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The ocean is huge. When you really stop and think about the scale,
it's humbling, it's mind-boggling, it's really hard to comprehend.
[Music]
Basically the world's life support system is dependent on the ocean,
right? A lot of people don't realize that every other breath we take
is because of the ocean.
[Music]
When we look at a map of the world
it's easy to think that the ocean has in fact been mapped,
because at global scale we can see the shape of a lot of features.
What that really represents is predicted bathymetry.
So for the majority of the ocean, we don't actually have direct measurements.
What we have is a prediction that is very coarse in resolution.
So this is an undersea mountain that was known from those satellite measurements
and you can see that there's some sort of mountain feature here,
you can tell there's some undulations in the terrain, but you can't really make out any fine features.
Once we came through and mapped it on this expedition from the hull-mounted sonar,
we revealed all these much more fine-scale volcanic pinnacle cone features which were previously unknown for this area.
Here you have an image of a NOAA ship with a multi-beam sonar that's hull-mounted so it's
sending out a sound signal from under the hull. And it's basically in a fan-shaped swath,
and you can see that it's sending out these sound signals and we can actually
measure the time it takes to bounce from the ship to the seafloor and back, and that's giving us the distance.
Along this whole swath you're gathering many measurements, and then we can
turn the ship around and do another section and stitch those two together and build a 3D terrain map.
When we're out there in the ocean and we're making a discovery for the first time, there's really no feeling like that.
I mean you're stumbling across something that no human beings have yet seen and it's a really exciting time.
"Right now, we're 186 miles off the coast of Florida along the Blake plateau..."
"...Oh look at all those squid!" "Oh my gosh, that's beautiful..."
It looked, from the satellite imagery, like it was just "boring" seafloor,
just abyssal plain, there weren't any features, there weren't any creatures.
We wanted to fill in those gaps for mapping, so we started mapping that area,
and then miraculously we saw all these different seafloor features coming out on the mapping area and
it turned out that we were the first to discover this massive, massive
deepwater coral complex. [ Which] to date, as far as we know, is the largest deepwater coral complex in the world.
"I've never seen anything like this, this is honestly one of
the largest aggregative thickets of Lophelia that I've seen..."
The differences between looking at something from really far away and saying "Yeah, there's a seafloor there,"
versus zooming in and realizing that there's a whole dynamic
community that could be a game-changer for management decisions and all sorts of things,
that's the value add that we see when we map something
and then start exploring and investigating.
"Pilot, dive super?" "Go dive super." "You guys are free to continue your descent."
What's really fascinating about these ships is we can map one night
and then go out the very next day and put down these deep-diving robots
and see in high-resolution cameras what's living there.
It's all sort of iterative, right? And we can keep mapping and getting more detail,
and more information, and all of that feeds up into our global understanding
of how our planet works, what resources we have, what we need to conserve, where we can build,
where fisheries are sustainable, where they're not.
And so, when we think about
a global community and our contributions to it,
I think it really starts with a much better understanding of the oceans,
and how we serve them and how they serve us.
So there's a huge initiative right now to map the
remaining part of the world's oceans that's not mapped yet.
The creation of this project is really meant to inspire the effort to completely map the ocean floor by the year 2030.
This is the coverage in the 2022 data release.
Basically black is where we don't have data. I think it's very difficult to try
to, even for myself, to have a true sense of the scale of what we're trying to do.
A single project, a single nation, a single group can't do it alone.
We have to work and build this map together.
"So it's really important for us to do these types of explorations, even in waters outside the U.S economic zone, because these waters are connected. The ocean knows no boundaries." [Music]
We may draw political boundaries for various reasons, but we have
to really understand the ocean and its processes.
It's often been said that people don't protect what they don't understand.
If we're not able to see what's out there in the ocean, then we're really not able to
truly appreciate it and therefore care about it. So part of all these efforts are
to really sort of shine a light on what a wonderful and amazing place that the ocean is, including the deep sea,
and bring that home.
This is our home planet, and we need to understand what's out there.