Translator: Leanne Ma Reviewer: Elena Montrasio
Earlier this year, I led a scientific expedition
to St. Helena Island.
It's one of the most remote inhabited islands on the planet.
It's about halfway between Angola and Brazil,
smack in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean.
And with no flights yet,
the only way to get there is the same way they have
for five hundred years,
by ship.
Takes about five days, each way, from Cape Town.
It is a fascinating and somewhat forbidding place.
It's ringed with cliffs, pretty much all the way round.
And many of those have fortifications on the top
from the time when Napoleon was exiled there,
at the beginning of the 19th century.
We went there to study the world's biggest fish
and also one of its most mysterious,
"whale sharks".
These giant but peaceful animals visit St. Helena
as a part of an incredibly long global movement patterns.
And we wanted to know where they come from,
what they're doing in St. Helena
and where they go when they leave.
But while we were there,
we took a break from our "whale sharking" activities
and went to visit the one and only beach
that they have in all of St. Helena.
It's a black-sand beach, called 'Sandy Bay'.
And on the beach of 'Sandy Bay',
here is what we found:
All those little bits of white and blue and other colours
standing out against the sand:
pieces of plastic.
And this isn't plastic discarded by the people of St. Helena.
This plastic's got history.
This plastic has traveled
thousands of miles on ocean currents
since being discarded by someone else,
somewhere else.
More recently, I had a chance to visit the Galapagos.
Again, to study whale sharks.
and all the other incredible life
that makes its home in those islands
made famous by Charles Darwin
and the voyage of the Beagle.
And again, on tour to Good Bay Beach,
in amongst those amazing marine iguanas,
we found plastic.
As a marine biologist,
I came away from these experiences deeply conflicted.
The discoveries that we've made about
whale sharks in St. Helena and the Galapagos
were exhilarating.
And so was seeing all the other amazing life in these very special places.
But ever since I got back,
these images of plastic on a far-flung beach
have been a real mental splinter.
They are nagging reminder to all of us
that even the remotest parts of the ocean
are being affected by our actions,
here on land.
It's quite a strange sensation
to plan and carry out expeditionary research
to very remote locations
only to find out that banal items
like a drink bottle, or a cigarette lighter
or a plastic bag beat you there.
When it comes to environmental problems,
acute issues, like the Deep-Water horizon oil spill
are certainly very important
and they definitely attract the lion share of media attention.
But in the long run,
it is the chronic problems
that are the greater existential threat to the oceans,
things just like plastic pollution.
I can't help but wonder what impact all those little bits of plastic have
on the whales harks that I study.
Whale sharks are filter feeders.
They make a living by separating plankton
from huge volumes of water,
and I'm all but certain that they ingest this stuff while they are doing it.
The truth is, I don't know yet,
what impact plastic has on the health of whale sharks.
And scientists are only just beginning
to unravel the impacts of plastic
on other species.
But what we do know
is that the plastic problem in the oceans
is getting worse.
In a recent report,
the ocean conservancy estimated
that within 10 years,
within 10 years,
for every 3 pounds of fish
that live in the ocean
there will be a pound of plastic floating around.
For many of the animals that make their home in the ocean,
that amounts to death by a thousand cups.
Chronic problems like plastic pollution,
are incredibly important because of all of the things
the ocean does for us.
This one globally connected layer of salty water
that covers 70% of our planet
serves us as a highway, a pantry, a pharmacy, a sewer.
It's the very lungs of the Earth.
In fact, the ocean does so many things for us
that it may very well be our very best friend,
and yet, we don't know it very well.
And in a lot of ways,
we don't treat this friendship with the respect that it deserves.
Let me share just a couple of the things that our friend, the ocean, does for us.
There is an old saying that,
'A true friend is someone who helps you move',
and by that yard stick, the ocean is a very good friend indeed
because about 90% of global commerce
takes place on the oceans.
The majority of things you and I touch every day
were on a ship at some point,
in either their raw material, or their manufactured form,
maybe even the seat that you are sitting on.
The ocean is a pantry.
It's the last significant remaining source of wild-caught food on the planet.
About 3 billion people rely on the ocean every day to provide them
with the significant portion of the protein that they need.
It's been said that if it swims, wriggles, or oozes through the ocean,
someone, somewhere eats it.
Coral reefs are the rainforest of the sea,
or as marine biologists like to think about it,
rain forests are the coral reefs of the land.
A healthy coral reef is one of the most spectacular natural things
you can experience:
overflowing with colour,
and more types of animal life than you can find anywhere else.
And all of that diversity
is a veritable goldmine of potential scientific discoveries,
including the largest natural repository of pharmaceutical drugs
that we can use in the fight against disease.
The National Cancer Institute maintains a list of promising anti-cancer compounds
and right now, more of those candidates
come from the ocean, than anywhere else.
Most people think the air we breathe comes from trees.
That's only half right,
because half of the oxygen -
actually more than half of the oxygen in the atmosphere
comes not from majestic forests,
but from tiny, single-celled planktonic algae
that float around in the ocean.
Untold billions of little green microorganisms
are keeping you and I alive every day
by providing half of the oxygen that is in your lungs at this very moment.
So, if you don't believe the ocean is a good friend to you,
try skipping every other breath.
Finally, the ocean is doing us a huge favour
by regulating and buffering our climate.
Ocean current systems, like the Gulf Stream,
play critical roles in redistributing
the Sun's energy from the equator towards the poles
which drives seasonal weather patterns
that are essential for agriculture, bird migrations, little league games,
and pretty much everything else.
And ever since the industrial revolution,
the ocean has absorbed a quarter of the carbon dioxide emissions,
and almost all of the heat
that's been trapped by the greenhouse effect so far.
We have a tendency to think about climate change
as an atmospheric phenomenon,
something that happens up there.
But, climate change is really about the oceans,
every bit as much as it's about the atmosphere.
So, if I have convinced you
that the ocean is truly a good friend to us,
providing us with all kinds of benefits and favors,
what scientists and economists like to call 'ecosystem services'.
But I think it's fair to ask,
What kind of friend are we to the oceans?
How well do we really even know this friend that does so much for us?
I don't think we know as much as we should,
and we definitely don't know as much as we need to
in order to navigate the challenges of the coming century.
How is this possible?
How is it that in the 21st century our knowledge is deficient
about the dominant geographical feature on our planet?
By contrast, earlier this year,
NASA was able to send us back high-resolution images of Pluto,
a dwarf planet that is more than four billion miles away from Earth.
That's a truly staggering scientific achievement.
And yet, we've still only documented a few percent of our own ocean floor.
On defence of the marine scientists,
NASA has a much bigger budget for exploration.
But, the ocean is also a challenging place to work.
in many ways, it's just as challenging as space,
and in a number of very important ways,
it's maybe even more challenging than space.
As a result of the difficulties of working in the ocean,
our understanding of what the ocean is like is lacking.
And public perception of the oceans is very very biased.
I want to give you a very simple example:
I'd like you to hold in your mind, if you would, for just a moment,
a mental image of an average bit of the ocean and what that's like,
just an average bit of the open ocean somewhere,
while I show you what 94% of the ocean actually looks like,
in fact, I have already showed you.
Are you ready?
Looks like nothing!
94% of the ocean is a pitch-black, formless void.
That's because sunlight only penetrates about two football fields,
below the surface.
The rest, about 11,000 feet, on average looks like this:
completely dark, 24/7, 365,
apart from the occasional flash of bioluminescence.
If you compare that with your mental image of an average bit of ocean,
I am willing to bet that they are different.
And that's what I mean when I say
our perception of what the ocean is really like is biased.
But it doesn't stop there.
The ocean is colder than you think, too.
Beyond the reach of sunlight,
it hovers just above the freezing point,
everywhere.
It doesn't matter if you are off the coast of Greenland or off the coast of Hawaii,
the overwhelming majority of the ocean
is in a state of frigid, perpetual darkness.
There are two main reasons why
our friend the ocean is so inscrutable to us,
and it's not the cold, and it's not the dark.
The first is that you have to go there to see it.
You can stripe on a scuba tank and jump in.
I like to do that.
But the bit you can see that way is less than 1 % of the average depth.
So, if you want to get to know the rest,
you have to use other methods.
But they can't be remote methods,
at least not in the NASA sense.
When NASA sent that New Horizon probe to Pluto,
it sent back its treasure trove of data by radio waves.
But radio waves don't penetrate through sea water.
So, if you want to get to know the oceans,
you really have to go there and see them.
Sound, in the form of sonar,
remains the best way to send and receive information under water.
And to be honest, from an engineering perspective,
it's not very good at it.
If you want to get to know the oceans,
you have to go there,
you have to take a submersible,
or you have to go out on a ship,
and take one of these tethered remotely operated vehicles with you.
But you have to physically go there.
And that's when the second problem gets you.
because if you try to go there,
the ocean will try to stop you,
or even kill you.
Undoubtedly, the most hostile aspect of working in the deep oceans is pressure.
At the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean -
that is the Mariana's Trench, off the coast of Guam -
the pressure is more than 1100 times
what we are experiencing sitting in this room.
What does that even mean?
Well, it's about the same pressure that takes place
for a split second in the chamber of a gun when a 357 magnum round goes off.
But down there, it's like that all the time.
Ever since Malaysian airlines flight 370 went missing in 2014,
it's the difficulty of working under those kinds of conditions
that have made it so hard to find,
to the surprise of everybody, it seems,
except oceanographers and marine biologists.
Maybe it's no surprise that we have only been
to the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean in person
precisely twice in human history.
Once in 1961, and once a couple of years ago.
More people have walked on the surface of the Moon
than have been to the deepest part of our ocean.
Blows my mind.
We can't fully appreciate yet
exactly how much our present and future existence on this planet
depends on the health of the oceans
because we just don't know them well enough yet.
But what we do know suggests that we ought
to cultivate this friendship a little bit better.
The Senegalese Conservationist Baba Dioum said,
'We will only protect what we love and we only love what we understand.'
We need to make an effort to understand
everything that the ocean does for us
in all of its magnificent complexity
so that we might be better stewards
of this fate that we are both going to share.
We shouldn't shy away from the challenges of working in the deep ocean.
We should embrace them as opportunities.
There are fantastic chances waiting out there for us to explore
and discover,
invent things,
solve problems,
and inspire new generations of scientists, engineers and leaders.
There are acute and chronic problems facing the ocean.
It's true.
The good news
is that science tells us the ocean is a resilient place.
The other good news
is that we know what many of the solutions are already.
It's really just a matter of implementation.
Activation energy, if you like.
Based on what I saw in St. Helena and the Galapagos,
if I could ask you to do one thing for the oceans today,
it would be to cut down on plastic.
Bring a cloth bag to the supermarket.
Say no to the straw.
Recycle.
These are small, simple, easy, local changes in behaviour.
And if f we all do them, they really can and they really will,
make a real difference to this problem that occurs
because the ocean is downstream of everything else.
If you are a business person,
ask yourself what opportunities the ocean offers for business success
while at the same time
achieving lasting and positive environmental change.
We need more solutions like this one:
This is the Baltimore trash wheel, a solar powered device
that pulls plastic garbage out of rivers and streams
before it even reaches the sea.
What a fantastic idea!
There are markets for these kinds of things,
and if we really set our hearts to it,
we could fix this problem.
If we are willing to invest a little bit of our time,
some money,
and a whole lot of creative energy
in rebuilding our relationship with the ocean,
we should have a bright future together.
There is no reason we can't continue to use the ocean
to drive international commerce.
We will find ways to feed a growing population
through fisheries managements and creative aquaculture.
The search for drugs in the ocean can continue,
and we will all be able to breathe a lot more easily,
if we can cut down on the carbon emissions,
and restore the balance between the ocean and the atmosphere.
But we have to get cracking.
The ocean cannot continue to take the hits for us forever.
If we can rise to these challenges,
then I get to achieve my greatest dream
which is to leave to my kids an ocean
that is as dark and cold and clean as they need it to be
and in the surface layers, at least,
also, as blue and as beautiful and as brimming with life as they deserve.
And I hope I am not alone in having that dream.
So let's embrace our friend, the ocean while we still can.
Thank you.
(Applause)