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The oceans cover some 70 percent of our planet.

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And I think Arthur C. Clarke probably had it right

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when he said that perhaps we ought to call our planet

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Planet Ocean.

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And the oceans are hugely productive,

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as you can see by the satellite image

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of photosynthesis, the production of new life.

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In fact, the oceans produce half of the new life every day on Earth

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as well as about half the oxygen that we breathe.

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In addition to that, it harbors a lot of the biodiversity on Earth,

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and much of it we don't know about.

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But I'll tell you some of that today.

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That also doesn't even get into the whole protein extraction

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that we do from the ocean.

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That's about 10 percent of our global needs

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and 100 percent of some island nations.

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If you were to descend

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into the 95 percent of the biosphere that's livable,

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it would quickly become pitch black,

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interrupted only by pinpoints of light

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from bioluminescent organisms.

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And if you turn the lights on,

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you might periodically see spectacular organisms swim by,

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because those are the denizens of the deep,

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the things that live in the deep ocean.

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And eventually, the deep sea floor would come into view.

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This type of habitat covers more of the Earth's surface

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than all other habitats combined.

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And yet, we know more about the surface of the Moon and about Mars

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than we do about this habitat,

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despite the fact that we have yet to extract

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a gram of food, a breath of oxygen or a drop of water

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from those bodies.

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And so 10 years ago,

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an international program began called the Census of Marine Life,

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which set out to try and improve our understanding

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of life in the global oceans.

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It involved 17 different projects around the world.

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As you can see, these are the footprints of the different projects.

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And I hope you'll appreciate the level of global coverage

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that it managed to achieve.

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It all began when two scientists, Fred Grassle and Jesse Ausubel,

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met in Woods Hole, Massachusetts

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where both were guests at the famed oceanographic institute.

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And Fred was lamenting the state of marine biodiversity

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and the fact that it was in trouble and nothing was being done about it.

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Well, from that discussion grew this program

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that involved 2,700 scientists

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from more than 80 countries around the world

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who engaged in 540 ocean expeditions

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at a combined cost of 650 million dollars

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to study the distribution, diversity and abundance

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of life in the global ocean.

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And so what did we find?

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We found spectacular new species,

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the most beautiful and visually stunning things everywhere we looked --

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from the shoreline to the abyss,

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form microbes all the way up to fish and everything in between.

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And the limiting step here wasn't the unknown diversity of life,

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but rather the taxonomic specialists

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who can identify and catalog these species

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that became the limiting step.

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They, in fact, are an endangered species themselves.

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There are actually four to five new species

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described everyday for the oceans.

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And as I say, it could be a much larger number.

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Now, I come from Newfoundland in Canada --

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It's an island off the east coast of that continent --

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where we experienced one of the worst fishing disasters

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in human history.

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And so this photograph shows a small boy next to a codfish.

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It's around 1900.

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Now, when I was a boy of about his age,

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I would go out fishing with my grandfather

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and we would catch fish about half that size.

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And I thought that was the norm,

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because I had never seen fish like this.

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If you were to go out there today, 20 years after this fishery collapsed,

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if you could catch a fish, which would be a bit of a challenge,

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it would be half that size still.

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So what we're experiencing is something called shifting baselines.

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Our expectations of what the oceans can produce

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is something that we don't really appreciate

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because we haven't seen it in our lifetimes.

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Now most of us, and I would say me included,

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think that human exploitation of the oceans

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really only became very serious

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in the last 50 to, perhaps, 100 years or so.

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The census actually tried to look back in time,

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using every source of information they could get their hands on.

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And so anything from restaurant menus

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to monastery records to ships' logs

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to see what the oceans looked like.

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Because science data really goes back

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to, at best, World War II, for the most part.

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And so what they found, in fact,

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is that exploitation really began heavily with the Romans.

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And so at that time, of course, there was no refrigeration.

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So fishermen could only catch

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what they could either eat or sell that day.

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But the Romans developed salting.

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And with salting,

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it became possible to store fish and to transport it long distances.

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And so began industrial fishing.

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And so these are the sorts of extrapolations that we have

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of what sort of loss we've had

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relative to pre-human impacts on the ocean.

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They range from 65 to 98 percent

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for these major groups of organisms,

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as shown in the dark blue bars.

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Now for those species the we managed to leave alone, that we protect --

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for example, marine mammals in recent years and sea birds --

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there is some recovery.

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So it's not all hopeless.

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But for the most part, we've gone from salting to exhausting.

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Now this other line of evidence is a really interesting one.

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It's from trophy fish caught off the coast of Florida.

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And so this is a photograph from the 1950s.

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I want you to notice the scale on the slide,

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because when you see the same picture from the 1980s,

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we see the fish are much smaller

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and we're also seeing a change

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in terms of the composition of those fish.

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By 2007, the catch was actually laughable

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in terms of the size for a trophy fish.

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But this is no laughing matter.

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The oceans have lost a lot of their productivity

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and we're responsible for it.

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So what's left? Actually quite a lot.

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There's a lot of exciting things, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about them.

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And I want to start with a bit on technology,

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because, of course, this is a TED Conference

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and you want to hear something on technology.

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So one of the tools that we use to sample the deep ocean

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are remotely operated vehicles.

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So these are tethered vehicles we lower down to the sea floor

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where they're our eyes and our hands for working on the sea bottom.

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So a couple of years ago, I was supposed to go on an oceanographic cruise

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and I couldn't go because of a scheduling conflict.

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But through a satellite link I was able to sit at my study at home

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with my dog curled up at my feet, a cup of tea in my hand,

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and I could tell the pilot, "I want a sample right there."

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And that's exactly what the pilot did for me.

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That's the sort of technology that's available today

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that really wasn't available even a decade ago.

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So it allows us to sample these amazing habitats

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that are very far from the surface

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and very far from light.

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And so one of the tools that we can use to sample the oceans

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is acoustics, or sound waves.

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And the advantage of sound waves

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is that they actually pass well through water, unlike light.

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And so we can send out sound waves,

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they bounce off objects like fish and are reflected back.

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And so in this example, a census scientist took out two ships.

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One would send out sound waves that would bounce back.

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They would be received by a second ship,

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and that would give us very precise estimates, in this case,

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of 250 billion herring

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in a period of about a minute.

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And that's an area about the size of Manhattan Island.

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And to be able to do that is a tremendous fisheries tool,

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because knowing how many fish are there is really critical.

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We can also use satellite tags

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to track animals as they move through the oceans.

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And so for animals that come to the surface to breathe,

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such as this elephant seal,

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it's an opportunity to send data back to shore

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and tell us where exactly it is in the ocean.

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And so from that we can produce these tracks.

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For example, the dark blue

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shows you where the elephant seal moved in the north Pacific.

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Now I realize for those of you who are colorblind, this slide is not very helpful,

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but stick with me nonetheless.

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For animals that don't surface,

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we have something called pop-up tags,

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which collect data about light and what time the sun rises and sets.

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And then at some period of time

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it pops up to the surface and, again, relays that data back to shore.

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Because GPS doesn't work under water. That's why we need these tools.

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And so from this we're able to identify these blue highways,

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these hot spots in the ocean,

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that should be real priority areas

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for ocean conservation.

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Now one of the other things that you may think about

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is that, when you go to the supermarket and you buy things, they're scanned.

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And so there's a barcode on that product

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that tells the computer exactly what the product is.

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Geneticists have developed a similar tool called genetic barcoding.

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And what barcoding does

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is use a specific gene called CO1

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that's consistent within a species, but varies among species.

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And so what that means is we can unambiguously identify

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which species are which

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even if they look similar to each other,

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but may be biologically quite different.

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Now one of the nicest examples I like to cite on this

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is the story of two young women, high school students in New York City,

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who worked with the census.

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They went out and collected fish from markets and from restaurants in New York City

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and they barcoded it.

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Well what they found was mislabeled fish.

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So for example,

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they found something which was sold as tuna, which is very valuable,

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was in fact tilapia, which is a much less valuable fish.

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They also found an endangered species

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sold as a common one.

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So barcoding allows us to know what we're working with

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and also what we're eating.

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The Ocean Biogeographic Information System

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is the database for all the census data.

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It's open access; you can all go in and download data as you wish.

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And it contains all the data from the census

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plus other data sets that people were willing to contribute.

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And so what you can do with that

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is to plot the distribution of species and where they occur in the oceans.

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What I've plotted up here is the data that we have on hand.

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This is where our sampling effort has concentrated.

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Now what you can see

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is we've sampled the area in the North Atlantic,

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in the North Sea in particular,

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and also the east coast of North America fairly well.

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That's the warm colors which show a well-sampled region.

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The cold colors, the blue and the black,

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show areas where we have almost no data.

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So even after a 10-year census,

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there are large areas that still remain unexplored.

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Now there are a group of scientists living in Texas, working in the Gulf of Mexico

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who decided really as a labor of love

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to pull together all the knowledge they could

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about biodiversity in the Gulf of Mexico.

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And so they put this together, a list of all the species,

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where they're known to occur,

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and it really seemed like a very esoteric, scientific type of exercise.

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But then, of course, there was the Deep Horizon oil spill.

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So all of a sudden, this labor of love

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for no obvious economic reason

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has become a critical piece of information

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in terms of how that system is going to recover, how long it will take

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and how the lawsuits

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and the multi-billion-dollar discussions that are going to happen in the coming years

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are likely to be resolved.

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So what did we find?

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Well, I could stand here for hours, but, of course, I'm not allowed to do that.

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But I will tell you some of my favorite discoveries

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from the census.

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So one of the things we discovered is where are the hot spots of diversity?

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Where do we find the most species of ocean life?

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And what we find if we plot up the well-known species

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is this sort of a distribution.

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And what we see is that for coastal tags,

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for those organisms that live near the shoreline,

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they're most diverse in the tropics.

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This is something we've actually known for a while,

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so it's not a real breakthrough.

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What is really exciting though

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is that the oceanic tags, or the ones that live far from the coast,

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are actually more diverse at intermediate latitudes.

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This is the sort of data, again, that managers could use

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if they want to prioritize areas of the ocean that we need to conserve.

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You can do this on a global scale, but you can also do it on a regional scale.

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And that's why biodiversity data can be so valuable.

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Now while a lot of the species we discovered in the census

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are things that are small and hard to see,

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that certainly wasn't always the case.

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For example, while it's hard to believe

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that a three kilogram lobster could elude scientists,

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it did until a few years ago

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when South African fishermen requested an export permit

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and scientists realized that this was something new to science.

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Similarly this Golden V kelp

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collected in Alaska just below the low water mark

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is probably a new species.

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Even though it's three meters long,

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it actually, again, eluded science.

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Now this guy, this bigfin squid, is seven meters in length.

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But to be fair, it lives in the deep waters of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,

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so it was a lot harder to find.

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But there's still potential for discovery of big and exciting things.

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This particular shrimp, we've dubbed it the Jurassic shrimp,

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it's thought to have gone extinct 50 years ago --

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at least it was, until the census discovered

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it was living and doing just fine off the coast of Australia.

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And it shows that the ocean, because of its vastness,

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can hide secrets for a very long time.

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So, Steven Spielberg, eat your heart out.

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If we look at distributions, in fact distributions change dramatically.

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And so one of the records that we had

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was this sooty shearwater, which undergoes these spectacular migrations

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all the way from New Zealand

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all the way up to Alaska and back again

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in search of endless summer

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as they complete their life cycles.

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We also talked about the White Shark Cafe.

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This is a location in the Pacific where white shark converge.

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We don't know why they converge there, we simply don't know.

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That's a question for the future.

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One of the things that we're taught in high school

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is that all animals require oxygen in order to survive.

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Now this little critter, it's only about half a millimeter in size,

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not terribly charismatic.

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But it was only discovered in the early 1980s.

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But the really interesting thing about it

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is that, a few years ago, census scientists discovered

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that this guy can thrive in oxygen-poor sediments

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in the deep Mediterranean Sea.

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So now they know that, in fact,

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animals can live without oxygen, at least some of them,

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and that they can adapt to even the harshest of conditions.

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If you were to suck all the water out of the ocean,

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this is what you'd be left behind with,

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and that's the biomass of life on the sea floor.

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Now what we see is huge biomass towards the poles

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and not much biomass in between.

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We found life in the extremes.

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And so there were new species that were found

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that live inside ice

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and help to support an ice-based food web.

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And we also found this spectacular yeti crab

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that lives near boiling hot hydrothermal vents at Easter Island.

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And this particular species

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really captured the public's attention.

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We also found the deepest vents known yet -- 5,000 meters --

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the hottest vents at 407 degrees Celsius --

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vents in the South Pacific and also in the Arctic

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where none had been found before.

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So even new environments are still within the domain of the discoverable.

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Now in terms of the unknowns, there are many.

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And I'm just going to summarize just a few of them

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very quickly for you.

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First of all, we might ask, how many fishes in the sea?

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We actually know the fishes better than we do any other group in the ocean

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other than marine mammals.

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And so we can actually extrapolate based on rates of discovery

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how many more species we're likely to discover.

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And from that, we actually calculate

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that we know about 16,500 marine species

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and there are probably another 1,000 to 4,000 left to go.

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So we've done pretty well.

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We've got about 75 percent of the fish,

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maybe as much as 90 percent.

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But the fishes, as I say, are the best known.

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So our level of knowledge is much less for other groups of organisms.

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Now this figure is actually based on a brand new paper

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that's going to come out in the journal PLoS Biology.

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And what is does is predict how many more species there are

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on land and in the ocean.

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And what they found

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is that they think that we know of about nine percent of the species in the ocean.

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That means 91 percent, even after the census,

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still remain to be discovered.

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And so that turns out to be about two million species

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once all is said and done.

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So we still have quite a lot of work to do

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in terms of unknowns.

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Now this bacterium

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is part of mats that are found off the coast of Chile.

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And these mats actually cover an area the size of Greece.

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And so this particular bacterium is actually visible to the naked eye.

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But you can imagine the biomass that represents.

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But the really intriguing thing about the microbes

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is just how diverse they are.

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A single drop of seawater

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could contain 160 different types of microbes.

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And the oceans themselves

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are thought potentially to contain as many as a billion different types.

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So that's really exciting. What are they all doing out there?

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We actually don't know.

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The most exciting thing, I would say, about this census

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is the role of global science.

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And so as we see in this image of light during the night,

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there are lots of areas of the Earth

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where human development is much greater

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and other areas where it's much less,

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but between them we see large dark areas

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of relatively unexplored ocean.

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The other point I'd like to make about this

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is that this ocean's interconnected.

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Marine organisms do not care about international boundaries;

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they move where they will.

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And so the importance then of global collaboration

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becomes all the more important.

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We've lost a lot of paradise.

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For example, these tuna that were once so abundant in the North Sea

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are now effectively gone.

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There were trawls taken in the deep sea in the Mediterranean,

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00:15:04,000 --> 00:15:06,000
which collected more garbage than they did animals.

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00:15:06,000 --> 00:15:09,000
And that's the deep sea, that's the environment that we consider to be

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00:15:09,000 --> 00:15:11,000
among the most pristine left on Earth.

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00:15:11,000 --> 00:15:13,000
And there are a lot of other pressures.

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Ocean acidification is a really big issue that people are concerned with,

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as well as ocean warming, and the effects they're going to have on coral reefs.

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On the scale of decades, in our lifetimes,

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we're going to see a lot of damage to coral reefs.

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And I could spend the rest of my time, which is getting very limited,

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going through this litany of concerns about the ocean,

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but I want to end on a more positive note.

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And so the grand challenge then

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is to try and make sure that we preserve what's left,

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because there is still spectacular beauty.

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And the oceans are so productive,

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there's so much going on in there that's of relevance to humans

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that we really need to, even from a selfish perspective,

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00:15:45,000 --> 00:15:47,000
try to do better than we have in the past.

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So we need to recognize those hot spots

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and do our best to protect them.

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When we look at pictures like this, they take our breath away,

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00:15:53,000 --> 00:15:55,000
in addition to helping to give us breath

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by the oxygen that the oceans provide.

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00:15:57,000 --> 00:16:00,000
Census scientists worked in the rain, they worked in the cold,

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00:16:00,000 --> 00:16:02,000
they worked under water and they worked above water

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00:16:02,000 --> 00:16:04,000
trying to illuminate the wondrous discovery,

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00:16:04,000 --> 00:16:06,000
the still vast unknown,

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00:16:06,000 --> 00:16:09,000
the spectacular adaptations that we see in ocean life.

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00:16:09,000 --> 00:16:12,000
So whether you're a yak herder living in the mountains of Chile,

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00:16:12,000 --> 00:16:15,000
whether you're a stockbroker in New York City

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00:16:15,000 --> 00:16:17,000
or whether you're a TEDster living in Edinburgh,

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the oceans matter.

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And as the oceans go so shall we.

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Thanks for listening.

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(Applause)