Our country has two 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 Saturn,

and we have other manifestations of space exploration.

Well, there's also another program,

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, or not the reason, but here's why I ask that question.

If you compare NASA's annual budget to explore the heavens,

that 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 percent of the planet, so buckle up.

OK. And what we're going to do

is we're going to immerse ourselves in my world.

And what I'm going to try -- I hope I make the following points.

I'm going to make it right now in case I forget.

Everything I'm going to present to you

was not in my textbooks when I went to school.

And most of all, it was not even in my college textbooks.

I'm a geophysicist, and 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 of Marshall Kay's geosynclinal cycle, which is a bunch of crap.

In today's context, it was a bunch of crap,

but 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

were mostly discoveries made by accident.

Mostly discoveries made by accident.

We were looking for something and found something else.

And everything we're going to talk about

represents a one tenth of one percent 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.

In fact, I have another version at my office

and I ask people, "Why are there mountains here, on this area here,

but there are none over here?" And they go, "Well, gee,

I don't know," saying,

"Is it a fracture zone? Is it a hot spot?"

No, no, that's the only place a ship's been.

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 percent of the planet because, you know,

it's really naive to think that the Easter Bunny

put all the resources on the continents.

(Laughter)

You know, it's just ludicrous.

We are always, constantly playing the zero sum game.

You know, we're going to do this, we're going to take it away from something else.

I believe in just enriching the economy.

And we're leaving so much on the table, 72 percent of the planet.

And as I will point out later in the presentation,

50 percent of the United States of America lies beneath the sea.

50 percent 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 percent.

Why? OK. Now, I began my explorations the hard way.

Back then -- actually my first expedition

was when I was 17 years old. It was 49 years ago.

Do the math, I'm 66. And I went out to sea on a Scripps ship

and we almost got sunk by a giant rogue wave,

and I was too young to be -- you know, I thought it was great!

I was a body surfer and I thought, "Wow, 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 120, 121 -- I 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 Sea Cliff and Cyana,

and all the major deep submersibles we have, which are about eight.

In fact, 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 very difficult to get there, if you do it physically.

But I was enraptured, and in my graduate years

was the dawn of plate tectonics. And we realized

that the greatest mountain range on Earth lies beneath the sea.

The mid-ocean ridge runs around like the seam on a baseball.

This is on a Mercator projection.

But if you were to put it on an equal area projection,

you'd see that the mid-ocean ridge covers 23 percent

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 range, as Earth 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 it 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 the boundary of creation as we call it --

into the Rift Valley -- until a group of seven of us

crawled in our little submarines in the summer of 1973, 1974

and were the first human beings to enter the Great Rift Valley.

We went down into the Rift Valley.

This is 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 for that reason, you do not have photosynthesis in the deep sea.

And 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 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.

In plate tectonic theory, we knew that if you had plates collide,

it made sense: 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.

It 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, at the axis, there was missing heat. It 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 [explanation] was that there were hot springs.

So, 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 Galapagos Rift,

and did we find the missing heat.

It was amazing. These giant chimneys, huge giant chimneys.

We went up to them with our submersible.

We wanted to get a temperature probe, we stuck it in there,

looked at it -- it pegged off scale.

The pilot made this great observation: "That's hot."

(Laughter)

And then we realized our probe was made out of the same stuff --

it could have melted. But it turns out the exiting temperature

was 650 degrees F, hot enough to melt lead.

This is what a real one looks like, on the Juan de Fuca Ridge.

What you're looking at is an 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 by what we discovered.

We discovered a profusion of life,

in a world that it should not exist [in]. Giant tube worms, 10 feet tall.

I remember having to use vodka -- my own vodka -- to pickle it

because we 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 clam.

No mouth, no gut, no digestive system.

Their bodies 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 this in our textbooks.

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 this silly trip, up and down on a submarine:

average depth of the ocean, 12,000 feet;

two and half hours to get to work in the morning;

two and half hours to get to home. Five hour commute to work.

Three hours of bottom time, average distance traveled -- one mile.

(Laughter)

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 continued 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.

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 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 limestone formations

and upside down pools. Look at that.

How do you do that? That's water upside down.

We went in underneath and 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