Paul Snelgrove: A census of the ocean

39,740 views ・ 2012-02-28

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

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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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which collected more garbage than they did animals.
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And that's the deep sea, that's the environment that we consider to be
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among the most pristine left on Earth.
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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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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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in addition to helping to give us breath
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by the oxygen that the oceans provide.
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Census scientists worked in the rain, they worked in the cold,
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they worked under water and they worked above water
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trying to illuminate the wondrous discovery,
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the still vast unknown,
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the spectacular adaptations that we see in ocean life.
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So whether you're a yak herder living in the mountains of Chile,
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whether you're a stockbroker in New York City
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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)
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About this website

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