38 Speaker A The water at 3,000 m depth is not simply cold in the way that a cold room is cold or even in the way that a winter lake is cold. It is a different category of cold. Around 2 to 4° C, just above 25:51 Speaker A freezing, sustained across vast distances and enormous volumes of water with almost no variation. There is no seasonal change down there. No warming in summer, no slight variation with the weather above. The temperature has been essentially the same for a very long 26:09 Speaker A time. Stable in the way that only the deep ocean can be stable, which is to say almost geologically stable. If you placed your hand in that water, the cold would not feel sharp the way ice water does at the surface. The pressure would 26:23 Speaker A be the more immediate sensation. At 3,000 m, the pressure is roughly 300 atmospheres, which means 300 times the pressure you feel sitting in this room right now. Every square cm of surface area is bearing the weight of a column 26:39 Speaker A of water 3 km tall. The human body cannot survive that without protection. The ROV cameras that film the 2023 holes were built to withstand it. Housed in thick titanium and glass pressure vessels specifically engineered for this environment. 26:56 Speaker A But even understanding the numbers does not quite communicate what that pressure means in practice. It means that any airspace collapses instantly. It means that the water itself becomes slightly denser, slightly more compressed than surface water. It means that sound 27:12 Speaker A travels through it differently, that light behaves differently, that chemistry behaves differently. It is not just deep water. It is a different physical environment. And then there is the darkness. Total absolute unbroken darkness. No sunlight reaches the seafloor at 3,000 m. The last traces of 27:32 Speaker A sunlight disappear somewhere around 200 m in what oceanographers call the twilight zone. Below that, nothing. The only light that exists in the deep ocean is bioluminescence produced by living organisms and the artificial lights of research equipment. 27:50 Speaker A When the Okanos explorer's ROV descended to the seafloor and switched on its lights, it was illuminating a place that had been in complete darkness for in some cases millions of years. The sediment the cameras revealed had never been touched by sunlight. Not once in 28:07 Speaker A all the time it had been accumulating there. That sediment is worth spending a moment on because it is central to understanding why the holes are so puzzling. The seafloor sediment in the mid-Atlantic ridge region is mostly composed of two things. Fine carbonate 28:23 Speaker A particles and clay. The carbonate comes largely from the shells and skeletal remains of tiny marine organisms for aminifera and coccalithophores mostly that live in the surface waters far above and slowly sink when they die. 28:39 Speaker A This process is called the biological pump and it has been operating continuously for hundreds of millions of years. 28:46 Speaker A The clay fraction comes from land derived particles carried into the ocean by rivers and wind settling so slowly through the water column that a single particle might take years to reach the bottom. The result is a sediment layer 29:00 Speaker A that is extraordinarily fine grained, water saturated and soft. Not soft the way wet sand is soft, more like a very thick, very cold pudding. It holds its shape when undisturbed, but it deforms easily under any pressure. A finger 29:18 Speaker A pressed into it would sink in. A current passing over it can reshape it. An organism moving through it leaves a clear impression. The deposition rate for this sediment. The rate at which new material accumulates on the seafloor is 29:34 Speaker A almost incomprehensibly slow. In the open Atlantic, far from any river input or volcanic activity, the seafloor accumulates roughly 1 to 3 cm of sediment per thousand years. That is not a typo. 1 to 3 cm per thousand years, 29:52 Speaker A which means that a layer of sediment 10 cm thick might represent several thousand years of accumulation. 29:58 Speaker A The surface of the seafloor that the ROV cameras were filming was in a very real sense an ancient surface. 30:06 Speaker A The top few millimeters might be relatively recent, but just beneath that, the sediment was old, and the holes punched through that surface were punched through something that had been quietly accumulating in total darkness for a very long time. What scientists 30:21 Speaker A typically find when they survey the seafloor in this part of the mid-Atlantic ridge is a mixture of geological and biological features, none of them particularly mysterious. There are pillow lavas, rounded loes of basaltt that form when magma erupts 30:37 Speaker A underwater and the outer surface cools almost instantly into a glassy skin while the interior stays molten and pushes outward. 30:45 Speaker A Pillow lavas are common along the ridge axis where fresh magma reaches the surface most frequently. Further from the axis, the lava fields are older, more fractured, increasingly buried under sediment. There are fault scarps, steep rocky faces where the seafloor has 31:04 Speaker A cracked and one side has dropped relative to the other, exposing cross-sections of the oceanic crust like geological pages. There are hydrothermal features ranging from the dramatic chimney structures of active vent fields to the much subtler diffuse seepage zones where warm water simply percolates 31:25 Speaker A up through the sediment without any visible structure. and there are biological traces. The deep seafloor is not lifeless even in the coldest and darkest regions. It is home to organisms that have adapted to conditions most life on Earth cannot tolerate. Polyat 31:42 Speaker A worms that burrow through the sediment, holtherans that move slowly across the surface ingesting sediment and extracting organic material. Brittle stars, amphipods, fora minifer living in the top few cm of sediment. These organisms leave marks, burrows, trails, feeding traces, fecal mounds. 32:05 Speaker A The seafloor in many regions is covered in a faint texture of biological activity. A kind of slow motion record of life going about its business in the dark. Scientists who study this have a word for it. Lebanon, a German term meaning life traces, which 32:23 Speaker A we will come back to in more detail later. The point for now is that biological traces on the seafloor are normal, expected even. They are part of the background texture of what the cameras see. So when the ROV cameras 32:38 Speaker A found the holes in 2023, the scientists watching the footage were not surprised to see holes in the sediment in principle. Holes happen, burrows happen, traces happen. What surprised them was the specific character of these holes, the regularity of the spacing, the 32:55 Speaker A clean, roughly circular shape of each opening, the raised sediment around the rims, and the fact that the holes were arranged in a line, which is not how biological burrowing activity typically looks. A population of burrowing worms does not produce a straight line of 33:10 Speaker A evenly spaced holes. It produces a scattered field of holes at various depths and angles clustered where the organic content of the sediment is highest, thinning out where it is lower. 33:22 Speaker A The line is what made these holes strange. The regularity is what made them hard to fit into the normal categories. The raised edges deserve particular attention because they carry information about how the holes were formed in soft water saturated sediment 33:38 Speaker A at depth. The way material is displaced around an opening tells you something about the direction and nature of the force that created it. If something collapses from above, the edges tend to slope inward and downward like the walls 33:52 Speaker A of a sinkhole. If something is pushed upward from below, the sediment around the opening is pushed outward and upward, creating a raised rim. If something is inserted from above and then withdrawn, the walls of the hole are compressed outward and the rim may 34:08 Speaker A be slightly elevated from that compression. The 2023 holes had raised rims. That is a meaningful detail. It suggests either upward displacement from below or insertion and withdrawal from above. Both of those are possible, but both of them are also specific. They 34:28 Speaker A narrow the range of explanations rather than expanding it. There is also the question of what was not found around the holes. No tracks leading to them. No organic material visible at the openings. No disturbance of the surrounding sediment beyond the 34:43 Speaker A immediate rim. In shallow water environments, when a ray uses suction feeding to extract buried prey, it leaves a pit with disturbed sediment spreading outward in a fan pattern from the direction of approach. When a worm excavates a burrow, there is often a 35:00 Speaker A mound of excavated material nearby or a faint trail where the worm moved across the surface before entering. 35:07 Speaker A The 20 23 holes had none of that. Just the holes themselves in their lined with their raised rims and nothing else. This cleanliness is part of what makes the feature so difficult to categorize. The absence of associated evidence is itself 35:24 Speaker A a kind of evidence, though it has to be handled carefully. It is possible that any associated traces were erased by a bottom current before the ROV arrived. 35:35 Speaker A It is possible that the organism responsible never crossed the sediment surface at all, approaching only from within the sediment itself. It is possible that the geological process responsible left no byproduct at the surface. Absence of evidence is not 35:51 Speaker A evidence of absence as the saying goes and it applies here. But the cleanness of the holes is still worth noting because it means that whatever explanation eventually proves correct will need to account for a feature that arrived without leaving a visible 36:05 Speaker A signature of its own arrival. The environment itself compounds all of this. Investigating these holes is not like going back to look at a strange rock formation in a national park. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is not accessible by any ordinary means. Getting a research 36:22 Speaker A vessel to the site requires weeks of planning, significant funding, and a window in the ship's schedule. The dive itself takes hours just to descend and ascend. Time on the seafloor is precious and expensive, and the sediment, as soft 36:39 Speaker A and easily disturbed as it is, does not necessarily preserve features for long. a mild bottom current, an organism passing through, a small seismic tremor from the ridge itself. Any of these could slump the sediment walls of the holes and erase them entirely. 36:57 Speaker A By the time a follow-up expedition could be mounted, the holes might simply be gone. Not filled in dramatically, just gradually smoothed over. The way a footprint in wet sand eventually disappears as the water moves across it. 37:11 Speaker A There is something quietly humbling about that. The holes were found, filmed, and then the ship moved on. 37:19 Speaker A Because that is how ocean exploration works. You cover as much ground as you can in the time you have, and you record what you see, and you hope that the record is enough to work with later. The Okanos explorer was not on a mission 37:32 Speaker A specifically to study holes in sediment. It was conducting a broader survey of the Mid-Atlantic ridge. The holes were found incidentally the way most deep sea discoveries are found by accident while looking for something else or simply looking. And once found and filmed, the 37:50 Speaker A expedition continued. The ROV came back to the surface. The ship moved on. The holes stayed where they were, 3,000 m down in the dark, in the cold, with no one watching them. That is the physical reality of the place where these holes 38:06 Speaker A exist. Not a dramatic abyss in the cinematic sense, but a specific environment with specific properties, soft sediment and crushing pressure and total darkness and extraordinary slowness that makes the holes both possible and puzzling. 38:24 Speaker A Understanding that environment is what allows you to understand why the biological hypothesis, for all its appeal, runs into specific problems when applied to these specific holes. Because biology in this environment is real and active, but it follows patterns. And the 38:40 Speaker A patterns here do not quite fit. That is where the investigation really begins to get interesting. Because the biological world of the deep seafloor is stranger and more varied than most people realize. And the question of whether something living made these holes is not 38:56 Speaker A simple to answer even for scientists who study deep sea organisms for a living. So let us talk about biology because the biological explanation is the first place most scientists go when they see holes in seafloor sediment and for good 39:12 Speaker A reason. The deep ocean is not empty. It is not the barren lifeless plane that people sometimes imagine when they think about the bottom of the sea. It is crowded in its own quiet way with organisms that have adapted to 39:27 Speaker A conditions that would kill almost anything living at the surface. And many of those organisms burrow. They have been burrowing into seafloor sediment for hundreds of millions of years. The traces they leave behind, the holes and tunnels and compression marks are so 39:42 Speaker A common that geologists who study ancient rock formations use them as evidence of past life. So when the Okanos explorer cameras showed a line of holes in sediment at 3,000 m, the immediate instinct of many scientists watching was to ask, "What animal made those?" It is 40:00 Speaker A a reasonable question. There are quite a few candidates in the deep sea biological catalog. Polycape worms are one of the most abundant and diverse groups of animals on the deep sea floor. 40:12 Speaker A There are thousands of species ranging from a few millimeters to over a meter in length and many of them are borrowers. They excavate tubes in the sediment lining them with mucus or with particles of sediment cemented together and they live inside those tubes 40:30 Speaker A extending their feeding appendages into the water above or filtering organic particles from the sediment around them. 40:37 Speaker A The holes they leave at the sediment surface are real and common, but polycape burrow openings tend to be small, often only a centimeter or two across, and they usually accompanied by a slight mound of excavated material nearby or by a faint mucus lining 40:53 Speaker A visible at the opening. They also tend to cluster in areas of high organic content, which means their burrows appear in groups but not in lines and the spacing between them is irregular, governed by the distribution of food and 41:07 Speaker A the behavior of individual worms rather than by any geometric principle. Echurine worms, sometimes called spoon worms, are another burrowing group found in deep sea sediments. They are softbodied and unsegmented, and they create U-shaped burrows with two openings at the surface. The openings 41:25 Speaker A can be several cm across, which puts them in the right size range. But again, the two openings of a U-shaped burrow are connected, not independent, and the spacing between them reflects the length of the worm's body, not a repeating 41:40 Speaker A geometric pattern across several meters of seafloor. Holyurans, which most people know as sea cucumbers, are extremely common in the deep ocean. Some species are burers, pushing themselves into the sediment and processing it for organic material as they go. They are slowm moving and leave 41:59 Speaker A distinctive trails at the surface, long furrows where their bodies have pushed through the top layer of sediment. A few species create openings in the sediment surface as part of their feeding behavior. But holyan traces are generally elongated and messy, 42:16 Speaker A reflecting the animals movement through the sediment rather than a fixed excavation point. They do not typically leave clean circular evenly spaced holes. Burrowing crustations are also present in deep sea environments, including various amphipods and isopods, as well as some species of shrimp that 42:36 Speaker A excavate burrows in softer substrates. Their burrows can be circular and relatively clean at the opening, and some species are known to create clusters of burrows in the same area, but crustation burrows in the deep sea are usually associated with visible 42:53 Speaker A tracks or disturbances on the surrounding sediment surface because these animals have to move across the surface to find their burrowing sights, and their legs leave impressions in the soft sediment as they do. None of these organisms taken individually produces a 43:09 Speaker A pattern that matches the 2023 holes precisely. That does not mean biology is ruled out. It means that if a biological organism is responsible, it is either an unusual behavior from a known species or it is something less well understood. 43:25 Speaker A One organism that came up in discussions after the footage was released is the xeno fire. These are genuinely remarkable creatures and they deserve a moment of attention. Xeno fires are giant single-sellled organisms technically protests rather than animals found in deep sea environments including 43:44 Speaker A the Hadal zone of the Mariana Trench. The word giant here is not an exaggeration. Some species grow to over 20 cm across, making them among the largest single-sellled organisms on Earth. They build a structure called a test which is a kind of external 44:01 Speaker A skeleton made from sediment particles and organic material cemented together and they live inside it. Some species of xenophor are associated with depressions or disturbances in the sediment surface. 44:15 Speaker A Their tests are sometimes mistaken for sponges or other cesile animals when seen on camera. A few researchers suggested that xenophas or their empty tests could potentially account for some of the hole-like features seen on deep seafloor footage. But xenopha traces not 44:33 Speaker A typically linear or evenly spaced and their structures sit on top of the sediment rather than penetrating into it. The match is imperfect. 44:42 Speaker A What made the 2023 holes specifically difficult to assign to any known biological source was not just the absence of a perfect candidate organism. 44:52 Speaker A It was the combination of features that would need to be explained together. The spacing was regular. Not approximately regular, not loosely regular, but regular in a way that suggested some kind of repeating mechanism. The holes were in a line. The sediment rims were 45:08 Speaker A raised and there was nothing else around them. No tracks, no mounds, no associated material of any kind. For a biological explanation to work, you would need an organism that burrows at regular intervals along a straight path, leaves clean circular openings of 45:24 Speaker A consistent size, displaces sediment outward rather than piling it up nearby, and moves without leaving any surface trace of its own movement between burrow sites. That is a very specific set of behaviors and no known deep sea organism has been documented doing all of them 45:42 Speaker A together. This is where the 2004 discovery becomes relevant and it is worth pausing on it for a moment because it changes the framing of the question considerably. 45:53 Speaker A In 2004, during an earlier Noah expedition along the Mid-Atlantic ridge, ROV cameras captured what appeared to be a similar set of holes in the seafloor sediment in roughly the same region. The footage was noted at the time, discussed 46:09 Speaker A among the scientists on board and filed away without a definitive explanation. It did not receive the same public attention that the 2023 footage would, partly because social media and online science communication were much less developed in 2004, and partly because 46:26 Speaker A the 2004 expedition did not make the footage publicly available in the same way. But the record exists. Scientists who reviewed the 2023 footage and went back through older expedition logs found it. The fact that similar holes had been 46:43 Speaker A documented in the same area nearly 20 years earlier is significant for several reasons. First, it suggests that whatever process or organism is responsible is not a one-time anomaly. 46:56 Speaker A It has happened at least twice in the same general location separated by nearly two decades. That argues against a random or accidental cause. Second, it means the feature is persistent in some sense. Not necessarily that the same holes persist over time, but that the 47:14 Speaker A conditions that produce them persist. Whatever makes these holes, it keeps making them or it made them again. 47:21 Speaker A Third, it shifts the question from why did this happen once to what is the ongoing mechanism that produces this kind of feature in this part of the ridge? For the biological hypothesis, the 2004 comparison is a double-edged piece of evidence. On one hand, it 47:38 Speaker A supports the idea that a biological organisms responsible because organisms live in environments and return to them, and a species that burrows in a particular area of the seafloor might produce similar features across different years. On the other hand, it 47:53 Speaker A raises the question of why no organism has ever been observed in or near these holes during any of the ROV dives. The Okanos Explorer's cameras are good. The Deep Discoverer R OV can resolve features a few centimeters across at 48:10 Speaker A close range. If a worm or crustation or any other visible organism were regularly creating holes of this kind in this area, there is a reasonable chance that something would have been caught on camera by now, either in the act of 48:23 Speaker A burrowing or simply living near the holes. The absence of any observed organism is not proof that no organism is responsible, but it is a data point that the biological hypothesis has to account for. Some researchers have suggested the possibility of a very 48:39 Speaker A small organism, something below the resolution of the ROV cameras that works collectively. There are known examples of colonial or aggregating organisms in the deep sea that produce structures larger than any individual member. For minifera, for instance, are tiny 48:55 Speaker A single-sellled organisms that build shells and can aggregate in the sediment in large numbers, altering its structure in ways that are visible at the surface. 49:05 Speaker A If a colony of very small organisms were excavating material from a point in the sediment, working together without any individual being large enough to see clearly on camera, they might produce a hole that looks clean and organism free 49:19 Speaker A from above. This is speculative. There is no documented example of colonial microorganisms producing this kind of evenly spaced linearly arranged burrowing pattern. 49:32 Speaker A But it is the kind of hypothesis that is difficult to rule out without direct sediment sampling from inside the holes themselves which has not yet been done. 49:42 Speaker A There is also the matter of what the holes might be for if they are biological. 49:46 Speaker A Burrowing in the deep sea serves several purposes. Some organisms burrow to find food trapped in the sediment. Some burrow to escape predators or to create a stable home environment. Some burrow as part of reproduction. 50:03 Speaker A The function of a burrow shapes its physical characteristics. A feeding burrow tends to be temporary and may not have a clean opening because the organism is actively disturbing the sediment around it. A residential burrow tends to be more permanent and better 50:19 Speaker A maintained with a cleaner opening because the organism returns to it repeatedly and keeps it clear. If the 2023 holes are residential burrows, you would expect to find an organism inside them, or at least signs of regular use. 50:34 Speaker A If they are feeding excavations, you would expect to find disturbed sediment inside and around them. Neither of these was clearly observed. 50:43 Speaker A The honest summary of the biological hypothesis is this. Biology is the most plausible broad category of explanation. 50:51 Speaker A Because organisms make holes in seafloor sediment all the time and the deep mid-Atlantic ridge is a biologically active environment. But the specific combination of features in the 2023 holes, the regularity, the linearity, the clean raised rims, the absence of 51:08 Speaker A associated traces does not fit neatly with any documented burrowing behavior from any known deep sea species. That gap could be filled by a species that has not yet been observed in this behavior or by an unusual behavioral mode of a known species or by something 51:25 Speaker A else entirely. The gap is real and it is what keeps the question open. What makes this genuinely interesting rather than just frustrating is that the deep ocean's biological catalog is far from complete. 51:40 Speaker A New species are described from deep sea expeditions every year. Behaviors that have never been documented are captured on ROV footage regularly. The ocean floor is not a finished book. It is more like a library where most of the shelves 51:54 Speaker A have never been reached. So, the possibility that the organism responsible for these holes is simply one that has not been wellstudied or has never been filmed in the act of burrowing is not a desperate fallback. 52:07 Speaker A It is a realistic scientific possibility. The deep sea biological community is small. The ocean is large and the intersection of the right research vessel with the right patch of seafloor at the right moment is a rare event. But biology is only one of the 52:22 Speaker A hypotheses that scientists considered when the footage was released. And as compelling as it is as a starting point, the geological world of the mid-Atlantic ridge offers its own set of possible explanations. rooted not in living organisms but in the slow enormous 52:40 Speaker A forces that are pulling the ocean floor apart beneath those holes one centimeter at a time year after year in the dark. 52:49 Speaker A The geological world of the mid-Atlantic ridge is not a quiet place. Even though it sits in total darkness under kilometers of water, it is one of the most internally active environments on the planet, constantly venting heat, releasing gases, and reshaping its own 53:06 Speaker A surface through processes that operate on time scales ranging from seconds to millions of years. So when scientists looked at those small evenly spaced holes in the seafloor sediment and began asking what could have made them, the geological column of explanations was 53:23 Speaker A not a short one. The earth itself has many ways of punching holes in soft sediment. The question is whether any of those ways match what the volcano's explorers came actually captured. The most well-known geological process that creates holes in the deep sea floor is 53:40 Speaker A something called a pockm mark. Pock marks are depressions formed when pressurized fluid or gas escapes from below the sediment, pushing upward through the soft material and blowing a craterlike opening at the surface. 53:53 Speaker A They're found in many parts of the world's oceans, including the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and parts of the Norwegian continental shelf, and they have been studied fairly extensively since the 1970s. 54:06 Speaker A In some regions, fields of pockm marks cover thousands of square kilometers of seafloor. Each one a record of where gas or fluid once escaped in a burst. They are caused by methane released from decomposing organic material buried in 54:19 Speaker A the sediment, by brine seeping upward from salt deposits, or by hydrothermal fluids migrating through cracks in the rock below. 54:29 Speaker A Pockmarks are in their way a reasonable first thought when you see a hole in the seafloor. The mechanism is straightforward. Pressure builds beneath the sediment. The overlying material cannot hold it and the gas or fluid vents upward, leaving a depression 54:45 Speaker A behind. But pock marks have a characteristic size and shape that makes them fairly easy to recognize. They tend to be large. A typical pock mark is anywhere from a few meters to tens of meters in diameter. Some are hundreds of 55:00 Speaker A meters wide. Their edges are not raised in the way the 2023 holes edges were. 55:05 Speaker A Instead, pockmark walls tend to slope inward forming a bowl or funnel shape because the escaping gas or fluid carries sediment upward and disperses it rather than pushing it neatly to the sides. And pock marks are usually associated with detectable geochemical 55:23 Speaker A signatures. Elevated methane concentrations in the water above them or visible bacterial mats growing on the sediment surface fed by the chemical energy of the seeping fluids. The 2023 holes match almost none of these characteristics. They are centime scale, 55:42 Speaker A not meter scale. Their edges are raised outward, not sloped inward. No bacterial mats were observed around them. No elevated gas concentrations were reported in the water column above them. 55:55 Speaker A The Okenos Explorer carries instruments capable of detecting methane anomalies in the water and no such anomaly was noted in the dive logs for that section of the ridge. So the classic pockmark explanation while geologically sensible in a general sense does not fit the 56:12 Speaker A specific evidence from this site. That said, the geological hypothesis does not rest entirely on pockm marks. There is a more subtle possibility worth considering, which is whether the volcanic activity of the mid-Atlantic ridge itself could produce very small, 56:27 Speaker A very localized fluid escape features that differ from classical pocks in scale and mechanism. The ridge is not uniformly active. It has areas of intense hydrothermal venting, areas of recent lava flows, and areas that appear relatively quesuscent at the surface, 56:44 Speaker A but may still be experiencing low-level fluid migration through the fractured bassel beneath the sediment. In areas like this, volcanic gases, primarily carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, can seep upward through the rock and into the overlying sediment layer. If that 57:03 Speaker A seepage is focused along a fracture or a crack, the gas might follow a linear path and exit at multiple points along the crack's trace at the sediment surface. This is actually an intriguing geometric match for what was observed. 57:16 Speaker A The holes in the 2023 footage were arranged in a roughly linear pattern. A subsurface fracture running in a straight line beneath the sediment could in theory produce a series of exit points along that line spaced at intervals determined by the local 57:33 Speaker A permeability of the sediment and the pressure of the ascending fluid. The raised sediment edges could potentially be explained by the upward pressure of escaping gas compressing the sediment walls of each exit point as it pushes through. This is speculative and no 57:49 Speaker A subsurface fracture has been directly imaged at that specific location, but the geometry is at least consistent. 57:57 Speaker A The Mid-Atlantic Ridge near the Azors is not a geologically inactive stretch of the ridge. Within a few hundred km of where the 2023 holes were filmed, there are two of the most wellstudied hydrothermal vent fields in the Atlantic. Lucky Strike, discovered in 58:14 Speaker A 1992, sits on the ridge about 370 km south of the Azors at a depth of around 1,700 m. It is one of the largest known hydrothermal vent fields in the Atlantic, hosting dozens of active black smoke vents and supporting dense 58:33 Speaker A communities of muscles, shrimp, and tubeworms. Rainbow discovered in 1997 sits further south at around 2,300 m depth and is known for producing unusually ironrich and hydrogenrich hydrothermal fluids. 58:50 Speaker A The kind that support chemosynthetic life even without the sulfur based chemistry typical of most vent fields. 58:57 Speaker A Both of these sites are expressions of the intense heat and fluid activity that characterizes this section of the ridge. 59:03 Speaker A They are the dramatic visible end of a spectrum of geological activity that also includes subtler lower temperature fluid migration across much wider areas of the seafloor. The question is whether that subtler fluid activity could produce cime scale holes with raised 59:22 Speaker A edges and linear spacing. And the honest answer from the geological side is possibly. But it would be a very unusual expression of a known process and one that has not been documented in quite this form before. The scale mismatch is 59:39 Speaker A the central problem. Gas seepage features in the geological literature range from large pockm marks down to what are sometimes called micro seeps which can produce smalltimes barely visible disturbances in sediment. But even micro seeps in the published record 59:56 Speaker A tend to be irregular in their spacing and do not typically produce the clean round raised rim holes that the Okanos explorer filmed. The regularity is what geology struggles to explain. Natural fluid escape tends to follow the path of 60:11 Speaker A least resistance, which means it tends to be somewhat irregular, finding weak points in the sediment rather than spacing itself evenly along a line. 60:21 Speaker A There is one other geological mechanism worth mentioning which is sediment collapse over a subsurface void. If a small cavity forms in the rock or compacted sediment beneath the surface layer and the overlying soft sediment is not strong enough to bridge the gap, it 60:37 Speaker A can collapse downward into the void creating a pit at the surface. This process is well known in terrestrial geology where it produces sink holes and it has been documented on the seafloor in a limited number of cases usually in 60:51 Speaker A carbonetrich environments where the underlying rock is susceptible to dissolution. The mid-Atlantic ridge is primarily a bazaltic environment, not a carbonate one, which makes this mechanism less applicable here. And again, a collapse pit would tend to have inward sloping edges, not raised outward 61:10 Speaker A pushing ones. The sediment displacement in the 2023 holes points away from collapse and toward either extraction from above or pressure from below. 61:22 Speaker A What makes the geological hypothesis both interesting and frustrating is that the mid-Atlantic ridge is a place where the boundary between geological and geochemical and biological processes is genuinely blurry. 61:38 Speaker A Hydrothermal vents are geological features, but they support entire ecosystems. Methane seeps are geological in origin, but they are often mediated by microbial communities that consume the methane and produce the bacterial mats that scientists use as indicators of seepage. 61:57 Speaker A The deep sea floor is not neatly divided into a biological layer and a geological layer. They interpenetrate. 62:04 Speaker A So when scientists try to decide whether the 2023 holes are geological or biological, they are working with a distinction that the ocean floor itself does not always respect. It is worth pausing for a moment on what the geological hypothesis would mean if it 62:20 Speaker A were correct or at least partially correct. If micro seepage of volcanic gas along a ridge fracture is producing these holes, then they are a surface expression of processes happening in the rock tens or hundreds of meters below. 62:33 Speaker A They would be a kind of window, very small, very subtle, into the internal plumbing of the ridge. That would actually be scientifically valuable, not just as a curiosity, but as a potential monitoring tool. Patterns of micro seepage can change before larger 62:49 Speaker A volcanic events as pressure builds in the subsurface system. If these holes are geological, and if they can be mapped and tracked over time, they might tell scientists something about the state of the ridg's internal activity. 63:03 Speaker A in ways that are currently very hard to measure. That is not a reason to conclude they are geological. It is just a reminder that even if the explanation turns out to be relatively mundane by deep sea standards, the implications might still 63:18 Speaker A be interesting. But the scale problem keeps coming back. 5 to 10 cm is a very small feature for a geological process to produce with such regularity. 63:31 Speaker A The forces operating inside the mid-Atlantic ridge are enormous. The plate separation alone, that slow pull of 2.5 cm per year, involve stresses measured across hundreds of kilome of rock. The hydrothermal systems at Lucky Strike and Rainbow involve fluid 63:49 Speaker A temperatures of hundreds of degrees and pressures that would be lethal at the surface. These are not delicate, precise mechanisms. They are vast, slow, powerful ones. The idea that such a system would express itself at the seafloor surface as a series of neat 64:06 Speaker A centime scale holes evenly spaced with clean raised rims require some fairly specific conditions to be in place. 64:16 Speaker A Conditions that have not yet been identified or confirmed at this site. This is where the geological hypothesis lands. At least for now, it is not impossible. The ridge is active. Fluids do migrate through the sediment in this region. And the linear arrangement of 64:32 Speaker A the holes is at least geometrically consistent with a subsurface fracture. But the specific combination of small scale, regular spacing, and outward raised sediment edges does not match any well doumented geological process. Like the biological hypothesis, it can explain holes in principle, but it 64:53 Speaker A struggles with these holes in particular. Scientists working on deep sea geology are used to this kind of situation where a feature is clearly real, clearly documented, and clearly does not fit neatly into the existing catalog of known processes. 65:10 Speaker A The deep ocean has a long history of producing things that required new categories. The discovery of hydrothermal vents in 1977 required not just a new geological category, but an entirely new biological one. The Lost City vent field found in 65:28 Speaker A 2000 on the Mid-Atlantic ridge about 900 km west of the Azors produced carbonate chimneys and warm alkaline fluids through a process called serpentinization, a chemical reaction between seawater and the mantle rock below. and it did not fit the existing model of how 65:48 Speaker A hydrothermal vents were supposed to work. Lost City required a new framework. It is possible, though far from certain, that whatever is making these holes will eventually require one, too. For now, the geological column of explanations offers real possibilities 66:05 Speaker A and real problems in roughly equal measure. The ridge is active enough and the fluid dynamics of the region complex enough that a geological origin cannot be dismissed. 66:18 Speaker A But the evidence does not yet support it clearly and the specific characteristics of the holes point in directions that geology has trouble following all the way to a satisfying answer. The question remains open, sitting on the seafloor in 66:32 Speaker A the dark 3 km down, waiting for someone to look more carefully. And the third broad category of explanation, the one involving not organisms and not the earth's interior, but human activity and human equipment, brings its own set of 66:47 Speaker A possibilities and its own set of problems, and it is worth examining with the same careful attention because the deep ocean is not as untouched by human presence as it might seem. The idea that human beings might be responsible for 67:01 Speaker A the holes is on the surface a reasonable one to consider. The deep ocean feels remote and untouched, and in many ways it is, but human activity has been reaching into the deep Atlantic for longer than most people realize. 67:16 Speaker A The first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1858, though it failed within weeks. A more durable one followed in 1866, running from Valencia Island in Ireland to Hart's content in Newfoundland, crossing some of the deepest water in the 67:33 Speaker A Atlantic and resting in places on the very sediment we are talking about. Since then, the Atlantic has accumulated a remarkable amount of submarine infrastructure. There are currently dozens of active fiber optic cable systems crossing the Atlantic carrying the internet traffic, financial data, 67:52 Speaker A and phone calls that pass between continents every second of every day. Some of these cables run close to or across the mid-Atlantic ridge. The seafloor in this region is not entirely pristine, so the question is fair. Could the holes have been made by something 68:08 Speaker A human? A cable laying ship dragging a plow through the sediment? a piece of equipment that touched the bottom unexpectedly. A previous scientific instrument that left marks before the 2023 Okanos expedition arrived. Noah's scientists considered this carefully and their reasoning for largely dismissing 68:28 Speaker A it is worth walking through in some detail because it is not a dismissal based on assumption. It is based on what the footage actually shows and what the operational records of the expedition confirm. The holes were discovered by 68:42 Speaker A the ROV cameras as the vehicle was traveling along the seafloor and encountered them. They were already there. The ROV had not yet passed over that section of the seafloor and no sampling tools had been deployed in that area during the dive. The expedition's 68:57 Speaker A own equipment could not have made them, at least not during that dive. That much is straightforward. The more complicated question is whether some previous expedition or piece of infrastructure could have been responsible. And here the evidence becomes harder to trace 69:13 Speaker A with certainty because the historical record of what has physically touched the deep Atlantic seafloor is extensive but not complete. Cable laying operations, for example, do leave marks. 69:26 Speaker A A cable plow dragged along the bottom to bury a fiber optic line can produce a continuous furrow in the sediment, sometimes meters wide, sometimes accompanied by mounding on either side where the sediment was displaced. These marks have been documented in surveys of 69:43 Speaker A the seafloor near cable routts, and they can persist for years because the deep sea environment is so still that disturbances heal slowly. But a cable plow produces a continuous trench, not a series of discrete, evenly spaced holes. 69:59 Speaker A The morphology is completely different. Trollling is another form of human disturbance worth mentioning, though it is more relevant to shallower water. 70:08 Speaker A Bottom trolling, where a weighted net is dragged along the seafloor to catch fish, has caused significant damage to shallow and mid-depth marine ecosystems around the world. The marks left by troll doors, the heavy metal frames that hold the net open, have been documented 70:25 Speaker A at depths down to around 1,500 m in some regions. But 2,500 to 3,000 m is generally beyond the depth where commercial trolling operates. And the marks left by troll doors are typically long paired grooves, not small circular holes. Again, the 70:45 Speaker A morphology does not match. Anchors are another possibility that gets raised in discussions like this, and it is worth addressing briefly. A ship's anchor dropped in deep water would leave a substantial impact crater, not a small hole, and anchoring in 3,000 m of water, 71:04 Speaker A is not something ships do routinely, because you would need an absurd length of chain to reach the bottom, and the anchor would not hold usefully in soft sediment anyway. Anchoring at that depth is essentially not a practical operation 71:18 Speaker A for any vessel. What about scientific equipment specifically? Deep sea research involves deploying a variety of instruments that do touch the seafloor. 71:29 Speaker A Sediment corers are dropped from ships and driven into the bottom by their own weight to extract columns of sediment for analysis. When they are retrieved, they leave a cylindrical hole in the seafloor. A sediment cora hole could in 71:43 Speaker A principle look somewhat like the holes in the footage, but corora holes are typically larger around 10 to 15 cm in diameter or more depending on the corora type and they are deployed individually not in a series of evenly spaced 71:59 Speaker A positions along a line. You would have to imagine a scenario where someone methodically corded the seafloor at regular intervals along a straight path and then left without any record of having done so. That is not how scientific cing expeditions work. 72:16 Speaker A They're carefully documented. The locations of every core are recorded and the data is eventually published or archived. There is also the question of ROV thrusters. When a remotely operated vehicle hovers near the seafloor, its thrusters generate downward jets of 72:33 Speaker A water that can disturb the sediment. This is a well-known problem in deep sea research, and scientists are careful to approach sensitive sites slowly and to position the ROV at a height that minimizes this effect. Thruster wash can create irregular scour marks in soft 72:51 Speaker A sediment, small pits and ripples where the water jet hits the bottom. But thruster disturbance tends to produce diffuse irregular patterns, not cleaned edge circular holes with raised rims. 73:04 Speaker A The physics of a water jet hitting soft sediment at depth does not produce that kind of result. The jet disperses, it scour. It creates turbulence. It does not punch a neat hole and push the edges outward in a symmetrical ring. 73:20 Speaker A The sediment displacement pattern, those slightly raised rims around each hole, is actually one of the more diagnostic features of the 2023 discovery. And it is one of the reasons the equipment hypothesis struggles. 73:34 Speaker A When something is inserted into soft water saturated sediment from above and then withdrawn, it tends to leave a hole with slightly compressed walls and a small raised collar at the surface where the sediment was pushed up and outward 73:47 Speaker A during insertion. This is consistent with say a feeding appendage being pushed into the sediment and pulled back out. It is also broadly consistent with something pushing upward from below which would produce a similar outward displacement. What it is not 74:03 Speaker A particularly consistent with is the kind of disturbance that equipment makes. Equipment dragging along the bottom tends to push sediment to the sides in a way that creates ridges parallel to the direction of travel, not symmetrical raised rims around individual circular 74:19 Speaker A openings. Equipment impacting the bottom tends to create craters, not clean holes with tidy edges. None of this is to say that a humanmade origin is physically impossible. It is to say that the specific characteristics of the holes, their size, their spacing, their 74:36 Speaker A arrangement, and particularly the raised sediment rims do not match the signatures left by any documented piece of equipment or human activity that scientists have been able to identify. 74:48 Speaker A The equipment hypothesis is not ruled out by some single decisive piece of evidence. It is undermined by the accumulating mismatch between what equipment does to sediment and what these holes look like. It is worth pausing to appreciate how much of the 75:03 Speaker A deep seafloor has actually been disturbed by human activity, even if these particular holes were not caused by it. 75:11 Speaker A A 2021 study published in the journal Science of the Total Environment estimated that bottom trolling disturbs an area of seafloor roughly equivalent to the entire land surface of South America every year. Though the vast majority of this is in shallower water, 75:29 Speaker A the deep ocean below 2,000 m is less affected by trolling but more affected by other kinds of disturbance. Submarine cables, as mentioned, have been crossing the Atlantic for over 150 years. The first transatlantic cable route passed through some of the same general region 75:47 Speaker A of the North Atlantic where the Mid-Atlantic ridge runs. Abandoned cables, failed cables, cables that were cut and never retrieved. These are all lying on the seafloor somewhere. The Deep Atlantic is not a museum exhibit behind glass. It is a working 76:03 Speaker A environment that has been touched, crossed, and occasionally damaged by human activity for a very long time. And yet, for all of that, the 2023 holes do not fit neatly into the catalog of humanmade disturbances. 76:18 Speaker A The scientists who reviewed the footage were not naive about the possibility of equipment involvement. Noah's deep sea exploration teams are experienced enough to know what their own tools leave behind and experienced enough to know what other kinds of human activity look 76:33 Speaker A like on the seafloor. Their assessment that the holes were of unknown origin was not a failure of investigation. 76:42 Speaker A It was an honest statement that the features did not match any known template, humanmade or otherwise. There is something a little quietly unsettling about that if you let yourself sit with it. Not unsettling in a frightening way, but in the way that a gap in a familiar 76:57 Speaker A map can be unsettling. The deep ocean is the largest environment on Earth, and humanity has been interacting with it in various ways for centuries. We have laid cables across it, fished its edges, dropped instruments into it, and sent 77:12 Speaker A robots to photograph it. And still something is making small evenly spaced holes in the sediment of the mid-Atlantic ridge. And we cannot say with confidence what it is. That is a genuinely strange position to be in. It is also in a practical sense a position 77:31 Speaker A that is very difficult to get out of quickly. The tools available for investigating the deep sea floor have real limitations and the humanmade hypothesis illustrates some of them clearly. To definitively rule out a previous human disturbance, you would 77:47 Speaker A ideally want a comprehensive record of every piece of equipment that has ever touched the seafloor in that specific area, every cable laying operation, every scientific expedition, every cing event. That record does not fully exist. 78:04 Speaker A Some of it is in published scientific literature. Some of it is in shipping and cable company records that are not publicly accessible. Some of it is simply not recorded anywhere because not every operation that touches the deep ocean floor is carefully documented. The 78:20 Speaker A absence of a known cause is not the same as proof of an unknown one. It just means the question stays open longer. 78:28 Speaker A What is interesting about the humanmade hypothesis and perhaps the reason it lingers even after the evidence against it has been laid out is that it represents a kind of flaw for our uncertainty. If the holes were made by 78:42 Speaker A equipment, they are unusual but ultimately explicable within the framework of things we already know. 78:47 Speaker A They would be a documentation failure, not a knowledge failure. The world would be the same shape it was before. The reason scientists and interested observers keep returning to the biological and geological possibilities, even though those also have serious 79:02 Speaker A problems, is that those explanations, if correct, would tell us something genuinely new. a previously undocumented organism with a very regular feeding or burrowing behavior. A previously undocumented microscale expression of geological activity along the ridge. 79:19 Speaker A Either of those would expand the map. Equipment marks would just fill in a blank with something already familiar. 79:26 Speaker A That distinction matters, not because it should bias the investigation toward more exciting conclusions, but because it clarifies what is actually at stake in the question. Science is not supposed to prefer interesting answers over boring ones. The goal is accurate 79:42 Speaker A answers. But the reason these holes attracted so much attention from nowhere scientists posting the footage publicly to science journalists covering the story and readers sharing it widely is that the boring answer does not seem to fit and the non- boring answers, the ones that 79:58 Speaker A would require new thinking, are still in play. That is a genuinely unusual situation and it is worth acknowledging it as such. The human-made hypothesis then arrives at roughly the same destination as the biological and geological ones. It is possible in a 80:15 Speaker A general sense. It is poorly supported by the specific evidence. It cannot be entirely ruled out because the historical record of human activity in the deep Atlantic is incomplete and it leaves the question of what actually made these holes as open as it was 80:29 Speaker A before. three broad categories of explanation, each with real arguments in its favor, each running into the same wall of specific features that do not quite fit. The holes are small, regular, lined up in a row, edged with raised 80:45 Speaker A sediment, found at 3,000 m in an environment that is difficult to reach and harder to watch. They were there in 2023. 80:55 Speaker A They were there in essentially the same form when a previous expedition passed through the same general region back in 2004. 81:03 Speaker A Whatever is making them has apparently been making them for at least 20 years and possibly much longer and has so far declined to be caught in the act. That long history, the fact that this is not a single anomalous observation, but a 81:18 Speaker A repeated pattern across nearly two decades of deep sea exploration in the area is actually one of the more significant details in the whole story. 81:27 Speaker A And it opens up a wider question. If these holes have been appearing in the same region for that long, and if similar unexplained features have been documented in other parts of the deep ocean as well, then the 2023 discovery 81:40 Speaker A is not really an isolated mystery. It is one piece of something larger, a pattern of unexplained seafloor features that goes back further and spreads wider than any single expedition can capture. And understanding that broader context, the history of similar findings in other 81:59 Speaker A places and other times is where the story goes next. The 2004 expedition is worth pausing on for a moment because it tends to get overshadowed by the 2023 footage, which was sharper, more widely shared, and arrived in a media 82:15 Speaker A environment that could carry it much further much faster. But the 2004 discovery is in some ways the more quietly striking detail. It means that when the Okanos explorers cameras captured those holes 19 years later, scientists were not looking at something 82:31 Speaker A entirely new. They were looking at something they had seen before and had not yet explained. That gap, nearly two decades of not knowing, is itself a piece of information. It tells you something about how slowly deep sea mysteries tend to resolve and about how 82:48 Speaker A rarely the ocean floor gives you a second look at the same thing. The 2004 sighting came during an earlier Noah expedition along the same general stretch of the Mid-Atlantic ridge in the waters near the Azors. The holes observed then were similar in character, 83:05 Speaker A small, roughly circular, arranged with a regularity that stood out against the otherwise undisturbed sediment. They attracted attention among the scientists who saw them, were noted in expedition logs, and were then essentially filed away under the broad and honest category 83:21 Speaker A of things we do not yet understand. No follow-up expedition was organized specifically to investigate them. The holes did not become a major story at the time, partly because the footage was not widely distributed and partly because the scientific community, while 83:36 Speaker A curious, did not have an obvious next step to offer. They were a puzzle without an immediately available tool for solving it. What is interesting about that 19-year gap is that it was not a gap of inattention. 83:52 Speaker A Noah and other institutions continued exploring the mid-Atlantic ridge throughout that period. The Lucky Strike vent field, already known since 1992, received continued study. The Lost City carbonet field discovered in 2000 became one of the most intensively studied hydrothermal sites in the world. Various 84:13 Speaker A mapping campaigns passed through the region. And yet the holes were not widely documented again until 2023, which could mean several things. It could mean the holes are intermittent, appearing and disappearing with some regularity that we have not yet 84:29 Speaker A characterized. It could mean they are common but small enough to be missed by cameras. not specifically looking for them. Or it could mean the 2023 ROV happened to pass over a site where the holes were particularly fresh and clear, 84:42 Speaker A and that on other dives they were present, but less obvious. The sediment on the ridge floor is soft enough that a hole could slump and partially fill within days or weeks, leaving only a faint depression rather than the clean 84:54 Speaker A edge feature the cameras captured. Any of those explanations is plausible. None of them is confirmed. 85:01 Speaker A What the 2004 and 2023 sightings share beyond the physical appearance of the holes is the same absence of an observed cause. No organism was seen creating them. No geological process was caught in the act. They were simply there 85:17 Speaker A already formed, already waiting. That is a frustrating kind of evidence to work with because it tells you the result without telling you the mechanism. It is a little like arriving at a campsite and finding a fire already burning with no 85:30 Speaker A one around. You can describe the fire in detail. You can measure its temperature and examine the wood it is consuming. 85:37 Speaker A But without watching it being lit, you are working backward from the effect. And the deeper you dig into the evidence, the more possible causes you can find and the harder it becomes to choose between them. 85:49 Speaker A This pattern of unexplained seafloor holes appearing in multiple places and multiple decades is not unique to the mid-Atlantic ridge. That is the broader context that the 2023 discovery fits into. And it is a context that goes back further than most people realize. The 86:07 Speaker A deep ocean floor is in the language of marine geology extensively marked, covered in traces. Biologists and geologists who study the seafloor use a specific German term for this leenpuran. 86:22 Speaker A It translates roughly as life traces and it refers to the category of marks, impressions, tracks, burrows and disturbances left behind by organisms moving through or feeding on seafloor sediment. The term was first used systematically in the 1950s and 1960s 86:40 Speaker A when a German geologist named Adolf Silha began applying it to both modern seafloor observations and to trace fossils preserved in ancient rock. 86:49 Speaker A Silus's work was foundational in the field now called the study of traces left by living things and it gave scientists a formal framework for thinking about the marks they were finding on the ocean floor. 87:03 Speaker A The reason Lebanon Spiran matters here is that it establishes something important. The seafloor is not blank. It has never been blank. Even in the deepest, coldest, most remote parts of the ocean, organisms are moving, feeding, burrowing, and leaving evidence 87:21 Speaker A of their presence. The abyssal plains of the Pacific, the Hadal trenches of the Marana, the carbonate sediments of the Atlantic. All of them are covered in traces that range from easily identifiable to completely baffling. 87:35 Speaker A Scientists who study seafloor images routinely encounter marks they cannot assign to a specific organism or process. This is not a failure of the field. It is a reflection of how incompletely sampled the deep ocean is and how many organisms down there have 87:51 Speaker A never been directly observed. Some of the documented cases of unexplained seafloor features are worth looking at specifically because they help place the mid-Atlantic ridge holes in a wider picture. 88:03 Speaker A In 2016, during Noah dive operations near the Mariana Trench, cameras captured a series of small pits in the sediment at extreme depth that did not match known biological or geological templates. They were documented, discussed, and ultimately left without a 88:20 Speaker A confirmed explanation. Much like the 2023 holes, the Mariana Trench sits in the Western Pacific, far from any tectonic spreading center, which means the geological context is entirely different from the mid-Atlantic ridge. 88:35 Speaker A And yet, the visual similarity of the unexplained features was striking enough that researchers noted the parallel. Off the coast of California in Mterrey Bay, a different set of mysterious circular depressions was found in the seafloor sediment at much shallower depths in the 88:51 Speaker A range of a few hundred meters rather than a few thousand. These depressions attracted significant attention because they appeared in an area that's relatively wellstudied being close to the Montterrey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, which has operated ROVs in the region for decades. After 89:08 Speaker A considerable investigation, one leading explanation that emerged was that the depressions were made by Pacific Electric rays, which use electro reception to detect buried prey and may use suction feeding in a way that leaves circular impressions in soft sediment. 89:24 Speaker A That explanation is still debated, and not all researchers find it fully convincing, but it is at least a testable hypothesis with a specific candidate organism. The Montre case is a useful comparison because it shows what a resolution to this kind of mystery can 89:40 Speaker A look like and how long it can take to get there even in a relatively accessible location with good research infrastructure. 89:48 Speaker A The broader point is that the category of unexplained seafloor traces is genuinely large. It is not a fringe observation or a marginal curiosity. 89:59 Speaker A Scientists who spend careers studying seafloor imagery accumulate substantial libraries of features they cannot explain with confidence. Most of these never become public stories because they are documented in technical expedition logs and occasionally in scientific papers, but they do not have the visual 90:16 Speaker A clarity or the viral moment that the 2023 Noah footage had. The holes on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge became widely known partly because the footage was striking and partly because Noah made the deliberate choice to share it publicly and ask for input. 90:33 Speaker A That choice was unusual. Most unexplained observations from deep sea expeditions stay within the scientific community, discussed at conferences and in correspondence, but not broadcast to a general audience while still unresolved. 90:48 Speaker A The concept of Leeben Shbururan also carries something philosophically interesting, though it is worth being careful not to overstate it. When Sailor and his colleagues began systematically cataloging traces on the seafloor, they were acknowledging that the ocean floor is not just a geological surface. It is 91:06 Speaker A a livedin place. Organisms have been moving through deep sea sediment for hundreds of millions of years. And the traces of that movement are preserved both in modern sediment and in ancient rock. Some of the trace fossils studied by eologists are more than 500 million 91:22 Speaker A years old and they show the same basic categories of behavior, burrowing, feeding, moving that are still visible on the seafloor today. The holes on the mid-Atlantic ridge, whatever made them are part of that very long history of the seafloor being marked and remarked 91:39 Speaker A by whatever lives there. That long view does not make the 2023 holes less interesting. If anything, it makes them more so because it means that whatever process is responsible has deep time precedent. 91:54 Speaker A Deep sea organisms have been burrowing into sediment since before the Atlantic Ocean existed in its current form. The mid-Atlantic ridge itself is geologically young by planetary standards, having begun forming around 180 million years ago. As the superc continent panga broke apart, the 92:13 Speaker A sediment that now covers its flanks has been accumulating since then, layer by slow layer at rates of perhaps a cime per thousand years in some areas. 92:24 Speaker A Every trace left in that sediment is a small entry in an enormously long record. 92:31 Speaker A There is also a practical dimension to the broader history of unexplained seafloor features that is worth sitting with. The fact that similar holes have been observed in 2004 and 2023 and that comparable unexplained features have been documented in other ocean basins 92:48 Speaker A creates a kind of distributed puzzle. No single expedition can solve it because the observations are spread across different locations, different research institutions and different decades. 93:01 Speaker A Connecting them requires someone to actively look for the pattern to pull together expedition logs, publish papers and archived footage from multiple sources and ask whether these things are related. That kind of synthesis work is genuinely difficult and it tends to 93:16 Speaker A happen slowly in science, especially when the primary question is still at the stage of what is this rather than how does it work. What the history of these sightings does suggest at minimum is that the 2023 holes are not a fluke. 93:31 Speaker A They are not the result of an unusual alignment of conditions that happened once and will not happen again. They appear to be a recurring feature or at least a recurring category of feature in the deep Atlantic and possibly in other 93:45 Speaker A ocean basins as well. That recurrence is actually useful scientific information, even if it does not immediately point toward an explanation. It suggests that whatever is responsible is a stable ongoing process rather than a one-time event. It suggests that there are 94:02 Speaker A probably more of these holes in places where no camera has yet passed. And it suggests that a targeted follow-up expedition, one specifically designed to find and study these features, would very likely find them again. The difficulty, of course, is that knowing a 94:17 Speaker A phenomenon is real, and recurring is not the same as knowing what it is. The deep ocean is full of real and recurring phenomena that took decades to explain and some that remain unexplained. Still, the existence of chemosynthetic ecosystems around hydrothermal vents was 94:36 Speaker A suspected before it was confirmed. And when it was finally confirmed in 1977 at the Galapagus Rift, it required a direct dive by the submersible Alvin to settle the question. The vents themselves had been theorized based on indirect evidence for years before anyone 94:52 Speaker A actually saw one. The holes on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge are in a somewhat similar position. There is enough evidence to say they exist and to describe their characteristics in some detail, but not yet enough to say what made them. The answer is somewhere in 95:07 Speaker A the sediment or in the organisms that live near it or in the geological processes operating beneath it. It is a real answer, not an unknowable one. It just has not been found yet. the 2004 sighting, the 2023 footage, the Mariana 95:25 Speaker A observations, the Mterrey depressions, the broader catalog of Libanspuran that covers the ocean floor like a kind of wordless writing. All of this forms a context in which the mid-Atlantic ridge holes are unusual, but not without company. They are the most publicly 95:42 Speaker A visible example of a category of deep sea mystery that is wider and older than most people realize. And that wider context, while it does not answer the question of what made these specific holes does make the question feel less 95:55 Speaker A like an isolated anomaly and more like a thread in a much larger fabric, pull on it in the right way with the right tools and enough time, and it might lead somewhere genuinely new. The challenge is that pulling on threads in the deep 96:09 Speaker A ocean is an extraordinarily difficult and expensive undertaking. And the tools available for doing it have real and specific limitations that shape what is possible and how quickly progress can be made. So let us think about those tools for a moment because the gap between 96:26 Speaker A what scientists want to know and what they're actually able to find out in a place like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is itself a significant part of the story. 96:34 Speaker A The ship at the center of the 2023 discovery is the Noah shippanos explorer. It was commissioned in 2010 and is currently the only United States federal vessel dedicated entirely to ocean exploration rather than a specific research program. 96:51 Speaker A That distinction matters. Most research ships go to sea with a defined scientific question and a team assembled to answer it. The Okanos explorer goes to sea to look in a more general sense to survey places that have not been 97:07 Speaker A surveyed. document what is there and transmit what it finds in real time to scientists and the public on shore. It carries two remotely operated vehicles. 97:18 Speaker A The Deep Discoverer, which does the actual diving and collecting, and the Serios, a camera platform that follows above it and provides a wider view of the scene. Together, they can operate at depths down to roughly 6,000 m, which 97:32 Speaker A covers the vast majority of the ocean floor. The ship is not enormous by research vessel standards, but it is well equipped and the live streaming capability that allowed the 2023 holes to reach a public audience almost immediately is part of its design 97:50 Speaker A philosophy from the beginning. The ROVs themselves are impressive pieces of engineering. Deep Discover carries highde cameras, manipulator arms, water samplers, and various scientific instruments. It can collect biological and geological samples, measure temperature and salinity, and document what it encounters with enough visual 98:13 Speaker A detail that researchers on shore can participate meaningfully in the observations as they happen. During the 2023 dive, scientists watching the live feed from shore were among the first to flag the holes as unusual, which is part of how the public 98:30 Speaker A engagement model is supposed to work. The footage was not reviewed after the fact and then released. It was seen, discussed, and logged in something close to real time. But here is where the limitations begin to appear. An ROV like 98:45 Speaker A Deep Discover is not designed to wait. It is designed to move, to cover ground, to document as much as possible during a dive window that is itself constrained by ship time, weather, and the enormous logistical effort required to keep a 99:00 Speaker A vessel at sea. When the ROV passed over the holes in 2023, the team could slow down, maneuver closer, take images, and make notes. What they could not do was park the vehicle next to the holes, and watch them for the next 6 hours to see 99:18 Speaker A whether anything emerged. The cost of ship time makes that kind of patient observation almost impossible to justify within the structure of a standard expedition. Research vessel time in the deep ocean runs somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 per day, depending 99:35 Speaker A on the ship, the crew, the fuel, and the operational support required. A week of sitting still over one small patch of seafloor waiting for something to happen would represent an enormous expenditure with no guarantee of any result. And 99:50 Speaker A that is simply not how expedition funding works. There is also the problem of sediment sampling. 99:57 Speaker A One obvious response to finding unexplained holes in the seafloor is to take a sample of the sediment around them and examine it in a laboratory. 100:05 Speaker A Sediment cores are a standard and well-developed tool in ocean science. Scientists lower a weighted tube into the seafloor. It penetrates the sediment and when it is retrieved, it contains a column of material that can be analyzed for chemistry, microbiology, 100:22 Speaker A particle composition, and the presence of organic material. cores have been used to reconstruct climate history going back millions of years to identify microbial communities living far below the seafloor surface and to document the slow accumulation of material that covers the ocean floor 100:41 Speaker A like a kind of geological diary. They are genuinely powerful tools. The difficulty is that taking a sediment core from inside or immediately adjacent to the holes would almost certainly destroy the very features being investigated. The act of inserting a 100:57 Speaker A cing tube disturbs the sediment around it, collapses delicate structures, and mixes layers that might otherwise tell a story about sequence and timing. If the raised edges of the holes carry information about how they were formed, pushing a sampling device through them 101:13 Speaker A erases that information in the process of collecting it. This is not an unusual problem in science, but it is a particularly frustrating one when the feature being studied is small, fragile, and located at the bottom of 3 km of 101:28 Speaker A ocean where you cannot simply come back next week with a different approach. Every decision made during a dive is essentially final, at least for that expedition. Sonar mapping offers a different kind of tool and in many ways it has transformed what scientists know 101:44 Speaker A about the deep seafloor over the past few decades. Multi-beam sonar mounted on the hull of a research vessel sends out a fan of acoustic pulses that bounce off the seafloor and return to the ship, building up a detailed picture of the 101:59 Speaker A bottom topography as the vessel moves. Modern systems can map the seafloor at a resolution of somewhere between 1 and 10 m depending on the water depth and the specific equipment being used. That sounds precise and for large scale 102:13 Speaker A geological features, it is genuinely impressive. The multi-beam maps of the mid-Atlantic ridge show the central rift valley, the flanking mountain ridges, the fault scarps, and the broad volcanic terrain in remarkable detail. 102:29 Speaker A You can see features the size of a city block from the surface of the water, but the holes are 5 to 10 cm wide. 102:37 Speaker A Multi-beam sonar cannot see them. They are simply too small by roughly two orders of magnitude to appear in any acoustic survey conducted from the surface. Even the most advanced sonar systems mounted on ROVs and designed for close-range highresolution mapping would 102:55 Speaker A struggle to resolve features at this scale with enough clarity to be scientifically useful. The holes exist at a scale that falls between the resolution of surface-based sonar and the field of view of an ROV camera. 103:10 Speaker A They're too small for one tool and too deep for most others. This is not a failure of technology so much as a mismatch between the tools that exist and the specific dimensions of the problem. There is also the question of 103:23 Speaker A what happens to the holes over time. Deep sea sediment, as mentioned earlier, is extremely soft and water saturated. 103:31 Speaker A At 3,000 m depth, the sediment on the flanks of the mid-Atlantic ridge behaves almost like a very slow fluid. It can be disturbed by bottom currents, by the movement of organisms, by small geological events, and possibly by the 103:46 Speaker A passage of an ROV itself. A hole punched into that sediment might persist for days, or it might begin to slump and refill within hours, depending on the local conditions. No one knows exactly how long the 2023 holes had been there 104:01 Speaker A when the ROV found them, and no one knows how long they persisted afterward. If a follow-up expedition were mounted specifically to find them, there is a real possibility that the specific holes documented in July 2023 would no longer 104:17 Speaker A be visible in their original form. New holes might have formed nearby, or the same process might have created similar features in a different location along the ridge, but the exact site might look quite different. 104:31 Speaker A This impermanence is not a reason to give up on investigation, but it does complicate the planning of any targeted follow-up. What scientists would ideally want in a situation like this is a way to leave something behind. Not a ship, 104:45 Speaker A not an ROV, but an instrument package sitting on the seafloor near the holes recording whatever happens over a period of weeks or months. Time-lapse camera systems have been deployed in the deep ocean before and they have produced genuinely remarkable results. Long-term 105:03 Speaker A seafloor observatories exist in several locations, including the Neptune Cable Network off the coast of British Columbia and the Mars Cabled Observatory operated by the Mterrey Bay Aquarium Research Institute of Central California. 105:20 Speaker A The Mars Observatory has been operating since 2009 and is connected to shore by a fiber optic cable that provides both power and data transmission, allowing scientists to observe the seafloor continuously without the expense of keeping a ship on station. Cameras at 105:39 Speaker A the Mars site have captured things that would have been nearly impossible to document with ROV visits alone, including the behavior of animals over longtime periods, the response of the seafloor community to seasonal changes in food supply falling from above, and 105:54 Speaker A occasional geological events that happen without warning. A similar instrument package deployed near the mid-Atlantic ridge holes would be extremely valuable. 106:03 Speaker A Even a simple camera system running on battery power set to take an image every few minutes for several weeks could answer the most basic question. Does anything visit the holes? And if so, what is it? Passive acoustic monitors 106:18 Speaker A could record sound in the frequency range used by various marine organisms, potentially detecting the presence of animals that the camera might miss in the darkness. Sediment traps positioned nearby could collect whatever material falls into or settles around the holes, 106:34 Speaker A providing a sample that might contain biological or chemical evidence of what is happening there. The barriers to doing this are real, though. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is not close to anything. The nearest significant land mass to the section of the ridge where 106:48 Speaker A the 2023 holes were found is the Azor's Archipelago, a group of Portuguese islands sitting almost directly on the ridge itself. Roughly 1,500 km west of mainland Portugal, the Azors have a small research infrastructure and have been used as a base for Atlantic 107:06 Speaker A expeditions, but they are not a major hub for deep sea science. And the logistical challenge of deploying instruments at 3,000 m depth and then returning weeks or months later to retrieve them is substantial, even from a welle equipped port. You need a ship 107:23 Speaker A capable of handling the deployment, a team trained to operate the instruments, a recovery plan that accounts for the possibility that the instruments may have drifted or been buried, and enough funding to cover all of it for what might be a multi-year project. That kind 107:38 Speaker A of sustained targeted investigation of a single small feature on the seafloor is genuinely difficult to fund because the scientific payoff is uncertain and the question while fascinating does not obviously connect to the major funding priorities of ocean science which tend 107:55 Speaker A to focus on climate fisheries and large scale geological processes. There is also something worth saying about what the tools reveal even when they cannot answer the specific question. The fact that the Okanos explorer was passing over that section of the mid-Atlantic 108:11 Speaker A ridge at all in July 2023. The fact that it had R ovs capable of diving to that depth and cameras capable of resolving features at the centime scale. The fact that the footage was being transmitted in real time to 108:26 Speaker A scientists on shore and to a public audience online. All of this represents an extraordinary expansion of what is possible compared to even 30 years ago. 108:38 Speaker A The first ROV dives on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge were conducted in the 1980s, and the footage from those early expeditions was grainy, limited in duration, and seen by a very small number of people. 108:52 Speaker A The idea that a research ship could stream live video from 3 km below the surface to anyone with an internet connection would have seemed implausible to the scientists who made those early dives. In that sense, the 2023 discovery 109:07 Speaker A is itself a product of a technological moment that is historically recent and still developing. The next generation of deep sea tools may close some of the gaps that currently make questions like the mid-Atlantic ridge holes so difficult to answer. Autonomous 109:22 Speaker A underwater vehicles, which can operate without a tether and follow pre-programmed survey routes, are becoming more capable and more affordable. Some AUV designs are now being tested for long duration missions lasting weeks rather than hours, which would allow a vehicle to survey a large 109:39 Speaker A area of the seafloor at high resolution without requiring continuous ship support. Advances in battery technology, acoustic communication, and onboard data processing are all moving in directions that would make sustained deep sea observation more practical. Whether any of these tools will be specifically 109:57 Speaker A directed at the mid-Atlantic ridge holes depends on whether the scientific community decides the question is worth the investment. And that decision is itself shaped by factors that have as much to do with funding priorities and institutional attention as with pure 110:12 Speaker A scientific curiosity. For now, the holes remain documented but unexplained, and the tools that could answer the question are either not quite right for the task or not yet deployed in the right place. That is not a permanent condition. It is a temporary 110:27 Speaker A one shaped by the practical realities of what deep sea science currently looks like and what it costs. But it does mean that the answer, whatever it is, will require more than the footage that already exists. It will require a 110:41 Speaker A deliberate decision to go back, to look again, and to stay long enough to actually see what happens. And that question of what a real investigation would look like and what it would actually take to get one funded and 110:53 Speaker A launched opens into something worth thinking about carefully. To understand why the Mid-Atlantic Ridge matters beyond the mystery of a few small holes in the sediment, it helps to step back and think about what this place has already taught us. Because the 111:09 Speaker A scientific history of the ridge is genuinely remarkable and it changes the context of everything that happens there. For most of human history, the floor of the Atlantic Ocean was simply unknown. People had been sailing across it for centuries. But what lay beneath 111:26 Speaker A was a matter of guess work. The ocean was deep. That much was understood. And it was assumed to be more or less flat. 111:35 Speaker A a featureless plane of mud stretching from one continent to the other. The idea that there was a mountain range down there running the full length of the ocean longer than the Andes and the Rockies combined would have seemed 111:48 Speaker A extraordinary to anyone before the midentth century. And yet there it is. The systematic study of the Atlantic seafloor began in earnest after the Second World War. 111:59 Speaker A Partly because the war had produced a generation of scientists with experience in sonar technology and a practical interest in understanding what the ocean bottom actually looked like. One of the key figures in what followed was a geologist at Princeton University named 112:15 Speaker A Harry Hess. Hess had served as a naval commander during the war and had used his ship's sonar equipment to map the seafloor during Pacific crossings, accumulating data as he went. After the war, he kept thinking about what the 112:29 Speaker A data meant. The seafloor was not flat. It had structure. It had ridges and valleys and features that did not fit the existing picture of a geologically quiet ancient ocean basin. By the early 1960s, Hess had developed an idea that 112:44 Speaker A would eventually become one of the most important concepts in the history of geology. He proposed that the ocean floor was not old and static, but young and constantly moving. 112:54 Speaker A Magma from the Earth's interior was welling up through a central rift in the mid ocean ridges, solidifying into new rock and then slowly spreading outward in both directions, pushing the continents apart. 113:07 Speaker A The ocean floor in his model was essentially a giant conveyor belt continuously created at the ridges and eventually consumed back into the earth at the deep trenches that ring the Pacific. He called this seafloor spreading and it was the mechanism that 113:23 Speaker A made the theory of plate tectonics work. The evidence that confirmed his idea came from an unexpected direction. 113:31 Speaker A Scientists studying the magnetic properties of rocks on the Atlantic seafloor noticed something strange. The magnetic signatures of the rock were arranged in parallel stripes on either side of the mid-Atlantic ridge and the stripes were mirror images of each 113:46 Speaker A other. This made sense if you accepted Hess's model because the rock had solidified from magma at different times in Earth's history when the planet's magnetic field was pointing in different directions and the spreading process had carried the rock outward symmetrically 114:02 Speaker A from the central rift. The magnetic stripes were a record of the Earth's own history frozen into the seafloor. This discovery published in the early 1960s by Frederick Vine and Drummond Matthews in Britain was one of the pieces of 114:17 Speaker A evidence that turned plate tectonics from a speculative idea into accepted science. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge was not just a geographic feature. It was a window into how the planet actually works. What happens at the ridge in physical terms is worth describing 114:33 Speaker A slowly because it is genuinely hard to picture. Deep beneath the rift valley that runs along the center of the ridge, the two plates are being pulled apart. 114:43 Speaker A As they separate, the pressure on the hot mantle rock below decreases, and that reduction in pressure allows the rock to partially melt, producing magma. 114:52 Speaker A The magma rises through cracks and fishes, sometimes erupting onto the seafloor as lava, sometimes cooling more slowly in the crust below. The lava that reaches the seafloor is chilled almost instantly by the near freezing water and forms distinctive rounded shapes that 115:10 Speaker A geologists call pillow lavas because they look quite accurately like stacked pillows of dark rock. Over time, new magma pushes the older rock aside and the plates continue to move. The North American plate and the Eurasian plate are currently separating at roughly 2 115:28 Speaker A 1/2 cm per year, which is about the rate at which your fingernails grow. It sounds slow, but over millions of years, it adds up to entire ocean basins. The ridge is not geologically uniform along its length. Some sections are more 115:44 Speaker A volcanically active than others. Some sections have well-developed rift valleys, while others are more structurally complex. 115:52 Speaker A The section near the Azors, where the 2023 holes were found, sits close to the Azor's triple junction, a point where three tectonic plates meet, which makes it geologically complicated even by the standards of the ridge. The crust in 116:09 Speaker A this region is thicker than average. The volcanic history is complex and the seafloor topography is irregular in ways that reflect millions of years of competing geological forces. It is not a simple place to study and it is not a 116:24 Speaker A simple place to interpret. The discovery that changed biology as profoundly as Hess's work changed geology happened in 1977. 116:34 Speaker A And it did not happen on the mid-Atlantic ridge, but on a similar spreading center in the Pacific, the Galapagos rift. A team of scientists diving in the submersible Alvin found something that the scientific consensus at the time said should not exist. They 116:51 Speaker A found hydrothermal vents, cracks in the seafloor where superheated water was pouring out of the crust. And around those vents, they found life. 117:01 Speaker A Not sparse, barely surviving life, but dense, thriving communities of organisms. Tube worms over 2 m long, clams the size of dinner plates, shrimp, crabs, fish, and thick mats of bacteria coating every available surface. 117:20 Speaker A The water emerging from the vents was hot enough to kill most organisms instantly. But the communities living slightly away from the vent openings were thriving on the chemical energy in the vent fluid rather than on sunlight. 117:33 Speaker A This was the first ecosystem ever documented that ran entirely on chemosynthesis rather than photosynthesis and it fundamentally change the definition of what life requires. 117:46 Speaker A Before 1977, sunlight was considered the non-negotiable foundation of all ecosystems. After 1977, it was not. The Mid-Atlantic ridge has its own vent fields and some of them are among the most studied in the world. The Lucky Strike Field, 118:04 Speaker A discovered in 1992, sits at roughly 1,700 m depth on the Azor segment of the ridge and hosts a dense community of organisms, including large muscles, shrimp, and various microbial communities. Lucky Strike is one of the most intensively monitored hydrothermal 118:22 Speaker A vent sites in the Atlantic with repeated expeditions over more than three decades providing a long-term picture of how vent communities change over time. The Rainbow Field discovered in 1997 at about 2,300 m depth is geochemically different from Lucky Strike. The fluids 118:43 Speaker A emerging from rainbow are rich in iron, hydrogen, and methane rather than the sulfur dominated chemistry typical of many Pacific vents, and the ecosystem that has developed around it reflects those differences. 118:57 Speaker A Rainbow has been of particular interest to scientists studying the origins of life because the chemistry of its vent fluids resembles some of the conditions that early Earth may have offered to the first living organisms. Then there is the lost city field. Discovered in the 119:13 Speaker A year 2000 by a team led by Deborah Kelly of the University of Washington, Lost City is different from both Lucky Strike and Rainbow in almost every way. It sits at about 700 to 800 m depth on a section 119:28 Speaker A of the ridge where the seafloor is made of peridotite, a type of mantle rock that has been pushed up to the surface by geological forces rather than covered by the typical bazaltic lava. When seawater reacts with peridotite, it 119:42 Speaker A drives a chemical process called serpentinization, which produces hydrogen and methane and heats the water to temperatures up to 91°. 119:52 Speaker A The fluids emerging from Lost City are highly alkaline with P values around 9 to 11 and they build towering white carbonate chimneys that can reach heights of 60 m, which makes the site look in photographs like something from 120:06 Speaker A another planet. The microbial communities at Lost City are thick and varied, and the site has been described as one of the best natural analoges for the conditions under which life may have first emerged on Earth, possibly in similar alkaline 120:20 Speaker A hydrothermal environments on the early seafloor. Lost City is also located within a few hundred km of the section of the ridge where the 2023 holes were found, which is a reminder of how much geological and biological complexity exists in this relatively small stretch 120:37 Speaker A of the Atlantic. What all of this scientific history establishes is that the mid-Atlantic ridge is not a blank or featureless place. It is one of the most geologically and biologically significant environments on the planet. 120:50 Speaker A and scientists have been studying it seriously for more than 60 years. And yet the holes remain unexplained. 120:58 Speaker A That is the part that is worth sitting with for a moment because it tells you something about the scale of what is still unknown even in places that have received sustained scientific attention. 121:08 Speaker A Lucky Strike has been visited dozens of times. Rainbow has been studied by multiple international research programs. Lost City has its own dedicated scientific community and still a feature as simple as a line of small holes in the sediment found by a passing 121:25 Speaker A ROV cannot be confidently explained. The ridge is a living laboratory as scientists often describe it, but it is a laboratory with thousands of rooms that no one has ever opened. The broader context here is worth being clear about. 121:42 Speaker A The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is not the deep ocean equivalent of a remote wilderness that science has barely touched. It is actually one of the better studied parts of the deep ocean, precisely because it sits beneath the heavily traffked North 121:55 Speaker A Atlantic and has been the focus of geological interest since the early days of plate tectonics research. 122:02 Speaker A If the ridge has features that cannot be explained, that says something important about the rest of the ocean, the parts that have received far less attention. 122:12 Speaker A The Pacific has spreading centers that are geologically similar to the mid-Atlantic ridge, but have been visited far less frequently. 122:20 Speaker A The Indian Ocean ridge system is even less studied. The deep basins between the ridges, the abyssal plains that cover more of the Earth's surface than any other single type of terrain, are almost entirely unknown at the biological level. The holes on the 122:35 Speaker A Mid-Atlantic ridge are not an anomaly in the sense of being uniquely mysterious. They are an anomaly in the sense of being noticed, which is itself a function of where the Okanos explorer happened to be in July 2023. 122:49 Speaker A There is something quietly humbling about that. The scientific importance of the mid-Atlantic ridge, the role it played in establishing plate tectonics, the discovery of chemosynthetic ecosystems, the ongoing research into the origins of life at sites like Lost City. All of this represents decades of 123:08 Speaker A careful cumulative work by thousands of scientists. And it has produced genuine understanding of how the earth works at a fundamental level. But the holes sit alongside all of that understanding, unresolved. A reminder that scientific progress in the deep ocean tends to 123:25 Speaker A happen in patches with large gaps between what is known and what has simply never been looked at closely enough to know anything about at all. 123:35 Speaker A The ridge itself will keep spreading. The plates will keep moving. New rock will keep forming at the rift. Lava will keep cooling into pillow formations. And the vent communities at Lucky Strike and Rainbow and Lost City will keep living 123:48 Speaker A their strange sunless lives, cycling chemicals through ecosystems that would have seemed impossible to biologists a century ago. Whatever is making those holes, if it is something biological, it will keep making them or stop or change or be replaced by something else 124:08 Speaker A entirely indifferent to whether anyone is watching. The seafloor does not wait for science to catch up with it. And that is what makes the public response to the footage so interesting to think about because when Noah posted the video 124:22 Speaker A and the internet picked it up and people started offering explanations and theories, what was really happening was something worth examining carefully. The gap between what the footage showed and what science could say about it became briefly a public conversation. And that 124:38 Speaker A conversation had its own dynamics, its own distortions and contributions that tell you something about how scientific uncertainty moves through the modern world. When Noah posted the footage publicly in July 2023, the decision was a deliberate one. The AY's ocean 124:55 Speaker A exploration team had looked at the holes, discussed them among themselves, consulted with a handful of outside researchers, and arrived at the honest conclusion that they did not know what had made them. Rather than sitting on the footage while waiting for an 125:09 Speaker A explanation that might not come quickly, they uploaded it, wrote a brief description in their expedition log, noting that the holes were of unknown origin, and essentially ask the world to take a look. It was a straightforward scientific choice, the kind of thing 125:25 Speaker A that happens more often than people realize in fields where the data outpaces the interpretation. But the ocean is a subject that carries a particular weight in the public imagination and the footage did not stay quiet for long. Within a few days, it 125:40 Speaker A had been picked up by Liv Science, EFL Science, and New Scientist, among others. The framing varied depending on the outlet, but the core of the story was the same. Strange, evenly spaced holes deep in the Atlantic, and no one 125:56 Speaker A knows what made them. That combination, visual strangeness plus scientific uncertainty plus depth and darkness is almost perfectly designed to travel fast on the internet. And it did. The video itself is not dramatic to look at. It is ROV footage from the deep ocean, which 126:17 Speaker A means it is dimly lit, slightly grainy, and very slow. The seafloor drifts past in shades of brown and gray. And the holes appear as dark circles against the pale sediment, arranged in a line that looks almost too neat to be natural. 126:34 Speaker A That neatness is what catches the eye. People watched it and immediately understood intuitively why scientists were puzzled. The holes look deliberate. 126:43 Speaker A They look made. Whether that intuition is meaningful or just a trick of pattern recognition is a question that the footage itself cannot answer. The range of explanations that circulated online was wide. Some were earnest attempts to apply biological knowledge. Suggestions 127:01 Speaker A about specific worm species, about the feeding behavior of eels, about burrowing sea urchins. A number of marine biologists and oceanographers who saw the footage on social media offered their own tentative ideas, and some of those ideas were genuinely useful contributions to the 127:20 Speaker A conversation. Others were less grounded. The alien hypothesis appeared quickly, as it tends to do whenever something unusual is found in a remote environment. Some people suggested the holes were evidence of government underwater testing, perhaps sonar equipment, perhaps something more classified. There were 127:40 Speaker A theories about submarine drones, about geological probes, about natural gas venting and patterns that no one had previously documented. 127:48 Speaker A Most of these ideas were offered in good faith by people who were genuinely curious, which is worth acknowledging. 127:55 Speaker A The impulse to explain is not a bad one. The problem is that the impulse to explain quickly without the constraints of actual data produces explanations that feel satisfying but carry no real weight. Noah a scientist responded to some of this publicly mostly through 128:13 Speaker A social media and through statements to science journalists. Their tone was measured and careful. They did not dismiss the biological hypotheses. They did not confirm the geological ones. They noted consistently that the holes were of unknown origin, that several explanations were being 128:33 Speaker A considered, and that further investigation would be needed to say anything definitive. That is exactly the right thing to say when you genuinely do not know the answer. but is also a statement that sits uncomfortably in the current media environment where 128:48 Speaker A uncertainty tends to be read as either cover up or failure rather than as the normal condition of scientific inquiry at the edge of what is known. What is interesting about the alien hypothesis specifically and the reason it is worth 129:02 Speaker A spending a moment on rather than simply dismissing it is what it reveals about how people process unexplained things in remote environments. 129:11 Speaker A The deep ocean is one of the few places left on Earth that still carries a genuine sense of the unknown. The sense that something could be down there that has not been discovered yet. That feeling is not entirely irrational. The 129:26 Speaker A deep ocean does contain organisms that would have seemed fantastical before they were discovered. The giant squid was considered a myth for centuries before specimens were confirmed in the late 19th century. The kilacanth, a fish that was thought to have been extinct 129:41 Speaker A for 65 million years, was found alive in 1938 off the coast of South Africa. The hydrothermal vent ecosystems with their tube worms and chemosynthetic bacteria were genuinely not imagined by science until they were found in 1977. 129:59 Speaker A So, the idea that something unknown might be down there is not crazy. The ocean has surprised science before and it will again. 130:08 Speaker A But the alien hypothesis does not really engage with any of that. It is not saying that an undiscovered organism might be responsible. It is saying that the holes were made by something from outside Earth, which is a claim that 130:21 Speaker A requires a completely different order of evidence than anything the footage provides. The reason this matters is not to make anyone feel foolish for the thought. It is that the alien framing tends to shortcircuit the more interesting and more plausible possibilities. If you 130:38 Speaker A decide the holes are alien made, you stop asking which organism might be responsible or which geological process might produce this pattern or what the sediment displacement actually tells you about the mechanics of hole formation. 130:52 Speaker A The mystery becomes a conclusion rather than a question and that is where curiosity stops being useful. The citizen science dimension of the public response is worth treating more carefully because it is genuinely more complicated than the alien theories. 131:09 Speaker A Platforms like a naturalist have demonstrated over many years that non-expert observers can make real contributions to biological documentation. 131:20 Speaker A Thousands of marine species observations have been logged by recreational divers and fishermen and coastal walkers who noticed something unusual and recorded it. In some cases, those observations have led to the documentation of species in new locations or the identification 131:36 Speaker A of previously undescribed behaviors or the early detection of invasive species spreading into new habitats. The crowd is not always wrong, and the instinct to involve the public in scientific observation is a good one when it is structured carefully. 131:51 Speaker A The problem with applying that model to the Noah footage is that the footage shows something that requires deep contextual knowledge to evaluate properly. The holes look strange to everyone who sees them, but understanding why they are strange specifically requires knowing what the 132:07 Speaker A seafloor in that region normally looks like. what kinds of organisms live at those depths and what traces they typically leave and what the mechanical properties of deep sea sediment actually are. Most people watching the video on social media do not have that background 132:23 Speaker A and so their pattern matching runs on the wrong data set. They compare the holes to things they have seen before in shallower water or on land or in other videos and the comparisons are often not valid at 3,000 m. This is not a 132:38 Speaker A criticism of public curiosity. It is just a description of why crowdsourced explanations for highly specific deep sea phenomena tend to generate more noise than signal. 132:50 Speaker A Noah's decision to post the footage and ask for public input was still the right one for reasons that go beyond the immediate question of what made the holes. Transparency about what ocean exploration finds, including the things that cannot be explained, builds public 133:06 Speaker A understanding of what scientific investigation actually looks like. Most people's mental model of science involves confident answers delivered after careful study. The reality of frontier research, especially in the deep ocean, involves a great deal of footage like this. something unusual, a 133:24 Speaker A brief window of observation, and then the ship moves on and the question stays open. Showing people that process, letting them see the uncertainty in real time, rather than presenting only the cleaned up results, is genuinely valuable, even when it produces some 133:41 Speaker A noise and some bad theories along the way. There is also something worth noting about the specific language Noah used in their expedition log. The phrase of unknown origin is a precise scientific statement. It does not mean inexplicable. 133:57 Speaker A It does not mean impossible to explain. It means that at the time of writing, the origin had not been determined. That is a narrow and honest claim. But when that phrase traveled through media coverage and social media posts, it 134:12 Speaker A often got expanded. of unknown origin became baffling scientists which became no explanation possible which became something strange is happening on the ocean floor. Each step in that chain is a small distortion but they accumulate and by the time the story reaches 134:28 Speaker A someone who has not seen the original footage or the original log entry. It can sound like something far more dramatic than what was actually observed. This is not a problem unique to ocean science. It happens across all fields where scientific uncertainty 134:42 Speaker A intersects with public interest. Climate research, medical studies, archaeological discoveries, all of them go through versions of this distortion when they enter the media cycle. But the deep ocean has a particular vulnerability to it because there is so little public baseline knowledge about 135:00 Speaker A what the deep seafloor normally looks like. If you tell someone that scientists found an unusual rock formation in the Rockies, most people have enough general knowledge about geology and mountain environments to contextualize that mildly. If you tell someone that scientists found 135:17 Speaker A unexplained holes on the Mid-Atlantic ridge at 3,000 m depth, almost no one has a mental model of what that environment looks like under normal circumstances. And so the strangeness of the holes cannot be calibrated against any familiar reference point. Everything 135:33 Speaker A about it sounds extraordinary because the entire setting is extraordinary to most people. That gap in baseline knowledge is one of the things that makes ocean science communication genuinely difficult. And it is also one of the things that makes the Okanos 135:47 Speaker A explorer's practice of live streaming its dives and posting footage publicly so valuable over the long term. Every piece of footage that shows people what the deep sea floor actually looks like, what the normal sediment texture is, what a typical animal track or burrow 136:04 Speaker A looks like, what pillow lava formations and hydrothermal vent chimneys look like, builds a small piece of that baseline. The holes are interesting precisely because they deviate from what the seafloor normally looks like in that region. But you can only appreciate that 136:19 Speaker A deviation if you have some sense of what normal looks like, and most people do not have that yet. The scientific community's response to the public attention was on the whole measured and collegial. 136:31 Speaker A Several researchers who had not been on the Okenos expedition offered their own thoughts through interviews and social media posts. Some pointed to the possibility of a burrowing organism that had not been observed directly. 136:44 Speaker A Others noted the similarity to holes found in the same region in 2004, which had also gone unexplained. A few researchers expressed mild frustration at the alien framing, not because they were offended by it, but because it tends to pull media attention away from 137:00 Speaker A the more interesting scientific questions. The honest scientific conversation about the holes is actually quite fascinating, involving sediment mechanics, deep sea animal behavior, geological fluid dynamics, and the limits of ROVbased investigation. 137:18 Speaker A That conversation is richer and stranger than the alien theory, and it deserves more attention than it typically gets when the alien framing dominates the coverage. One of the things that the public response revealed, perhaps unintentionally, is how much appetite 137:34 Speaker A there is for genuine ocean mystery. People shared the footage widely, not because they wanted to believe in aliens, most of them anyway, but because they were genuinely fascinated by something unexplained in a remote and barely known environment. That 137:50 Speaker A fascination is a real resource. It is the same impulse that drives people to support ocean conservation, to follow deep sea research programs, to donate to organizations like MBRI, or to watch a explorer live streams. 138:07 Speaker A The challenge for science communicators is to channel that fascination toward the actual complexity of the ocean rather than letting it settle into simple narratives that feel satisfying, but miss what is genuinely interesting. 138:21 Speaker A The holes on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge are genuinely interesting, not because they are inexplicable in principle, but because explaining them requires careful attention to a very specific set of conditions at a very specific depth in a very specific sediment type, and the 138:38 Speaker A tools and time needed to do that carefully are not easy to come by. The public conversation around the footage was imperfect, as public conversations about scientific uncertainty usually are, but it was also in its best moments a real engagement with a real question. 138:55 Speaker A People looked at the footage and ask what made those holes, and that is exactly the right question. The fact that the answer is still not certain is not a failure of science. It is a description of where the ocean stands 139:08 Speaker A right now in the catalog of things humanity has looked at carefully and things it has only glimpsed in passing. 139:15 Speaker A The footage itself has settled back into the archive of the Okanus explorers expedition logs where it sits alongside thousands of hours of other deep sea footage. Some of it explained, some of it still waiting for context or followup. The holes, if they are still 139:32 Speaker A there, are sitting in the dark at 3,000 m in the soft sediment of the mid-Atlantic ridge, undisturbed by the brief moment of internet attention they received. Whether they are the product of something living or something geological or something that does not 139:48 Speaker A fit neatly into either category, the sediment around them still holds the physical record of how they were made. 139:55 Speaker A The edges are still raised or they have slumped back into the surrounding seafloor or new holes have appeared nearby or the whole site has been quietly reworked by a current or a passing organism. There is no way to 140:08 Speaker A know without going back. And what a real return to that site would actually require. What it would take to move from footage and speculation to a genuine answer is a question worth thinking through carefully. So, let us think 140:24 Speaker A about what the sediment is actually telling us. Because the holes themselves are one thing, but the edges of those holes are another thing entirely. And in some ways, the edges are more informative than the holes. At 3,000 m 140:38 Speaker A depth, the sediment on the mid-Atlantic ridge is not like the sand on a beach or the soft mud you might find at the edge of a lake. It is water saturated almost completely. The fine grained carbonate particles and clay minerals that make up 140:52 Speaker A most of the seafloor sediment in that region have been settling slowly for thousands of years, accumulating at a rate of perhaps a cime or two per thousand years in some areas and they are permeated with seawater throughout. 141:06 Speaker A The result is a material that behaves under disturbance less like a solid and more like a very dense, very cold slurry. It holds its shape well enough to preserve tracks and impressions over time because the pressure and cold 141:21 Speaker A temperature keep it relatively stable, but it is also sensitive to even small forces. An organism moving through it leaves a trace. A current strong enough to disturb it can smooth the surface clean. And something pushing into it from above or pushing out from below 141:39 Speaker A will displace the surrounding material in ways that are physically readable. if you know what to look for. The raised edges around the 2023 holes are the detail that scientists kept returning to in their discussions. When sediment is displaced outward and upward around the 141:54 Speaker A rim of a hole, it indicates one of two things broadly speaking. Either something was pushed into the sediment from above and then withdrawn, compressing the walls of the hole and leaving a slight mound at the surface as the material was forced sideways or 142:11 Speaker A something moved upward through the sediment from below, pushing outward as it went and leaving a raised collar at the exit point. These two mechanisms produce subtly different edge profiles. 142:24 Speaker A And ideally, you would want highresolution imaging of the rim geometry to distinguish between them. 142:29 Speaker A The ROV footage from the Aranos Explorer captured the holes clearly, but the camera angles and lighting during that dive were not optimized for detailed rim analysis. What the footage does show is that the edges are raised rather than 142:43 Speaker A collapsed inward, which rules out a third possibility, a simple collapse pit where overlying sediment falls into a subsurface void. In a collapse feature, the edges tend to slope downward toward the hole. These edges sloped upward. 142:58 Speaker A That distinction matters. In shallow water environments, raised edge holes of a similar scale have been documented in connection with the feeding behavior of certain rays and flatfish. Rays, particularly skates and some species of stingray, use a combination of suction 143:15 Speaker A and jet propulsion to excavate prey buried in soft sediment. They position themselves above a patch of seafloor, detect the electrical signals of buried organisms using their ampoli of laorenzini and then use muscular suction to pull sediment and prey upward into their 143:33 Speaker A mouths, leaving a small pit with a raised rim. The resulting holes can be quite regular in shape and they can appear in clusters or loose lines if a ray is moving and feeding repeatedly along a path. The similarity in edge 143:47 Speaker A morphology to the mid-Atlantic holes is real enough that some researchers mentioned it as a possible analogy. 143:54 Speaker A But there is an obvious problem with applying that explanation directly. The species of rays that feed this way in shallow coastal waters do not live at 3,000 m depth on the mid-Atlantic ridge. 144:07 Speaker A The deep sea relatives of skates do exist at those depths and some of them are known to feed on benthic organisms. 144:15 Speaker A But whether any of them produce this specific pattern of hole and rim in the sediment is not well documented. The comparison is still useful though not as a direct explanation but as a mechanical analogy. It demonstrates that suction-based feeding by an organism 144:32 Speaker A positioned above the seafloor can produce raised edge holes of the right scale and shape. That is a physically plausible mechanism. The question then becomes whether any organism known to inhabit the mid-Atlantic ridge at those depths could produce that mechanism or 144:49 Speaker A whether there might be organisms there that have not yet been described. That second possibility is not as outlandish as it might sound. The deep Atlantic is genuinely undersampled. 145:01 Speaker A The Okanos Explorer and its predecessors have covered significant ground, but the mid-Atlantic ridge stretches for 16,000 km, and the total cumulative bottom time of all ROV dives along its length represents a vanishingly small fraction of the total seafloor area. New species 145:21 Speaker A are described from deep sea samples regularly. In 2023 alone, multiple new species of deep sea fish, invertebrates, and microorganisms were formally described from Atlantic and Pacific samples. The idea that there might be a midsize benthic organism at 3,000 m on the ridge whose feeding 145:44 Speaker A behavior has not been observed is not a stretch. It is simply a description of how incomplete the biological survey of that environment is. The scale of the holes is worth dwelling on for a moment. 145:57 Speaker A 5 to 10 cm in diameter. That is roughly the diameter of a tennis ball at the upper end or a large coin at the lower end. In the context of deep sea biology, that size range corresponds to the 146:12 Speaker A feeding appendages or body diameters of quite a few organisms. Certain polyat worms can reach that diameter. Some holyans, the sea cucumbers that move slowly across the deep sea floor, have oral tentacle spreads in that range. Various crustations, including some isopods and 146:31 Speaker A amphipods found at abyssal depths, have body dimensions that overlap with the lower end of that range. And some ainoderms, including brittle stars and certain sea urchins, have feeding structures that could interact with sediment at that scale. None of these 146:47 Speaker A are proven candidates for the 2023 holes. But the size alone does not exclude biology. The size is consistent with biology. It just does not point to any one organism specifically. The regularity of the spacing is the harder thing to explain biologically. The holes 147:05 Speaker A appeared in a line with roughly consistent gaps between them. Biological processes tend to produce clustering or random scatter, not linear regularity. 147:15 Speaker A There are exceptions. Some organisms move in straight lines across the seafloor while feeding. And if they pause at regular intervals to probe the sediment, they could in principle produce a linear series of holes with consistent spacing. But that kind of 147:30 Speaker A behavior has not been documented for any known deep sea organism in a way that matches what the footage shows. It is not impossible. It is just not supported by existing observations. From a geological standpoint, the raised edges present a different kind of puzzle. If 147:45 Speaker A the holes were produced by fluid or gas escaping from below, you would expect the sediment to be pushed upward and outward, which is consistent with the raised rim observation. 147:56 Speaker A Micro seepage of volcanic gases or hydrothermal fluids along fault lines in the ridge is a real phenomenon. The mid-Atlantic ridge is geologically active and the seafloor in that region is crossed by fracture zones and fault scarps where fluids can migrate upward 148:14 Speaker A through the crust. In principle, a small focused discharge of gas or warm fluid through a cime scale conduit in the sediment could push material upward and outward leaving a hole with raised edges. The problem is the regularity. 148:29 Speaker A Again, natural fluid seepage tends to follow pathways of least resistance through the sediment and underlying rock and those pathways are controlled by the local geology, which is rarely arranged in a neat line with consistent spacing. 148:44 Speaker A Pock marks, the large scale version of this process, are almost always irregular in their distribution. The idea that micro seepage would produce a perfectly spaced linear series of small holes requires a very specific and unlikely geological arrangement of 149:02 Speaker A subsurface conduits. There's also the question of what happens to the holes over time. Sediment at 3,000 m is not static. Deep ocean currents, while slow by surface standards, do move across the seafloor and can gradually redistribute fine particles. 149:20 Speaker A biological activity. The movement of worms and small crustations through the upper layers of sediment constantly reworks the surface on time scales of days to weeks in biologically active areas. If the holes were produced by a one-time event, whether biological or 149:37 Speaker A geological, they would not necessarily persist for long. The fact that similar holes were found in the same general region during the 2004 Okanos expedition suggests either that the process producing them is recurring or that the holes are more 149:54 Speaker A persistent than expected or both. The 2004 holes were not in exactly the same location as the 2023 holes, but the regional similarity is striking enough that most researchers treat them as related phenomena rather than coincidences. 150:12 Speaker A What the raised edges cannot tell us, unfortunately, is the direction of force with enough precision to definitively distinguish between a top down and a bottom-up origin. The footage shows the general morphology, but detailed sediment analysis would require physical 150:28 Speaker A samples from the rim. And collecting those samples without disturbing the structure is genuinely difficult. A sediment core driven into the rim of a hole would collapse the hole's geometry in the process of collecting it. A careful push core or suction sample 150:43 Speaker A taken from the immediate rim area might preserve more of the structure, but that kind of delicate targeted sampling at 3,000 m requires a level of OV precision and time on site that the Okanos Explorer's 2023 dive did not include. 151:01 Speaker A The discovery of the holes was itself incidental to the dive's primary survey objectives. The ROV passed over them. 151:09 Speaker A The cameras captured them. The scientists noted them and discussed them in real time. And then the dive continued. There was not an opportunity to stop and conduct a detailed sediment investigation on the spot. This is a recurring feature of deep sea discovery. 151:26 Speaker A The conditions that make a finding significant are often the same conditions that make it hard to follow up on immediately. The ROV is moving through a vast and unfamiliar landscape. 151:37 Speaker A Time on the seafloor is limited, and the expedition has a schedule and a set of primary research objectives that cannot simply be abandoned because something interesting appeared in the frame. The holes were noted, logged, and flagged for future attention. 151:52 Speaker A Whether that future attention comes depends on funding, scheduling, and the competing priorities of a research program that covers an enormous amount of ocean with limited resources. 152:04 Speaker A In the meantime, the physical record of the holes exist in two places. It exists in the ROV footage, which is archived and publicly accessible through Noah's ocean exploration program, and it exists or existed in the sediment itself in the 152:20 Speaker A actual raised edges and cylindrical walls of those holes at the bottom of the Atlantic. The footage is permanent. 152:27 Speaker A The sediment record is not. By now, months after the dive, the holes may have been partially or fully reworked by the slow processes of the deep sea floor. Or they may still be there, largely intact in the dark and cold and 152:42 Speaker A pressure, waiting for a camera to return. There is genuinely no way to know without going back. What the sediment mechanics ultimately offer is not a definitive answer, but a set of constraints. The holes were made by something that displaced material 152:59 Speaker A outward and upward. The scale is consistent with both biological and geological processes. The regularity of spacing is harder to reconcile with known geological processes than with behavioral biology. But no specific organism has been identified that matches the observed pattern. The raised 153:18 Speaker A edges suggest active displacement rather than passive collapse. And the fact that similar holes appeared in the same region nearly 20 years earlier suggests that whatever produced them is not a one-time anomaly, but something that recurs, or at least something that the 153:34 Speaker A environment in that part of the ridge supports repeatedly. That is actually a fairly specific set of things to know about an unexplained phenomenon. It is not nothing. It narrows the range of plausible explanations without eliminating the ambiguity entirely, and 153:51 Speaker A it points toward what a more careful investigation would need to focus on the rim geometry and detail, the sediment composition immediately around the holes compared to the surrounding seafloor and ideally some form of time-lapse observation to see whether the holes 154:08 Speaker A persist, change, or are associated with any observable activity. None of that is easy to do, but it is not impossible either. It is a question of whether the resources and attention can be directed toward this specific site at this 154:23 Speaker A specific depth with enough time and precision to collect the kind of data that would actually resolve the question. That question, what a real investigation would look like and what it would take to conduct one, is where the story naturally goes next. So what 154:39 Speaker A would it actually take to find out? That is a reasonable question to sit with for a moment because it is easy to describe something as unexplained and leave it there. As if the mystery is simply permanent. As if the ocean has 154:53 Speaker A decided to keep this secret and that is the end of it. But the holes are not supernatural. They were made by something. something physical operating under the same rules of chemistry and biology and fluid dynamics that govern everything else on this planet. The 155:10 Speaker A answer exists. It is just currently located at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in the dark under 300 atmospheres of pressure, roughly 2,000 m below the nearest sunlight. The problem is not that the answer is unknowable. The problem is that getting to it requires a 155:29 Speaker A very specific set of tools, a lot of time, and a funding structure that does not always reward patient targeted follow-up on discoveries that were made by accident during a survey aimed at something else entirely. The most obvious thing that would help is simply 155:45 Speaker A watching, not visiting once, filming for a few minutes, and leaving. actually watching, leaving a camera system on the seafloor near the holes for an extended period of time, days or weeks, or ideally months, and recording whatever happens. This sounds straightforward, 156:04 Speaker A but in practice, it is a fairly significant undertaking at 3,000 m depth. The technology to do it exists. 156:12 Speaker A It has existed for a while, actually. Autonomous lander systems, which are essentially weighted platforms that sink to the seafloor, sit there recording and then release a float and ascend to the surface when triggered by an acoustic signal from the ship above, have been 156:27 Speaker A used in deep sea research for decades. They can carry cameras, acoustic monitors, sediment traps, and various sensors. Deploying one near the holes would not require the same level of ship time as an ROV dive because the lander goes down on its own, but it would still 156:43 Speaker A require a ship to be in the area, a lander system to be available and configured for the right depth and duration, and a return trip to recover the data. 156:53 Speaker A There is a working example of what long-term seafloor observation can produce, and it is worth knowing about. 157:00 Speaker A The MBARI Mars Observatory, which stands for Mterrey Accelerated Research System, is a cabled seafloor observatory located about 900 m deep in Mterrey Bay off the coast of California. It has been operating since 2009. The cable connection means it can transmit data 157:19 Speaker A continuously in real time, which is something a lander cannot do. Over the years, the Mars Observatory has recorded things that would never have been captured by a single ROV dive, the behavior of deep sea animals over seasonal cycles, the passage of internal 157:35 Speaker A waves, the slow accumulation and redistribution of sediment, the arrival and departure of different species at different times of year. It has captured footage of animals that were not previously known to visit that depth in that region. The point is that 157:51 Speaker A continuous observation reveals things that snapshot visits cannot. A single ROV passed through a site tells you what was there at that moment. A camera running for 3 months tells you what the site actually does. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is not Montterrey Bay. There is no 158:08 Speaker A existing cable infrastructure on the seafloor of the ridge in the area where the holes were found. A cabled observatory is not a realistic option there without a very large and expensive installation project. But a lander deployment is more feasible. The 158:23 Speaker A challenge is that the holes may not be persistent enough to still be present by the time a follow-up expedition could be organized. 158:30 Speaker A Organizing a targeted research dive to a specific location on the Mid-Atlantic ridge takes time. securing ship time, designing the scientific program, obtaining the necessary permits for working in international waters, assembling the team, and actually getting the ship to the right part of 158:48 Speaker A the ocean typically takes at least a year, often longer, from the point at which a discovery is made. By then, the specific holes filmed in 2023 may have been reworked by the slow background processes of the deep sea floor. 159:03 Speaker A Sediment at that depth is not as static as it might seem. Fine particles settle and shift. Biological activity in the upper few cm of sediment, even in a relatively low productivity area like the open Atlantic, continuously reworks the surface. The walls of a small hole 159:23 Speaker A in soft carbonate clay sediment could slump and partially fill within weeks. This is one of the genuinely frustrating aspects of deep sea discovery. The window between finding something and being able to study it properly is often very short and the logistical timelines 159:41 Speaker A of ocean research are very long. The holes were found on a dive that was already underway. The ROV was already at depth. The cameras were already running. 159:51 Speaker A If there had been any way to pause the primary mission and spend several additional hours at the site conducting targeted sediment sampling around the holes, that would have been extraordinarily valuable. But expedition time at sea is planned months in 160:06 Speaker A advance. The ship has a schedule, the ROV has a dive plan, and there are usually multiple scientific objectives competing for the same limited hours. 160:17 Speaker A The 2023 Okanos expedition was not primarily designed to investigate holes in the sediment. It was conducting a broader survey of the ridge. The holes appeared, they were documented, and the dive continued. Sediment sampling done carefully, could tell quite a lot. A 160:35 Speaker A push core taken from the rim of one of the holes, the kind of small tube that is pressed gently into the sediment by the ROV's manipulator arm, would preserve the layered structure of the sediment right at the edge of the hole. 160:48 Speaker A Analyzing that core under a microscope could reveal whether any biological material is present. Fragments of worm tubes crustation exoskeleton mucus trails, or microbial mats. It could also show whether the sediment grains at the rim are sorted differently from the 161:05 Speaker A surrounding seafloor, which would indicate whether they were deposited there by a fluid flow or physically displaced by something solid. The grain size distribution around the rim compared to background sediment a meter away is actually a meaningful data point. If the rim sediment is coarser, 161:23 Speaker A that suggests material was pushed upward from below where deeper sediment layers often have slightly different composition. If it is finer, that might suggest surface sediment was compressed inward from the sides. Passive acoustic monitoring is another tool worth mentioning. Some geological and 161:40 Speaker A biological processes in the deep ocean produce sound. Hydrothermal venting produces a characteristic low frequency noise as hot fluid moves through rock fractures. Certain animals produce sounds during feeding or movement. If a hydrophone were deployed near the holes for an extended period, it might detect 162:00 Speaker A acoustic signatures associated with whatever is creating them. This is speculative because the process might be entirely silent. But acoustic monitoring is relatively cheap compared to ROV time and a lander carrying a hydrophone and a camera could potentially capture both 162:17 Speaker A sound and visual data simultaneously. If an organism is responsible and if that organism is active enough to create multiple holes over a period of time, there is at least a chance that a camera left running long enough would catch it 162:32 Speaker A in the act. The deeper logistical problem is funding. Research vessel time in the deep ocean costs roughly $50,000 to $100,000 per day, depending on the ship and the equipment. A targeted follow-up expedition to the Mid-Atlantic ridge holes, even a modest one lasting 2 162:51 Speaker A weeks, would cost somewhere between 1 and $2 million before you account for equipment, personnel, and analysis. 162:58 Speaker A Funding agencies, including NOA's own ocean exploration program, allocate resources based on scientific priority and proposal quality. An unexplained set of holes in the sediment is genuinely interesting, but it competes for funding with climate research, fisheries biology, deep sea mineral surveys, and a 163:20 Speaker A long list of other priorities. A proposal to go back and study the holes would need to make a compelling scientific case, not just for curiosity, but for what answering the question would actually contribute to broader scientific understanding. 163:35 Speaker A If the holes turn out to be made by a previously undescribed organism, that is a significant biological finding. If they are made by a known organism behaving in an unexpected way that is still interesting. If they are geological, understanding the micro 163:51 Speaker A seepage mechanism could have implications for understanding fluid dynamics and ridge sediments. The scientific case is not weak. But making it persuasive enough to secure dedicated ship time is a different matter. There is also the question of whether the 164:06 Speaker A holes are still there or whether new ones have formed. The 2004 and 2023 observations suggest that whatever process creates these holes operates in this region of the ridge on a time scale of years to decades, not once in 164:21 Speaker A geological history. If that is true, then even if the specific 2023 holes have been reworked by now, a return visit to the same general area would likely find similar features, that actually makes the scientific case somewhat stronger. You're not chasing a 164:38 Speaker A single anomaly that may have disappeared. You're investigating a recurring phenomenon that appears to be characteristic of this part of the seafloor. That is a more tractable scientific problem because you have a reasonable expectation that the phenomenon will be present when you 164:53 Speaker A arrive, even if not in the exact same spots. What a real investigation would ideally look like if resources and time were not limiting factors, is something like this, an RV dive to the site to document current conditions and collect 165:10 Speaker A targeted sediment push calls from hole rims and surrounding areas. Simultaneous deployment of a longduration camera lander nearby set to record continuously for 60 to 90 days. Recovery of the lander after that period and analysis of the footage and any acoustic data. 165:28 Speaker A A follow-up dive if the lander footage suggests active processes with more targeted sampling based on what was observed. That sequence of events from initial planning to final data analysis would realistically take two to three years and multiple ship expeditions. It 165:46 Speaker A is not an unreasonable scientific program. It is actually fairly modest by the standards of large oceanographic projects, but it requires someone to prioritize it, fund it, and commit to the follow through. What makes this particular mystery sit in an interesting 166:02 Speaker A place scientifically is that it is not so remote or so technically demanding that it is effectively unreachable. The Okanos explorer can dive to the relevant depth. Lander technology is mature and available. Sediment analysis techniques are well established. The mid-Atlantic 166:21 Speaker A ridge, while far from land, is regularly visited by research vessels. This is not like trying to study the bottom of the Mariana Trench, where the depth and pressure create genuinely extreme engineering challenges. 3,000 m is deep, and the pressure is serious, but it is 166:40 Speaker A well within the operational envelope of existing research infrastructure. The answer is not locked behind technology that does not yet exist. It is locked behind logistics, funding, and the prioritization of one scientific question among many. 166:55 Speaker A It is also worth noting that most of what we know about the deep sea floor was not discovered through targeted investigations of specific phenomena. It was discovered by accident during expeditions designed to do something else. The hydrothermal vents at the 167:12 Speaker A Galapagus Rift were found during a dive that was primarily mapping the seafloor topography. The Lost City Vent on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge was discovered in 2000 during a cruise that was conducting geological surveys. The 2023 holes were found during a general survey dive. This 167:31 Speaker A is the normal pattern of deep sea discovery. You go somewhere to look at one thing and you find something else that turns out to be more interesting. 167:39 Speaker A The implication is that the follow-up investigation of the holes, when it eventually happens, may itself produce additional unexpected findings. The deep sea floor has a way of rewarding the act of looking, even when you're not quite sure what you're looking for. For now, 167:55 Speaker A the holes remain in the category of documented but unexplained. The footage is there, archived and publicly available, timestamped, and geoloccated. 168:06 Speaker A The scientific community knows they exist. The question has been posed. What is missing is not awareness or interest, but the specific sustained logistically difficult act of going back to that place with the right tools and enough time to actually watch and sample and 168:25 Speaker A listen. That gap between knowing something unexplained exists and being able to conduct the investigation that would explain it is one of the most common and quietly frustrating features of deep ocean science. It is not unique to the holes. It applies to dozens of 168:41 Speaker A other documented anomalies across the world's oceans. Features and phenomena that were observed once, noted in a log, and then left waiting for a follow-up that may or may not come within any particular researcher's career. The holes are waiting. The sediment around 168:58 Speaker A them is doing whatever sediment does at 3,000 m in the dark. Whether they are still intact, whether new ones have formed nearby, whether something is actively producing them right now at this moment, there is simply no way to 169:12 Speaker A know without returning. And that thought that the answer is physically present on the seafloor of the Atlantic right now, sitting in the cold and the dark, unchanged or changed, visible or buried. 169:26 Speaker A That is actually a strange and interesting thing to sit with. The ocean does not keep its mysteries because it is hiding them. It keeps them because getting there is hard and staying there is harder. And the ocean is very large 169:38 Speaker A and we're still in many ways just beginning to understand what it contains. That brings us to something worth considering more broadly, which is just how much of the ocean floor remains in that same condition, observed only in fragments, mapped only in outline, and 169:54 Speaker A what the existence of places like this actually means for our understanding of the planet we live on. As of 2024, roughly 80% of the ocean floor has not been mapped at high resolution. That number gets repeated often enough that 170:09 Speaker A it has started to feel like a fact people absorb and then set aside. The way you absorb a large number about the distance to a distant star. It sounds significant and it is, but it does not quite land in the body the way it 170:23 Speaker A should. So, let me try to make it a little more concrete. The total area of the ocean floor is approximately 361 million km. Highresolution seafloor mapping, the kind that can resolve features at the scale of meters rather than kilome has been completed for only 170:41 Speaker A a fraction of that. The rest has been measured primarily by satellite alimmetry which detects subtle variations in sea surface height caused by the gravitational pull of underwater mountains and trenches. 170:56 Speaker A That method gives you the broad shape of things. It tells you a ridge is there, that a seamount rises from the plane, that a trench cuts deep into the crust, but it cannot show you a hole 10 cm wide 171:10 Speaker A in soft sediment. It cannot show you an animal track, a vent field the size of a city block, or a field of strange evenly spaced punctures in the sea floor. For features at that scale, you need a ship 171:25 Speaker A and an ROV and time and a specific decision to go to a specific place and look carefully. 171:33 Speaker A The seabed 2030 project is trying to change the broad picture. It is a collaboration between the General Baometric Chart of the Oceans known as GBCO and the Nippon Foundation, a Japanese philanthropic organization. 171:49 Speaker A The goal announced in 2017 is to produce a complete highresolution map of the entire ocean floor by the year 2030. 171:58 Speaker A As of the mid 2020s, the project has made genuine progress incorporating data from research vessels, commercial ships fitted with mapping sonar and autonomous underwater vehicles. The percentage of the seafloor mapped at useful resolution has grown meaningfully since the project 172:16 Speaker A began. It is real scientific work and it matters enormously for navigation, geology, climate science and resource management. 172:28 Speaker A But there is an important distinction worth holding on to. Mapping the seafloor baimetrically, meaning measuring its depth and shape, is a different task from surveying it biologically or geologically at close range. A complete baimetric map of the ocean floor would tell us where every 172:46 Speaker A ridge and canyon and plane is located. It would not tell us what lives there, what processes are active on the sediment surface, or what small-cale features are present that only become visible when a camera is a meter away 172:58 Speaker A from the bottom. The seabed 2030 project is building the atlas. The biological and geological survey of what is actually happening on the seafloor is a much larger, much slower and arguably more difficult undertaking that has no equivalent deadline and no equivalent 173:17 Speaker A funding commitment. This matters for the holes, but it also matters more broadly. The midatlantic ridge is one of the most geologically significant features on the planet. It has been known to science since the 1850s when depth soundings during the transatlantic telegraph cable 173:35 Speaker A surveys revealed a raised region in the middle of the Atlantic. The full extent and significance of the ridge was not understood until the 1960s when Harry Hess's theory of seafloor spreading gave it a context. And yet, even now, with 173:52 Speaker A decades of dedicated research behind us, the ridge is known mostly through a collection of specific sites that have been visited and studied in detail, surrounded by vast stretches that have been seen only by sonar from above, or not at all. Lucky Strike, Rainbow, Lost 174:10 Speaker A City, the Tag Hydrothermal Field near the equator, a handful of others. These are the places with names, the places that appear in papers and documentaries. 174:22 Speaker A Between them is a great deal of seafloor that has been overflown by ships, mapped in broad outline, and otherwise left alone. The holes were found in one of those in between places. Not at a named vent field, not at a previously 174:38 Speaker A documented site of special interest, just somewhere along the ridge during a general survey dive in the kind of seafloor that researchers passed through on the way to somewhere else. And that is part of what makes them interesting as a symbol, not just as a phenomenon. 174:54 Speaker A They were found because someone was looking. Not looking for them specifically, but looking in general, carefully with good cameras and attentive eyes. The simple act of being present and paying attention produced a discovery that nobody expected. There is 175:12 Speaker A something quietly important in that. The ocean does not announce its surprises. It does not mark the interesting spots on a map or send up a signal when something unusual is happening on the bottom. The surprises are there distributed across the seafloor, waiting 175:29 Speaker A for the specific and effortful act of going to look. Most of the seafloor has never been looked at in that way, not even once. No camera has ever been within a kilometer of the vast majority of the ocean bottom. Whatever is down 175:44 Speaker A there, whatever processes are active, whatever organisms are living and feeding and leaving traces in the sediment, it is all happening without an observer in the dark at pressure in cold that is just a few degrees above freezing, completely indifferent to 176:00 Speaker A whether anyone will ever come to see it. That is not a sad thought exactly. It is more of a strange one. 176:09 Speaker A We live on a planet where the majority of the surface, if you count the ocean floor as surface, which geologically speaking it is, has never been directly observed by any human instrument. The land has been photographed from satellites at resolutions that can read 176:25 Speaker A a license plate. The ocean floor remains mostly dark and mostly unknown. Not because the technology to look at it does not exist, but because the ocean is so large and the act of looking so slow and expensive that we have simply not 176:39 Speaker A gotten to most of it yet. We are early in this process, genuinely early in a way that is easy to underestimate. The holes sit inside that context. There are small mystery in physical terms. 10 cm wide, perhaps 20 cm deep, arranged in a 176:57 Speaker A line along a section of seafloor near the Azors. They are not a geological catastrophe. They are not evidence of something threatening or dangerous. They are just unexplained and unexplained in a way that is honest and straightforward. The scientist who found 177:12 Speaker A them said so. Noah published the footage, noted that the origin was unknown, and asked if anyone had ideas. 177:20 Speaker A That is a reasonable scientific response to something you do not understand. Not alarm, not overclaiming, just documentation and an open question. 177:31 Speaker A What the holes represent in a broader sense is the condition of most deep ocean science. Not crisis, not conspiracy, not the dramatic unknown of science fiction, but the quieter and more ordinary unknown of a field that is working carefully through a very large 177:48 Speaker A subject with limited tools and limited time. The deep ocean is full of things that have been seen once and not yet explained. Full of organisms that have been photographed but not yet described formally. Full of geological features that have been mapped and outline but 178:04 Speaker A not yet sampled. The holes are one item in a long list of open questions, and they sit on that list without apology, waiting for someone to come back with the right equipment and enough time. 178:17 Speaker A It is worth thinking just for a moment about what is above those holes. Right now, the water column above the mid-Atlantic ridge near the Azors is ordinary Atlantic Ocean. Ships cross it regularly. Cargo vessels on their way between Europe and North America. 178:34 Speaker A fishing boats working the productive waters around the Azor's archipelago, the occasional research vessel. The surface up there can be rough or calm depending on the season. There are storms in winter, karma stretches in summer, seabirds fly over it. The water 178:51 Speaker A is blue and cold and unremarkable from above and 3,000 m below the surface of all that ordinary Atlantic Ocean in complete darkness under pressure that would crush an unprotected human body in seconds. The seafloor sits quietly. The holes, if they are still there, are 179:12 Speaker A sitting in that darkness right now. If they have been reworked by currents or biological activity, the sediment around them has settled back into something smoother, and whatever made them may have moved on or gone still. 179:27 Speaker A If new holes have formed nearby, they are forming in the dark without any witness. The process, whatever it is, continues or has stopped, and there is no way to know which without going back. 179:39 Speaker A That is the situation. It is not dramatic. It is just the reality of a planet where the largest environment is also the least observed. 179:49 Speaker A There is a phrase that comes to mind though it belongs more to philosophy than to oceanography. 179:55 Speaker A It is the idea that the map is not the territory. We have charts of the Atlantic. We have sonar profiles of the mid-Atlantic ridge. We have temperature and salinity data from thousands of oceanographic stations. We have a detailed understanding of the plate 180:12 Speaker A tectonic processes that drive the ridg's geology. All of that is real knowledge carefully gathered over more than a century of work. And yet the territory, the actual physical seafloor with its sediment and its organisms and its strange small holes is still mostly 180:28 Speaker A unknown in the direct observational close-up way that would let us say with confidence what is happening there. The knowledge we have is real but incomplete and the incompleteness is not a failure. 180:39 Speaker A It is just the current state of a very large and very slow scientific project. 180:45 Speaker A What the 2023 holes did in a small way was remind people of that incompleteness. 180:51 Speaker A They went briefly viral, which is a strange thing for a section of seafloor sediment near the Azors to do. They appeared in science news articles and on social media. And for a few days, people who had never thought much about the 181:04 Speaker A mid-Atlantic ridge were looking at ROV footage of a dark, flat sea floor with small holes in it and finding it genuinely interesting. Some of those people probably went and read about hydrothermal vents or about deep sea organisms or about how plate tectonics 181:23 Speaker A works. That is not a bad outcome for a few cm scale holes in soft sediment at 3,000 m. The ocean has a way of doing that, of producing small, specific, concrete things that open into larger questions. A hole in the sediment 181:40 Speaker A becomes a question about what organism or process made it, which becomes a question about what lives at that depth, which becomes a question about how life survives without sunlight, which becomes a question about the conditions under which life might exist elsewhere in the 181:56 Speaker A solar system. The chain of inquiry that starts with something small and physical can extend a long way if you let it. 182:04 Speaker A That is not unique to oceanography. It is how science generally works. But the deep ocean is particularly good at producing these small concrete things that open into large questions because it is so poorly known that almost anything you find there is genuinely 182:22 Speaker A new. If you have been listening to this and you have a theory about what made those holes, the comment section is a real place to put it. Not because citizen science is going to solve this particular mystery in a comment thread, 182:36 Speaker A but because the range of ideas that people bring to a question like this is genuinely interesting, and occasionally someone with relevant expertise sees something in a comment that connects to a piece of the puzzle they had not considered. Noah asked for public input 182:52 Speaker A for exactly that reason. The scientific community does not have a monopoly on useful observations, and a question that is genuinely open is genuinely open to everyone. The more likely resolution, when it comes, will probably arrive quietly, not as a dramatic announcement, but as a 183:12 Speaker A paper in a marine geology or biological oceanography journal describing the results of a targeted follow-up expedition that found similar holes, deployed a lander, and recovered footage of whatever is actually responsible. The paper will have a careful title and a 183:28 Speaker A method section and a discussion of alternative hypothesis. It will be read by a few hundred specialists and perhaps picked up by a science journalist who will write a short article about it. The mystery will be solved or at least significantly 183:43 Speaker A narrowed and the seafloor near the Azors will go back to being a place that most people do not think about until the next dive finds something else. Because that is how this goes. The deep ocean is not running out of surprises. It has barely 183:58 Speaker A started offering them up. Every expedition that goes down there and looks carefully comes back with something that was not expected. 184:06 Speaker A Something that does not fit neatly into existing categories. Something that requires a new question. The holes are one of those things. They will eventually have an explanation and the explanation will probably be interesting and it will probably suggest three more 184:22 Speaker A questions that did not exist before. That is the nature of the place. So the holes sit there in the dark at the bottom of the Atlantic on the flank of the longest mountain chain on Earth in a place where the seafloor is slowly 184:37 Speaker A pulling apart at roughly the speed your fingernails grow. Whatever made them is either still there or has moved on or was never a living thing at all. The sediment around them is water saturated and soft and very old in the way that 184:51 Speaker A deep sea sediment is old. built up over thousands of years at a rate of millimeters per millennium. The water above them is cold and dark and under pressure that is difficult to truly imagine. And somewhere up above all of 185:05 Speaker A that, the Atlantic Ocean reflects whatever light the sky is offering. And ships cross it without knowing what is below them. And the world goes about its business entirely unaware that 3,000 m down, there are small, evenly spaced holes in the seafloor that no one has 185:21 Speaker A yet explained. That feels like a good place to rest for tonight. Thank you for spending this time here. If you found this interesting, a like on the video helps more people find their way to it, and subscribing means you will be here 185:34 Speaker A the next time something quiet and strange and worth thinking about comes along. If you have a theory about the holes or a question or just want to say where you are listening from tonight, the comments are open and genuinely 185:46 Speaker A read. Sleep well wherever you are. The ocean will still be there in the morning. Most of it still unknown, still going about whatever it is going about. 185:57 Speaker A Patient and dark and full of things we have not yet thought to look for. Topics: Mid-Atlantic Ridge deep sea plate tectonics Atlantic Ocean NOAA Okeanos Explorer Azores seafloor mystery hydrothermal vents ocean exploration Study this video - [Flashcards from this video](https://sozai.app/tools/ai-flashcard-generator/?from=transcript&id=84063) - [Quiz on this video](https://sozai.app/tools/quiz-generator/?from=transcript&id=84063) Free, made by AI from this transcript. 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