WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:01.522 --> 00:00:09.971 [Music] 00:00:09.971 --> 00:00:15.888 The ocean is huge. When you really  stop and think about the scale,   00:00:15.888 --> 00:00:20.580 it's humbling, it's mind-boggling,  it's really hard to comprehend. 00:00:26.120 --> 00:00:27.120 [Music]   00:00:27.120 --> 00:00:30.600 Basically the world's life support  system is dependent on the ocean,   00:00:30.600 --> 00:00:33.704 right? A lot of people don't realize that every other breath we take 00:00:33.704 --> 00:00:36.000 is because of the ocean. 00:00:41.160 --> 00:00:41.700 [Music]   00:00:48.720 --> 00:00:51.729 When we look at a map of the world 00:00:51.729 --> 00:00:54.509 it's easy to think that the ocean has in fact been mapped, 00:00:54.509 --> 00:00:57.720 because at global scale we can see  the shape of a lot of features. 00:01:00.569 --> 00:01:03.869 What that really represents is predicted  bathymetry. 00:01:03.869 --> 00:01:09.480 So for the majority of the ocean, we don't actually have direct measurements. 00:01:09.480 --> 00:01:13.260 What we have is a prediction that is very coarse in resolution. 00:01:13.260 --> 00:01:13.760 00:01:13.760 --> 00:01:17.635 So this is an undersea mountain that was known from those satellite measurements 00:01:17.635 --> 00:01:22.255 and you can see that there's some sort of mountain feature here, 00:01:22.255 --> 00:01:27.637 you can tell there's some undulations in the terrain, but you can't really make out any fine features. 00:01:27.637 --> 00:01:38.400 Once we came through and mapped it on this expedition from  the hull-mounted sonar, 00:01:38.400 --> 00:01:40.400 we revealed all these much more fine-scale volcanic pinnacle cone features  which were previously unknown for this area. 00:01:40.680 --> 00:01:45.960 Here you have an image of a NOAA ship with a multi-beam sonar that's hull-mounted so it's   00:01:45.960 --> 00:01:52.020 sending out a sound signal from under the hull. And it's basically in a fan-shaped swath, 00:01:52.020 --> 00:01:56.013 and you can see that it's sending out these sound signals and we can actually 00:01:56.013 --> 00:02:01.273 measure the time it takes to bounce from the ship to the seafloor and back,  and that's giving us the distance. 00:02:01.273 --> 00:02:08.177 Along this whole swath you're gathering many measurements, and then we can 00:02:08.177 --> 00:02:12.222 turn the ship around and do another section and stitch those two together  and build a 3D terrain map. 00:02:12.222 --> 00:02:17.380 When we're out there in the ocean and we're making a discovery for the  first time, there's really no feeling like that. 00:02:17.380 --> 00:02:23.837 I mean you're stumbling across something that no human beings have yet seen and it's a really exciting time. 00:02:23.837 --> 00:02:28.380 "Right now, we're 186 miles  off the coast of Florida along the Blake plateau..." 00:02:30.840 --> 00:02:34.260 "...Oh look at all those squid!" "Oh my gosh, that's beautiful..."   00:02:35.040 --> 00:02:40.200 It looked, from the satellite imagery,  like it was just "boring" seafloor,   00:02:41.220 --> 00:02:45.120 just abyssal plain, there weren't  any features, there weren't any creatures. 00:02:47.820 --> 00:02:48.320 We wanted to fill in those gaps for mapping, so we started mapping that area, 00:02:48.320 --> 00:03:00.960 and then miraculously we saw all these different seafloor features coming out on the mapping area and   00:03:00.960 --> 00:03:01.460 it turned out that we were the first to  discover this massive, massive 00:03:01.460 --> 00:03:14.520 deepwater coral complex. [ Which] to date, as far as we know, is the  largest deepwater coral complex in the world. 00:03:16.620 --> 00:03:21.900 "I've never seen anything like  this, this is honestly one of   00:03:21.900 --> 00:03:26.340 the largest aggregative thickets  of Lophelia that I've seen..." 00:03:30.420 --> 00:03:36.000 The differences between looking at something from really far away and saying "Yeah, there's a seafloor there," 00:03:36.000 --> 00:03:43.500 versus zooming in and realizing that there's a whole dynamic 00:03:44.100 --> 00:03:50.340 community that could be a game-changer for management decisions and all sorts of things,   00:03:50.340 --> 00:03:54.348 that's the value add that we see when we map something 00:03:54.348 --> 00:03:56.673 and then start exploring and investigating. 00:03:56.673 --> 00:04:01.867 "Pilot, dive super?" "Go dive super." "You guys are free to continue your descent." 00:04:01.867 --> 00:04:08.447 What's really fascinating about these ships is we can map one night 00:04:08.447 --> 00:04:13.503 and then go out the very next day and put down these deep-diving robots 00:04:13.503 --> 00:04:17.420 and see in high-resolution cameras what's living there. 00:04:19.020 --> 00:04:25.800 It's all sort of iterative, right? And we  can keep mapping and getting more detail,   00:04:25.800 --> 00:04:32.760 and more information, and all of that  feeds up into our global understanding   00:04:32.760 --> 00:04:40.440 of how our planet works, what resources we have, what we need to conserve, where we can build, 00:04:40.440 --> 00:04:45.811 where fisheries are sustainable,  where they're not. 00:04:48.600 --> 00:04:49.380 And so, when we think about 00:04:49.380 --> 00:04:57.240 a global community and our contributions to it, 00:04:57.240 --> 00:05:00.685 I think it really starts with a much better understanding of the oceans, 00:05:00.685 --> 00:05:02.820 and how we serve them and how they serve us. 00:05:05.880 --> 00:05:08.760 So there's a huge initiative right now to map the   00:05:08.760 --> 00:05:11.280 remaining part of the world's  oceans that's not mapped yet. 00:05:13.620 --> 00:05:19.860 The creation of this project is really meant to inspire the effort to completely map the ocean floor by the year 2030. 00:05:19.860 --> 00:05:27.420 This is the coverage in the 2022 data release. 00:05:28.980 --> 00:05:38.460 Basically black is where we don't have  data. I think it's very difficult to try   00:05:38.460 --> 00:05:43.800 to, even for myself, to have a true sense  of the scale of what we're trying to do. 00:05:46.440 --> 00:05:49.604 A single project, a single nation, a single group can't do it alone. 00:05:49.604 --> 00:05:51.874 We have to work and build this map together. 00:05:51.874 --> 00:06:03.760 "So it's really important for us to do these types of explorations, even in waters outside the U.S economic zone, because these waters are  connected. The ocean knows no boundaries." [Music]   00:06:05.820 --> 00:06:09.240 We may draw political boundaries  for various reasons, but we have   00:06:09.240 --> 00:06:11.220 to really understand the ocean and its processes. 00:06:13.560 --> 00:06:17.340 It's often been said that people don't  protect what they don't understand.   00:06:18.240 --> 00:06:18.740 If we're not able to see what's out there in the ocean, then we're really not able to 00:06:18.740 --> 00:06:25.220 truly appreciate it and therefore care about it. So part of all these efforts are 00:06:25.220 --> 00:06:32.700 to really sort of shine a light on what a wonderful and amazing place that the ocean is, including the deep sea,   00:06:32.700 --> 00:06:33.486 and bring that home. 00:06:33.486 --> 00:06:36.120 This is our home planet, and we need to understand what's out there.