WEBVTT

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I'm an underwater explorer,

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more specifically a cave diver.

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I wanted to be an astronaut
when I was a little kid,

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but growing up in Canada as a young girl,
that wasn't really available to me.

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But as it turns out,
we know a lot more about space

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than we do about the underground waterways
coursing through our planet,

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the very lifeblood of Mother Earth.

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So I decided to do something
that was even more remarkable.

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Instead of exploring outer space,

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I wanted to explore
the wonders of inner space.

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Now, a lot of people will tell you

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that cave diving is perhaps
one of the most dangerous endeavors.

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I mean, imagine yourself
here in this room,

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if you were suddenly
plunged into blackness,

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with your only job to find the exit,

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sometimes swimming
through these large spaces,

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and at other times
crawling beneath the seats,

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following a thin guideline,

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just waiting for the life support
to provide your very next breath.

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Well, that's my workplace.

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But what I want to teach you today

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is that our world
is not one big solid rock.

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It's a whole lot more like a sponge.

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I can swim through a lot of the pores
in our earth's sponge,

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but where I can't,

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other life-forms and other materials
can make that journey without me.

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And my voice is the one
that's going to teach you

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about the inside of Mother Earth.

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There was no guidebook available to me

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when I decided to be the first person
to cave dive inside Antarctic icebergs.

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In 2000, this was the largest
moving object on the planet.

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It calved off the Ross Ice Shelf,

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and we went down there
to explore ice edge ecology

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and search for life-forms beneath the ice.

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We use a technology called rebreathers.

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It's an awful lot like the same technology
that is used for space walks.

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This technology enables us to go deeper

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than we could've imagined
even 10 years ago.

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We use exotic gases,

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and we can make missions
even up to 20 hours long underwater.

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I work with biologists.

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It turns out that caves
are repositories of amazing life-forms,

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species that we never knew existed before.

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Many of these life-forms
live in unusual ways.

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They have no pigment
and no eyes in many cases,

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and these animals
are also extremely long-lived.

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In fact, animals swimming
in these caves today

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are identical in the fossil record

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that predates the extinction
of the dinosaurs.

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So imagine that: these are
like little swimming dinosaurs.

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What can they teach us
about evolution and survival?

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When we look at an animal
like this remipede swimming in the jar,

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he has giant fangs with venom.

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He can actually attack something
40 times his size and kill it.

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If he were the size of a cat,

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he'd be the most dangerous
thing on our planet.

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And these animals live
in remarkably beautiful places,

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and in some cases,
caves like this, that are very young,

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yet the animals are ancient.

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How did they get there?

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I also work with physicists,

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and they're interested oftentimes
in global climate change.

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They can take rocks within the caves,

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and they can slice them
and look at the layers within with rocks,

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much like the rings of a tree,

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and they can count back in history

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and learn about the climate on our planet
at very different times.

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The red that you see in this photograph

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is actually dust from the Sahara Desert.

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So it's been picked up by wind,
blown across the Atlantic Ocean.

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It's rained down in this case
on the island of Abaco in the Bahamas.

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It soaks in through the ground

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and deposits itself
in the rocks within these caves.

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And when we look back in the layers
of these rocks, we can find times

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when the climate
was very, very dry on earth,

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and we can go back
many hundreds of thousands of years.

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Paleoclimatologists are also interested

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in where the sea level stands were
at other times on earth.

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Here in Bermuda, my team and I embarked

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on the deepest manned dives
ever conducted in the region,

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and we were looking for places

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where the sea level
used to lap up against the shoreline,

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many hundreds of feet
below current levels.

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I also get to work with paleontologists
and archaeologists.

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In places like Mexico,
in the Bahamas, and even in Cuba,

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we're looking at cultural remains
and also human remains in caves,

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and they tell us a lot

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about some of the earliest
inhabitants of these regions.

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But my very favorite project of all
was over 15 years ago,

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when I was a part of the team
that made the very first

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accurate, three-dimensional map
of a subterranean surface.

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This device that I'm
driving through the cave

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was actually creating
a three-dimensional model as we drove it.

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We also used ultra low frequency radio

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to broadcast back to the surface
our exact position within the cave.

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So I swam under houses and businesses
and bowling alleys and golf courses,

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and even under a Sonny's BBQ Restaurant,

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Pretty remarkable, and what that taught me

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was that everything we do
on the surface of our earth

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will be returned to us to drink.

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Our water planet is not just
rivers, lakes and oceans,

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but it's this vast network of groundwater
that knits us all together.

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It's a shared resource
from which we all drink.

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And when we can understand
our human connections with our groundwater

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and all of our water resources
on this planet,

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then we'll be working on the problem

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that's probably the most important
issue of this century.

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So I never got to be that astronaut
that I always wanted to be,

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but this mapping device,
designed by Dr. Bill Stone, will be.

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It's actually morphed.

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It's now a self-swimming autonomous robot,

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artificially intelligent,

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and its ultimate goal
is to go to Jupiter's moon Europa

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and explore oceans beneath
the frozen surface of that body.

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And that's pretty amazing.

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(Applause)