Fabien Cousteau: What I learned from spending 31 days underwater

I have a confession to make.

I am addicted to adventure,

and as a young boy,

I would rather look outside the window

at the birds in the trees and the sky

than looking at that two-dimensional

chalky blackboard where time stands still

and even sometimes dies.

My teachers thought there was something wrong

with me because I wasn't paying attention in class.

They didn't find anything specifically wrong with me,

other than being slightly dyslexic because I'm a lefty.

But they didn't test for curiosity.

Curiosity, to me,

is about our connection

with the world, with the universe.

It's about seeing what's around that next coral head

or what's around that next tree,

and learning more not only about our environment

but about ourselves.

Now, my dream of dreams,

I want to go explore the oceans of Mars,

but until we can go there,

I think the oceans still hold

quite a few secrets.

As a matter of fact,

if you take our planet as the oasis in space that it is

and dissect it into a living space,

the ocean represents over 3.4 billion

cubic kilometers of volume, within which

we've explored less than five percent.

And I look at this, and I go, well,

there are tools to go deeper, longer and further:

submarines, ROVs, even Scuba diving.

But if we're going to explore the final frontier

on this planet, we need to live there.

We need to build a log cabin, if you will,

at the bottom of the sea.

And so there was a great curiosity in my soul

when I went to go visit a TED [Prize winner]

by the name of Dr. Sylvia Earle.

Maybe you've heard of her.

Two years ago, she was staked out

at the last undersea marine laboratory

to try and save it,

to try and petition

for us not to scrap it

and bring it back on land.

We've only had about a dozen or so

scientific labs at the bottom of the sea.

There's only one left in the world:

it's nine miles offshore

and 65 feet down.

It's called Aquarius.

Aquarius, in some fashion,

is a dinosaur,

an ancient robot chained to the bottom,

this Leviathan.

In other ways, it's a legacy.

And so with that visit, I realized that my time is short

if I wanted to experience

what it was like to become an aquanaut.

When we swam towards this after many

moons of torture and two years of preparation,

this habitat waiting to invite us

was like a new home.

And the point of going down to

and living at this habitat was not to stay inside.

It wasn't about living at something the size of a school bus.

It was about giving us the luxury of time

outside to wander, to explore,

to understand more about this oceanic final frontier.

We had megafauna come and visit us.

This spotted eagle ray is a fairly common sight in the oceans.

But why this is so important,

why this picture is up,

is because this particular animal brought his friends around,

and instead of being the pelagic animals that they were,

they started getting curious about us,

these new strangers that were moving into the neighborhood,

doing things with plankton.

We were studying all sorts of animals and critters,

and they got closer and closer to us,

and because of the luxury of time,

these animals, these residents of the coral reef,

were starting to get used to us,

and these pelagics that normal travel through stopped.

This particular animal actually circled

for 31 full days during our mission.

So mission 31 wasn't so much

about breaking records.

It was about that human-ocean connection.

Because of the luxury of time, we were able

to study animals such as sharks and grouper

in aggregations that we've never seen before.

It's like seeing dogs and cats behaving well together.

Even being able to commune with animals

that are much larger than us,

such as this endangered goliath grouper

who only still resides in the Florida Keys.

Of course, just like any neighbor,

after a while, if they get tired,

the goliath grouper barks at us,

and this bark is so powerful

that it actually stuns its prey before it aspirates it all

within a split second.

For us, it's just telling us to go back

into the habitat and leave them alone.

Now, this wasn't just about adventure.

There was actually a serious note to it.

We did a lot of science, and again, because of the luxury of time,

we were able to do over three years of science

in 31 days.

In this particular case, we were using a PAM,

or, let me just see if I can get this straight,

a Pulse Amplitude Modulated Fluorometer.

And our scientists from FIU, MIT,

and from Northeastern

were able to get a gauge for what coral reefs do

when we're not around.

The Pulse Amplitude Modulated Fluorometer, or PAM,

gauges the fluorescence of corals

as it pertains to pollutants in the water

as well as climate change-related issues.

We used all sorts of other cutting-edge tools,

such as this sonde, or what I like to call

the sponge proctologist, whereby the sonde

itself tests for metabolism rates

in what in this particular case is a barrel sponge,

or the redwoods of the [ocean].

And this gives us a much better gauge

of what's happening underwater

with regard to climate change-related issues,

and how the dynamics of that

affect us here on land.

And finally, we looked at predator-prey behavior.

And predator-prey behavior is an interesting thing,

because as we take away some of the predators

on these coral reefs around the world,

the prey, or the forage fish, act very differently.

What we realized is

not only do they stop taking care of the reef,

darting in, grabbing a little bit of algae

and going back into their homes,

they start spreading out and disappearing

from those particular coral reefs.

Well, within that 31 days,

we were able to generate over 10 scientific papers

on each one of these topics.

But the point of adventure is not only to learn,

it's to be able to share that knowledge with the world,

and with that, thanks to a couple of engineers at MIT,

we were able to use a prototype camera called the Edgertronic

to capture slow-motion video,

up to 20,000 frames per second

in a little box

that's worth 3,000 dollars.

It's available to every one of us.

And that particular camera gives us an insight

into what fairly common animals do

but we can't even see it in the blink of an eye.

Let me show you a quick video

of what this camera does.

You can see the silky bubble come out

of our hard hats.

It gives us an insight

into some of the animals that we were sitting

right next to for 31 days

and never normally would have paid attention to,

such as hermit crabs.

Now, using a cutting-edge piece of technology

that's not really meant for the oceans

is not always easy.

We sometimes had to put the camera upside down,

cordon it back to the lab,

and actually man the trigger

from the lab itself.

But what this gives us

is the foresight to look at and analyze

in scientific and engineering terms

some of the most amazing behavior

that the human eye just can't pick up,

such as this manta shrimp

trying to catch its prey,

within about .3 seconds.

That punch is as strong as a .22 caliber bullet,

and if you ever try to catch a bullet

in mid-flight with your eye, impossible.

But now we can see things

such as these Christmas tree worms

pulling in and fanning out

in a way that the eye just can't capture,

or in this case,

a fish throwing up grains of sand.

This is an actual sailfin goby,

and if you look at it in real time,

it actually doesn't even show its fanning motion

because it's so quick.

One of the most precious gifts that we had underwater

is that we had WiFi,

and for 31 days straight we were able to connect

with the world in real time from the bottom of the sea

and share all of these experiences.

Quite literally right there

I am Skyping in the classroom

with one of the six continents

and some of the 70,000 students that we connected

every single day to some of these experiences.

As a matter of fact, I'm showing a picture that I took

with my smartphone from underwater

of a goliath grouper laying on the bottom.

We had never seen that before.

And I dream of the day

that we have underwater cities,

and maybe, just maybe, if we push the boundaries

of adventure and knowledge,

and we share that knowledge with others out there,

we can solve all sorts of problems.

My grandfather used to say,

"People protect what they love."

My father, "How can people protect

what they don't understand?"

And I've thought about this my whole life.

Nothing is impossible.

We need to dream, we need to be creative,

and we all need to have an adventure

in order to create miracles in the darkest of times.

And whether it's about climate change

or eradicating poverty

or giving back to future generations

what we've taken for granted,

it's about adventure.

And who knows, maybe there will be underwater cities,

and maybe some of you

will become the future aquanauts.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)