Deep currents – an interview with Dr Helen Scales
Without the oceans that surround us, our planet would be 30 degrees hotter. Not that we’d notice, since we wouldn’t have air to breathe either. Marine biologist Dr Helen Scales wants us all to understand the importance – and the fragility – of our seas.
“Humans are visual and we’re not good at appreciating and caring about the things we can’t see,” she says. While some people, like Scales, love the sea and regularly engage with its waters as swimmers, rockpool explorers, divers or sailors, many people barely notice its existence, yet it has enabled life on Earth and continues to nurture and protect us – often in ways we don’t yet fully understand.
Scales will be explaining to delegates at the Chartered IIA’s Internal Audit Conference in October why we need to think more about the oceans and how we can all become advocates for preserving the last great wilderness on our planet. And why our support has never been more important.
Interconnected life
After gaining her doctorate at Cambridge University, Scales discovered that, in addition to her passion for the ocean and ocean life, she had a talent for communication. Since then, she has written several books and presented podcasts and radio documentaries on developments in marine science revealing the hidden beauties and explaining the interconnected complexities of the seas for laymen. Because, she says, we cannot take it for granted.
“Half of the oxygen we breathe comes from marine organisms, and the oceans are also responsible for creating and maintaining the balance of gases in our atmosphere. The oceans create our weather and not only absorb heat and trap carbon, but also move heat around the planet,” she says. “They make our world habitable.”
This is before we start considering the importance of seafood and the livelihoods of all the people who work on and around the sea. “News stories tend to focus on one area in isolation – overfishing in a particular region or loss of coral reefs – but what happens in the ocean is far more interconnected than on land,” she explains. “The deeper we look, the more we see that the ecosystems are connected – for example, many of our fisheries in coastal waters depend on food brought up by currents from the deep sea.”
We’re living in a golden age of ocean exploration, but there is much we still don’t understand. However, we do know that when we start interfering with ecosystems at ever greater depths, the impacts of our actions are likely to reverberate and escalate in ways that we can only guess.
“Climate change is much more complicated in the ocean than it is on land,” Scales says. “For example, warmer oceans carry less oxygen and our seas have lost two per cent of their oxygen in the past 50 years. Seawater is also becoming more acidic as more carbon dioxide is absorbed, making life stressful for all sorts of sea life. What’s more, creatures living in the sea are on the whole much more vulnerable to rising temperatures than those on land. Underwater there’s nowhere to hide from the heat. You can’t retreat into the shade or hide underground and only come out at night.”
Now, just as scientists have gained the technology to allow them to explore deeper in the ocean, new threats are emerging. The deep seas are beyond national frontiers and subject to unscrupulous exploitation.
“There are terrible atrocities being committed,” Scales warns. However, current negotiations to put in place a legal framework offer hope. “We desperately need a better way to think about the ocean in its entirety. The deep seabed was defined in the 1970s as being the ‘common heritage of humanity’. Like the moon,” she explains, “it doesn’t belong to any one group of people, it belongs to everyone alive now, and in the future, and we have to think more about what it does for us and will do for future generations.”
And humanity’s care for the oceans should extend beyond sharing out the economic profits. It must also take into account all the broader benefits that the planet as a whole gains. “We already have too many global problems caused by humans that we are struggling to sort out. We definitely don’t need to interfere with the deep seas in new ways that will create new, ever more complex issues,” Scales points out.
Reasons to be cheerful
There are, of course, many reasons for pessimism at the moment. This summer we have seen sewage released along UK beaches, while listening to warnings that a weakening Gulf Stream could make further changes to the climate of the UK and Ireland inevitable. However, Scales remains cautiously optimistic.
“The good news is that we know a lot about possible solutions, from allowing fish stocks to recover to cleaning rivers,” she says. “We need to lead by example, and not wait for others to act first, otherwise nothing will ever change. And because of the interconnectedness of the ocean, it means that success in one place – for example,
by creating more protected areas – can have positive effects elsewhere.”
She adds that she draws her optimism from two sources. The first is that there are many people already doing incredible things to protect the oceans and inspire others. “This needs to become even more mainstream,” she says.
The second is more personal. “When I go into the ocean myself and see something inspiring and wonderful – if I come eye to eye with an octopus – I realise that there are still so many wonders to be found, so much still to discover and so much to fight for.”
Making a sea change
What would Scales like each member of her audience at the Internal Audit Conference to take away from her keynote speech? “The ocean is not just for scientists or for scuba divers, it’s for all of us,” she says.
“I’d love it if each person would go away and think about what they are good at and what they can do to appreciate our oceans more and to preserve them and what they offer us. Find out more, go to the beach and experience it for yourself, tell other people about it and, if you want to take action, find the way you can make a difference in your life, your community and your organisation, whether this is joining a campaign against polluted rivers, choosing to fly less, driving a smaller car, or no car at all, reducing plastic waste or choosing more sustainable fish to eat.”
While this session at the conference will focus on the big picture and the wonders that science is still discovering, as well as the fragility and interdependence of the ecosystems throughout the entire, global ocean, further sessions during the day will develop themes around environmental risk and sustainability. Delegates will have many opportunities to consider and discuss the impacts of environmental change as well as issues arising from emerging risks, ongoing disruption and crisis management in their organisations.
Dr Helen Scales will be delivering the keynote address at the Chartered IIA’s Internal Audit Conference on 18 October. Readers can buy her latest book, The Brilliant Abyss: True Tales of Exploring the Deep Sea, Discovering Hidden Life and Selling the Seabed with a discount of 20% if they order directly from the Bloomsbury website using code ABYSS20 .
This article was first published in September 2022.