Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
306 | Helen Czerski on Our Energetic Oceans
Mon, 24 Feb 2025
It is commonplace to refer to the Earth's oceans as vast and largely unexplored. But we do understand some aspects, and improving that understanding is crucial to ensuring the continued viability and success of life on this planet. The oceans are a paradigmatic complex system: there are many components, distinct but mutually interacting, that add up to a nuanced whole. We talk with ocean physicist Helen Czerski about what the ocean is and how it's changing.Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/02/24/306-helen-czerski-on-our-energetic-oceans/Support Mindscape on Patreon.Helen Czerski received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at University College London. She is the author of several books, most recently The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works. She is a frequent television presenter for the BBC and elsewhere.Web siteUCL web pageGoogle Scholar publicationsWikipediaAmazon author pageBlueskySee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What distinguishes complex systems from complicated ones?
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. We had a AMA question a couple of weeks ago, earlier this month, that I'm not sure I did a great job of answering. You know, I tried to give an impression of what was in my mind. The question was about the difference between complexity in the sense of complex systems research versus simply being complicated.
I have actually invoked this distinction before. They're not the same thing, but, you know, neither word really has an agreed upon single definition. So I kind of And I said, well, it's up to whoever is speaking. You can mean different things.
But it occurred to me later when thinking about today's podcast that you're about to hear that there is sort of a single thing you can put your finger on that really distinguishes simply being complicated from being complex in the sense that we use it, which is complicated means there's a lot of stuff going on.
Complexity happens when there's a lot of stuff going on and those things interact with each other so that in some sense the whole system of interacting complicated things going on forms a whole. There is some notion of the system arising out of the smaller pieces in a way that still makes the pieces be important.
So it's different than the very, very simple-minded notions of emergence that we have sometimes in physics. where you have, you know, atoms coming together to make a fluid. That's absolutely true. You have many, many, many atoms, and they come together and they interact to make a fluid.
But then once you have that fluid description as a gas or a liquid or whatever, you can forget about the atoms, right? You can sort of average over what all the atoms are doing and get a pretty good higher-level description of what's happening. In a complex system, the little pieces that come together to give you the whole continue to matter.
In a country, a nation state, the individual people continue to matter. In an economy, the consumers and producers matter as well as the rules and regulations that guide their actions. And today's system, today's complex system that we'll be talking about is the Earth's oceans.
And they are themselves complex, but of course they also play an enormous role in the complex system, which is the Earth itself and the Earth's biosphere in particular. You know, you've all heard the numbers. Most of the Earth's surface is covered with water, a little bit over 70% of it. It's—the oceans are where most of our water is on Earth.
Some of it is on rivers and lakes or in the atmosphere, but the oceans is most of it. And you may also have heard that our climate is changing. It is completely unsurprising that the oceans have a huge effect on our climate. And it is also completely unsurprising that we humans are having a huge effect on our oceans. So today's guest, Helen Chersky, is going to tell us about that.
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Chapter 2: How do Earth's oceans impact our climate?
Then it's hard to see, you know, the satellites are not really showing us an image of the seafloor.
But it's very seductive, isn't it? It's very seductive to think we've got these global maps. And of course, we fill it in now using, so reanalysis is one word for it, where you take your bits of data and then you stitch them together with a computer model effectively. And it all looks smooth and nice and lovely. And it looks like you know everything. And of course, you don't.
So satellites are useful, but as you say, light doesn't travel. And one of the things that is interesting about the ocean that is kind of obvious to a physicist once someone's mentioned it, but no one ever really talks about it, is that on land for us, light is a long distance messenger and sound is a short.
distance messenger because you know you can't really hear another person across the street but you can see the moon right whereas in the ocean it's the other way around light doesn't even though we think of water as transparent light doesn't penetrate very far even in the clearest waters you might have a couple of hundred meters plus a bit on a good day and uh but sound at least the lower frequencies can travel potentially a very long way so sound is your long distance messenger and
in the ocean. And so we are also ocean blind because we are literally ocean blind, that we don't see the messenger that could tell us what's happening in the ocean. And so one of the other reasons we've underestimated the ocean on the very long list is that we can't look into it.
We can look into the sky, we can see clouds and we can see birds and we can see clouds going in different directions at different heights. we cannot look into the ocean.
And this is one of those places where I think improved, no one's really done a good job of this yet, but you can see it coming that some sort of augmented reality goggles effectively that give you, you can stand on a cliff and look into the ocean and it will show you a realistic sort of representation of what's let you see into the ocean. And then I think we'll start to see it as a place.
And so I think that conceptual shift is coming, I don't know where the computer models are who might solve that problem and work on that, but they have not emerged from the woodwork yet, but I'm sure they're out there.
Well, I know when it comes to exploring outer space, most of the heavy lifting is actually done by robots and autonomous vehicles, but there's also some romance and something personally important to having human beings up there. I presume it's a similar story with the oceans. I mean, do you think we should have more emphasis on human beings or less emphasis on human beings?
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