Cave-diving scientists are exploring the past while charting the future | The Excerpt
On Sunday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: Hidden beneath Earth’s surface are caverns and pathways that hold the secrets of our planet’s very beginnings. Even after decades of exploration, there are still new ecosystems and signs of past lives yet to be discovered. Trekking deep into the earth is not for the faint of heart. Enter a cohort of maverick scientists who strap on a harness and oftentimes scuba gear, and delve deep into the belly of the Earth. Who are these cave explorers, what have they found, and what do they still hope to discover? Phil Short, experienced cave diver and Research Diving and Training Lead at DEEP, joins The Excerpt to take us down below, back in time and into the future.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, December 8th, 2024. Hidden beneath Earth's surface are caverns and pathways that hold the secrets of our planet's very beginnings. Even after decades of exploration, there are still new ecosystems and signs of past lives yet to be discovered. Trekking deep into the Earth is not for the faint of heart. Enter a cohort of maverick scientists who strap themselves in or rather strap on a harness and oftentimes scuba gear and delved deep into the belly of the Earth. Who are these cave explorers? What have they found and what do they still hope to discover? Joining me now to take us down below back in time and into the future is renowned cave diver and educator, Phil Short. Thanks for joining me, Phil.
Phil Short:
Thank you for inviting me. It's great to be here.
Dana Taylor:
There are several ways to explore caves. When you cave dive, you're on limited time. Outside of monitoring your oxygen supply, what are the main challenges cave divers face and how advances in tech expanded your ability to conduct research?
Phil Short:
The main boundary to cave diving and the main hazard that we have to contend with and mitigate is navigation. Because when you go into a cave, they're not just a straight cylindrical tube or tunnel, they're labyrinthine. So there are side passages to left and right, but they're also three-dimensional. So there'll be passageways above you and below you via potholes in the floor and the ceiling. So the golden rule of cave diving is to maintain a continuous guideline to surface, that means all the way back to breathable air, either outside of the cave or in a dry area of the cave. And that line enables us to find our way in and out of the cave to the areas that we wish to explore. And when we're exploring, we're extending that line, never traveling through the cave without it.
Dana Taylor:
I'm sure that there are lots of different gadgets and things that you're able to take with you and that are above ground that are tech, new tech that you can share with us.
Phil Short:
Equipment is absolutely everything to the cave diver because we're in an environment that a human being just cannot survive in. We're underwater so we cannot breathe. So we're carrying a means of breathing. Now that might be traditional open-circuit scuba. It might be a closed-circuit rebreather, but whatever it is, we use a system called the rule of thirds. So we'll breathe one-third of our available breathing capability on the way in exploring the cave. We'll breathe one-third when we come out of the cave and when we turn. And then that means when we get back to safety, we have one-third remaining that wasn't used. And that remaining one-third can give us the opportunity to deal with unforeseen eventualities like the failure of our light, and brings us to the next piece of tech.
Caves are absolutely pitch black, not like a dark night in the forest. There is no light at all. So you can wave your hand in front of your face and see literally nothing. So much like the breathing supply. We carry three lights as a minimum. The line is so critical to us, we may become entangled in it if visibility reduces. So we carry a minimum of two cutting devices should we become entangled in the line to deal with that unforeseen eventuality. And of course there is the possibility that we might even lose that line. So we're trained through cave diver training to look for that line in the event we lose it with a lost line drill, and that means deploying another smaller line to search for the missing line.
And these are just the beginnings. Some of the latest state-of-the-art pieces of technology that help us is we now have navigational systems that can measure our distance, measure our direction so we can produce incredible maps of these cave systems rather than the old fashioned way of pen and paper by using these devices to run along the line that helps us and measure distance and direction.
Dana Taylor:
We've come to expect caves, whether they be accessible by foot or by diving, to reveal stories about early human life. The Chauvet Cave discovery in 1994 contains paintings dating back more than 30,000 years. What do findings such as this teach us about ourselves?
Phil Short:
So there's a very interesting point, and I've been extremely privileged in my cave exploration career over the last three decades to see two particular things that just inspired me with such an immense sense of awe as to how old our species are. In my case, both of these were in the Ural Mountains of Central Russia, and the first was cave paintings, much like you say, but in a different location of bison and horses and hand prints. And these paintings are actually overlaid by a clear, hard see-through layer. And you might think maybe that's protection put there to stop any damage. Well, it's not because this is in the middle of the Ural Mountains. It takes weeks to even get to these caves. That clear layer is calcite, so it's flowing see-through rock that forms very slowly over tens of thousands of years.
And by that, they can actually date these paintings because the formation couldn't have formed in any other way than over the top of the paint. So we know they're massively prehistoric. And so stand there and watch that and think, "Well, it took me an amount of time of all this high-tech equipment to get to this painting. Our ancestors crawled there with a flame light only, and for some reason unknown to us chose that spot to paint that incredible picture." And although they're stylistic, they're beautiful and they really do look like what was trying to be represented. So it really does make you feel like a tiny speck of sand in a massive desert in your importance to the bigger picture when you realize just how old we as a species are and then realize just how young even the oldest of our species is compared to the geology of our planet Earth.
Dana Taylor:
What kind of future is your cave diving potentially paving the way for? I see there's been some research about the possibility of humans living in pods underwater. What other realities might your research inspire?
Phil Short:
My job is exactly what you've just described. It's working as undersea research and training lead for DEEP that are working to put undersea pods or habitats. The idea being that if we can be in an environment where we can live on the ocean floor instead of a brief snapshot of what is down there, we can spend month on end in that environment studying, watching it live, learning what the creatures and the environment does, and really working out what we can do to protect it, what we can learn from it to assist ourselves, all sorts of potential including pharmaceuticals, medicine, climate change differences.
And these environments that we know nothing about like the deep ocean, like the continental shelves and like caves, all of which could yield information that can help us protect our home, planet Earth, protect the atmosphere of that home and deal with problems that we've had for many, many centuries, for example, certain diseases, et cetera. I think it's really, really inspirational that companies like DEEP are reaching out to actually find a way to give us the ability to learn more about our home as opposed to focusing all the time on other homes that are millions of miles away like other planets.
Dana Taylor:
Phil, you're an adventurer. What's been your most thrilling find so far?
Phil Short:
I think I would have to split that into one for cave diving and one for wreck diving because they both interest me and they're both very, very different. For wreck diving, it's the human story that is so inspirational, the people that were on that wreck and the story they have to tell. So I was involved in a maritime archaeological project of the Danish King's flagship from 1495. So this wreck sunk 500 years ago. So during the excavation we were bringing up as expected gun carriages, cannonball, and all of these sort of big items. But we bought up eventually, not really sure what it was, a thin sheet of material, maybe cardboard, thinking there wasn't cardboard in 1495.
When it came to surface and it was put in a tank of water and gently cleaned off the mud, it turned out to be a sheet of birch bark from a silver birch tree that contains a lot of oil. And on the skin of the bark, people had scratched away the dark layer of bark to leave engraving, and the engraving was peacocks and chimera, and the researchers worked out what this was was a sleeve to slide over the crossbow body because the sides of the crossbow were hunting seams engraved in bone that can be damaged by moisture. So they made a waterproof coat to protect the main sleeve of the crossbow. And after 500 years under the sea on a sinking ship, that piece of paper thin bark with those engravings still survives and is now in the museum for everybody to see and properly cataloged.
Caving wise, because caves form from limestone by dissolving the water, the cave and the limestone is made from, that limestone was once upon a time, millions of years ago, a warm, shallow tropical seabed. So if you imagine in that sea a large marine mammal is swimming along, reaches the end of its life, passes away and sinks, it lands on the bottom and a variety of marine life from little worms to fish come along and scavenge the carcass till nothing is left but the bones. And then over millions of years, sediment falls like dust rain in the ocean and buries that skellington.
And then over millions more years, those sediments get squashed and squashed and squashed until they form a sedimentary rock. Along comes me the cave diver, millions of years later, swimming along a tunnel nearly a mile inside a cave in Central Florida and turning a corner, having later jumping line to a new area, an area that's protected by not having a line in it, so only people who know where it is can get to it to protect what's there.
Because as you swim around the corner, there are the vertebrae, one and a half, two feet across of a whale and to the side of the vertebrae, the giant ribs sticking out of the floor of the limestone rock because the dissolution of the water has taken away the soft limestone and left the fossilized whale sticking out of the passage. So it's just awe-inspiring when you swim and you go, "Wow, I'm in a cave system in a swamp hundreds of miles from the ocean, and here's a whale." And for me, that was one of the most impressive things I've ever seen in a cave environment.
Dana Taylor:
Phil, can you give me an example of how the research you do going deep into the Earth informs the search for life on other planets?
Phil Short:
Analogs are environments that they use to enable us to learn about a method before we take it somewhere that is truly extreme, and the advantage of deep cave exploration, so the J2 project, for example, involved the team of 50 people living in the jungle where the cave entrance is for three months with no internet, no telephone, no TV, radio, and being self-sufficient, getting supplies from the local ranch up into the mountain on donkeys and then going down into the cave. And me personally, I spent the longest single time underground on the project of 21 days and 21 nights on our final exploratory mission.
And that's a similar thing to climbing Everest. You start in base camp and do camp one, camp two, camp three, resupplying those camps to eventually have enough material and infrastructure to make a big for the summit. The cave is exactly the same the other way around. We go underground to camp one, camp two, camp three. We then set up all the dive gear and dive through a flooded section, disassemble the dive gear to carry it again another half mile to the next flooded section, establish another camp and keep traveling. So what this has as an advantage for us to learn about extreme environments that we want to visit like space, if we were ever to terraform the moon or go and try to put man on Mars, we've got to learn how to deal psychologically, physiologically, equipment wise, supplies wise with these extreme environments that you cannot just say, "You know what? I don't like this. I want to go home now or leave."
from the end of J2, at the final point of exploration beyond camp four, the fastest way home would've been a four to five day caving trip of much effort, much rope climbing, some diving, just to get out. So there's no fast way. So what we can learn from these extreme environments like caves is how to equip ourselves to be capable mentally and physically to explore more extreme environments where we are likely to learn even more.
Dana Taylor:
And then finally, Phil, if there was one thing you'd like us to know about the world below, what would it be?
Phil Short:
It's truly beautiful. It's totally peaceful. The speed and rush and desire for everything to be instant, a quick fix disappears as soon as you deflate your buoyancy aid and disappear under the surface. It's a world of calm. It just stops and sits still. And if you take the time to pause and breathe and look around you, the longer you are there, the more the creatures around you will become used to your presence and start to come out and just exist as they would without you there. And you really are in a truly new realm, unlike anything you'll see on the surface because you're not meant to be there. Technology and training have given us the privilege to be there, so it really is as Jacques-Yves Cousteau said, the silent world. You just float there in silence, in peace, in calm, and absorb something truly wonderful and totally different.
Dana Taylor:
You took me on a lovely adventure today. Thank you so much, Phil, for being on The Excerpt.
Phil Short:
Thank you very much.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.