And I think Arthur C. Clarke probably had it right

when he said that perhaps we ought to call our planet

Planet Ocean.

And the oceans are hugely productive,

as you can see by the satellite image

of photosynthesis, the production of new life.

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

as well as about half the oxygen that we breathe.

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

and much of it we don't know about.

But I'll tell you some of that today.

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

that we do from the ocean.

That's about 10 percent of our global needs

and 100 percent of some island nations.

If you were to descend

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

it would quickly become pitch black,

interrupted only by pinpoints of light

from bioluminescent organisms.

And if you turn the lights on,

you might periodically see spectacular organisms swim by,

because those are the denizens of the deep,

the things that live in the deep ocean.

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

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

than all other habitats combined.

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

than we do about this habitat,

despite the fact that we have yet to extract

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

from those bodies.

And so 10 years ago,

an international program began called the Census of Marine Life,

which set out to try and improve our understanding

of life in the global oceans.

It involved 17 different projects around the world.

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

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

that it managed to achieve.

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

met in Woods Hole, Massachusetts

where both were guests at the famed oceanographic institute.

And Fred was lamenting the state of marine biodiversity

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

Well, from that discussion grew this program

that involved 2,700 scientists

from more than 80 countries around the world

who engaged in 540 ocean expeditions

at a combined cost of 650 million dollars

to study the distribution, diversity and abundance

of life in the global ocean.

And so what did we find?

We found spectacular new species,

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

from the shoreline to the abyss,

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

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

but rather the taxonomic specialists

who can identify and catalog these species

that became the limiting step.

They, in fact, are an endangered species themselves.

There are actually four to five new species

described everyday for the oceans.

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

Now, I come from Newfoundland in Canada --

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

where we experienced one of the worst fishing disasters

in human history.

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

It's around 1900.

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

I would go out fishing with my grandfather

and we would catch fish about half that size.

And I thought that was the norm,

because I had never seen fish like this.

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

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

it would be half that size still.

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

Our expectations of what the oceans can produce

is something that we don't really appreciate

because we haven't seen it in our lifetimes.

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

think that human exploitation of the oceans

really only became very serious

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

The census actually tried to look back in time,

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

And so anything from restaurant menus

to monastery records to ships' logs

to see what the oceans looked like.

Because science data really goes back

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

And so what they found, in fact,

is that exploitation really began heavily with the Romans.

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

So fishermen could only catch

what they could either eat or sell that day.

But the Romans developed salting.

And with salting,

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

And so began industrial fishing.

And so these are the sorts of extrapolations that we have

of what sort of loss we've had

relative to pre-human impacts on the ocean.

They range from 65 to 98 percent

for these major groups of organisms,

as shown in the dark blue bars.

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

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

there is some recovery.

So it's not all hopeless.

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

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

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

And so this is a photograph from the 1950s.

I want you to notice the scale on the slide,

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

we see the fish are much smaller

and we're also seeing a change

in terms of the composition of those fish.

By 2007, the catch was actually laughable

in terms of the size for a trophy fish.

But this is no laughing matter.

The oceans have lost a lot of their productivity

and we're responsible for it.

So what's left? Actually quite a lot.

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

And I want to start with a bit on technology,

because, of course, this is a TED Conference

and you want to hear something on technology.

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

are remotely operated vehicles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

that really wasn't available even a decade ago.

So it allows us to sample these amazing habitats

that are very far from the surface

and very far from light.

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

is acoustics, or sound waves.

And the advantage of sound waves

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

And so we can send out sound waves,

they bounce off objects like fish and are reflected back.

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

One would send out sound waves that would bounce back.

They would be received by a second ship,

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

of 250 billion herring

in a period of about a minute.

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

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

because knowing how many fish are there is really critical.

We can also use satellite tags

to track animals as they move through the oceans.

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

such as this elephant seal,

it's an opportunity to send data back to shore

and tell us where exactly it is in the ocean.

And so from that we can produce these tracks.

For example, the dark blue

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

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

but stick with me nonetheless.

For animals that don't surface,

we have something called pop-up tags,

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

And then at some period of time

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

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

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

these hot spots in the ocean,

that should be real priority areas

for ocean conservation.

Now one of the other things that you may think about

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

And so there's a barcode on that product

that tells the computer exactly what the product is.

Geneticists have developed a similar tool called genetic barcoding.

And what barcoding does

is use a specific gene called CO1

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

And so what that means is we can unambiguously identify

which species are which

even if they look similar to each other,

but may be biologically quite different.

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

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

who worked with the census.

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

and they barcoded it.

Well what they found was mislabeled fish.

So for example,

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

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

They also found an endangered species

sold as a common one.

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

and also what we're eating.

The Ocean Biogeographic Information System

is the database for all the census data.

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

And it contains all the data from the census

plus other data sets that people were willing to contribute.

And so what you can do with that

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

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

This is where our sampling effort has concentrated.

Now what you can see

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

in the North Sea in particular,

and also the east coast of North America fairly well.

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

The cold colors, the blue and the black,

show areas where we have almost no data.

So even after a 10-year census,

there are large areas that still remain unexplored.

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

who decided really as a labor of love

to pull together all the knowledge they could

about biodiversity in the Gulf of Mexico.

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

where they're known to occur,

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

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

So all of a sudden, this labor of love

for no obvious economic reason

has become a critical piece of information

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

and how the lawsuits

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

are likely to be resolved.

So what did we find?

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

But I will tell you some of my favorite discoveries

from the census.

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

Where do we find the most species of ocean life?

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

is this sort of a distribution.