Deep sea nodules, ideas in ecology, and three brilliant scientists not always on the money
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What are “shark potatoes” and how were they first discovered on the seafloor?
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Time for The Science Show. And this week, we find ourselves in challenging situations. Mining metallic nuggets from the seafloor, tracking the remarkably rapid evolution of weeds, and grappling with the legacy of eminent scientists who are absolutely sure they were right, even when the ideas they were spouting were just plain wrong.
I'm Belinda Smith. And I'm Robin Williams. Coming up, something unusual for The Science Show, though not for science itself. How massive brilliance can sometimes make clever scientists go too far.
But first, it never fails to astound me where fossilised remains can turn up. So earlier this month, paleontologists reported finding a feather entombed for 66 million years inside a dinosaur coprolite. That's fossilised faeces. Imagine that, turning over a pebble-sized piece of T-Rex poo to find a tiny, beautifully preserved feather. Or, how's this, busting open what looks like a lump of metal only to find a giant fossilised shark tooth. This happens more often than you might expect, as Peter de Cruyff discovered when he went searching for shark potatoes.
Potatoes are almost a misnomer. I get that, but I look at these and I immediately think of black truffles, which is probably a little bit more decadent. They do look a bit like a black truffle. That's Tim Ziegler, and he's not a market vendor.
I'm the collection manager of vertebrate paleontology at the Museum's Victoria Research Institute.
And Tim does have a table of wares to show me. Trays of black rocks that some people have referred to as shark potatoes? An unexpected
discovery for us, fossilised shark's teeth that have formed the centre of manganese nodules, metal lumps, oxides that have formed at the bottom of the deepest parts of the ocean.
That's right. A ball of metal with a shark tooth in the middle. Sometimes even a megalodon tooth. And all these potatoes are made over a really, really long time. These are potentially millions or tens of millions of years old. You can understand why Tim and other scientists are so interested in these sea spuds. But why does the President of the United States, Donald Trump, want to get his hands on them? This is so valuable. Shark potatoes aren't new to science. Researchers have been hoisting them up from the deep ocean for 150 years, including a famous multi-year voyage that started in 1872. Oceanographic expeditions
such as the Challenger expedition focused on mapping the depth of the world's oceans and learning what the ocean floor was made of. was the first time we really recovered and studied these objects in earnest.
One of the tools on board HMS Challenger was a dredge. It was a net fitted around an iron frame that was dropped over the side at the end of a long rope. The dredge was dragged along the seabed and collected earth samples, freaky looking creatures, shark teeth and a bunch of potato sized objects first thought of to be black coral? Thankfully, the trip was well documented, so we know exactly what its scientists were thinking about what they hauled up.
March 7, 1873, somewhere in the North Atlantic Ocean between Puerto Rico and Cabo Verde. Charles Wyville Thompson, chief scientist of HMS Challenger. The dredge came up at 4.15pm with a small quantity of red mud, in which we detected only one single but perfectly fresh valve of a small lamellae branchiate mollusc. In the mud there were also shark's teeth of at least two genera, and a number of very peculiar black oval bodies about an inch long, with the surface irregularly reticulated. My impression was that both the teeth and the concretions were drifted fossils, but on handing over a portion of one of the latter to Mr. Buchanan for examination, he found that it consisted of almost pure peroxide of manganese.
Did people think 150 years ago maybe the ocean floor is just metal and shark teeth or metal shark teeth?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What are “shark potatoes” and how were they first discovered on the seafloor?
0:00–6:23
2
How do manganese nodules form around shark teeth and what does this reveal about deep‑sea mineral deposits?
6:23–13:38
3
Why are governments and corporations interested in mining these deep‑sea nodules for critical metals?
13:38–18:40
4
What are the environmental risks of harvesting nodules and the associated deep‑sea ecosystems?
18:40–24:37
5
How are fast‑evolving weeds reshaping our understanding of rapid ecological change?
24:37–32:00
6
What lessons can we learn from the controversial ideas of Lynn Margulis, Paul Ehrlich and Desmond Morris?
32:00–38:47
7
How did Margulis’ endosymbiosis theory change the view of life’s origins despite her later missteps?
38:47–45:19
8
What is the lasting impact of these three brilliant but sometimes misguided scientists on today’s science and policy?
45:19–55:01
Speakers
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