Deep ocean mysteries and wonders - David Gallo

You know, I had a real rough time in school with ADD, and I have a PhD. I earned a PhD, but ... tough to pay attention -- biology, geology, physics, chemistry -- really tough for me. Only one thing grabbed my attention, and it's that planet called Earth. But in this picture here, you'll see that Earth is mostly water. That's the Pacific. Seventy percent of Earth is covered with water.

You can say, "Hey, I know Earth. I live here." You don't know Earth. You don't know this planet, because most of it's covered with that -- average depth, two miles. And when you go outside and look up at the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, the average depth of the ocean is 15 of those on top of one another. We've explored about five percent of what's in that water. "Explored," meaning, for the first time, go peek and see what's there.

So what I want to do today is show you some things about this planet, about the oceans. I want to take you from shallow water down to the deep water, and hopefully, like me, you'll see some things that get you hooked on exploring planet Earth. You know things like corals; you've seen plenty of corals, those of you who've been to the beach, snorkeling, know corals are an amazing place to go -- full of life, some big animals, small animals, some nice, some dangerous, sharks, whales, all that stuff. They need to be protected from humanity. They're great places.

But what you probably don't know is in the very deep part of the ocean, we have volcanic eruptions. Most volcanoes on Earth are at the bottom of the sea -- more than 80 percent. And we actually have fire, fire deep inside the ocean, going on right now. All over the world -- in the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean. In this place, the ocean floor, the rocks actually turn to liquid. So you actually have waves on the ocean floor. You'd say nothing could live there, but when we look in detail, even there, in the deepest, darkest places on Earth, we find life, which tells us that life really wants to happen.

So, pretty amazing stuff. Every time we go to the bottom of the sea, we explore with our submarines, with our robots, we see something that's usually surprising, sometimes it's startling and sometimes revolutionary. You see that puddle of water sitting there. And all around the water, there's a little cliff, there's a little white sandy beach. We'll get closer, you'll see the beach a little bit better, some of the waves in that water, down there.

The thing that's special about this water is that it's at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. So you're sitting inside a submarine, looking out the window at a little pond of water beneath the sea. We see ponds, we see lakes, we see rivers -- in fact, right here is a river at the bottom of the ocean going from the lower left to the upper right. Water is actually flowing through there. This totally blew our minds. How can you have this at the bottom? You're in the ocean looking at more water. And there's animals that only live in that water.

So, the bottom of the ocean -- I love this map, because it shows in the middle of the ocean, there's a mountain range. It's the greatest mountain range on Earth, called the mid-ocean ridge -- 50,000 miles long, and we've hardly had a peek at it. Hardly had a peek at it. We find valleys, many thousands of valleys, larger, wider, deeper than the Grand Canyon. We find, as I said, underwater lakes, rivers, waterfalls. The largest waterfall on the planet is actually under the ocean, up near Iceland. All that stuff is in that five percent that we've explored.

So the deal about the ocean is that to explore it, you've got to have technology. Not only technology, but it's not just Dave Gallo or one person exploring, it's a team of people. You've got to have the talent, the team. You've got to have the technology. In this case, it's our ship, Atlantis, and the submarine, Alvin. Inside that submarine -- this is an Alvin launch -- there's three people. They're being wheeled out onto deck. There's 47 other people, the teamwork on that ship, making sure that these people are okay.

Everybody in that submarine is thinking one thing right now: Should I have gone to the bathroom one more time? Because you're in there for 10 hours -- 10 hours in that little sphere. Three of you together and nobody is going to be around you. You go into the water and once you hit the water, it's amazing. There's a lovely color blue that penetrates right inside you. You don't hear the surface ship anymore, you hear that pinging of a sonar.

If you've got an iPhone you've got sonar on there -- it's that same pinging that goes down to the bottom and comes back up. Divers check out the sub to make sure the outside is okay, and then they say "Go," and down you go to the bottom of the ocean and it's an amazing trip. So for two and a half hours, you sink down to the bottom. And two hours of it is totally pitch black. We thought that nothing could live inside that world at the bottom of the ocean.

And when we look, we find some amazing things. All the way down -- we call it the mid-water -- from the top of the ocean down to the bottom, we find life. Whenever we stop and look, we find life. I'm going to show you some jellies. They're absolutely some of the coolest creatures on Earth. Look at that thing, just flailing his arms around. That's like a little lobster. That one is like all these animals with their mouths hooked together, the colonial animals. Some animals are tiny, some can be longer than this stage. Just amazing animals.

And you can't collect them with a net -- we have to go with our cameras and take a look at them. So every time we go, new species of life. The ocean is full of life. And yet the deepest part of the ocean -- when we go to that mountain range, we find hot springs. Now we were sure -- because this is poisonous water, because it's so deep it would crush the Titanic the same way you crush an empty cup in your hand -- we were sure there would be no life there at all.

Instead, we find more life and diversity and density than in the tropical rainforest. So, in one instance, in one peek out the window of the sub, we discover something that revolutionizes the way we think about life on Earth; and that is, you don't always have to have sunlight to get life going. There's big animals down there too, some that look familiar. That guy's called Dumbo. I love him. Dumbo's great. This guy -- oh man, I wish I had more footage of this. We're trying to get an expedition together to go look at this and maybe in a year we'll have that. Go online and look. Vampyroteuthis infernalis. The vampire squid. Incredibly cool.

In the darkness of the deep sea, he's got glowing tentacles, so if I'm coming at you like him, I put my arms out in the darkness so all you see are little glowing things over here. Meanwhile, I'm coming at you. When he wants to escape, he's got these glowing pods on his butt that look like eyes. Glowing eyes on his butt. How cool is that? Just an amazing animal. (Laughter) "Vampire" squid, because when it gets protective, it pulls this black cape over its whole body, and curls up into a ball. Outrageous animal.

This ship, "The Ship of Dreams" -- a hundred years ago this coming April, this ship was supposed to show up in New York. It's the Titanic. I co-led an expedition out there last year. We are learning so much about that ship. The Titanic is an interesting place for biology, because animals are moving in to live on the Titanic. Microbes are actually eating the hull of the Titanic. That's where Jack was king of the world there on the bow of the Titanic.

So we're doing real good. And what's exciting to me is that we're making a virtual Titanic, so you can sit there at home with your joystick and your headset on, and you can actually explore the Titanic for yourself. That's what we want to do, make these virtual worlds, so it's not Dave Gallo or someone else exploring the world; it's you. You explore it for yourself.

So here's the bottom line: The oceans are unexplored and I can't begin to tell you how important that is, because they're important to us. Seven billion people live on this planet and all of us are impacted by the sea, because the oceans control the air you breathe, the water you drink, the food you eat. All those are controlled in some way by the ocean, and this is a thing that we haven't even explored -- five percent.

The thing I want to leave you with is, in that five percent, I showed you some cool stuff. There's a lot more cool stuff -- every dive we go on in the ocean, we find something new about the sea. So what's in that other 95 percent? Did we get the exciting stuff or is there more out there? And I'm here to tell you that the ocean is full of surprises.

There's a quote I love by Marcel Proust: "The true voyage of exploration is not so much in seeking new landscapes," which we do, "but in having new eyes." And so I hope today, by showing you some of this, it's given you some new eyes about this planet, and for the first time, I want you to think about it differently. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)