Exploring the Ocean for Sixty Years | Best Job Ever

Even if you've never seen the ocean or touch the ocean, the ocean touches you with every breath you take, every trough of water you drink. It's the ocean. It's the ocean for me.

Being a biologist, just following my heart has led me to some fascinating places. What has held my attention all these years? It's life in the ocean. That's where most of life on Earth actually lives. These little guys in there—several species—they kind of all look alike, but they probably think the same thing about us.

As a scientist, I'd love nothing more than being an explorer, discovering the nature of life itself, that sense of Eureka. Well, mostly to go to 1,000 ft is really tough to do unless you have some special friend like this one. It's a wonderful passport into the ocean. SSTs are like little kids who never quite grew up, don't ever stop asking who, what, why, where, when, how.

Maybe whales and dolphins ask some of these questions, but they may wonder what stars are, and they may wonder what's in the depths of the ocean below where they swim. But only humans have the capacity to really answer those questions. And when you think only about 10% of the ocean has been seen or sampled at all, we're just beginning to assess the magnitude of our ignorance.

At the same time that we're learning more, we're also discovering how much we're losing. Oh, there must be a thousand fish here! How do you save the ocean? You find others who have a similar goal, and together you find ways and means of working with people who have the power to make decisions that ultimately result in protection for a place that you love. That's how it happens.

All of us depend on these ecosystems, and they're incredibly—in some ways, they're incredibly resilient if we do the right thing. But they're also really fragile.

It's a magical sight, that endless horizon that just stretches out to blue infinity. You jump in the ocean, and there you find happiness. One in every five breaths you take comes from this tiny little organism called the prochlorococcus. They produce 20% of the oxygen in the atmosphere.