 Every other breath we take is thanks to the ocean. We need the oxygen from the ocean, we depend on the ocean for food, it drives our weather systems, basically without the oceans, we cannot exist on this planet. Everywhere we look, as scientists, we find plastic. Whether the deep sea, the polar regions, the most remote ocean wilderness areas, we're finding plastic and plastic has come from people. So at the moment, we only recycle 9% of all plastic. That plastic is having an increasing impact on our ecosystem and on marine wildlife. We know it causes more disease in corals, whether it's entangling marine turtles, whether it's strangling seabirds, whether it's in the stomach of whales and dolphins. We now know that plastic is in every level of the food chain and it's having a really concerning impact on our environment and increasingly on us. This thing here is called a polymetallic nodule in the Pacific. There are these large abyssal plains and on the plains are these potato-sized nuggets of minerals. There's cobalt in here and rare earth elements. So these are some of the things that these new ocean miners are beginning to pursue so important to the hardware of renewable energy. That's solar and that's wind and that's also batteries as the storage hardware to capture and bottle up all of that energy. One of the things we think is so important is actually trying to use new technology to monitor the emergence of this industry. We use AI to process out exactly where mining vessels are operating in the oceans and then we share this on an open data platform. So you can see which country actually owns that claim area right next to Hawaii. Which country is doing this mining exploration? These spaces that we're proposing to mine are not empty spaces. They're actually rich with life and incredibly important ecologically. One of the potential impacts is that when you mine in the ocean you do something that you don't do on land, which is on land when you're excavating earth you set that earth aside. It stays put in a mound or a mountain. When you do that in the ocean you kick up these big plumes of sediment which travel with ocean currents which is always flowing like a river and those large plumes could in fact interact negatively with our fisheries that perhaps these plumes could source toxins that are stirred away in the deep ocean up into these food webs. Up until 1950 fishing was a coastal activity. Fishermen stayed close to where they lived. Globally we caught maybe 8 million tons a year. New much more powerful ships, much bigger nets came online and fishers spread across the world. And so by the turn of the century we were taking 95 million tons out of the ocean every year. One of the challenges when fisheries go global is that they go out of sight and so what happens on the water is a mystery to almost everybody and therefore criminals have free reign to take fish in violations of the laws that are meant to manage them. Global Fishing Watch was able to track a fishing vessel cruising across the ocean entering into a marine protected area created by the nation of Kiribati fishing in that protected area and then going home and on the basis of that information they find that fishing vessel $2 million. There's a UN agreement that requires each participating country to control the imports of seafood into its ports and to assure that none of the seafood that's landed in its ports is illegal. 85 countries are now operating under that treaty. If we can broaden that group to encompass all the important port and flag states around the world we can actually begin to close down the market for illegal fish and if illegal fishermen have nowhere to sell their catch they will find another business. How we engage the emergence of mining in the oceans will affect a huge part of the largest ecosystem on our planet. In the next two years the International Seabed Authority is finishing the code to allow this industry to go from exploration to full-scale commercial mining. We should use this data to get ourselves involved in shaping when that future becomes. I'm an ocean optimist. We came up with the hashtag Ocean Optimism to bring more people into ocean conservation and to see that we really can make a difference and there is hope.