Antje Boetius: The call of the deep sea

Antje Boetius was born on the 5th of March 1967 in Frankfurt in what was then West Germany. She grew up there, attending Schillerschule and the Justus von Liebig Gymnasium, both of which are in Darmstadt, but enjoyed many opportunities to escape for a holiday at the seaside.

She studied Biology at the University of Hamburg as an undergraduate, and received her PhD from the University of Bremen in 1996. During that time, she undertook 14 deep sea expeditions across the world’s oceans, but that number is now closer to 50.

Antje then joined the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology first as a post-doc, and then as an assistant professor. She is currently the Director of the Alfred Wegener Institute, which conducts climate and marine research in polar and high latitude waters.

Antje’s work has focused on deep sea microbiology, and she was the first person to describe anaerobic oxidation of methane, a process by which some species of microbe can subsist without atmospheric or dissolved oxygen by splitting apart sulphate molecules for the oxygen therein. The discovery of this process has highlighted the importance of keeping our seafloors pristine, as well as the role these microbes played in making earth habitable for us.

Antje - I wasn't exactly a kid that would go play in the mud a lot or play outside, or play soccer or something. I was reading books all the time and in the book reading, I loved books that were about adventure. I totally loved Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and I think I read it a hundred times or so. And I developed this fantasy of myself becoming a world ocean explorer and maybe also inspired by my grandfather, who was a captain, and maybe also by other people in my family that talked about the sea. But then also being a kid at the seaside, in any vacation my parents could take, we would go camping. And I always had this feeling I belong in the ocean. And so all of this together made this fantasy or this utopia of myself becoming a deep sea researcher. And today I'm a very happy person because I can say what I dreamt as a kid has become reality.

Will - Interesting that you mentioned your grandfather, of course, a navigator on the Hindenburg, and it kind of perhaps shows that navigation and exploration ran in your family.

Antje - <laugh>. Yeah. If there would be a gene for that. My grandfather, he often told us kids about the hard times when he was a young man and it was unemployment and poverty in Germany. Then of course the ugly war coming up, he lived between the two wars as a sailor. They were taken for the submarines, they were taken for the zeppelins. And it was all a story of the preparation of war in Germany. And so it was not actually that he meant to explore because he was curious. It was a matter of surviving and he simply trusted the ocean. He trusted his profession as a seamen to go on Zeppelins, because navigation skills were needed there as similar to what it is at sea.

Will - Good then that your research has become more of a scientific one then.

Antje - Yes, it's true <laugh>, but it's still this idea that we have this planet Earth, which is mostly ocean, and it is so unstudied that you have one dive to the deep sea, and you see some type of life that no one ever has seen before or will ever see again. Or you have an expedition and you make findings simply because it's so understudied. So in a way it is of course very hard natural science, but it is also discovery. It is also an adventure because just knowing that the next finding is looming around the corner is fascinating for a profession.

Will - Yes, I mean, I've met many marine biologists as part of my past life as a marine biologist across all various disciplines of marine biology. I think very few of them would be too keen to take a trip in a deep sea submersible, let alone how many you've been on. What is it about such a human hostile environment that fascinates you?

Antje - Yeah, the dive itself. So if you work with a manned submersible, it is the special experience of travelling into the deep. But what fascinates me is really the perspective that is simply the way towards the goal of your research. For example, the sea floor, in my case, it's a long way and you have to prepare for it. And then as you sink into the deep, it gets dark outside, life is different. You see organisms, you see the bioluminescence around you, and by that you have these two hours to focus on your work and you understand what it means, this giant dark space that the ocean is. And I love that. I love that situation of starting the research by travelling towards the depth of the oceans, having time to look outside and living a little bit of this dream of Captain Nemo <laugh> in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea <laugh>.

Will - You're painting it far more romantically. You're almost winning me over, I think. And I feel compelled to ask, given the amount of dives you've been on, what would you say is the coolest thing you've seen?

Antje - Oh, there's so many cool things. I mean, I always love the interaction with octopods, the kraken, because they're such curious beings. And to think of an organism that is actually just has a little bit different of a bauplan, a different form of life as a mussel is, or a clam or a snail, but because they have these neurons that that already form part of a brain in their head, and because they also have independent brains in the legs, they are a very curious, special human-responding life forms. And I love that when one dives almost always, where you meet one of these octopods and that interaction is to me, always the best. But then the landscapes also, I just love to dive into the deep sea and work at the salt lakes because you're in the water and you see water in the water because of the different densities. And so that is always very curious, the situation that you're already swimming in the water and then you see a lake. That's cool.

Will - Those are some great perks of the job <laugh>, but it probably wasn't what you had done there looking for.