![]() The next day, we dived to that very same place, and there was nothing happening. I felt like we should be falling out of the sky because we've just left, we've gone into outer space and now we should be coming back down to Earth. I can't wrap my head around the fact that we were ascending. Orla Doherty: We go down and we film for seven or eight hours, and then we ascend back to the surface. What does it feel like when you come back to the surface? I really felt like I had left Planet Earth entirely. It was truly like going to another planet that day. We watched as the bubbles cascaded out of nothing and shot past us. Then these bubbles shoot all the way up to the surface at 780 meters above us. You can see it in Blue Planet II, but these giant bubbles are rocketing out of what looks like a desert, a mud bottom, like nothing there. She led me to some methane bubbles which sounds somewhat unexciting. We took a detour on the recommendation of this brilliant deep sea scientist, Mandy Joye. In terms of feeling like an alien, like I come from outer space, the most crystal clear example of that for me is when we were working in the Gulf of Mexico. Then you go to solid dry land and you're not moving, but you think you are. I kind of had to stop and brace myself because that's what happens when you've been moving constantly. ![]() It was hilarious because I had land sickness so the shelves felt like they were going to cave in on top of me. Orla Doherty: The very first time that I'd been out at sea-we'd been out for about two months-we came back and I went into a supermarket to buy groceries. It was a place you could actually go to, which was incredible. The deep was no longer an academic place that you just read about in books. It completely transformed my sensory experience of the ocean. On my very first trip on Alucia, we took some dives and we talked about brainstorming a partnership and how we could really work together on that "Deep Sea" episode for the series. But then when I discovered that this deep ocean was all there for the taking if you had the tools to get into it, everything changed. My knowledge of the ocean up until standing on the deck of Alucia stopped at about 50 meters because that's kind of as deep as you can go when you're on SCUBA. ![]() Mark Dalio: You're going from zero hours in submersible to 500 hours, I believe. It was such a rush of excitement to meet a vessel like this and see the capabilities of ocean exploration. It can take us down to 1,000 meters and it's extraordinary. I've gone from some sort of Medieval sailing platform with a tiny engine and a generator, to Alucia, which is like this floating kind of spaceship with submersibles that can get picked up and dropped into the deep sea. A decade later, when I find myself standing on the deck of Alucia, it's like I'm traveling through time. Although it was very important work, the ocean exploration was done in a very antique, old school way. We studied the coral reefs and tried to understand them and diagnose them all around the world. Orla Doherty: I spent 10 years at sea studying coral reefs in the Pacific while living on a hand-built junk boat. The Deepest Dive in Antarctica Reveals a Sea Floor Teeming With Life Do you remember your first impressions of the ship? What was that like? I think it's been quite a journey being able to use the scientific platform to further our knowledge of the oceans and to excite the public too. A lot of the work that we did was with Orla and her team at Blue Planet II, like when we did the first 1,000 meter submersible dive in Antarctica. We used our platform at Alucia with two manned submersibles, helicopter operations, wet labs and dry labs to conduct really groundbreaking science. We undertook an expedition with NHK and Discovery to go film a giant squid for the first time. I was very much involved with the work Alucia was doing. We actually acquired it in 2012, while I was working at National Geographic. Mark Dalio: Alucia has been around for quite some time. It's the home base for filming Blue Planet II and the home of so much technological wizardry. ![]() Tell us a bit about the Alucia- the 56-meter research and exploration vessel built to broaden the scientific understanding of the ocean. ![]()
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