the first question is this our country
has to exploration programs one is NASA
with a mission to explore the great
beyond to explore the heavens which we
all want to go to if we're lucky and you
can see we have Sputnik and we have a
Saturn and we have other manifestations
of space exploration well there's also
another program that in another agency
within our government in ocean
exploration it's in NOAA the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
and my question is this why are we
ignoring the oceans here's the reason
not the reason but here's why I asked
that question if you compare NASA's
budget annual budget to explore the
heavens that's one year budget would
fund NOAA's budget to explore the oceans
for 1,600 years why why are we looking
up is it because it's heaven and hell is
down here is it a cultural issue why are
people afraid of the ocean or do they
just assume the ocean is just a dark
gloomy place that has nothing to offer
I'm going to take you on a 16-minute
trip on 72% of the planet so buckle up
okay and what we're going to do is we're
going to immerse ourselves in my world
and what I'm going to try to I hope I
make the following points I'm going to
make it right now in case I forget is
everything I'm going to present to you
was not in my textbooks when I went to
school and most of it was not even my
college textbooks when I've on
geophysicist and and I all my earth
science books when I was a student I had
to give the wrong answer to get an A we
used to ridicule continental drift it
was something we laughed at we learned
to Marshall kaise jiya synclinal cycle
which is a bunch of crap but we in
today's context it was a bunch of crap
but it was it was the law of geology
vertical tectonics all the things we're
going to walk through in our
explorations and discoveries of the
oceans we're mostly discoveries made by
accident
mostly discoveries made by accident we
were looking for something found
something else and everything we're
going to talk about represents a 1/10 of
1% glimpse because that's all we've seen
I have a characterization this is a
characterization of what it would look
like if you could remove the water it
gives you the false impression it's a
map it is not a map fact I commonly ask
people have another version of my office
and I ask people why are there mountains
here on this area here but there none
over here and they go well it's you'd
only try to be you know the same is it a
fracture zone is it a hotspot no no
that's the only place of ship spin most
of the southern hemisphere is unexplored
we had more exploration ships down there
during Captain Cook's time than now it's
amazing all right so we're going to
immerse ourselves in the 72% of the
planet because you know it's really
naive to think that the Easter Bunny put
all the resources on the continents you
know it's just ludicrous the we are
always constantly playing the zero-sum
game you know you know we're going to do
this we're going to take it away from
something else
I believe in just a rich in the economy
and and we're leaving so much on the
table 72% of the planet and as I will
point out later in the presentation
50% of the United States of America lies
beneath the sea 50% of our country that
we own have all legal jurisdiction have
all rights to do whatever we want lies
beneath the sea and we have better maps
of Mars than that 50% why ok now
I began my explorations the hard way
back then this was actually my first
expedition was I was 17 years old was 49
years ago do the math I'm I'm 66 and I
went out to sea on a script ship and we
almost got sunk by a giant rogue wave
and I was too young to be it you know I
thought it was a great out of the body
surfer and I don't walk that was an
incredible wave and we almost sank the
ship but I became enraptured with
mounting expeditions and over the last
49 years I've done about a hundred and
twenty twenty-one to keep doing them
expeditions but in the early days the
only way I could get to the bottom was
to crawl into a submarine a very small
submarine and go down to the bottom I
dove in a whole series of different deep
diving submersibles Alvin and see cliff
and Siana and all the major deep
submersibles we have which are about
eight in fact on a good day on a good
day we might have four or five human
beings at the average depth of the earth
maybe four or five human beings out of
whatever billions we've got going and so
it's it's very difficult to get there if
you do it physically but I was
enraptured back in my graduate years was
the dawn of plate tectonics and we
realized that the greatest mountain
range on earth lied beneath the sea the
mid-ocean ridge runs around like the
seaman of baseball this is on a on a
Makita projection but if you were to put
it on an equal area projection you'd see
that the mid-ocean ridge covers 23% of
the Earth's total surface area almost a
quarter of our planet is a single
mountain range and we didn't enter it
until after Neil Armstrong and Buzz
Aldrin went to the moon so we went to
the moon played golf up there before we
went to the largest feature on our own
planet and our interest in this mountain
ranges are scientists in those days was
not only because of its tremendous size
dominating the planet but the role it
plays in the genesis of the Earth's
outer skin because it's along the axis
of the mid-ocean ridge where the great
crustal plates are separating and like a
living organism you tear open it bleeds
its molten blood rises up to heal that
wound from the asthenosphere hardens
forms new tissue and moves laterally but
no one had actually gone down into the
actual site of boundary of creation as
we called it into the Rift Valley till a
group of seven of us
crawled in our little submarines in the
summer of 1973 1974 and we're the first
human beings to enter the Great Rift
Valley we went down into the Rift Valley
this is the all accurate except for one
thing it's pitch black
it's absolutely pitch black because
photons cannot reach the average depth
of the ocean which is 12,000 feet in the
Rift Valley it's 9,000 feet most of our
planet does not feel the warmth of the
Sun most of our planet is in eternal
darkness and in that for that reason you
do not have photosynthesis of the deep
sea with the absence of photosynthesis
you have no plant life and as a result
you have very little animal life living
in this underworld or so we thought and
so in our initial explorations we were
totally focused on exploring the
boundary of creation looking at the
volcanic features running along that
entire 42,000 miles running along this
entire 42,000 miles are tens of
thousands of active volcanoes tens of
thousands of active volcanoes there are
more active volcanoes beneath the sea
than on land by two orders of magnitude
so it's a phenomenally active region
it's not just a you know dark boring
place it's a very alive place and it's
then being ripped open but we were
dealing with a particular scientific
issue back then we couldn't understand
why you had a mountain under tension we
in plate tectonic theory we knew that if
you had plates collide it made sense
they would they would crush into one
another you would thicken the crust
you'd uplift it that's why you get you
know you get seashells up on Mount
Everest it's not a flood it was pushed
up there
we understood mountains under
compression but we could not understand
why we had a mountain under tension
should not be until one of my colleagues
said it looks to me like a thermal
blister and the mid-ocean ridge must be
a cooling curve we said let's go find
out we punched a bunch of heat probes
everything made sense except that the
axis there was missing heat there was
missing heat it was hot it wasn't hot
enough so we came up with multiple
hypotheses there's little green people
down there taking it there's all sorts
of things going on but the only logical
was that there were hot springs that
there must be underwater hot springs we
mounted an expedition to look for the
missing heat and so we went along this
mountain range in an area along the
Galapagos rift and did we find the
missing heat it was amazing these giant
chimneys
huge giant chimneys went up to them with
our submersible we want to get a
temperature probe we stuck it in there
looked at it with pegged off-scale pilot
made this great observation that's hot
then we realized our probe was made out
of the same stuff it could have melted
but it turns out the exiting temperature
with 650 degrees Fahrenheit hot enough
to melt lead this is what a real one
looks like on the one to Foucault Ridge
what you're looking at is incredible
pipe organ of chemicals coming out of
the ocean everything you see in this
picture is commercial grade copper lead
silver zinc and gold so the Easter Bunny
has put things in the ocean floor and
you have massive heavy metal deposits
that we're making in this mountain range
we're making huge discoveries of large
commercial grade ore along this mountain
range but it was dwarfed was dwarfed by
what we discovered we discovered a
profusion of life in a world that it
should not exist giant tubeworms ten
feet tall I remember having to use vodka
my own vodka to pick a liquor they don't
carry formaldehyde we went and found
these incredible clam beds sitting on
the barren Rock large clams and when we
opened them they didn't look like a clam
and when we cut them open they didn't
have the anatomy of a clan no mouth no
gut no digestive system they had inside
them their body said had been totally
taken over by another organism a
bacterium that had figured out how to
replicate photosynthesis in the dark
through a process we now call
chemosynthesis
none of it in our textbooks none of us
in our textbooks or that we did not know
about this life system we were not
predicting it we stumbled on it looking
for some missing heat so we wanted to
accelerate this process we wanted to get
away from the silly trip up and down on
a submarine average depth of the ocean
12,000 feet to an F hours to get to work
in the morning
two-and-a-half hours to get to home five
hour commute to work three hours of
bottom time average distance traveled
one mile on a 42,000 mile mountain range
great job security but not the way to go
so I began designing a new technology of
telepresence using robotic systems to
replicate myself so I wouldn't have to
cycle my vehicle system we began to
introduce that in our explorations and
we continue to make phenomenal
discoveries with our new robotic
technologies again looking for something
else moving from one part of the
mid-ocean ridge to another we were
the scientists were off watch and they
came across incredible life-forms they
came across new creatures they had not
seen before but more importantly they
discovered edifices down there that they
did not understand that it did not did
not make sense they were not above a
magma chamber they shouldn't be there
and we called it lost city and lost city
was characterized by these incredible
climb stone formations and upside down
of pools look at that how do you do that
that's water upside down we we went in
underneath it tapped it and we found
that it had the pH of Drano the pH of 11
and yet it had chemosynthetic bacteria
living in it end at this extreme
environment enough hydrothermal vents
were in an acidic environment all the
way at the other end in an alkaline
environment at a pH of 11 a life existed
so life was much more creative than we
had ever thought again discovered by
accident just two years ago working off
Santorini where people are sunning
themselves on the beach unbeknownst to
them in caldera nearby we found
phenomenal hydrothermal vent systems and
another more life systems this was two
miles from where people go to sunbathe
and they were oblivious to the existence
of this system again you know we stopped
at the water's edge recently diving off
in the Gulf of Mexico
finding a pools of water this time not
upside down right side up bingo it's
it's it's out you think you're in error
until your fish swims by you're looking
at you're looking at brine pools formed
by salt dye appears near that was
methane was I never seen volcanoes of
methane instead of belching out lava
they were belching out big big bubbles
of methane and they were creating these
volcanoes and there were flows not of
lava but of the mud coming out of the
earth but driven by meth never seen this
before moving on there's more than just
natural history that beneath the sea
human history our discoveries of the
Titanic the realization that the
deep-sea is the largest museum on earth
it contains more history than all the
museum's on land combined and yet we're
only now penetrating it finding that the
state of preservation we found the
Bismarck in 16,000 feet
we then found the Yorktown people always
ask did you find the right ship this
said Yorktown on the stern more recently
finding ancient history
how many ancient mariners have had a bad
day the numbers of million we've been
discovering these along ancient trade
routes where they're not supposed to be
the shipwrecks thanked hundred years
before the birth of Christ
this one sank carrying a prefabricated
home depot Roman temple and then here's
one that sank at the time of Homer at
750 BC more recently into the Black Sea
where we're exploring because there's no
oxygen there it's it's it's the largest
reservoir of hydrogen sulfide on earth
shipwrecks are perfectly preserved all
their organics are perfectly preserved
we begin to excavate them we expect to
start hauling out the bodies in perfect
condition with their DNA look at the
state of preservation still the ad mark
of a carpenter's look at the state of
those artifacts you still see the
beeswax dripping when they drop they
sealed it this ship sank 1500 years ago
fortunately we've been able to convince
Congress we begin to go on the hill and
lobby and we stole recently a ship from
the United States Navy the Okeanos
Explorer in its mission its mission is
as good as you could get its mission is
to go where no one has gone before on
planet Earth and it's I was looking at
it yesterday it's up in Seattle okay it
comes online it comes online this summer
and it begins its journey of exploration
but we have no idea what we're going to
find when we go out there with our
technology but certainly it's going to
be going to the unknown America this is
at that part of the United States that
lies beneath the sea we own all of that
blue and yet like I say particularly the
west and territorial trust we don't have
maps of them we don't have maps of them
we have maps of Venus but not of the
western territorial trust the way we're
going to run this we have no idea what
we're going to discover we have no idea
what we're going to discover going to
discover it an ancient shipwreck of
Phoenicians off Brazil or a new rock
formation a new life so we're going to
run it like an emergency hospital we're
going to connect our command center via
high bandwidth satellite link to a
building we're building at the
University of Rhode Island called the
inner space Center
and within that we're going to run it
just like you run a nuclear submarine
blew goal team switching them off and on
running 24 hours a day a discovery is
made that discovery is instantly seen in
the command center a second later but
then it's connected through Internet to
the new internet highway that makes
internet one look like a dirt road on
the information highway with 10 gigabits
a bandwidth will go into areas we have
no knowledge of it's a big blank sheet
on our planet will map it within hours
have the maps disseminated out to the
major universities it turns out that 90%
of all the oceanographic intellect in
this country are at 12 universities
they're all on i2 we can then build a
command center this is a remote Center
at the University of Washington she's
talking to the pilot
she's 5,000 miles away but she's assumed
command but the beauty of this too is we
can then disseminate it to children we
can disseminate they can follow this
expedition I've started a program thing
where you Jim Jim Young who helped we
start a program called the Jason project
more recently we've started a program
with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America
so that we can use exploration and and
the excitement of live exploration to
motivate them and excite them and then
give them what they're already ready for
I would not let an adult drive my robot
you don't have enough gaming experience
but I will let it kid with no license
take over control of my vehicle system
because we want to create we want to
create the classroom of tomorrow we have
stiff competition and we need to
motivate and it's all being done if that
your win or lose an engineer or a
scientist by the eighth grade the game
is not over it's over by the eighth
grade it's not beginning we need to be
not only proud of our universities we
need to be proud of our middle schools
and when we have the best middle schools
in the world we'll have the best kids
pumped out of that system let me tell
you because this is what we want
this is what we want this is a young
lady not watching a football game not
watching a basketball game watching
exploration live from thousands of miles
away and it's just dawning on her what
she's seen and when you get a jaw drop
you can inform you can put so much
information into that mind it's in full
reset mode and that's this this I hope
this I hope will be a future engineer or
a future scientist in the battlefield
for truth and my final question my final
question why are we not looking at
moving out onto the sea why do we have
programs to build a habitation on Mars
and we have programs to look at
colonizing the moon but we do not have a
program looking at how we colonize our
own planet and the technology is at hand
thank you very much
thank you thank you