Original subtitles

NARRATOR: They're watching you.

More than 6,000 satellites circle the Earth.

Every day, they uncover new,

mysterious phenomena that defy explanation.

From the skies,

the lost kingdoms of bloodshed and treasure.

It was a place of almost continuous violence

and conflict.

NARRATOR: The strange tale of space ape island.

This is a fitting tribute given they helped us

get to the moon and back.

NARRATOR: And the curse of the conquistadors.

Every person in Mexico City is in danger.

NARRATOR: Baffling phenomena, mysteries from space.

What on Earth are they?

[theme music playing]

North Wales,

a land of barren mountains and sweeping valleys.

Mark Horton is trekking through this ancient landscape,

hooked by a mystery captured from space.

This is a really intriguing

image with all these bizarre formations.

It's impossible to work out.

NARRATOR: The image, captured on July 3rd, 2019,

has revealed a series of strange shapes

on a mountaintop.

These are like giant 3-dimensional leaves

or feathers -- they're really bizarre.

NARDI: It looks like there's sort of giant plumes

of smoke on top of the earth here.

NARRATOR: Yet the strange patterns aren't

the only thing that's drawn Horton here.

What really intrigues me is these

ruins that are located in the middle.

I wonder whether they're

some kind of fortification,

and the blobby bits are

defensive structures surrounding it.

NARRATOR: If these are defensive structures,

Horton speculates they could be relics of some of the most

fearsome warriors in British history.

The reason why this fascinates me is that this is part of

a sort of a landscape

of the lost medieval kingdoms of Wales that

we actually know very little about.

NARRATOR: For long periods of history,

the country we now call Wales

was ruled by several different warring kingdoms.

During this era, they gain a fierce reputation

for resisting all attempts to conquer their lands.

Wales has a rich history of

rebel factions and warriors fighting for independence.

The Welsh repelled invaders for centuries,

forcing everyone who attempted it back over

the mountains, whether it was Romans,

Anglo-Saxons, or the Normans.

And what they did was to use

their knowledge of the mountainous terrain against

far more heavily armed opponents.

This is Guerilla warfare.

NARRATOR: The structure in the image sits in

perhaps the most formidable of these realms, Gwynedd.

In the ninth century, its ruler repeatedly defeats

hordes of invading Vikings

before uniting the three main kingdoms of Wales.

HORTON: In the Middle Ages,

this was a place of almost continuous violence

and conflict,

and I just wonder whether our structure

is part of this story.

NARRATOR: As Horton heads to the image coordinates,

he encounters another possible relic of this kingdom's

bloody history.

Wow, that's amazing!

NARRATOR: This is one of over 600 castles in Wales,

meaning this tiny country has more per square mile than

anywhere else on Earth -- to Horton,

its design suggests it dates from

the final days of Welsh independence.

HORTON: This is a square keep, and these type of castles were

only being built in the late 12th and early 13th centuries.

NARRATOR: In 1282, King Edward I of England,

enraged by the continual Welsh resistance, vows to finally

conquer its kingdoms.

After storming this castle,

his troops capture the last king of Gwynedd,

an event which marks the beginning of

more than 700 years of English rule here.

He was taken from here, and he was hanged,

drawn, and quartered,

a grisly fate to teach the rebellious

Welshmen a horrible lesson.

Maybe this castle and the structures I can see

on the satellite image are the last strongholds

of the Kingdom of Gwynedd.

NARDI: So at the time this castle was built,

it was common to have smaller outposts.

And it's possible that this is

what we see in our satellite image.

NARRATOR: Horton continues north.

But as he approaches the ruins, the mystery deepens.

This must be the buildings on the image.

They're really odd.

Look, it's not been mortared, and that's

not what you expect in the medieval period.

This is not medieval.

Actually, it's probably a lot more recent.

NARRATOR: The ruins have thick walls

and occupy an elevated strategic position.

Yet Horton doubts they once served a military function.

HORTON: What really puzzles me

is why anybody would construct something so large

and so substantial up here in this remote mountainside.

NARRATOR: Horton explores the wider area for clues.

The formations that I can see on the image

that's the buildings must be these mountainous heaps

of rock.

It's just extraordinary.

NARRATOR: The strange gray shapes in the image are millions

of tons of carved rock in piles up to 60 feet deep,

evidence Horton believes of many years of human toil.

This type of rock is a typical byproduct of mining operation.

But what were they mining so far

up here in the Welsh mountains?

NARRATOR: The Welsh mountains are known to contain silver,

tin, and gold, riches that lured

invaders here in ancient times.

But Horton believes this mine is different.

Look, I can see a tramway going across this top flat plane,

and that tells me that this is an industrial landscape.

NARRATOR: Several faint tracks line the site,

and they all converge at one place.

This huge chasm.

It just goes on endlessly into the center of the Earth.

NARRATOR: Coming up, death in the darkness.

It must have been terrifying for

children to be down here, as well.

NARRATOR: And the man who took on the mega storm.

Seems like a crazy idea,

but he managed to pull it off.

NARRATOR: Lured by strange patterns on a mountaintop

in Wales, Mark Horton

has discovered monumental ruins surrounded

by millions of tons of hand-cut rock.

The question is, what were they actually

mining high up in the Welsh mountains?

NARRATOR: A hidden tunnel could offer clues.

Wow.

It just seems to go on for -- forever

and ever into the very bowels of the earth.

NARRATOR: Horton follows the tunnel for nearly a mile,

descending hundreds of feet.

This place is an incredible time capsule.

The miners must just have

downed tools and abandoned all their machinery on the ground.

NARRATOR: At the end of one tunnel is

a chamber with sheer walls over 100 feet high.

I think I can now understand what's coming out of here.

What they're looking for is this material here.

Well, I can see that it's

a fine deposit.

This is slate.

NARRATOR: Geological records reveal that this corner of Wales

contains the highest quality slate reserves in the world.

And it's been plundered by warriors

and wealthy landowners for millennia.

Slate was a vital construction material

throughout most of building history.

It's used for Roman barracks as they conquered Europe 2,000

years ago, medieval castles for kings and noblemen,

vast churches, cathedrals, were kept dry

by roofs made from slate.

NARRATOR: Welsh slate mining remains small-scale

until the 18th century,

when a seismic event begins to reshape the mountain into

the strange patterns seen from space.

The onset of the Industrial Revolution

catapults Britain into the modern age.

This was the dawn of mechanized manufacturing,

which, of course, transformed societies all over the world on

a huge scale.

NARRATOR: The Industrial Revolution doesn't just

transform world economies,

but also where we build our homes and where we work.

When it begins, only 15 percent of people live in towns.

Yet by 1900, this figure has left to 85 percent.

This means the slate industry in Wales explodes.

[explosion blasts]

WALTERS: What we start to see with the Industrial Revolution

are all these quiet, rural areas

undergoing really rapid transformations as quarries are

quickly developed to feed the revolution's need for slate.

AUERBACH: So this mine, which once supplied the local region,

now was supplying this really important material to the whole

length of the British empire.

NARRATOR: By the late 19th century,

there are 23 slate mines around the site

in the image alone,

connected by 25 miles of underground tunnels.

The industry employs 17,000 people,

transforming a land of farmers into one of machines

and manufacturing.

AUERBACH: The growth of the slate industry clearly

is of huge economic benefit to the region,

but it comes at a cost, as well.

NARRATOR: As the industry grows, mine owners

ruthlessly exploit their workers,

paying them as little as $120 a week in today's money.

Mine owners also forced the workers to pay

for their own housing, candles, and tools...

tools which often kill them.

So this is how they clearly extracted the rock.

They must have drilled down

deep into the rock and packed it with gunpowder

that then would have been exploded.

[explosion blasts]

NARRATOR: Explosives and lack of safety procedures

mean that in this mine alone,

some 20 people lose their lives each year.

Another hazard is slate dust, which you're constantly

surrounded by and breathing in,

and this can cause silicosis, which,

after a fashion has your lungs turning to stone on the inside.

WALTERS: The life expectancy of these miners is shocking.

An average worker would have done well to reach just 45.

NARRATOR: It's not just grown men who die here.

As the Industrial Revolution accelerates,

more and more children

are forced underground to work at the rock face.

WALTERS: It's really hard to imagine the conditions of

these children.

They would hardly see daylight, and actually,

often, their eyesight was permanently damaged.

NARRATOR: By the early 19th century.

child labor accounts for up to 50 percent of the workforce

in some mines.

Children were a vital part of this operation.

They would accompany their fathers and uncles

to work, extracting rubble from the mine.

WALTERS: There are reports of children as young as seven

operating carts, with over two tons of

loose slate on them.

NARRATOR: At their peak,

the Welsh mines are churning out up to half a million tons

of slate a year.

But in the mid 19th century,

slate mining in North America starts to boom.

A lot of Welsh slate workers emigrated to the U.S.,

where they could take the same jobs, but at much

higher positions, because now they were viewed as experts.

WALTERS: Some of them become really very wealthy as a result,

and you could kind of say they're

real-life examples of the American dream.

NARRATOR: During the early 20th century,

cheaper products like concrete

finally sound the death knell for the slate industry in Wales.

Mines close, quarries fall silent.

Yet even today, evidence of their incredible impact on

the lives and deaths of people here

is still visible from space.

HORTON: This place tells the story of the heroism

of the men that worked here,

creating this extraordinary landscape.

NARRATOR: Coming up -- pests in space.

This would have been a genuinely

terrifying experience.

NARRATOR: And nature's revenge.

Things did not go as planned.

NARRATOR: December 2019.

An aerial survey of a featureless landscape in

Florida spots something out of place.

There's this zigzagging line that cuts

across the green landscape and divides it.

WALTERS: What this appears to be is an entire series of mounds,

and all around these mounds are these kind of

dark channels.

It looks like the dark stuff's probably water.

So we've got 12 islands that are each

isolated from each other by these channels.

NARRATOR: Analysts speculate the water channels could serve

a defensive purpose.

WALTERS: If you look at the way the canals are positioned,

they surround the mounds almost like they're barriers.

KAYS: One possibility is that each of these islands

is a separate little enclosure for animals.

There are some species that are not very

good swimmers, and one of those is chimpanzees.

NARRATOR: Further research confirms the site

is a primate sanctuary,

but it's not home to your average apes.

This place was set up to protect chimpanzees

who played a pivotal role in the history of humankind.

They helped us get to space.

NARRATOR: The epic story of these apes starts

in the aftermath of World War II.

Less than five decades after humankind's first flight,

the U.S. sets its sights on exploring outer space.

What we've got to remember is that space was a big unknown,

a very big unknown, and a few decades earlier,

even the idea would have been deemed insane.

NARRATOR: Exploring space isn't just

an extraordinary technical and engineering challenge.

It's also a biological one.

No one knows if living organisms can

survive radiation exposure at such high altitudes.

To ensure the safety of their crews,

scientists turned to a pest -- fruit flies.

They were ideal, because it doesn't take

much fuel to get them up there.

But also, fruit flies are

actually a model organism for genetics.

So they're able to see if

the radiation was having harmful effects on their genes.

NARRATOR: On February 20th, 1947,

engineers pack fruit flies

into a captured Nazi V-2 rocket

and blast them to an altitude of 360,000 feet.

The flies survived, and the genes weren't scrambled.

So the mission continued to get humans into space.

NARRATOR: Yet there are other questions about the effects

of space flight that the flies cannot answer.

KAYS: There was real concern that the change in

the acceleration was gonna just screw up the human

body somehow.

WALTERS: Scientists were concerned that astronauts

might actually suffocate on the contents of their own stomachs

if it all went kind of floating up.

NARRATOR: The following year, a rhesus monkey called Albert

becomes the first mammal to be launched

into the upper atmosphere.

KAYS: Poor Albert dies of suffocation

before reaching space, and so they had to try again.

They actually had a series of Alberts,

and none of them made it.

NARRATOR: The first simians to survive space flight

are Miss Baker and Miss Able,

who, in 1959,

reach an altitude of 300 miles.

Their success pushes NASA's animal test program up a gear.

And so the next step was to go for a chimpanzee.

Chimpanzees could be trained, so you could see if there was

something crazy happening in space

that was gonna affect our cognition or not.

NARRATOR: As part of its Mercury program,

NASA acquires 40 chimpanzees,

including a three-year-old male named Ham.

WALTERS: The researchers trained Ham through a mixture of

giving him mild electric shocks when he got things wrong,

and when he got things right,

lucky Ham got banana pellets.

So, by using this process,

what they taught Ham to do was to pull a series of levers when

prompted by a series of blinking lights.

NARRATOR: As training progresses, the 40 chimps

are whittled down to six possible candidates.

In January 1961, Ham is selected to become the first

great ape astronaut.

Poor little Ham is strapped into his capsule on a Redstone

rocket, and the entire country holds its breath.

You know, is Ham gonna make it to space and back alive?

[indistinct talking]

NARRATOR: On January 31st, Ham launches,

reaching speeds of 5,800 miles per hour.

During the mission,

he experiences over 14 Gs of acceleration

and six minutes of weightlessness

While he was up in space,

he performed his lever pulling job

only a fraction of a second slower

than he had done so on Earth.

KAYS: Ham returned almost completely unharmed.

He had a bit of a bruised nose,

but he showed that hominids could travel into space

and come back safely.

NARRATOR: Just four months after Ham's mission,

Alan Shepard becomes the first American human

to travel into space.

Shepard's flight would not have been possible

without this special astro chimp.

NARRATOR: Two years later, Ham is retired

to the National Zoo in Washington.

But NASA's other space chimps are leased

to a biological research company.

A. MORGAN: Even though the goal

was to prevent the loss of human life,

chimps are highly intelligent creatures.

This would have been

a genuinely terrifying experience for anybody.

NARRATOR: In 1997, a charity successfully files a lawsuit

demanding the release of the chimps, and the forgotten

pioneers of space flight are finally paid a small part of

the huge debt they are owed.

All the chimps were moved to an island sanctuary where

they could spend the remainder of their lives in

peaceful retirement.

And that's what the mounds in this image are.

This little island refuge is a fitting tribute, given

they helped us get to the moon and back.

NARRATOR: Coming up, code of the Aztecs.

Looks like this humongous,

spiraling swirl across the landscape.

NARRATOR: And inside the mystery mega storm.

They are some of the most heroic people

that I have ever met in my life.

NARRATOR: February 2019.

Satellites scanning Mexico City

spot something strange among the densely packed buildings.

This aerial photograph is so bizarre.

It looks like this humongous,

spiraling swirl across the landscape.

It's a very geometric shape,

almost reminds you of the cephalopod nautilus

with that unique spiral.

NARRATOR: The mystery crumbling structure measures

almost two miles in diameter.

BELLINGER: Buildings seem to kind of accommodate

the curve of this structure.

Whatever this is seems to predate this densely populated

city all around it.

NARRATOR: Local records confirm that the strange spiral

does have its roots in the distant past,

and it's a legacy of a series of catastrophic attempts

to play God with the lives of people who live here.

KOUROUNIS: The history of Mexico City has been shaped by

different cultures trying to control

the landscape around it.

And even in modern times, we're still trying to get it right.

NARRATOR: The structure has its origins in February 1519,

when conquistador Hernan Cortes arrives

on the eastern coast of Mexico.

Over the following months, his army moves inland,

slaughtering its way through the 80,000-square-mile

Aztec Empire.

HUNT: The Aztecs outnumbered the Spanish conquistadors

by thousands to one,

and yet, the Spanish had gunpowder.

[gunshot explodes]

The Aztecs fought with blades that were stone.

NARRATOR: In November 1519,

Cortes reaches what is now Mexico City

and discovers the extraordinary

aquatic Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan.

Prior to the Spanish invasion,

this area would have been completely underwater

and absolutely unrecognizable to what we see today.

Tenochtitlan was built directly over Lake Texcoco in

an ingenious set of natural and artificial islands

joined by causeways.

NARRATOR: Within a year, the conquistadors have razed

Tenochtitlan to the ground, and in its place,

begin constructing their own capital,

a city that will one day cover

the entire 2,000-square-mile lake basin.

OKEREKE: The Spanish wanted to make

Mexico City their crown jewel.

So they set out a plan to drain the entire Lake Texcoco,

which was an incredibly ambitious idea.

NARRATOR: The Spanish call this mega project

El Gran Desague, or the Great Drain.

OKEREKE: An incredible engineering plan is put forth,

including changing the course of the rivers that feed Texcoco,

and even constructing tunnels

through the balance to drain the water.

NARRATOR: Over several centuries, the lake recedes,

and Mexico City begins to rise from the lake bed.

By 1900, half a million people

live on land that was once 500 feet underwater.

OKEREKE: Draining a lake of this size is no easy task,

and things did not go as planned.

NARRATOR: As the metropolis grows, torrential rains

repeatedly refill parts of the ancient lake,

flooding entire neighborhoods for five years at a time.

Engineers attempt all kinds of different

methods to drain the water away.

OKEREKE: All the while, the city was getting flooded

over and over again.

NARRATOR: By 2020, Mexico City has

a population of more than 21 million people.

And the ghost of Lake Texcoco returns to haunt them.

The Spanish were successful in draining the water.

However, given that Mexico City sits at the bottom of

a basin, water is going to be an ongoing problem.

KOUROUNIS: When the rains come, particularly during

monsoon season at the end of summer,

all that water goes to the lowest point,

which happens to be the streets of Mexico City at

the bottom of the old lake bed.

NARRATOR: A massive 30 inches of rain

falls on the city every year.

These catastrophic deluges caused billions of dollars

worth of damage and kill thousands of people.

The Valley of Mexico has no natural water outlet.

All the water running off those mountains drains down

to this valley.

Floods are incredibly costly,

resulting in landslides, and they can even bring toxic

sewage into the streets.

Every person in Mexico City is in danger.

NARRATOR: To save lives, authorities have converted

a salt evaporation pond

on the lake bed into a giant flood defense system.

KOUROUNIS: Its size, over two miles wide,

will allow it to act like a giant reservoir,

holding water that would otherwise end up in the streets.

OKEREKE: The spiral is fitted with these huge pumps

that push the water away from the city

when in crisis.

NARRATOR: The site in the image is

the last line of defense against an unstoppable force

and a stark reminder of seven centuries

of misguided attempts to manipulate Mother Nature.

It's kind of remarkable that, 700 years after the Aztecs

successfully managed

water in this region, that modern engineers are trying to

match their success.

NARRATOR: Coming up, the secret government planes

spying on you.

They'd hoover up text messages and photos on

a massive scale.

NARRATOR: And the strange sea cipher.

It's really difficult to tell

what's going on underneath the surface.

NARRATOR: September 7th, 2021.

GPS satellites track over 45,000 aircraft

across 30 million square miles of U.S. airspace.

But at 3:30 p.m., investigators spot one plane

doing something weird.

What we're seeing here is a flight path,

but it's unlike any flight path that

I've ever seen before.

RODRIGUEZ McROBBIE: The pilot appears to be flying

in some sort of flower pattern almost.

It's like a star.

NARRATOR: Aircraft investigators watch the plane as it covers

2,500 miles in a seven-hour flight.

RODRIGUEZ McROBBIE: It's almost as if they're sort of

sweeping the skies, trying to get as much

information about this particular area

as possible.

NARRATOR: Leaked reports from international intelligence

agencies could explain

the strange flight pattern captured from space.

All over the world,

authorities have started using planes to collect digital

data from the ground,

and that includes here in the United States.

NARRATOR: Light aircraft are fitted with equipment,

which gathers vast amounts of cellphone data

from oblivious people below.

These devices are called dirtboxes,

and they mimic cellphone towers, and they actually

trick cellphones into connecting with them.

KOUROUNIS: They don't just hoover up

criminals' information, they gather location data,

text messages, and photos on a massive scale.

So when you have a dirtbox flying over a densely

populated area,

the scope of what they can actually pick up is

incredibly vast.

NARRATOR: According to the leaked documents,

a single dirtbox can track up to 10,000 cellphones,

putting hundreds of millions of ordinary Americans at risk

of being spied on.

This is a civil liberties issue,

the kind of thing that we see in other countries,

and we disapprove of.

It's the kind of thing that could easily

and is happening in the United States.

NARRATOR: Meteorologist Randy Cerveny has

a different take on the satellite data.

He believes the aircraft is tracking

something much deadlier than cellphone data.

CERVENY: This is hurricane research.

What we're seeing here is the plane

making different passes over top of the hurricane.

This is what we commonly consider hurricane hunting.

NARRATOR: In 2021, seven hurricanes

kill over 100 people in the U.S. alone,

causing $70 billion dollars in damage.

For scientists, forecasting their path

and intensity is a massive challenge.

What we need to know is what's going on inside the storm,

what are the dynamics of the air and the moisture,

and the only way to really get that data

is to go there and measure it.

NARRATOR: In the U.S., this highly dangerous task falls to

aviators at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric

Administration, or NOAA.

Their mission is to get up close to

the storm to gather vital data to feed into

their supercomputers.

Every little piece of data that we're able to gather helps

us to predict where these big storms are gonna go,

and that, in turn, helps to save lives.

NARRATOR: Each year, NOAA flies over 50 operations.

And each of these missions traces its roots

to a strange wager made back in the 1940s.

RODRIGUEZ McROBBIE: An American officer bet a British officer

that he could fly his single engine plane

right into the eye of the storm.

KOUROUNIS: It seems like a crazy idea,

but he managed to pull it off,

flying through torrential rains and incredible winds

and managed to somehow make it back all in one piece.

Not only had he won the bet,

but he'd also inadvertently kicked off hurricane hunting.

NARRATOR: 80 years later, in September of 2021,

satellites spot Hurricane Larry forming over

the Atlantic.

This is the type of storm that could threaten the U.S.

So two teams of hurricane hunters deploy from

the U.S. Virgin Islands to intercept it.

Most people don't think of meteorology as being

a life-threatening job, but in

the case of the hurricane hunters,

they are true heroes that risk their lives to try to

help us figure out what's gonna

happen in terms of our weather.

NARRATOR: As the planes approach the storm, they split up.

The faster, more agile jet,

a Gulfstream IV, flies above the hurricane, tracing

the star pattern seen in the satellite data.

By skirting the periphery of

these storms in very specific patterns,

the scientists are able to maximize their efforts

and gather the important bits of data as quickly

as possible before they have to return back to base.

One of the critical instruments on

the Gulfstream is what we call a radiometer.

It is looking at the heat

that's being put out by this hurricane.

NARRATOR: One hurricane can release heat energy equivalent

to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes.

Measuring it helps predict

the hurricane's intensity and its destructive power.

CERVENY: As our image shows you,

we actually go through multiple passes, because we want

to get quite different views of

what actually all parts of the hurricane are doing.

NARRATOR: Meanwhile, NOAA's sturdy Orion P-3 aircraft

heads straight into the eye of the storm.

We're gonna be studying the area right around the eye,

the thing that we call the eye wall.

That's the most intense,

the most dangerous part of the hurricane.

NARRATOR: After battling 180-mile-per-hour winds,

the hurricane hunters enter the eye of the storm,

a circular patch of calm weather up to 40 miles wide.

Precisely how the eye forms remains unclear,

but tracking the way it moves and evolves

helps to estimate the storm's path across the Atlantic.

This is knowledge that we can only get by sampling

directly in the hurricane

by using these kinds of planes,

and so it's absolutely critical work.

NARRATOR: The data gathered by the plane accurately predicts

Larry will swing north, making landfall in Canada.

Thanks to the hurricane hunters,

such forecasts have improved threefold in the last 20 years.

During this period, some hurricanes

have mysteriously intensified just before landfall,

meaning their work is more vital than ever.

We're getting a better knowledge of hurricanes

in general, and that's helping us with

things like climate change and understanding what's gonna

happen to hurricanes in the future.

NARRATOR: Coming up, a $100 million dollar mystery.

Reports suggest that this could be

devastating to the local environment.

NARRATOR: May 2021.

Eyes in the sky surveying

a coastal area of Fujian Province,

Vietnam, capture something strange.

There are all these little squares with white circles at

the corners, lots of them in a row.

linked by something long and thin,

and then every now and then, there's a larger structure

with deep circles around it.

SCHUTTLER: It's really difficult to tell

what's going on underneath the surface.

NARRATOR: The mystery pattern covers around

4.5 football fields worth of ocean.

It reminds some analysts of a tech innovation

aiming to solve an impending energy crisis.

There's a technological race going on to find innovative

ways to cool data centers and even avoid meltdowns.

RODRIGUEZ McROBBIE: On a small scale,

it's your laptop working too hard, maybe overheating,

maybe even shutting down, but on a larger scale,

a server meltdown can render internet services

inoperable for days at a time.

[alarm sounding]

NARRATOR: From social networking to stock markets,

we produce over one million petabytes of data a day,

which is stored in energy-hungry data centers.

Much of this energy is used to prevent overheating,

which can crash vital computer infrastructure.

[alarm sounding]

The latest solution to this problem

is to move server farms underwater.

If you can harness naturally cold ocean temperatures and use

them to cool servers, even just by a few degrees,

you can avoid meltdowns.

NARRATOR: Zoologist Roland Kays studies the image.

He thinks the mystery structures are designed to

satisfy our hunger for luxury food,

not phones.

I think this is evidence of some kind of aquaculture.

Vietnam has over 2,000 miles of coastline, and one of

the most valuable industries there is raising lobsters

for sale in the seafood market.

NARRATOR: Lobsters are aliens of the deep with two stomachs,

blue blood, and the ability to pee out of their heads.

Yet we still crunch our way through 400,000 tons

of these cockroach-like critters every year.

The most highly prized species of lobster

in Vietnam is the ornate lobster.

It's demanded in Europe, North America, Asia.

In fact, in China,

one pound of ornate lobster costs over 90 U.S. dollars.

NARRATOR: But there's a problem.

Wild lobster are overfished,

and the number caught worldwide is plummeting.

KAYS: A few centuries ago,

they were very plentiful, and they were even

fed to prisoners, because nobody else wanted to eat them.

Now, the situation is completely different.

In Vietnam alone,

it's a 100-million-dollar industry.

NARRATOR: Vietnamese farms, like the one captured from

the skies, produce around 1,600 tons of lobster each year.

They have a disturbing tendency to eat each other,

but the farmers here face bigger challenges than that.

You can't actually breed lobsters in captivity.

So smaller lobsters, called seeds, are captured so

they can fatten up and reach larger sizes.

Demand for these juvenile lobsters is so high that

they are routinely smuggled from abroad into Vietnam.

RUBEN: Smugglers pack thousands

of lobster seeds into bags or styrofoam containers,

and some have even tried to get them in through the airport

in their luggage.

Authorities have even set up a special task force

to crack down on lobster seed smuggling.

NARRATOR: Organized crime is not the only

dark side of the industry.

SCHUTTLER: Reports suggest that this growing aquaculture

could be devastating to the local environment.

RODRIGUEZ McROBBIE: Much like industrial farming on land,

industrial farming in the sea will have an impact.

RUBEN: Aquaculture is not limited to lobster farms

in Vietnam -- in fact, in the past decade or so,

we have actually been farming more fish by weight than beef.

NARRATOR: Each year, the aquaculture industry uses

over 3.5 million tons of fish food.

KAYS: All the food that goes in for the fish,

and all the waste that comes out,

ends up being fertilizer for the ocean for the algae

that grows around there.

You have all sorts of algal blooms, which

then caused their own problems for the environment.

NARRATOR: The poisonous algae can accumulate in shellfish

like lobsters.

If they're eaten, they can cause anything

from stomach upsets to paralysis and death,

a high price to pay for a lobster dinner.

The human population around the world is going to continue

to grow, so we need to find ways

to do aquaculture in a sustainable manner

so that it doesn't cause more problems than it solves.