 Probably some of you are familiar of the Norse tale of Jormungand. Jormungand was a snake, a malevolent snake that was cast into the oceans. It was supposed to be pushed there so that it would get out of the way of people on land. But unfortunately, this snake, instead of being banished, it thrived in the oceans. It started consuming everything in its way. It actually grew to such a large size that it wrapped its body around Middle Earth. And eventually, its head met its tail and they latched on one together. And the story tells that this latching on of head and tail of Jormungand created a kind of tenuous stability that prevented the oceans from collapsing, that prevented the Earth, indeed, itself from collapsing. Now, the tail of Jormungand reminds me in many ways of our own relationship with the oceans, of humanity's relationship with the oceans. Except we weren't pushed into the oceans. We, in fact, jumped into the oceans. If you had been sitting around a campfire half a million years ago and you suggested to one of your friends sitting in the campfire with you that our species would eventually come to the point where we dominate the oceans ecologically, that we just looked at you and they would have laughed. Because we're a land species. We're not made evolutionarily speaking to operate in the oceans. However, we used one of our very best capabilities, one of the very best attributes of humanity, to get ourselves ecologically into the oceans. And that is our ability to innovate, our ability to invent solutions to extend our ecological reach. And we have, indeed, extended our reach such that we are now a dominant force in the oceans. The dominance that humans exert on the oceans I think is really well represented in this image. This looks a lot like a world map. It is, indeed, not a world map. What this is is a data plot. This is a summary of billions of data points that were collected from sensors placed on fishing boats that satellites interpret and we process through algorithms that tell us where fishing activity is happening on our planet. The answer, it's happening all across our global oceans. The density of fishing activity, the density of human presence, is so high in the oceans that we actually reverse engineer just by plotting the data of where our fishing boats are operating. We reverse engineer the coastlines of all of the continents. So we are, indeed, now a dominant force in the oceans. So tools and technologies have helped us to get into this space. I'm going to argue today that tools and technologies are going to help us. Another suite of tools and technologies will help us balance the influence that we have on the oceans to create a kind of sustainable future for the oceans that we all want and that we all need. I want to switch gears a little bit for a moment and talk about extinction. Probably a lot of you have heard of the sixth mass extinction. This is a phenomenon described by scientists that suggests that the data shows that on land, and this is important, this is data and this is a phenomenon that's occurring on land, that extinction rates are beginning to accelerate so rapidly that they parallel some of the biggest mass extinction events seen in all of Earth's history. This is big, right? So this is the suggestion that on land extinction rates today match extinction rates that we saw during the late Cretaceous when an asteroid hit the planet and caused all the dinosaurs to go extinct. It seems on land that we are the new asteroid. But what about the oceans? Is the sixth mass extinction leaking into the oceans? I think that's a very important question for us to unpack together. The answer and the data shows us that indeed the sixth mass extinction has not yet begun in the oceans. And this is a wonderful piece of scientific news. Let's look at where this conclusion is drawn from. What I'm showing you here is a series of data, paleo-ecological data, that reaches back about 40 or 50,000 years. These are extinction profiles that humans are responsible for and have coded them in two ways. We have extinctions that occurred on land, those are coded in green. We have extinctions that occurred in the oceans that humans are responsible for and those are coded in blue. So the first thing you see is that there's a lot more green on this graph. There's a lot more green bars here. So there's a lot more extinction that happened on land than in the oceans. The second thing I think you see here is that there is an interesting episodic nature to extinction. Essentially, extinction follows us. We arrive in Australia, we see a pulse of extinction. We walk forward, our footprint arrives in America as we see a pulse of extinction. We in the last 500 years reach all the way around the planet and we see this gigantic explosion of extinction. That is what is populating these scientific dialogues about a six-mass extinction. But what's the story with extinction in the oceans? We have a wonderful amount of silence on this graph. There is no blue all the way across this record until we get to the last 500 years. And then we begin to see human-caused extinction in the oceans. You actually sum up the number of extinctions that have been caused in the oceans. In the last 500 years, you see over 500 animal species have been driven extinct on land and only 15 extinctions that have occurred in the oceans. You're looking here at a sampling of these oceans 15. Again, wonderful news. Why is there less extinction in the oceans? I think that's a critically important question for us to answer because if we answer that question, we're in a better position to make sure extinction does not proceed in the oceans as it has on land. This image, I think, helps us answer the question of why there has been less extinction thus far in the oceans. This is a rendering of what I think is a narrative view of our impact on humans' impact on wildlife and humans' impact on ecosystems. When we take this back about 50,000 years, we can compare what's happened on land to what's happened in the oceans, the way we've shaped ecosystems on land and the way we've shaped ecosystems on oceans. We've been hunting animals on land and we've been hunting and fishing animals in the oceans for an awfully long time. We started fishing in the oceans as long as 50,000 years ago. There's a very different shift, however, that occurs. This history looks relatively similar until we get to about this point. We get to about the period of the first Industrial Revolution. On land, there was a major shift where humanity decided we're not necessarily as interested in hunting animals directly. We're interested in hunting space. We're interested in using habitats. We need to build cities out into new ecological space. We need to use resources from habitats to fuel our industry. All important for our prosperity, all important for our growth, but a major shift in the way that we use ecosystems that caused major implications for wildlife in this space. Now, at the same time that we're beginning to use a lot of terrestrial real estate in different ways, we don't see a whole lot of use of ocean space. However, I want us together to look at some data that may suggest that's changing. And if that's changing, that's critically important, and this is why. This is connecting this discussion about how we use ecosystems, how we use wildlife to this dialogue of extinction. What I'm showing you here in green is an extinction plot. This is cumulative number of extinctions on land. In blue, this is the cumulative number of extinctions in the oceans. When extinctions really started to take off on land, again, was this period during the first Industrial Revolution, sort of late 1700s. This curve for extinction, the slope of this curve really arched up. We saw a mass influx, a mass increase in the number of extinctions. And that makes sense, right? If you're hunting deer, you may drive a deer closer to extinction, but if you're hunting a forest, they'll drive everything closer to the edge of extinction. And I think that is what is pushing this change in the shape of this curve. Now, a wonderful position to be in the oceans. We have this delightful flat line for extinction rates in the oceans. Now, the question, though, that I want to pose for you is whether if we're amplifying a marine industrial revolution, whether we're going to change the slope of that line. We absolutely do not want that to happen. Let's consider together whether there is data that shows an industrial revolution is taking off in the oceans. We'll look at a handful of different industries together and look at accelerations or patterns of growth in these marine industries. The first one I want to show you is seabed mining. Mining in the oceans was simply not a thing 15 years ago. It was technically impossible. But since then, we've built 300-ton, waterproof robots that can go down to the deepest parts of the oceans and can excavate rare earth elements. And then in the process, lots of biodiversity that's associated with the elements bring it back up to the surface. This is a massively growing industry. It's an industry that we may need. These rare earth elements are the things that I have in my iPhone, the things that I have in my computer, the things that I have in my hybrid cars. But this is happening at a rate that I think we all want to pay very close attention to. We have gazetted in the past 15 years over 1 million square kilometers of ocean for seabed mining exploration. That's 1 million square kilometers of ocean. So if this is an industry that's beginning, it's an industry that we want to pay very close attention to. Another indicator of change, another indicator of how we use ocean space. We're building power plants in the oceans. This is a curve that just shows offshore, the growth in the offshore wind industry. We absolutely need to be building power plants in the oceans. The oceans are like this gigantic battery of energy, of low carbon and energy that we need to plug into if we need to combat climate change. And we absolutely must combat climate change. We're not going to overheat our oceans and turn them into acidic mess. But we have to be aware that as we put more stuff in the oceans, more power plants in the ocean. This is going in on top of ocean ecosystems. This is maybe going in in corridors of migration for ocean animals. We need to be very thoughtful of how we engage the growth of this important industry. Another important ocean industry. This is growth in the shipping industry on the oceans. Traffic is increasing exponentially in the oceans. And traffic in the oceans causes many of the same problems for ocean ecosystems as traffic on land does. We have increased pollution, increased noise. We have increased roadkill even. A lot of these ships are striking whales, which is causing the impairment of recovery for a lot of at-risk whale species. This is another complicated one. This is fundamental to all of our industry, to all of our business. All the things that I'm wearing came across the Pacific on a ship like this, right? So we need to be very thoughtful how we engage and zone forward the transit pathways for this kind of growth. But a key indicator that something different is happening in the oceans. A last kind of growth. And this is big. This is farming in the oceans. 2014 was the first year that our planet ate more fish that came from farms than came from the wild. That's a transformative event. That stands on parallel with the event in our history when we switched from hunting and gathering and forest for our dinner to farming on land. This shift towards the dominance of farming in the oceans is going to have a major implications for what happens to ocean biodiversity in the future. This is just growth in agriculture for shrimp. We're seeing growth in many sectors of agriculture that follow these same kinds of growth trajectories. If there are lots of signs that we may be beginning a marine industrial revolution that's accelerating becoming more mature when we return to this dialogue about how this changed the way we're using ocean space interacts with extinction and biodiversity futures. We have to be very careful. We have to be very thoughtful because the last thing we want to do is build out this growth in a way that doesn't serve the oceans well. This ultimately that will not serve us well. So how do we keep this flat line of extinction flat in the oceans? I think technology again will help. Just as technology is helping us start these needed industries technology can help us move them forward intelligently. This is one example of the kinds of technologies that can help us do this. Probably many of you are aware of a revolution in Earth observation. We're sending out hundreds of new micro nanosatellites to get information from our planet and to observe our planet. They can play a critically important role in making sure that the marine industrial revolution moves forward intelligently. Here's an example. This is a demo of the application of satellite intelligence for ocean conservation. This black box that you're seeing here is one of the world's largest marine protected areas an ocean park that sets aside biodiversity for ocean futures set up very bravely by the country of Kiribati. We help look over Kiribati's shoulder and help them make sure that this park that we're setting up is exactly what they want it to do which is to remove fishing and protect fish and turtles and sharks inside this area. Six months before the establishment of the protected area it was full of fishing activity. We see this through these sensor data from these fishing vessels that are transit to us via satellite. Six months after the closure, it's effectively been closed. There's very little fishing activity. There is just one vessel that we detect using these new satellite tools that's fishing in the marine protected area. We transmit this information to the government. The government goes out, brings the ship into port, finds them and this is exactly the kind of success that we need to replicate. This is the kind of success that we need to engage these new technologies to make happen more often. How about bringing sharks into the internet of things? One thing that my lab does is we place satellite transponders, GPS units on the dorsal fins of sharks. These sharks are swimming around through the oceans and when their fins break the surface sort of jaw style they kick off a signal that tells us exactly where they are. That is data that's being plotted in these white circles here on this map. Sharks telling us what parts of the oceans they need, what parts of the oceans they use. Now all the colored information, again, is this data that I showed you in the previous slide. This is data of where people are fishing, how people are using the oceans. So we can hybridize these two new big data streams of where important ocean predator like sharks is using the oceans and important ocean predator like humans using the oceans and we can suddenly be in a very powerful position to zone out a future that works well for both of these marine apex predators. This is another example. Satellites, microsatellites and nanosatellites can pick up sensor data that can also watch the planet. We're working with a company in San Francisco called Planet Labs whose goal is to create a constellation that will look down and image every single meter of the planet every single day. When they do that, that's going to be an incredible repository information and it will be incredibly powerful, incredibly source of empowerment for the marine science community because we can look at the 71% of the planet that is oceans and watch how this industrialization is happening in that space. We can harness the power of some of these satellites to act like red light cameras so they can watch ocean protected areas and when there's an illegal incursion in this protected area we can act on that. We can watch aquaculture as it develops. We can look down on coral reefs and watch their health near real time. That's going to be incredibly powerful. Not all observation about ocean futures will happen from space. We also have a set of technologies that are going to need to observe these ecosystems from underwater. This is an example of another tool that my lab uses where we've used a sonar camera that was originally designed by the Navy to look for bad guys, to look for ocean biodiversity, understand what it's doing. We're watching sharks. We're watching manta rays. We're getting all kinds of very useful information to make sure that we keep them around in the oceans for our future. I was born in Los Angeles and Los Angeles is in California which is an area of America that was called once the Wild West. A lot of the wildness of Los Angeles of course is not gone. Very clearly seen in this image. But as a kid growing up in LA if I wanted to get back into nature all I had to do was jump in a car, travel on this very freeway, 10 minutes out to the coast, put on a mask, a snorkel, dive underwater and suddenly I was back in what was the, what is still alive? A true Wild West. I was swimming in the company of 300 pound giant sea bass. I can hear in the distance 30 ton gray whales breathing as they migrate up and down the California coast. And this is all happening while I look at the skyline of LA. This change in California happened in 85 years we went from a biodiverse desert to that scene that I showed you. Now I'm not suggesting that in 85 years the oceans are going to look like downtown LA but I am suggesting that in the next century the oceans will look a lot different than they do today. In the next two centuries they'll look a whole lot different and we need to anticipate that. We need to anticipate that for the purposes of business and for the purposes of conservation. I think none of us would go back to the beginning of the industrial revolution and undo that process and undo that progress. But if we could go back to the beginning of the industrial revolution and if we knew then what we know now about how our health is intimately linked to the health of the oceans. If we could take with us the tools that help us watch development happen watch industry begin we would absolutely redo that process in a way that's cleaner, smarter better for the environment and better for us. Very rarely does the environment give us second chances. The ocean is our second chance to do something right for a vast section of oceans. Do something right for business to do something right for biodiversity to do something right for the future of humanity. Thank you.