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Nov. 16, 2015 - Art Bell

02:25:51

Art Bell MITD - Jill Heinerth Underwater Cave Exploration

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	From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good
	morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in all 25 prolific time zones covered like
	blanket by this program midnight in the desert I'm Art Bell.
	Rules of the road, simple.
	No bad language on this show.
	No really bad language, and one call per show.
	That's the rule.
	All right, so there's a lot to talk about.
	It's going to be a very, very busy night, and boy do I have a guest for you, Jill Heinerth, coming up in a little bit on underwater cave exploration.
	I'm sure Jill's a very nice lady, but I think anybody who goes underwater into a cave system is out of their mind but you know that's just me we're gonna find out all about it she does amazing things I would recommend you to my website for a number of things but let me begin here because of course the Paris attacks
	The CIA director says more attacks are likely in the pipeline.
	There were to be seen today lots of ISIS guys on CNN saying, Europe, we got you and we're going to get you again, and America, you're next.
	American blood, they say they is the best, American blood.
	Our intelligence agencies are strained.
	And when they say that, they really mean it.
	If our intel agencies, if the NSA is strained to keep up with everybody who's here, or might be here, or has bad plans, then we're in big trouble.
	Lots of raids in France, associated with, and Belgium, associated with a bunch of arrests.
	They arrested a whole group of even suspected people.
	So we know that the Paris area was shocked by a major terrorist attack Friday night that's being claimed by the neo-caliphate, I like that phrase, terrorist group ISIS.
	But just hours before the attack was carried out, Facebook removed a key anonymous group responsible for identifying and reporting thousands of social media accounts used by ISIS recruiters.
	Now let's think about that.
	Anonymous, on our side, in the sense that they're exposing a group's planning to attack us, right?
	Now, regardless of what you think about ISIS, their origins, and who is pulling the strings and funding them, one thing is clear.
	They've been spreading their ideology and recruiting using Facebook and Twitter more than on-the-ground traditional methods.
	We talked about this last week.
	The anonymous group Red Cult initiated an operation to counter the ISIS social media presence called Op ISIS.
	Operation ISIS, in other words.
	We at Counter Current News, that's where this story came from, have been the primary contact point for Op ISIS from the start and we continue to be today.
	That's why our source in the Red Cult told us today that a group calling itself Report ISIS Accounts, run by Anonymous, was removed by Facebook and the administrators from the group All Banned.
	The anonymous group Red Cult initiated an operation to counter the ISIS social media presence called, again, Op ISIS.
	And, you know, you've got to ask why.
	Why keep anonymous from doing the job that American and European law enforcement either are unable to do, or overstrained, or unwilling to do?
	Exposing accounts used by ISIS to operate and recruit on social media Facebook has refused to respond to inquiries from Red Cult or from Counter Current News and several other alternative media outlets who have contacted them directly.
	Now Facebook, as you know, has its own terms of service agreement.
	What I want you to hear Is a message that I have on my Facebook, if you can take looking at this masked ISIS face.
	And I want to play this for you here on the air.
	The only thing you're missing is video.
	If you go to my website, you're not going to miss that.
	It's up there for you right now.
	But here's what they are saying.
	This is kind of an ISIS sort of introduction right now.
	Which is worth watching, by the way.
	The video you're listening to, available on my website.
	This is, of course, from our friends at Anonymous.
	Greetings citizen of the world and Facebook. We are Anonymous Red Cult.
	As most of you know, we're engaged in Operation ISIS from some time now, to fight ISIS online in different ways, like taking down ISIS sites, leaking information, exposing ISIS accounts on social media sites, One of our groups on Facebook called Report ISIS Accounts, with the URL, www.facebook.com.groups.ophisis, and it's dedicated to post and report ISIS accounts from YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites, where we reported and deactivated thousands of accounts.
	Accounts they used to communicate, recruit, and spread ISIS propaganda.
	Few hours ago, Facebook decided to close this group, So we asked, is it because ISIS supporters reported us back?
	And if so, for what reason?
	for it except quote we removed the post below because it doesn't follow the
	Facebook community standards end of quote so we asked is it because ISIS
	supporters reported us back and if so for what reason or Facebook is bothered
	from us reporting terrorists accounts that violate Facebook community
	standards anyway by using fake names and posting inappropriate and violent
	propaganda that only serve ISIS terrorism We ask, is this one of the new Facebook policies, to protect terrorists accounts?
	Instead of fighting it, or simply Facebook doesn't care, we leave this for the public opinion to judge this action by Facebook.
	Action that can only be interpreted that Facebook took a wrong decision.
	Anyway, we will continue our fight on ISIS.
	We are Anonymous.
	We are Legion.
	We do not forgive.
	We do not forget.
	Expect us.
	So, uh... Yeah, there's the, uh...
	There's the audio, and if that's not enough, trust me, you need to see the videos on my website artbill.com now.
	As you know, some weeks ago, months ago was it now?
	I believe, I solicited Anonymous, so that I could speak to Anonymous.
	Well, what I got was the doctor.
	Now, the doctor is This is very difficult.
	The doctor is... Doctor, what are you?
	What would you prefer to be called?
	You may as well use my handle.
	Call me the doctor.
	Okay, the doctor.
	Alright, good.
	Alright, so... You heard that, and I'm sure that's not the first time you heard it.
	It would seem, on the face of it, that Facebook is abridging the First Amendment right of anonymous to To do what?
	To expose ISIS?
	And that's bad?
	I do think it's problematic.
	I also think it's incredibly strange, because from what I've observed, Anonymous in general, and the Red Cult in particular, have had varying success with having the accounts of ISIS recruiters taken offline.
	But they seem to be getting hit.
	But Anonymous seems to Periodically get its own presence knocked offline and then brought back with no explanation The ISIS page being taken offline just hours before pick the massacre in Paris began is extremely strange Yes, I did a little bit of research earlier today and discovered that after
	Well, fascinating.
	not too long after uh...
	the massacre is over and uh... the chronology is being cleaned up
	the offices page was mysteriously brought back online
	without any comment from peaceful management or peaceful got content management i should say
	fascinating uh...
	uh... is so in other words you don't know if they reported you for some weird
	thing reported them for some weird thing
	and uh... that's what was taken down. It's possible.
	It's possible that some number of people in ISIS had reported that page and asked it to be taken down, and because Facebook is somewhat notorious for its real name policy, and by real name policy I mean if you get out of bed with your right foot on first instead of your left foot, they may freeze your account.
	That's right.
	That's right, I may freeze, I've been frozen three times.
	Yeah, so it's possible that some ISIS recruiters had the page frozen, they unfroze it.
	It's possible that Facebook, for whatever reason, got a hair up its nose and froze it, and then unfroze it.
	It's possible that someone told them to temporarily suspend the off-ISIS account.
	I don't know.
	It's... A mystery.
	It's a mystery.
	It's strange.
	All right.
	Let me ask you this.
	Is Anonymous getting in a position where it's going to virtually be at war with ISIS?
	Yes.
	And that war is going to consist of taking down their sites, I would presume.
	As well as quite possibly the identities of ISIS operatives.
	There's evidence that hacktivists were involved in stopping an attack in Tunisia some months ago.
	there's evidence that activists were involved in stopping an attack in
	tunisia some months ago there's evidence that activists were involved in uh...
	stopping a plot in new york some months ago
	well then uh... why in heaven's name doesn't uh... our government
	uh... through some backdoor uh... share allows information to be shared with with them
	Is there any of that going on, or can you not comment?
	I have no idea.
	My thought is that is not the case, simply because Governments tend to not like working with fifth columns, and Anonymous is sort of the ultimate fifth column.
	So, would you imagine that my Facebook account, which I do enjoy, is now in some jeopardy, or do you think it will remain up there?
	Um, I think it'll... I don't think it's in any jeopardy, at least not immediately, unless someone decides that they're not an Art Bell fan and decides to hit that little report button.
	Yeah.
	Well, I have been signed, sealed, delivered with a, you know, I had to... I believe I had to send a picture, ID, and I had to send my driver's license, so they should know who I am, but I guess they could have temporary amnesia.
	They could.
	Facebook's content management team is extremely large.
	It's spread across multiple continents, but they all have more or less equal access and authority to do what they're charged with, which is determine who is and is not allowed to use the service.
	Alright, here is a question for you.
	Do you know if Facebook or Twitter have made any public comment about the fact that ISIS is known to use the social media As ways to communicate.
	Have they made any comment about it?
	To the best of my knowledge, no.
	Nobody has.
	Lots of other people have.
	Certainly lawyers have, law enforcement agencies have, government agencies have.
	Okay.
	Well, I will depend on you for updates in the war.
	I would love to know how it's going, and if you have any future trouble of this kind, I sure hope you'll get hold of me first.
	Thank you very much, sir.
	All right.
	Thank you, doctor.
	That is the doctor, and he, I think, wants to be known just as the doctor, but he is sort of a consultant for us when it comes to matters of anonymous.
	Well, all right.
	Let us move on now, and Doctor, thank you for calling.
	Please keep me informed.
	So there you have it.
	I mean, that was a statement of war.
	Anonymous is at war with ISIS.
	So that's your headline, if you want one.
	And I wish them well.
	These bugs have to be exterminated.
	They're coming for us, you know.
	I don't know if you saw the videos or not, but they're coming for us, folks.
	So... All I can say is, uh, we're all in this together, right?
	And so we all have to hope for the best.
	Coming up, Jill Hyneth, in a moment.
	Stay right where you are.
	What she does is gonna absolutely blow your mind.
	She goes under the water, and then she goes in caves all over the world, even the Antarctic.
	Unbelievable.
	I'm Mark Bell. This is Midnight in the Desert.
	Take a walk on the wild side of midnight.
	From the Kingdom of Nigh, this is Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell.
	Please call the show at 1952-225-5278.
	That's at 1952.
	Call Art.
	Interrupting myself, as I said, uh, the headline you can take away from that last was, anonymous, is it war with ISIS?
	And if I were ISIS, That would be the last thing I'd want to hear.
	The very last thing.
	All right, coming up now, Jill Hinerth is an aquanaut who is recognized as one of the planet's great underwater explorers.
	More people have walked on the moon than have been to some of the remote places that Jill has explored here on Earth.
	An expert in one of the world's most dangerous endeavors, cave diving, The words give me a chill.
	Jill is a photographer, filmmaker, author, and instructor with over 7,000 scuba dives to her credit.
	Jill wrote, produced, and starred in the PBS documentary series, Water's Journey, and has led numerous National Geographic and NOAA expeditions.
	Jill is a monthly columnist for Diver Magazine.
	Her articles and photos have appeared in publications as diverse as the National Geographic and the Wall Street Journal.
	She is a fellow of the National Speleological Society.
	I get this right. Speleological society. I hope that's close.
	Or Speleological society.
	I'm not sure.
	We'll get it from Jill.
	The Explorers Club, the Royal National Canadian Geographical Society, Jill is in fact a well-respected voice now, in the discussion about water conservation and her We Are Water project and documentary film, which has won several environmental awards.
	Here she is.
	So is it speleological?
	It's hard to even know where to start, Jill.
	The science of caves.
	Okay, the science of caves.
	It's hard to even know where to start.
	Jill, most of us, I think, myself included, in a million years,
	I can't imagine suiting up in whatever, with whatever tanks,
	rebreathable or otherwise, and going into a cave under the water.
	What in God's name motivates somebody to do that?
	I mean, it's certainly not for everyone.
	I mean, I think most people would agree.
	Yes.
	Yeah, I mean, the darkness repels most people, just the darkness alone.
	But if you put someone underwater in complete darkness, it would be absolutely terrifying to most.
	But, you know, for me, it's, you know, looking around that dark corner, it's an invitation to go someplace that nobody's ever been before and see something remarkable that's never been recorded.
	Well, you know, sometimes when you look around that dark corner, you see a couple of red eyes.
	Yeah.
	You know, I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid, and that didn't really work out for me growing up in Canada, so this was the closest thing, I think, to exploring the unknown.
	Actually, pretty close.
	As pointed out, you know, we've been more around the moon than we have in the places where you go.
	It's absolutely true.
	You know, we simply have so much to learn about our oceans, the depths, as well as underwater caves.
	I like to think of myself as someone who's swimming inside the veins of Mother Earth.
	I mean, I think we could all agree that the Earth is this living body, and I'm like in the circulation system, in the lifeblood, and I kind of feel like my job is to report back on what I see and the changes that I see as well.
	All right.
	When you dive, I take it you dive at the very least with a partner?
	Not always.
	Really?
	So sometimes it takes a big team to pull off an expedition or a mission.
	I do quite a lot on my own as well because there are times when we're squeezing through a small space and you're better off on your own than having someone else become the cork in the bottle that contains your life.
	Yeah, well, in many of the movies about this sort of thing, they show people inevitably squeaking through these little places with their tank sort of getting caught on something.
	I mean, that close is the space that you can barely make it through.
	You've gone through places like that?
	Sure, absolutely, but there's also spaces that are the sizes of aircraft hangars, and you've got Literally no walls or floors or ceiling for reference.
	You're literally floating neutrally buoyant in the blackness.
	So there's huge spaces and there's tiny spaces inside the earth.
	And unknown spaces.
	I mean, as you point out, you just don't know what you're going to really run into, right?
	Oh, absolutely.
	I mean, that's the ultimate dream of cave diving explorers is to go someplace where nobody's been before and be the first to, you know, run a line and then survey an underwater cave.
	It's an incredible experience.
	It almost sounds like a line out of Star Trek.
	Right?
	Go where no man has gone or, well, in this case.
	May I ask your age?
	I'm fifty.
	Fifty, okay.
	I am.
	Wow.
	So, the dangers you face when you are exploring underwater caves, as insane as that seems, especially if it's a cave that's never been mapped or explored before, I imagine that's really freaky.
	Oh, I mean, it's exhilarating, because not only are the passages new, but the things that you could potentially discover within those spaces could be something completely new to science.
	It could be.
	Have you ever discovered a new life form, do you think?
	I've been on numerous expeditions where we have brought back new forms of life that have never been seen before, new species.
	The animals, the biology of underwater caves is incredible.
	There are animals that swim within the caves.
	They have no eyes, no pigment, and they're some of the oldest living fossils on the planet.
	Because they don't need eyes.
	That's right.
	They don't need eyes in a dark cave, right?
	So evolution has taken care of that and taken their eyes, if they ever had them.
	Yeah, I mean, they live in very food-scarce environments in tough conditions.
	Some of them live completely chemosynthetically, have nothing to do with, you know, sunlight for survival.
	And some of these animals that swim in caves today have actually remained unchanged.
	Like, they exist in the fossil record since before the extinction of the dinosaurs.
	So, they're exactly the same creature alive today that was around before the extinction of the dinosaurs.
	Yeah, I mean, 65, 70 million year old life forms.
	I mean, what can they teach us about evolution and survival?
	Quite a bit, I think.
	And how do you determine whether these life forms are a particular danger to human beings or not?
	There's no way of knowing that, right?
	No, not really.
	I mean, some of the animals have absolutely remarkable characteristics.
	Like there's an animal called Remipede.
	He's only about an inch long, but he can attack and kill something 40 times his size.
	He actually has venomous fangs and looks kind of like a crawly centipede with no eyes.
	If that thing was the size of a cat, it would be the most dangerous animal on earth.
	But it's just this little inch long thing swimming around in the water column.
	Well, you know they say that they may find the cure for cancer in some rainforest someday.
	Well, I think they could find it in caves.
	Exactly.
	So then, do you, when you encounter a new life form of some sort, or a new who knows what, do you gather some samples of things and bring them back for analysis?
	Mm-hmm.
	So usually I'm kind of the hands and the eyes of scientists who make that their specialty.
	So they may tell me what they need or tell me what to photograph or document.
	But yeah, we do bring back these swimming animals as well as other things like sponges and algal samples.
	Right.
	And some of those have absolutely remarkable potential medicinal qualities.
	anti-cancer agents and anti-bacterial qualities that are hundreds of times more powerful than what we find in similar animals in the ocean.
	Yeah, that's exactly what I was talking about.
	So you do find stuff like that, wow!
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Okay, you have explored, I understand, a place called Ice Island in 2000.
	Yeah, so... First of all, where is Ice Island?
	So, Antarctica.
	In the year 2000, my team and I were planning to go to Antarctica to follow in the footsteps of Sir Ernest Shackleton and his early explorations.
	And the night before our pitch to National Geographic, the largest iceberg in recorded history calved off of the Antarctic ice shelf, the Ross Ice Shelf.
	Hold it, hold it right there.
	This is what we call a hook.
	We've got this break I told you about coming up.
	And then we've got lots of clear geography to navigate above ground.
	I guess different people get their adrenaline from different places.
	For me, it definitely doesn't come from a cave deep underwater.
	But for my guest, Jill, It does, and it just blows my mind.
	We'll be back.
	Midnight in the Desert doesn't screen calls.
	We trust you, but remember the NSA.
	Well, you know, to call the show, please dial 1-952-225-5278.
	That's 1-952-CALL-ART.
	By the way, it's cold out there, baby.
	552-78-51952. Call Art.
	By the way, it's cold out there, baby.
	When I say cold, I mean it's about 39 degrees right now, with 20 to 30 mile an hour winds.
	So on the way over here... Oh, it was cold.
	So, so cold.
	Well, alright, back to my guest, and we've got a special one.
	Jim Heinerth, Joe Heinerth, and she...
	has done incredible stuff.
	She dives, and she was about to tell us about Antarctica.
	You know, that's one place I've wanted to go that I haven't been.
	I almost booked a $25,000 fee on a Russian icebreaker to get down there, but never did quite take the final step.
	And, Jill, I can imagine diving.
	I really can't imagine diving in caves under the water and I beyond, it's completely beyond my understanding to go up and dive in caves under the water in the Antarctic.
	Well, yeah, it was a real interesting project, probably the most interesting and perhaps the most dangerous of my life.
	The largest iceberg in recorded history calved away from the Ross Ice Shelf and started floating into the Ross Sea.
	And it was the size of Jamaica.
	And literally, the night before we were to make a pitch to National Geographic, we completely changed the course of our story concept, because we realized the significance that if things the size of Jamaica are breaking off of Antarctica, then what does that mean?
	And back in 2000, the words global climate change were pretty fresh in everybody's vocabulary.
	Yes.
	I remember that breakaway.
	It was big news, no question about that.
	And what I'm curious about is, how did you change your pitch to them?
	Since it broke off, I'm sure you were thinking there'd be an opportunity to do what?
	Well, instead of just following the course of Sir Ernest Shackleton from New Zealand south to the Ross Sea, we decided to intercept this iceberg and we told National Geographic that we were going to climb it, we were going to study the ice edge ecology, and we were going to go cave diving inside of the actual iceberg itself.
	I wonder how many things they get you to sign You know, before they send you off to do that.
	You know, for that particular project, I was really in charge of designing the diving technology that we would use, and I wanted to use a device called a rebreather.
	And when we applied for our permit to the National Science Foundation in order to go to Antarctica, they declined to give us a permit.
	They declined?
	Yeah, they thought our plan was dangerous.
	Well, duh.
	Yeah, of course it was dangerous.
	Again, let's stop here for a second.
	Tell me about a rebreather.
	I'm curious anyway.
	I understand a tank with oxygen.
	Sure.
	So most scuba divers dive with a tank on their back of just breathing air.
	Right.
	And every time they exhale, they make bubbles and they sort of waste the exhaled breath.
	Right.
	But a rebreather is just like the same technology you use in a spacesuit.
	So it's a closed circuit device and it captures the exhaled breath, scrubs the carbon dioxide out of it, and then injects a tiny bit of oxygen back into the breathing media so that you're back to the amount that you require for metabolism.
	Okay.
	How long does it last, Jill, compared to a similar size tank of breathable air?
	Well, that's the beauty of the technology really, because it gives us a range in terms of depth and time that we can't possibly reach with normal scuba.
	Because a normal scuba tank, you know, The deeper you go, the faster you use it up.
	But with a rebreather, you could have even as long as 20 hours underwater with a very small gas supply, as opposed to 10, 20, 50, even 100 tanks required to do the same dive if it's a deep one.
	Holy mackerel!
	That is a gigantic increase in time you can spend in the water, and probably an increase in the danger for spending that much time in the water, I would think, as well.
	Yeah.
	Well, I mean, there's obviously the danger of just the exposure in the environment, but also you're carrying like a life support equipment, a gas mixing station on your back, and you're constantly manipulating the gases that you're breathing.
	So the deeper you go, the more you have to reduce the oxygen.
	The deeper you go, you have to get rid of nitrogen and replace it with helium.
	And so there's a constant, you know, revision of the breathing gas that's occurring to optimize it for your dive.
	How deep do you go or can you go?
	Well, the deepest I've been is just over 450 feet.
	Holy smokes.
	Some divers have been in the range of a thousand feet on a single person without support other than their diving apparatus.
	My ears start popping at the bottom of the deep end.
	I can't imagine 450.
	My goodness.
	When somebody dives, these are just basic things I'm asking now, but if you go down 400 or 450 feet, what's the deal on coming back up?
	Well, you have a really long time that you have to take to carefully come up in stages.
	We call that decompression time.
	Right.
	And you have to slowly, you know, re-acclimate your body and slowly ramp up the oxygen again so that you can rid your body of the inert gases like helium and nitrogen.
	And if you don't, then you can suffer from decompression illness.
	It could be a terrible injury or death.
	Yeah, I hear it's a pretty bad way to die.
	Yeah, I think that wouldn't be good.
	Okay, so, then one more thing.
	What would the temperature of the water in the vicinity of the ice island be?
	So, just about 28 degrees Fahrenheit or minus 1.8 Celsius.
	Good Lord.
	So, yeah, one-tenth of a degree colder and it would be frozen solid.
	So, it's as cold as it gets.
	How does a diver, no matter how they're layered, survive that?
	Well, it's cold.
	No matter what technology you have, it's still cold.
	But we do wear dry suits so that we're surrounded by an envelope of dry air.
	Now, we have heated undergarments that we can wear, but there's still parts of your skin that are exposed, like your face, and it's cold.
	I don't know how you come out of that without the equivalent of frostbite or whatever it is that you get underwater.
	Well, it really is kind of acclimation.
	I mean, the first time you dive in really cold water is the toughest, but you do kind of get used to it and you have to be really careful when you get out of the water because you're usually in a significantly colder environment.
	As soon as you're out of the water, when you're wet, that's when you get frostbite.
	So you can actually get frostbite underwater?
	I don't know of anybody that's had it underwater, but you can certainly cause other neuralgias, other issues, damage to your nerves.
	So then does the temperature or anything else limit, you've got the rebreather and I understand that, but are you limited in the amount of time you can spend underwater in those conditions?
	Oh, absolutely.
	I mean, there's only so much you can tolerate.
	It's bracing.
	Bracing.
	Yeah, I'll bet it is.
	So, how long?
	Well, I've done just over three hours in Antarctica.
	I've done like five hours in Arctic waters.
	They were a tiny bit warmer.
	One-tenth of the degree you said from being frozen.
	Yes.
	And we're talking here about salt seawater.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, sometimes when we get into the water in Antarctica, we're actually entering in what's like a slushy, you know?
	You're kind of pushing chunks of ice and slush out of the way as you dive down.
	Okay.
	Before we continue with Ice Island, and we're going to, I'm really curious.
	You're 50 now.
	When did you get started with this and how did you get started?
	Well, you know, I was kind of a late bloomer in a way.
	I've always loved the water and as a kid I was inspired by Jacques Cousteau and even watching, you know, Apollo, you know, lunar rovers and things like that.
	Right.
	And I always wanted to do it, but I didn't start until I was in university.
	So, you know, a lot of people started earlier.
	You can start as young as 12.
	But I guess I was a late bloomer.
	I think I was 22 or 23 when I started.
	Nevertheless, at this age, you've got a lot of experience behind you.
	Yeah, yeah.
	This has been my full-time career, so it's all I do.
	So small dives, I presume, at first in your 20s, and then when did you begin to get interested in going into caves?
	Because that seems like, I don't know, a logarithmically greater danger.
	Well, you know, I always liked the environment of dry caves and I would say, you know, even as a kid I liked being in small cozy spaces and I don't have an ounce of claustrophobia.
	Obviously.
	Well, I mean, really, on my fourth dive, I had a peek into an underwater cavern environment, and I went, oh, this is something remarkable.
	And I moved very quickly to increase my skills and background and find a way to make it my full-time career.
	I interviewed a very good friend years ago.
	Was her name, and she explored caves, but above Earth.
	Yeah, I remember listening to your interviews with Bonnie Crittle.
	Really?
	You heard Bonnie?
	Oh, yeah, absolutely.
	Okay, so you do what she does only... Underwater.
	Only underwater.
	Are caves underwater... This would be a silly question, I guess.
	Are they markedly different than caves above water?
	Well, you know, a little bit.
	You'll kind of laugh at this, but I'm actually more comfortable underwater in a cave than dry in a cave.
	Because, in a way, when a cave is filled with water, it's likely to be more stable than one that's just air-filled.
	So, less likely to collapse.
	You know, I was about to ask about stalactites and mites, but I'm looking at a photograph here that you supplied.
	Is that you, by the way?
	Um, so yeah, I supplied a couple.
	There's one with some giant formations.
	Oh my god, what are those?
	So I shot that photo.
	That's in Bermuda.
	Giant stalagmites.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, they're big alright.
	Holy moly.
	You know, what's fascinating about those, obviously that was formed when the cave was dry, so water soaks down through the ground and drips from the ceiling and just literally takes one drop of calcite at a time to make those giant mounds.
	And I've worked with paleoclimatologists and physicists who take these giant stalagmites and they cut them and look at them like rings of a tree.
	And do you know they can actually count back those rings and look at the ancient climate on Earth.
	They can go back like 350,000 years in some of these formations and see what climate was like at other times.
	That is amazing.
	Isn't that cool?
	Right.
	It's very cool.
	And so climate is something I really want to talk about.
	But before that, tell me the story of Ice Island and what it was like and what you did.
	Well, I suppose that's a bit of a climate story, too, because I guess climate change almost killed me.
	Oh?
	Yeah.
	So, we went to Antarctica, made a crazy journey, you know, 12 days from New Zealand.
	Now, you didn't have permission for the rebreather, right?
	Well, we were rejected by the National Science Foundation, so we had to apply to another country, because you need a permit to go to Antarctica.
	So, New Zealand took us with open arms, and the U.S.
	wrote us a letter saying that if we got into trouble, don't expect American assets to come and help.
	So, we went, very confident that we had the best and safest plan possible for the environment.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	So, 12 days across the Southern Ocean.
	The craziest seas on the planet where like storms can go all the way around the earth unimpeded and brew up the seas like you can't imagine and 60-foot seas for days on end and in fact one of those Russian icebreakers that you were talking about was in the Rossi at the same time and they were a day ahead of us experiencing 100-foot seas.
	Oh my God!
	Yeah, so you might want to rethink making that investment in a trip.
	Well, I just wanted to say, you know, and that's why people do that, by the way.
	You know, people have got money who just want to say they stepped foot in Antarctica, and the Russians will take you there for about $25,000 a piece.
	Yeah, yeah, they sure will.
	So going from New Zealand, at what time of year?
	So, we were there in the Antarctic summer, so we were there in like January, February, sort of towards the end of the Antarctic summer.
	It would not be possible to go in the winter, right?
	Well, by boat it would have been pretty tough because, you know, the sea ice even at the end of the summer is like freezing north at like a mile per day.
	And in the year that we went, the sea ice was very difficult.
	So when we finally encountered the pack, we didn't anticipate how difficult it would be to move through the sea ice.
	And my first thought was, wow, you know, I thought we're looking at global climate change here, and then it occurred to me that all the sea ice is just even more evidence of everything that was, you know, breaking up and filling the Ross Sea that summer.
	So we got down there, and the next thing that occurred to us was, how do you know when you're actually there?
	When you're trying to encounter something that's the size of Jamaica, I mean, it literally fills the horizon.
	Sure.
	That's really true.
	In other words, even GPS... Well, we didn't have any satellite access.
	We lost satellite contact about a hundred miles south of New Zealand.
	We were basically black like off the radar for two months with the exception of this incredible woman in New Zealand who had a radio and she could reach us and she could reach the Russian icebreakers down there and she would relay and let us know like every few days we would reach her and she would let us know how people were doing.
	So in other words a woman in quotes in New Zealand was your Gee, wouldn't you think that somebody officially would have a radio going in New Zealand for
	Yeah, but back in 2000, I guess things were a little different.
	So this woman, her name was Mary, Bluff Fisherman's Radio, she called herself.
	Boy, that was like a wonderful voice to hear every few days and know that somebody would know something about us if anything happened.
	Do you know what medium she was using?
	I mean, was it amateur radio?
	Was it some Government allocation of radio frequencies?
	No, no, she's an amateur.
	She's an amateur, okay, a ham.
	She's a ham, yeah.
	Alright, I have talked to people, of course, at our station, the Antarctic.
	I've even had the privilege of talking to the North and South Pole at the same time.
	The only thing they were doing was trading t-shirts.
	Anyway, so here you are, looking for this ice island, and how would you know when you got there?
	Yeah, well, I mean, we had a helicopter.
	So, for the journey, we had to take the helicopter apart and then reassemble it when we got back down there and got to some, you know, reasonable sea conditions.
	Aye, aye, aye.
	Where we could work.
	And even in transit, the helicopter took such a beating.
	The electrical system was still wired to the battery and all the wiring literally dissolved in the salt water from From the seas we were taking on, and so the first thing we had to do was rewire a helicopter, and not a single person on the boat was an aircraft mechanic.
	Well, how was the first ride for somebody?
	Yeah, so we had this incredible guy, Laurie, who was a New Zealand sheep herder.
	He was a remarkable guy.
	He wouldn't obviously take anyone up with him for that first flight.
	He was anxious to put it in the air and everything worked out okay.
	Amazing!
	You had to reassemble, rewire... Yeah, rewire, put the rotors on and basically reassemble the helicopter once we got there.
	How many of you were there?
	There were 18 of us on a little boat just over 100 feet long.
	And I kept thinking, boy, this is a small boat.
	It wasn't ice-strengthened.
	But I was told that a 100-foot boat might do better than a 300-foot icebreaker because it could bob in between the waves instead of breaking in half.
	Yeah?
	Oh, good.
	Great.
	Yeah.
	Actually, getting down to Ice Island, how long did that take from New Zealand?
	Twelve days.
	Twelve days.
	12 days of 60 foot or better seas, huh?
	All right, hold tight.
	We're in a short break.
	Holy mackerel!
	What an interview.
	you ever heard anything like this before?
	Where are those happy days they seemed so hard to find?
	I tried to reach for you but you have closed your mind Whatever happened to our love?
	Take a walk on the wild side of midnight.
	From the Kingdom of Nigh, this is Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell.
	Please call the show at 1952-225-5278.
	That's 1952.
	Call Art Bell.
	Little stumble there.
	Jill Heiner is my guest.
	She is a diver.
	An underwater cave diver.
	And she did underwater cave diving.
	On a place called Ice Island.
	Now, this was a giant, state-sized piece that calved off the Ross Ice Shelf, and she was in water that was a tenth of a degree from freezing.
	That would be the freezing temperature of salt water.
	Unbelievable.
	So, I've been in a cruise ship, Jill, when there were like, I think, 30 foot waves and you know the crew was getting sick nobody you could walk down the aisles everybody was in their room tossing their cookies so how in the world how did your team do I let me ask that going down with 60 foot to up to 100 foot waves I can't I can't even imagine
	No, it's terrifying, really.
	I mean, we had some crises where, you know, fuel tanks that were lashed to the deck broke free and were sliding around and, you know, you're submarining off of every wave.
	It's terrifying.
	Yeah.
	Did most of the crew manage not to get seasick?
	They'd done it before?
	Oh no, everybody got sick.
	Yeah, there's no way around it.
	Everybody got sick and everybody got injured.
	Yeah, you can't even go to the bathroom without getting injured.
	Oh, let's not even talk about that.
	But yes, I have a clear picture in my mind that won't go away now.
	So, Ice Island.
	Okay, there's a lady on the radio, ham operator.
	How does that help you know when you've arrived where you want to be?
	Well, she was able to communicate with some of the other Russian icebreakers down there and was able to give us their position and what they were seeing and with that and the helicopter we sort of slowly moved our way through the pack.
	We got stuck in the pack for a couple of days, completely sealed around with sea ice.
	Wow.
	That was a little scary because, you know, in Shackleton's footsteps the last thing you want to do is end up like his ships and get crushed.
	Absolutely right, yes.
	Yeah, but we eventually, as we continue to move south, the B-15 iceberg itself is also dynamic.
	You know, it was breaking, pieces were breaking off of it as well, so it was spreading itself out around the Ross Sea.
	We're having a very slight breakup in our audio, Jill.
	It probably has to do with, we're just having a vicious windstorm here now, so it may be that, it may be the internet in between, who knows?
	Anyway, I'm getting 99.9% of what you're saying, and folks, if you hear a little break-up, that's what's going on.
	We've got a big windstorm going on.
	All right.
	Anyway, so you finally get on station, and by that, what does that mean?
	I mean, you snuggle up to it?
	Here's something I want to know.
	When you reached it, how far had it moved from the Ross Ice Shelf, per se, do you know?
	Yeah, quite a bit.
	So as it was breaking up, at times we were even anchoring ourselves to pieces of it and moving with it.
	You could move even 20 or 30 miles in the course of a day.
	Not feeling like you're moving at all because you're moving with the ice.
	That's right.
	So, very dynamic.
	But we finally decided to conduct our biggest cave dives in a piece of it that had dripped up on the sea floor and gotten stuck near a place called Cape Hallett.
	Which is actually the first place where people wintered in Antarctica and spent a whole year.
	And it was at that location that we very, you know, tentatively first dove inside these crevices and started to look around.
	In this first big cave dive, my partner and I went in through a crack, basically, in the
	ice.
	It was probably 20 feet across.
	The surface of that crack looked like the dimples on a golf ball.
	It had been carved by the movement of the water.
	We moved in through that crack and all we could see was blackness below us.
	We just went down and down and down.
	At 130 feet, we hit the sea floor and I looked off to my right and there was this just vast
	tunnel leading off into the blackness beneath the iceberg.
	We turned and went inside.
	Where it was in contact with the sea floor, we saw this incredible garden of life, like
	filter-feeding animals, just grabbing things out of the current that was rushing by.
	So, it was beautiful.
	I mean, it was remarkable.
	Now, on that particular dive, we heard sounds.
	You know, the ice is loud.
	It's cracking.
	It's thudding.
	It's groaning.
	It's kind of alarming.
	But, you know, I didn't quite know the meaning of those sounds at that point.
	And when we turned to come back out the way we'd gone in, the whole environment had changed.
	And what we didn't know is that in our, you know, time inside the iceberg, a big piece had calved off the entrance and had basically, to the eyes of the people topside, closed the door that we'd gone in.
	I bet they panicked.
	Yeah, they did, because at that point they realized that there was nobody left on the expedition who was prepared to rescue us, or nothing they could do.
	Was there any communication line between you and those above?
	No, there wasn't, and that actually proved to be problematic during the project, because it's easy To get away from being in the line of sight of the boat when you're surrounded by ice, even if you're in the open water.
	Sure.
	Yeah.
	So when we came back, the doorway had basically closed and we had to find a new route out of the iceberg.
	And when we surfaced, they were shocked.
	They literally had thought that we had been crushed in that calving.
	Holy mackerel.
	There's no rules when something hasn't been done before, and so you're learning on the fly.
	What sounds really crazy to someone outside of the situation, it seemed sensible at the time.
	Every day we learned a little something more, and we revised our plan.
	Sure, we were taking risks, but we were doing it on the best information that we had at the time.
	How long were you down at that point?
	Uh, you know, on that dive, it was probably only about two hours in the water, but it, you know, it was long enough.
	It was, uh, it was pretty cold.
	Well, I've certainly heard icebergs come in Alaska, and it sounds like a gunshot going off.
	It does.
	Or a loud kaboom.
	I can't imagine what it sounds like underwater.
	It reverberates, like, in your chest.
	You can feel it, you know, in your sternum, just as something like that breaks.
	Really?
	But that ended up not being sort of the worst of our troubles as we continued in the project and began doing more and more dives and filming inside the iceberg.
	We started to experience crazy currents that would come up out of nowhere.
	We were actually approaching the full moon when the tidal currents can be stronger.
	But we were finding it impossible to predict when these raging currents would hit us.
	Well, any idea what generated raging currents inside?
	I think it's a lot of things.
	I think it's the tide changing.
	It's a lot of the motion of the ice.
	So as an iceberg lifts and drops in the sea, it's actually creating like a suction and a push.
	And so there's so much going on, it was just impossible to predict.
	So we had one dive where we literally Couldn't come out the way we went in we got swept through
	but my partner and I saw light on the distant horizon and just
	started swimming For that light and we swam and we swam and we swam and and
	by the time we surfaced We were out of sight of the boat like all
	All we could see was ice around us.
	And I thought, oh my God, this is how we're going to die, like a flea on the planet.
	At that point, once you surface, do you have any sort of short-range radio?
	No, no.
	I mean nowadays divers do have little lifeline radios that they can use, but at the time we didn't.
	When was this exactly?
	2000?
	So it was 15 years ago.
	15 years ago.
	Yeah.
	So I have a little like inflatable, we call it a safety sausage.
	So it's about a six foot tall orange balloon basically that you inflate.
	Right.
	So I inflate this thing hoping that they can see the bit of orange above the ice, and I just kind of laugh because I think, there's no way, you know, unless they put that helicopter in the air, they're not going to see us.
	Right.
	But fortunately, the very same currents that swept us through the Berg also knocked the boat off its anchorage.
	And as the boat was trying to reposition, the stern swung around the edge of the iceberg, and I heard someone yell, is that Jill?
	And I thought, oh yes!
	You don't mean that you were, were you alone?
	No, I was with one partner at that point.
	Okay.
	Yeah, with a diving partner.
	Anybody ever tell you you're crazy?
	Yeah, my mom.
	Your mom, yeah.
	I bet your mom has a lot to say about this.
	Yeah, I think she's probably lost a bit of sleep over the years.
	So you were down there how long, totally?
	So we were down there for two months, and it was the last dive down there that was really the most terrifying.
	Why?
	Why?
	Well, we needed more footage, we thought, for a movie, so three of us this time.
	With a large camera and big lights went inside the iceberg caves and worked our way quite a ways in and the current was stiffening it was getting stronger and stronger and And also I had a leak in my glove.
	So now I've got ice cold water in contact with one hand and and my hand feels like wood, you know, it's it's painful and and And not working anymore.
	And I call the dive.
	So I turn to the cameraman and my partner and I thumb the dive.
	So we turn around and try to come out and the current is so strong we're not making any headway.
	And when you're surrounded by ice you don't have a lot to grab on to.
	Alright, quick question.
	Do you have anything that helps you move like some little Jetsons, jetpackers, something underwater, anything you can use that helps you move, or is it Euler flippers?
	Yeah, not on that trip.
	So sometimes divers do use propulsion vehicles, like underwater scooters.
	Right.
	We used those to go a long way back in caves, but we didn't use those in Antarctica.
	So we were just having to swim, and where we could grab something on the bottom, pull ourselves along against the current.
	So, my hand's like dying, you know, we're not seeming to get much closer to the entrance and we're all starting to get worried.
	And we finally, with unbelievable effort, reached the point where we're at 130 feet of depth.
	Added a bunch of decompression time to our dive, but we're looking up at a sheer wall of ice and it's the only way out.
	And I couldn't climb it.
	I'd grab my hand on the wall and it would just slide down the surface.
	I had nothing to grip into that ice wall and I really thought we weren't going to get out.
	Now let me be clear, you have to climb a hundred foot wall before you get to To the surface.
	And that wall was part of Ice Island?
	Yeah, all solid ice around us.
	We're coming up this crevasse of ice, basically.
	I've got it.
	I needed that picture in my head, and it's not a good one.
	If you can't grab on, and you can't pull yourself up, is there a way to add buoyancy?
	You can't come up quickly.
	Right.
	And even when we tried to add buoyancy, the current was pressing down on us, trying to keep us down.
	Right.
	Now, I've been observing these really cool little fish about the size of your thumb.
	They're called ice fish.
	Yes.
	And they're clear.
	You can actually see the insides of their, you know, gut.
	And they have some sort of an antifreeze component to their bloodstream.
	And they occupy these holes in the ice when they're trying to hide from the current and I have noticed this on other dives.
	So my solution for getting up that ice wall was to evict the ice fish and jam my fingers into their burrows and use those like handholds so that we could pull ourselves up.
	God.
	So the way they dig these holes is with this, what you call, antifreeze in their system.
	Yeah, so I mean that's what keeps them from freezing solid and I think they basically chew their own little burrow into the ice so they can hide.
	That's unbelievable.
	So you finally made it to the surface.
	Yeah, but... But?
	But, yeah.
	I mean, I got out of the water and the first words to the Chief Science Officer were, the cave tried to keep us today.
	And we sat down and took our equipment off, but we decided we needed one last bit of footage.
	And we decided that we would prepare our gear, have a meal, And we would post a watch on the deck, a watch that could tell us when the current finally lessened.
	So we sat down to a meal and I heard screams on the deck.
	There was no doubt that something terrifying was happening.
	So we dropped our meals, we ran up on deck, and the entire face of the ice that we were just inside was exploding and crumbling and calving and throwing up this huge wave towards us.
	And within the course of minutes it became just like brash sea ice, as far as we could see.
	So the iceberg that we were just inside exploded.
	Exploding?
	How does that happen?
	Well, if you think about an ice cube that you drop into a drink on a hot summer day, Sure.
	and falls apart sometimes.
	Sure.
	Probably what happened in this Antarctic summer is that during the day as things warmed up
	and the cracks had melt water dripping through them, in the evenings they would freeze again
	and stress that giant ice cube we were inside.
	And eventually the current and the cracks and the stress and all of it was just more
	than this piece we were inside could bear and it fell apart.
	What would happen if you had been down near it when it went?
	I have no doubt that we would have been killed, crushed.
	we wouldn't have made it.
	So you were taking film for...
	what kind of film?
	film.
	I presume high-definition, really cool stuff?
	Yeah, we had actually one of the first real, you know, HD cameras from Sony on that trip.
	It was like, you know, camera number six.
	And so yeah, we were shooting still photos as well as HD for documentary film in the National Geographic article.
	Alright, that's a long time ago.
	What became of Ice Island, the piece that broke off?
	Where is it?
	Does it still exist?
	Yeah, so pieces of Ice Island, of the B-15 iceberg, survived for a long time.
	Like, the average age of these big, huge mega-bergs is usually about seven years before they all completely break up.
	Right.
	But through satellite imagery, they're able to track them for years and years and years, and I think, you know, there's probably still little chunks of it floating around, but the, you know, the bulk of it is gone now, part of the ocean.
	Yeah.
	So, what an unusual, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
	I bet you had to sell hard for that one.
	It was amazing.
	I mean, we all came home and it was just surreal coming back from that whole experience.
	We didn't even really understand the magnitude of what had just happened and what we'd witnessed.
	When you got down inside this ice island, what was in there?
	I mean, was there an in there, as it were?
	Yeah, so imagine that this used to be part of the Ross Ice Shelf, part of the whole continent of Antarctica.
	Really, as you're diving down, you're diving back through history, through layers and layers and layers of snow that's been compacted into ice.
	So sometimes the layers are, you know, thinner or whiter, less compact, and at other times it's like as clear as glass, and you can see things in the ice, you know, like dirt and even, you know, organisms and things that are frozen in that, in that, you know, matrix.
	So it's the same stuff that, you know, people core, and yet we were able to swim down through it.
	Did you ever see any bizarre, I know it sounds like a science fiction movie, but any bizarre creatures in the ice itself?
	So in the spots where the iceberg had tripped up on the ocean floor and we had contact with the ocean floor, it was full of life.
	Like we had these amphipods, kind of like giant cockroaches about the size of your hand.
	literally thousands of mating pairs of them swimming around us like raining off the ceiling and bouncing off of us.
	It was wonderful. Yeah, horror show kind of material.
	Yeah, what you're describing is an absolute horror show and I wouldn't even need those creatures for it to be one.
	But because the currents ripping through all of these cracks and crevices,
	then that's bringing food to, you know, organisms that can live in these strange places.
	is.
	What's it like going someplace like that, that I presume man has never been before?
	Oh, I mean, unbelievably exhilarating.
	You know, I'm not a scientist.
	I'm actually an artist.
	But I get to do this sort of, you know, citizen science, you know, advanced degree in curiosity.
	Yes.
	And so it's wonderful to come back from these sorts of experiences and sit down with the scientists and tell them what we've seen.
	And we can throw out all kinds of wild, you know, imaginative suppositions.
	And they're kind of like, wow, you know, you can't say that.
	But ten years later, you'll see papers written on it.
	Are most of the scientists easy to work with?
	Because I've noticed that some science people are Not tolerant of other folks?
	Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting because, you know, my university schooling is in fine arts.
	Right.
	And so, yeah, some people may sort of thumb their nose at that, but really the kinds of scientists that work on these extreme expeditions Because they've dedicated their life to some very specialized aspect of science, they can't possibly be prepared to do the kind of dives that we are, because we've dedicated our lives to exploration technology.
	So it's a partnership, it's a collaboration, and it's really exciting when you get to work with people that enjoy that collaboration, and I've been fortunate.
	What would you, I guess you would describe that as the single most dangerous situation you've been in?
	Yeah, it ranks right up there, I think.
	I just can't imagine.
	You wouldn't go back and do that again, would you?
	Well, I've done a couple of other projects in the Arctic and I've dived in and around icebergs in Newfoundland as well.
	There's something about, I love the ice, so I don't know if I'd say no.
	Going back, I know a lot more and I might plan things a little differently, but what an opportunity that was.
	Absolutely, once in a lifetime.
	Yeah.
	So nobody died.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	No, that actually was a question.
	Nobody died, right?
	Nobody died.
	Unfortunately, you know, cave diving is known as one of the most dangerous endeavors, and I certainly have lost a lot of friends over the years.
	Fortunately, never with me in the water on a project with me, but I've written a lot of eulogies for friends.
	It's very unforgiving.
	What is the most likely thing to kill you?
	Well, it turns out that it's actually probably decisions people make before they get in the water.
	But the most common thing is like the failure to keep a continuous guideline, a tactile reference all the way home to the opening.
	Yeah.
	So it lapses in judgment more than anything else that kills a cave diver.
	And if you, of course, if you're down deep and your mixture has changed in some unsavory manner, you start making bad decisions.
	Yeah, that is possible.
	That is possible.
	And then there's also, you know, the variabilities of the fact that we're doing something, we're pushing the physiological Envelope of humanity.
	I mean I've had decompression sickness myself and You know it We're just pushing the envelope.
	So there's always a crapshoot where that's involved as painful as they say Yes, I found it to be incredibly painful Interestingly enough not at the moment that I got bent but after my first real treatment I felt the most pain from it and If you're down 400 feet then how slowly do you have to come up, Jill?
	Well, you know, in some cases hours.
	It depends on how long you stay down.
	The longest mission that I've been involved in was a 22-hour mission on a project.
	So it was five hours of what we call bottom time at 300 feet and then 16 and a half hours of decompression.
	Holy mackerel!
	So as you're As you're coming up, how do you regulate that?
	I take it, add buoyancy, right?
	Somehow, and rise a certain amount, and then how do you stop?
	Well, we sort of come up in 10-foot stops, basically.
	And it's all about buoyancy control.
	You know, there's usually some sort of visual or tactile reference for you, but yeah, you're very well-trained in maintaining your depth of your stops.
	And each stop is a little bit longer and a little bit longer and a little bit longer into the shallow stops.
	Really?
	I would have thought shorter and shorter and shorter, but the other way around.
	No, the decompression for like a 300 foot dive that I was just describing started at 260, and then you had to work your way up slowly, but the shortest stops are the longest.
	You're the shallowest stop.
	If you had something really going wrong, and you had to get to the surface really quickly, You can't.
	You have to solve your problem underwater or you'll die.
	You can't skip the decompression on a dive like that.
	So isn't there some way that the ship above can have a decompression chamber and you could Maybe I've seen that in a movie, you know, they come up quickly and slam them into a chamber and hope for the best.
	In some cases, but you know, you're talking about the kind of infrastructure that's only available for really high-end kind of project with a lot of funding.
	Most the time, you know, we're kind of scrappy.
	We don't have that kind of support available to us.
	But even, you know, even a brief delay in getting someone to a chamber, I mean, it still, you know, could cost them their life.
	So just that very act of surfacing still could kill them, even if they're immediately put into a recompression chamber.
	Okay.
	You have done dives in other parts of the world, right?
	Oh yeah, everywhere from underneath the Egyptian desert to Siberia, Mexico, Bahamas, Australia, all over the place.
	Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico?
	Absolutely, yeah.
	Nice caves?
	Unbelievable.
	I mean, quite beautifully decorated caves along the coast and then fascinating, you know, deeper caves inland, you know, filled with the remains of Mayan civilization.
	Is it mostly for the fun of it?
	Or do you do it generally for money?
	I mean, you know, a project of some sort?
	Well, so I have this weird kind of hybrid career, so anything that keeps me underwater.
	So sometimes I'm teaching people cave diving and rebreather diving, sometimes I'm I completely understand that.
	Thank you.
	I love radio.
	Sometimes I'm consulting to an equipment manufacturer or writing articles for magazines.
	So I do whatever I have to to allow me to continue this.
	But I do it for the love of the sport.
	I love being underwater.
	I completely understand that.
	Thank you.
	I love radio.
	In a way, after doing a show you have to decompress.
	But good Lord, nothing like that.
	So, Jill Hinerth is my guest and I hope you're listening.
	Welcome to my show.
	I'm your host, Bill Shkurti.
	To call the show, please direct your finger digits to dial 1952-225-5278.
	That's 1952.
	Call Art.
	Interrupting my own guy.
	Silly, huh?
	Anxious to get back on Joe Hiroth is my guest.
	We have been describing what it's like to dive Underwater, in the caves, in the Ad-Arnic.
	If you can believe that, I didn't even know people were able to do something like this, much less that I was about to have somebody on the air who did it.
	It's just unbelievable to me.
	It seems like it would be so inhospitable to human beings that You just couldn't do it, but obviously you can, sort of.
	Don't you have sort of a worry, Jill, about stuff like, you know, being buried alive?
	Well, I mean, you have to take a certain amount of fear with you, or you don't have any self-preservation at all.
	Um, but I do think of myself as kind of risk averse, like I'm a planner, a problem solver.
	Um, so I try to do things as safely as possible for myself and my team.
	So when a wall comes down blocking you, you go, okay, um, well, let's see.
	We're underwater.
	It's freezing.
	There's a hundred foot wall in front of us.
	What now?
	I mean the truth of the matter is when anything goes wrong you have to push all the emotions aside and you just have to be pragmatic and just take one small step at a time not knowing necessarily how it's all going to work out but knowing that you're making the best next step towards survival.
	Okay, so what you're doing is so dangerous that in a way I would imagine you kind of have to make peace in your own mind about the fact that it could cost you your life.
	Well, I mean, that's a discussion I have to have with my family, too.
	I mean, it certainly terrifies my husband, but he has come to terms with the fact that he understands that what I do is my passion and that's what makes me who I am.
	So taking these risks is a part of living fully for me.
	And I guess for a lot of people who do very dangerous things, and I sort of get that, I don't think that I could do it, but I kind of get it.
	So, you did things like following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great?
	Yes, yeah.
	So, my colleagues and I, quite soon after the Arab Spring, took a journey across the western desert of Egypt.
	Following in Alexander's footsteps because I'd read in historical record that Alexander made this journey with his army to a place called the Temple of Jupiter Amun in Siwa and it was there he was called by an oracle to visit this temple and the oracle told him that he was the first true pharaoh of Egypt And Alexander had an interest in underwater exploration.
	And it turns out that the Oracle was a well.
	And Alexander actually thought that the Oracle well was attached to other parts of the settlement underground.
	And that was enough for me.
	That was enough for me to want to go.
	You ever heard of a place called Mel's Hole?
	Yes, yeah, I've definitely heard your interviews on Melzul.
	Okay, so there's this well that I presume you decided you were going to go down inside this well.
	Mm-hmm.
	And so you're in Egypt.
	Mm-hmm.
	There's a well.
	And what?
	They lower you into it or what?
	Well, it was in a historic site and During the time, just after the Egyptian Spring, there was not really any leadership in control in Egypt and so every step of the way we were kind of negotiating here or there or everywhere else with bribes.
	Oh, I know how it works in Egypt.
	I've been there and I know that It's also what so-called spring has now turned into the storm season.
	Yeah.
	All over there.
	It's very dangerous.
	Yeah.
	So, you know, we knew better than to ask someone if it was going to be okay for us to go in the well.
	Like we often say it's better to ask forgiveness than permission.
	That's right.
	And or come up with a bribe up front.
	So my friend and I very quickly shimmied down this well shaft.
	Shimmied?
	Yeah, so, you know, climbed down.
	You mean like one foot on one side and one foot on the other and slowly going down or what?
	Yeah, yeah, we did.
	Where was the water level?
	Well, it turns out that the whole bottom of the well was filled with rubble and water, so we couldn't dive in it.
	So I thought, oh, I'm disappointed.
	But, as everybody knows, there's oases all over places like this, places where ponds palm trees are growing beside ponds and so that water has
	to come from somewhere and we decided to go examine all of these oases and see if
	we could find any of Alexander's fabled connections underground.
	Right, and?
	Well, it turns out that Egypt, Libya, Chad and Sudan sit on the oldest fossil aquifer
	on the planet, the largest fossil aquifer on the planet, meaning that it only rains
	in that part of Egypt once every 25 years or so.
	So the water in the aquifer is not being replenished.
	Once every 25 years?
	Yeah, yeah.
	So, it's still coming out of the ground in these Oasis Springs, and it's creating an opportunity for agriculture, you know, date ponds and other things.
	Great life.
	Yeah, and civilization always grows up around water resources.
	It sure does.
	So, we checked these things out, and they were often surrounded by Roman or Greek era walls to contain the water.
	Yeah, pretty amazing and connected oftentimes through these large irrigation channels and sometimes underground through, you know, stone sort of pipeways to move water from place to place.
	Are you telling me this was man-made stuff?
	Yeah.
	Oh my God, how deep?
	So, not very deep actually.
	The biggest problem we ran into was the temperature of the water.
	So, Russians in the 1980s went to this area hoping to drill for oil and instead struck water.
	And the water came spewing out of the ground in geysers basically, hot water.
	And it would create these enormous lakes in the middle of the desert.
	And then the lakes would evaporate and become like hyper saline and make it impossible eventually for things to grow at all.
	But the water that was coming out of the ground turned out to be hot enough for us to make tea with.
	Oh, that's really hot.
	So I don't think we had any dives on that project that were any deeper than about 35 feet deep before it got simply too hot.
	Wow.
	From one to the other, ice to water hot enough to make tea, that's ridiculous.
	Was it actually at any point boiling?
	Yeah, steaming, absolutely.
	Oh good lord.
	Coming out of the ground like a geyser, yeah.
	So these were connected?
	Yeah, so the Romans and the Greeks that had occupied the area had made very elaborate irrigation structures like above and below ground to move water around.
	And I'd really like to go back because I still think there's so much that we can learn from that area.
	There's so many Roman Greek remains and ruins that are just sticking out of the sand in this very remote part of the desert.
	You want to go back, why?
	What do you think might be there that would be really cool?
	Well, you know, I still think that there's an opportunity for us to find some of Alexander's, you know, caves.
	I think that nobody's found the ultimate resting place of Alexander the Great.
	Right.
	And, you know, perhaps it'll be there or perhaps it'll be associated with some other oracle spring, you know, in Turkey or other parts of the world.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	There is something called the Tunnel to Atlantis.
	Ah, yeah.
	What's that?
	So, that's in the Canary Islands.
	Yes.
	In Lanzarote.
	It's the longest submerged lava tube cave on Earth that has been so far explored by divers.
	So it's literally part of the Monte Corona volcano on Lanzarote.
	And we went there again to look at the unique biology within these cave systems and hoping to find something that hadn't been recorded by science before and indeed did find several new species there.
	Wow!
	And you think most of the new species that you find are particular cave dwellers, that is to say they've got no sight ability?
	So they live their entire life cycle in the darkness, never coming out to the light.
	No eyes, no pigment, just white.
	So if we eventually find living things on other planets, they probably will have adapted to whatever conditions are present.
	Would it be your view that life is virtually everywhere under all conditions?
	I mean, you've seen most everything.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	So, some of the animals that are in the tunnel to Atlantis, Atlantida Cave, are this little teeny crab called Moonidopsis.
	It's the only place on Earth where we find Moonidopsis other than on the deep smoking ocean vents, those hot steaming chemical vents.
	And there's actually scientists who are astrobiologists who spend their entire life studying those types of animals that we find in caves, because it seems to be the closest correlation to the type of life we could find in outer space.
	Exactly.
	Well, you know, those vents you talked about are thought to perhaps be under the water on some planets and moons that we know of.
	Yes, and actually I participated in a project here where we created the first ever three-dimensional map of a cave system.
	And the device that we used to map that cave system has now morphed into an artificially intelligent autonomous vehicle that has a mission now with NASA to go to Jupiter's moon Europa and do just that.
	So go underneath the frozen ocean.
	So, you don't plan on volunteering for the Europa mission?
	No, I mean, I get to drive that here on Earth as a part of its development, but there's no cave divers going on that one.
	Gotcha.
	How do you all map normally?
	I mean, if you're into a cave that has never been explored, how do you map it?
	So traditionally, it's been really simple.
	We've literally run a guideline and measured everything with a standard compass and knotted guideline or with measuring tapes.
	But I've also, as I said, worked on projects where we use things like this sonar mapper developed by Bill Stone, which could measure the distance from the mapper to the walls of the cave.
	In 32 directions, like four times a second and bring back all that data.
	So you get a virtual picture when you're done.
	Wow!
	And nowadays the technology is amazing.
	We can do 360 degree filming and create basically virtual reality environments and high-resolution three-dimensional models of artifacts that could be printed or shared digitally for scientists to look at too with unforeseen accuracy, unbelievable accuracy.
	So, your job, I mean, you're mainly a diver.
	You're not a scientist, but you do take scientists to these places.
	So, how do they normally approach you?
	I mean, take the Ice Island dive, for example.
	How were you first approached by that?
	Before that, I mean, does somebody come and say, oh, look, we have this idea.
	What do you think of going down to this broken off hunk of ice and diving in it?
	Yeah, so sometimes it works that way, where I get a call, whether it's from a scientist or whether it's from, you know, Hollywood for movie making.
	Sure.
	And then sometimes it's the other way around, where I or my team come up with the idea.
	And then we seek out the scientists to look at what we found.
	So, in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, when we have found, you know, cultural remains and even human remains inside the cave, we know well enough to call the scientists in to properly document and explore that.
	Okay, so let's see.
	You're underwater, in a cave, finding human remains?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	In Mexico, in the Yucatan Peninsula, the caves, the sinkholes there, they call them cenotes, were the portal to the underworld of Xibalba to the Mayans.
	Detritus of their lives was, you know, thrown into this cenote as well as, you know, ceremonial and sacrificial acts, you know, committed around these locations.
	And so we find all kinds of things inside these caves.
	And human remains survive the chest of salt water and whatever occurrence may or may not be inside a cave?
	Well, in many of these caves, the artifacts are actually in the best possible conservation environment they can be in because they're below a layer of water and in water that's anoxic, so there's no oxygen.
	So they're preserved and they don't decompose until we bring them out.
	So we try to leave artifacts always in place, untouched, undisturbed, until the right scientists and conservators can take charge and make a decision whether they want to bring something out.
	Well, you know, even running into it, a jail underwater in a dark cave with, I guess, just your light shining on it and what you find is a skeleton, that's got to be a Quite a moment?
	Well, you know, there's just one place that just sticks in my mind.
	I called it the Well of Time.
	And on the surface, imagine you're in this real desert environment with just these hennikin plants that they use to make sisal rope with.
	And there's some cattle roaming around and there's a Mayan guy pumping a, you know, metal rusty pump up and down and up
	and down and he's pulling water out of this well to fill troughs for his cattle. And
	so we go and we see him and we look in the well and we realize that this is
	just the doorway to a vast cave below.
	And although that, you know, surface of the well is only just a few feet across, we can look down and our voice echoes away into the darkness.
	So we rappelled down to the water level about 70 feet below.
	And it was this vast bell shaped chamber and then water below.
	And looking into the clear water I could see that literally there was like a mountain below the opening.
	A mountain of stuff that had come one at a time through this hole in the ceiling.
	And at the top of the mound were rusted buckets that maybe this guy had dropped throughout his lifetime.
	And then a little bit deeper in the water column we run into these Spanish colonial water carrying pottery vessels.
	Also dropped long ago.
	Yeah, yeah. And then a little bit deeper.
	It looks like it's cracked dry earth, like mud, except that it's underwater, but it's still cracked, you know, the way it does when something dries up.
	And on that cracked earth were the skulls of big longhorn cattle and other animals, but they seem to be ritually laid out with other pieces of pottery.
	This is just great.
	You know, I live in the desert, and I drink well water.
	And, uh, maybe I'm gonna switch to bottles.
	It's not my idea of a great bottom to a well, but, uh, you know, I guess it cleans up over time, eh?
	Well, I mean, a little bit deeper.
	We went further down in the water column, and there were human skulls.
	Oh, God.
	Laid out on this cracked earth, staring up towards the surface.
	And then we saw, you know, the full bones of entire human skeletons.
	Mmm, I know what everybody wants at the bottom of their well.
	Okay, stay right there.
	Thankfully, we're at break point.
	Won't be a long one, though.
	We'll be right back.
	Welcome back to another episode of the The Big Bang Theory.
	This is Midnight in the Desert.
	To call the show, if you're east of midnight, call 1-952-CALL-ART.
	If you're west of midnight, call 1-952-225-5278.
	one nine five two two two five fifty two seventy eight johanna is my guest
	a couple of the most incredible hours that i've ever done on radio
	now.
	No question about it.
	Listen, if you want to join the conversation, please do.
	Be my guest.
	Um, area code 952-225-5278, or if you wish, area code 952, put a one in front of it, of course, 952-CALL-ART.
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	And if you don't have questions, after hearing all this, Well then, you haven't been listening.
	I know that this is only one show, but based on what I've heard, we could probably do many, many shows on this kind of thing.
	There's something called Urban Caving, is that correct?
	Yeah.
	What does that mean?
	Well, my colleagues and I did a series of documentaries for PBS called Water's Journey.
	And our premise was to follow the course of water through the planet, no matter where it would lead us.
	And that included basically caving through the storm water systems beneath, you know, major cities.
	All right.
	Amazing experience.
	All right, here's a question for you.
	I live out here in the desert, Jill, Vermont, Nevada.
	Do you know where that is?
	Yeah, pretty much.
	Are you on top of the Oglala Aquifer?
	I don't know what they call it.
	It's an aquifer, that's for sure.
	You don't have to get down too far.
	I don't know, 80 feet to 100 feet and you hit water.
	And it's pretty good drinkable water, I'm told.
	Although now I have visions set up by you of what the bottom of it's like.
	I guess what I'm asking, no one here has any idea, really, Of what constitutes this aquifer we're in.
	I know that there have been people who have done some diving not far away into this pupfish area.
	Have you heard about that?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	That's scary too.
	You haven't done it, have you?
	No, I haven't done that particular cave, but some of my colleagues have.
	I see.
	So, would you ever, for example, try to get into an aquifer Like the one that I envision below me, and then sort of map it or figure out where the water comes from, because honestly, they take guesses.
	They don't really know where the water goes.
	Yeah, that's absolutely what we do.
	You know, 20 years ago, water managers and scientists thought we were all just a bunch of adrenaline junkies that didn't have much to contribute to the understanding of water moving through the planet.
	Right.
	But now, you know, cave divers really are an important part of helping get that very real data.
	So we swim, you know, through the Earth's sponge, basically, and where we can't go, sometimes we'll use things like fluorescein dye and put that into places where we think we've got a conduit going in a particular direction and then search for that dye in people's wells and other water supplies to really understand where everything's flowing.
	Out here, people say, just follow the radiation.
	Alright, so here's a question for you.
	Our oceans, Jill, we're hearing that the health of the oceans is not good.
	We're hearing that there are what are called dead areas out in the middle of the ocean.
	There are shockingly cold areas in parts of our ocean.
	Mm-hmm.
	All kinds of strange things going on and a change underway, a sort of an earth change underway.
	How do you feel about that?
	What do you know?
	Oh, I mean, there's absolutely no doubt that we're going through, you know, rapid, rapid exponential changes these days.
	But, you know, even if we look back in history, we can see you know, changes that occurred, like those Mayan skeletons
	that we found, you know, lying on cracked earth, submerged beneath the water inside of a well,
	are evidence that Mayans were doing anything that they could, sacrificing their own
	people to beseech the gods to rain at a time of drought. But, you know, we look back in history and see
	these other very dramatic climate changes that happened quickly, but now it's happening fast. Is it?
	Absolutely.
	Are you convinced of that?
	I have no doubt in my mind.
	Do you think our ocean levels are rising?
	Absolutely.
	No question.
	I think they're rising.
	I think our ocean is acidifying.
	I think that we're polluting our freshwater resources and overusing them to a point of disastrous consequences.
	It's frightening.
	How do you notice these changes, Jill?
	Is it storms?
	Is it just tides?
	How do you measure and know that things are changing in the ocean?
	Well, where I live now in North Florida, I'm living in some of the most prolific springs, caves in the world and right on top of the Florida Aquifer, so I'm living at the beginning of the pipeline basically.
	And I've been here about 20 some odd years now, and I've seen the flow of the water that's coming out of these springs lessen.
	I've seen the quality of that water deteriorate.
	The nitrates are increasing.
	I've seen springs completely dry up and disappear and fill in.
	And all of that's the beginning of the pipe that leads down to rivers and streams and lakes and estuaries and out to the ocean.
	I mean you can go to the Florida Keys and you can see this big bloom of green algae like spilling out towards the Gulf Stream.
	There's no doubt that everything we do on the surface of our Earth is affecting not just the groundwater but lakes and oceans as well.
	Jill, I remember seeing something on TV, fascinating too, about some people who were doing cave diving in Florida, about where you are, trying to go from I don't know, too.
	I guess from an underwater aquifer and then trying to reach the ocean.
	Now, I'm not sure whether that was probably the film that I made, Water's Journey, where we were being tracked from topside and we were underneath golf courses and bowling alleys and even a barbecue restaurant.
	Yeah, yeah, I saw that.
	I saw that.
	Yeah, okay, that was me.
	Oh, good Lord.
	How many, I want to be careful how I ask this, how many people like you are there?
	And when I say like you, I mean, you know, I don't want to use the word crazy because it's not crazy, but you know, you're out really on the edge of what you're doing.
	How many people like you are there?
	Well, you know, cave divers and ones that stay in the sport are a pretty small community.
	There's very few that do this as a full-time career, really.
	I would think, yeah.
	Yeah.
	But it's a small community.
	It's an international community, interestingly.
	So, you know, my friends are all over the world, really.
	I can imagine.
	I mean, you have traveled the world, right?
	And then you have the We Are Water project, and of course we are.
	Human beings are a high percentage of water.
	Yeah, you know, I sat down a few years ago and looked at all the things that I've been involved in and I keep seeing the same lessons over and over again wherever I go.
	I'm, you know, learning about climate change.
	I'm learning about how, you know, our water resources are changing and I recognize that I had an opportunity really to be that kind of voice from inside the planet and could use my adventures to teach people about how they're connected with their water resources.
	Okay, one more question from me, and then I want to turn you over to the audience, and it's this.
	I lived on Okinawa for a lot of years, island of Okinawa, and beneath the Ryukyu Islands, there is a virtual civilization to be found, sort of an ancient A Japanese civilization, I guess, or something.
	And there have been a number of dives in that area to look for what used to be there.
	Now, how often have you been in a dive and you see that at one time, you know, what you're swimming around or diving around was once obviously above land where people lived.
	Yeah, well, you know, that's so interesting because sea levels have been dramatically different on this planet.
	I did a project in Bermuda where our job was to do the deepest manned dives ever conducted in the region to find those signs where the sea used to lap up against the shoreline deeper down.
	And we discovered these sea level notches at 370 feet.
	Beneath the surface of the ocean, so 370 feet lower than it is today.
	So certainly there are unbelievable archaeological remains all over this planet that are now submerged and maybe only to be found with new technologies and satellite imagery and other cool things.
	Okay, let's take a few calls, shall we?
	On the phone, you're on the air with Jill.
	Have you ever dived on the crystal pyramids?
	Since you're down in that area, you were just talking about Bermuda, have you ever dived
	on the crystal pyramids?
	What do you know about those and what is your most treasured project?
	No, I haven't done anything on the crystal pyramids, but I, you know, I think some of the projects where we've found, like, remains of early inhabitants of a region are really interesting to me.
	So in the Yucatan, and in Cuba, and in the Bahamas, we found some of the, you know, early human remains and artifacts with those finds that were really interesting.
	He asked you your most cherished project.
	Yeah, my most cherished project.
	Boy, they're all so good.
	Maybe the most cherished one will be the next one, but I would say the most beautiful caves in the world are on the island of Abaco in the Bahamas.
	Really?
	So that would probably be my favorite cave.
	Okay, are we coming across a big fish?
	Oh, lots of big fish, yeah.
	I've come face to face with a shark at an entrance to a cave.
	I've leaned on alligators underwater during decompressions.
	There's lots of life as well.
	How do you lean on an alligator during decompression?
	Because you're coming up, right?
	Yeah, well, sometimes you're just sitting still for long periods of time in dark, murky,
	muddy water.
	Got that.
	And you're not seeing anything.
	And just sitting there on decompression, suddenly, you know, the log beside me swam away.
	The log beside you.
	Yeah.
	But I've also done quite a bit of work in the Florida Everglades, pretty up close and Hey Art, this is one of the more interesting guests you've had in quite a while.
	Something I think a lot of the other listeners out there might be wondering, but maybe just kind of afraid to ask.
	Do you think there's any chance Uh, you know, that they could be the underwater bases that we hear about from time to time, you know, with the conspiracy theorists, I guess.
	Well, we can certainly ask Jill if she's run into any underwater bases.
	No, I haven't run into any underwater bases, I'm afraid.
	So, um, I kind of doubt it.
	But I'm sure there's still a lot of things for us to find in our, you know, underwater resources on this planet.
	Yeah, just kind of a curiosity thing, and a job like that must make it real tough to get life insurance, that's for sure.
	Oh yeah, there's no life insurance.
	No life insurance.
	Okay, well I've got another one for you.
	On Earth, that is for us Earth dwellers, every now and then we look up in the sky, Jill, and we see What we call a UFO, simply an unidentified flying object.
	And I wonder if you have seen ever anything underwater moving quickly that was just not identifiable.
	Well, you know, I had one dive in this quite remarkable sinkhole, and it's about 400 feet deep.
	And there was this tunnel coming in at about 110 feet deep and it was perhaps the size a little larger than a basketball and coming out of this tunnel was this Sort of translucent, gelatinous orb, basically.
	And then smaller, little, like golf ball to baseball size, gelatinous colonies, just drifting out of this tunnel.
	And I've talked with my, you know, microbiology friends, and they're like, oh yeah, that's definitely, you know, a bacterial colony of some sort.
	You know, there's some pretty weird life on the microbial scale that you really have to wonder about.
	You know, just going.
	I just I don't know how you do it.
	Hello there, Frank, I believe.
	Frank.
	Yes.
	Am I on the air?
	You are.
	Oh, Mark, you are.
	I'm so glad that you are back on the air.
	I'm one of those listeners that heard you 30 years ago.
	I met you even one time, I think you had a radio station at the Union Plaza, way back.
	I was at KUWN in Las Vegas, yes.
	I had a little break and I just got a brief minute to talk to you, but then every night I would just listen to you.
	I'm sure there's hundreds, if not thousands, just like me, listening right now, trying to say, hey, welcome back again, even though you've been talking back.
	Oh, it's very interesting about the caves and the underwater caves.
	Are you back in the Nye County, sir?
	Yes, yes.
	My wife and I are thinking of moving out there, but one thing I did check about with the water and the aquifers, I don't know if I should say this, but it doesn't matter, I mean, they had, what was it, 910 nuclear explosions, I think?
	I know.
	Yeah, that's the only thing but it hasn't caught up with anybody or nothing yet and they say it's going to take a long time.
	Yes, well do you have any questions for Jill, my guest?
	Jill, I did hear one time there was a cave or an underwater cave going from California and it went all the way to Colorado.
	I'm sure it was just a It might have been a story, but I heard that quite a few times.
	It came over that there was actually a passageway from California all the way to Colorado.
	Have you ever heard anything like that, Jo?
	Is that possible?
	No, well, probably not.
	However, I mean, if we think of the way water can travel through the planet, you know, sometimes it's traveling in between grains of sand, and then sometimes it's traveling through spaces that are large enough for me to swim through.
	You know, spring sheds and water sheds cover vast regions, you know, like that Nubian aquifer that's beneath Egypt, Libya, Chad, and Sudan, you know, four entire countries, or the Floridan aquifer underneath northern Florida, Georgia, Alabama.
	So these are, you know, vast bodies of water locked up inside the earth, but it doesn't necessarily mean that we can swim all the way through that, but the water can, materials can, and life forms can.
	Can any of these, like the ones you were talking about in Egypt, can any of those wells or anything be connected to Antarctica possibly?
	Or do they see their way through the earth through certain ways like that?
	Well, that's kind of an interesting question.
	For example, how far could you conceivably keep going down?
	Well, I suppose if you were the tiniest of, you know, biological animals that we find inside the caves, they've probably made great journeys from these deep smoking ocean vents all the way into, like, a limestone cave in Bermuda, because we have animals in limestone caves in Bermuda that are, like, young caves, but somehow these, you know, very ancient animals are living in these water-filled caves. How did they get there? They
	had to have found their way through the matrix of the earth. So maybe I can't swim
	there, but other things are making that journey. So I think that our entire earth is really a
	ball of life, but it's life forms that we may not know about or understand yet.
	I have a lot of people who constantly badger me about the earth actually being not a ball
	at all, Jill, but flat.
	Flat as a pancake.
	Yeah, I don't know if I'd quite buy that one.
	No, and to go with it, the sun is only 3,000 miles above the earth.
	But, you know, when I say they believe this, Jill, I mean with almost a religious fervor, they believe this.
	So, there you have it.
	Is there anything that in your dives, in your travels, confirms for you beyond any shadow of a doubt or need for a debate that the earth is indeed basically a ball.
	Is there anything I see?
	Well, you know, Mammoth Cave.
	I've done some exploration in Mammoth Cave.
	We actually have to take into account the curvature of the Earth.
	That's right.
	When we do surveys there, because it's so big.
	It covers such a vast area.
	You have to accommodate that curvature in the surveys.
	Well, there you have it, Flat Earth people.
	Hello, you're on the air with Jill.
	Hello.
	It's me.
	It's you.
	Yes, you.
	Hi, I'm Lucian.
	Jill, whenever you went in the cave with the small hole, did you turn your light off to see if that small hole gave much light in that cave?
	Yeah, so oftentimes when we're in what we call the cavern zone, so just in the doorway of a cave, yeah, we can certainly see the light of the entrance, but you know, once you're a little ways in, it's complete blackness.
	Now, some caves have multiple entrances, so we may actually swim for great distances and then come to another entrance.
	Actually, Jill, I was going to ask, and Colin, hold on just one sec, do you ever find under The Earth, under the ocean, that you swim into a cave and there's some kind of artificial life, uh, not life, light!
	In the cave, does anything give off light?
	Bioluminescence?
	Yeah, there is quite a bit of bioluminescence in the ocean and then I've seen some in cave animals but also in fossils.
	We can look at ancient shells that are now within caves and look at them under black light basically and see patterns on them that glow in the dark.
	Caller?
	Do you, gosh I went blank, do you, well you seem to be very worldly.
	The radiation that was given off in that plant in Japan, your colleagues, is there still a lot of radiation that's affecting a fishes and have you heard anything about that?
	Well, okay, let's ask.
	It is actually a good question.
	I remember that an awful lot of water was getting dumped into the ocean, Jill, from Fukushima.
	Yeah, I mean, that's still, to me, extremely worrying.
	Traditionally, we've talked about the solution to pollution is dilution, but you can only do that so much, and we're proving that in our oceans today.
	We just can't keep throwing stuff in the garbage heap of the ocean and not expect to see changes.
	So yeah, I think places like Fukushima are still a great worry, as well as the Gulf oil spill.
	How much of a garbage heap is the ocean?
	Can you tell me?
	Oh, it's terrifying.
	I mean, we have, like you said, dead zones in parts of the ocean and in port areas.
	We have the plastic garbage patch in the middle of the Pacific.
	We have a terrible problem with microplastics contaminating the ocean and being consumed by the organisms in the ocean.
	So, yeah, it's tough.
	And the oceans are the lungs of the planet, much like the rainforest.
	If the lungs of the planet are sick, then we will be, too.
	Do you ever give talks on this?
	Yeah, I do, actually.
	I just did a TED Talk this weekend, in fact.
	Really?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Okay.
	Let's go to, I think, Jasper, Texas.
	Hello.
	Go ahead, sir.
	Hi, Art.
	Hi, Jill.
	John, just wanted to ask Jill a couple questions.
	Jill, when you were in Antarctica, were you diving rebreather or open circuit?
	And the other question is about how many log dives do you have all together and about how
	many hours?
	So, yeah, in Antarctica we used Cislunar Mark V rebreathers and that gave us, you know,
	the long times in it as well as a bit of an additional warmth for diving in that really
	cold water because the rebreathers themselves create a little bit of heat in the chemical
	reaction of the scrubbing process.
	I have about 7,000 dives.
	I honestly haven't tallied the total hours, so I'm not sure I could give you that number.
	Hey Art, good show, good topic.
	Thanks a lot, bud.
	73.
	Okay, take care.
	73 is a ham radio.
	Kieran, are you by chance a licensed ham?
	I'm not, but you know who my brother was when I was growing up?
	VE3ILZ.
	I even remember his number.
	The reason I asked is because you said that you were in communication with a ham in New Zealand, and so somebody in your party must have been a ham.
	It doesn't matter.
	You talk to whoever you can talk to.
	Yeah.
	No, somebody on the boat was handling all the communications, but it sure was a warm voice to hear every few days.
	Yeah.
	Wow.
	So, do you imagine continuing to do this, Jill, you know, for a long time, or is there a practical limit to when you want to hang up your flippers?
	Well, I certainly hope I'll be doing this for a long time yet.
	I have a dear friend in the UK who is one of the very first cave divers.
	His name's John Buxton.
	Right.
	And he turned 80 a few years ago.
	And for his 80th birthday, he did a dive in a place called Wookiee Hole.
	And, you know, dived up to sump 22 in Wookiee Hole and spent a weekend of cave diving.
	If John Buxton can do it, then that's going to be my role model.
	Well, I suppose, in a sense, like being in space, you are, if not weightless, kind of weightless in a way, right?
	And so, as you get older, this hurts and that hurts, but not so much in no gravity or little gravity.
	So I guess that might make sense.
	Yeah, it's great.
	I mean, it's definitely you escape the noise and the rush of the world and you're underwater just, you know, surrounded in the arms of the ocean.
	It's like another or otherworldly would be a way to put it.
	Sure.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	Let me quickly re-educate everybody here.
	Bad term, right?
	Here are the numbers, and we've got several, and I didn't give them all out either.
	Our public number is area code 952-225-5278.
	952-225-5278. 952-225-5278. If you would like to call our first time caller line, it is
	952-225-5278.
	area code 775-285-5800. And I do apologize for not giving that out.
	775-285-5800.
	So, Jill, what have you got coming up next?
	Well, I've got some ongoing work in Cuba that I'm pretty excited about.
	I'd like to do as much as I can there before KFC arrives.
	Right.
	Well, it's coming soon!
	It is coming soon, yeah.
	And working also with a National Geographic Innovation Fellow who's a real specialist in 3D imaging as well as 360 camera work, so I'm quite excited to be doing some more work with him as well.
	You know, it's amazing.
	Today, we can find an artifact in a cave and shoot pictures that can be all put together with software to create a really accurate 3D model that we can even print.
	So we could print a skull and send it to a scientist to look at.
	That's incredible.
	All right.
	Hold tight.
	We're at a break.
	I've given you the numbers.
	Jill is here.
	Jill's an amazing woman.
	No question about that.
	Want to talk to her?
	Now's your chance.
	We'll be right back.
	To call the show, if you're East of Midnight, call 1-952-CALL-ART.
	If you're West of Midnight, call 1-952-225-5278.
	Those are the numbers.
	Make sure you pick the right one.
	Are you East or West of Midnight?
	I'm Art Bell, and Jill Heiner is my guest.
	She is a Cave diver.
	Underwater cave diver.
	Not frequently in your life will you meet anybody who has gone diving in caves inside the ice in the Antarctic.
	You just don't run into somebody like that.
	It's the most astounding thing I've ever heard.
	If you'd like to reach us on Skype, we are MITD51.
	MITD 51.
	And Jill, are you still there?
	I'm still with you.
	Okay, good.
	Here we go.
	Bloomington, Illinois, I believe.
	Hello.
	Hi.
	Yes, a friend of mine got me hooked on your show.
	Thank him for me, please.
	Yeah, it's a great honor to be on your show.
	I run a route every night, and honestly, it's the same route every night.
	The only thing that makes it more interesting is the topics you Thank you.
	I do understand if you're a long-haul driver, having a talk show, you can only listen to music so long, and then you start to fall asleep anyway.
	So having something that is actually a story, keeping your brain engaged, it works.
	It does.
	It does very well, especially with your show.
	I have a question for Jill.
	I heard her talk about I'd like to get into it and see what kind of findings she found.
	of get into it and see what kind of findings she found in that cave.
	I mean Atlantis is something I've heard as a kid being a mythical city underwater.
	I don't think she's actually confirming Atlantis, but you never know.
	Yeah.
	So... Well, Atlantida Cave.
	So it's inside the Monte Corona volcano in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands.
	And the entrance, the dry entrance to the cave is actually a big show cave.
	So, people go there to, you know, walk inside the cave.
	There's a big dining area.
	There's a, like, a concert hall in the, within the natural cave.
	And then, the funny thing is, is that we actually have to walk through this ballroom area, climb over a little fence, and then we're, like, caving down this boulder slope to get to the water where the lava tube continues and plunges beneath the surface of the ocean beneath the floor of the ocean
	and there's this quite remarkable thing inside this cave about you know a mile inside
	these tunnels and they're huge black dark vast tunnels that we swim through
	but suddenly we arrive at this mountain of snow white sand and it's about 80 feet high from floor
	to ceiling just like the bottom of an hourglass, basically.
	And this white sand has actually fallen, perhaps a single grain at a time, From a hole in the ceiling that's, you know, beneath the seafloor, basically.
	So one drop of sand at a time is coming through the ceiling and creating this 80 foot high mountain, like an hourglass.
	And we were, you know, pushing, you know, core samples into this to pull out sand from Sand Mountain and discovered numerous new species that hadn't been recorded before.
	So pretty interesting.
	It is very interesting.
	I appreciate you taking my call.
	You bet.
	Take care.
	Might I know, Jill, what your husband says about all this?
	I mean, obviously the two of you have to have a conversation every now and then about what you're about to do.
	Oh, you know, often, I mean, I hit the jackpot.
	I got the best guy in the world in my life.
	But, you know, sure, Robert worries.
	It's a bit of a role reversal in our life where he has to be, you know, home maintaining the business while I'm off doing these dangerous, crazy things.
	And I have to promise to him that each decision I make, I think about him, you know?
	And I think about what's best for both of us.
	I mean, come on, let's face it, if you've got a wife who's going to say, OK, honey, see you soon.
	I'm off to cave dive the Antarctic.
	Yeah.
	You know, that's kind of like I imagine a an astronaut says goodbye to his mate before, you know, getting on top of that rocket and blasting off.
	Oh, I mean, it's incredibly difficult.
	I mean, he not only has to face the dangers that I have to confront underwater, but sometimes, you know, the dangers in hostile regions that I go to as well.
	Sure, sure.
	Yeah, it's not an easy life, but that's why I say I've hit the jackpot, because he really understands that this is what makes me whole, and you just can't stuff a butterfly into a jar and expect it to live.
	That's right.
	So it's with love and respect that he tolerates and embraces and supports everything that I do.
	Must be a good guy.
	He is.
	Teaneck, New Jersey.
	You're on the air.
	Hi.
	Hi, thanks so much Art, I love you.
	Joe, the only question that keeps running in my head is, why aren't you, or do you, use drones to do Preliminary research into particular cave divings, because you have cameras, you check temperature, yada yada, and it may reduce the dangers that you're confronting.
	Yeah, awfully good question, or at least have a first look and make sure something around the corner isn't going to kill you.
	Yeah, no, that's a great question and we actually have tried.
	So, we had a project in the Yucatan where our goal was to use these tethered small sort of, you know, robots to send them down to have a first look and then if things looked interesting then we would follow with dive team.
	But it turns out that when something is tethered and you're trying to drive it topside with a joystick You just don't have that same perception that the human brain does of developing that model of what's around you.
	So on that project, I spent more time actually rescuing the drone because it gets stuck.
	There you go.
	I kind of understand that caller.
	You can imagine.
	You really don't have that perspective.
	So as she said, you end up rescuing the drone.
	But, you know, we're at a really interesting time in technology that artificial intelligence is going to change everything.
	So, Dr. Bill Stone's work with creating autonomous, artificially intelligent, you know, swimming robots, basically.
	We can now send these into a cave environment.
	They can go down, map in three dimensions.
	They can chase the flow.
	They can pick up life forms.
	They can learn all about their environment and then come back as the fuel's running out.
	So, the technology's coming fast.
	Let me tell you something, Jill, and thank you, Caller.
	There are people talking about an artificial intelligence singularity, AI singularity.
	Have you heard that term?
	Yeah, it's interesting.
	You know, we At this point in time, I think a lot of people think that artificial intelligence is going to exist in your, you know, the Roomba skirting around on the floor, or this robot that I just described swimming, you know, underwater.
	But I don't think that's how it's all going to pan out.
	I think that technology and humanity will eventually morph in some way.
	You know, your personal computer or your cell phone will be a part of your body, and so will its artificial intelligence.
	So, yeah, I think that we're going to co-evolve, really, with technology.
	Well, you know, that would be nice, if we co-evolve.
	A lot of people, including a lot of very smart scientists and business moguls, think that what's going to happen, Jill, is that this singularity is going to result in the takeover.
	That machines, when they become AI, We'll realize that we are an inefficient, war-like species that is not helping the planet at all.
	And the only logical conclusion, you follow me, right?
	Yeah, well, we might be lucky to last that long if we don't, like, make ourselves extinct before that.
	With the rate that we're destroying our planet.
	I so hear that.
	Let's go to Eugene, Oregon.
	Hello.
	Hey, how's it going, Art?
	It's going very well, sir.
	I'm very thankful to be on your show.
	I really appreciate you being back, and I just want to say thank you so much.
	And I just had a couple questions for Jill.
	One question is, the 7,000 dives.
	Now, we're not talking about, like, the times you jump in the deep end of the pool.
	That doesn't go on the stats, right?
	That's just No, that's how I count my dives, sir.
	But the real question is, so in all these dives, in all these fantastic places all over the world, what's your most profound spiritual experience that you've ever had while you're diving?
	Where you felt like, oh my God, there's underwater angels around me, there's underwater God, whatever that means.
	And it's just, wow, what a transformative experience.
	What a good question.
	Really, it is a good question.
	Jill?
	Yeah.
	You know, very recently I had a dive that was just like you described.
	So I was in the Azores and on top of the volcanic seamount offshore from the island of Santa Maria.
	And we were jumping in the water with the promise to swim with these giant mobulas, these giant devil rays.
	And I got down there with my camera and this unbelievable train of 40 devil rays lined up and just came in swooping arcs.
	They would come before me closer and closer and closer until one by one they would hover over me until I exhaled and I think my exhaled breath would hit the bottom of this devil ray and it was like I was tickling it.
	It would kind of shiver and move along and the next one would move in.
	And that went on for like 90 minutes.
	I was just blown away with this sort of communion I was having with these animals.
	It was amazing.
	Wow, that's quite the story.
	That is amazing.
	Thank you so much for sharing.
	You bet.
	Take care.
	Have you broken any world records in all you've done?
	Well, you know, I've done a lot of firsts for women, for sure.
	You know, my dives in Wakulla Springs with the U.S.
	Deep Caving Team sort of took me further into deep caves than any woman had been before and, you know, pretty much In the top ten of distances that any man had done at the time.
	But cave diving is not really competitive.
	You know, exploration is sort of, I guess, a more pure form of expression and it's really the scientific objectives that are so much more important to me.
	Like, I'm not really interested in Being the deepest or anything like that, I'd rather have these profound experiences and connect with science and understanding.
	Sure.
	Just as he sort of asked, and sure enough you had one, I can imagine you have had many profound experiences.
	Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
	Entire expeditions that were like going to another planet.
	All right, let's go to Silverdale, Washington.
	Hello.
	Hello, I wanted to ask if you have known of the Dos Ojos down in the Yucatan.
	They were exploring that many years ago when we were down there and we got to cave dive it with one of the divers and it was spectacular but we didn't go in very far.
	It was my first cave dive and it was just gorgeous and we'd already been in the cenotes and were fascinated by that so he said if you're that interested and you know we're experienced divers he said he'd take us through and he did.
	But they were in a challenge with another cave system in that area, and whoever could map out the largest distance and connect the two would prove that they were the longest, I think the longest cave system at that time that had ever been explored.
	But they needed to gather the other one, so whoever could do it first to break through would grab the other one's distance.
	Yeah, I was involved in that exploration of Dos Ojos in the mid to late 90s.
	At the time, we were sort of the competing team with the cave next door, which was called Nahoche.
	The bigger cave always swallows up the smaller cave when they eat, and we were trying to connect them.
	Since that time, so much exploration has happened in that part of the Yucatan that many of the largest cave systems have all been connected, you know, literally hundreds of miles of passages.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	It was spectacular and I thought it was very interesting.
	The fellow that took us, I think his name was David, and his mother was tending the turtle sanctuary there, Ishka'sel I think.
	That would have been Buddy Quattlebaum and his mother used to do the turtle sanctuary.
	Buddy ran Hidden Worlds Dive Center down there.
	Wow.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Really interesting.
	I wanted to also ask, with the blue hole in Belize, do you think that that was ever a
	spinote before the oceans rose, or that that could have ever been a spinote, or how was
	that formed do you think?
	Yeah, so that's exactly what it is.
	In fact, so a cenote, a sinkhole, a blue hole, those are actually the same geologic formation.
	So you can imagine kind of a big hourglass shape that occurs in the earth, and that's from a, you know, a ceiling that's collapsed down inward on a vast underground chamber.
	So yeah, that's a cenote or a sinkhole as well.
	Any idea how deep that is?
	The blue hole?
	Oh boy, I'm trying to remember.
	I think it's like 400 plus.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Really deep.
	Thank you so much.
	Very interesting.
	And I love hearing you.
	And thank you, Art.
	It is interesting.
	Thank you.
	And quickly, Tacoma, Washington.
	Tacoma, going once.
	Going twice.
	Gone.
	Hello there.
	You're on the air.
	Who, me?
	You.
	Hello, Art.
	Hi.
	Hello from another high desert where it's freezing tonight.
	Boy, it is cold out there, brother.
	Okay, real quick.
	Do you know Shelter Valley?
	Pardon me?
	Do you know Shelter Valley in California?
	I'm sorry, I don't.
	Okay, just below Borrego.
	Okay.
	Do you have a question for my guest?
	I was going to ask, yeah, I was going to ask Jill.
	Somebody told me about 20, 30 years ago that there was a lava tube that connected Two of the Hawaiian Islands.
	Huh.
	Wow.
	He could be walked.
	Hmm.
	I don't know about that.
	There are some pretty significantly long, dry lava tubes in Hawaii, but I don't know about any that connect the islands.
	Bummer.
	Well, it's a pretty cool idea, though, I think, actually.
	Yeah.
	All right, Caller, thank you.
	I'm sorry we're at the end of the program.
	We just All the time gone!
	Jill, it has been an incredible pleasure having you on the air.
	We'll have to do another show.
	The things you have done, my God, woman, the things you have done, and you're going to keep doing them, huh?
	Absolutely.
	Have you written a book yet?
	No, I'm working on it.
	I hope I have it done by the end of the summer.
	Alright, and a photo album.
	Yeah, I definitely got lots of photos on IntoThePlanet.com.
	Alright, well, thank you for sharing with us.
	It has been truly an honor.
	Thank you, Jill.
	Oh, thanks Art.
	Good night.
	There you go.
	That's Jill.
	What a story.
	Unbelievable stuff.
	Only when you do talk radio do you run into things like this.
	Can you imagine being underneath what cab from the Ross Ice Shelf in the Antarctic?
	Can you imagine being under there?
	Can you imagine having that hundred foot wall of ice in front of you that you can't... Well, wait a minute.
	Those little fish.
	Maybe you can climb that way.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Well, wait a minute.
	Hey, in El Paso, Texas, do you want to tell everybody goodnight?
	In El Paso, Texas, goodnight to you wherever you are.
	Say, goodnight world.
	Goodnight world.
	That's the way to do it, brother.
	Goodnight to you and everybody else.
	Goodnight.
	Midnight in the desert, and there's wisdom in the air.

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