 What I'd like to start with here is by calling your attention to something very special about this planet and that is the vast amount of blue that we have on our planet. If you were to add up all of the space on our planet where life can exist, you'd realize that 90% of that space is liquid water. Water is the ingredient to which all of our histories are linked. Water, I like to think of it as the master reagent in the human experiment. It's also an important reagent in a somewhat more humble experiment of my own. I was born near the beach, I spent a lot of times, perhaps too much time in the waves. I worked as a deckhand on fishing boats and now I'm a professor of marine biology at the University of California Santa Barbara. I want to share with you today why I think we're sitting in the most important period ever in the history of our oceans. So our impact on land and on sea has been very different. This is just a 50,000-year view of how we've impacted these two domains. One of the things that jumps out at you right away when you look at these two very divergent histories is the very early start of the industrial, the first industrial revolutions on land. Now not only this industrial revolution start early, it also started with a lot of enthusiasm. So much enthusiasm that sometimes we forgot a very important point, which is that we absolutely need the prosperity and we need the growth that comes from industrial revolution, but we also need clean air, we need clean water, and we need healthy ecosystems. Humans have sometimes been slightly slow learners on this point. This is a river not far, for example, where my mother grew up. Unregulated pollution from industry that went into this river caused the river, the river itself, to catch fire. Not once, but 13 times before we actually got the memo that we can't do this to ecosystems that we ourselves are members of. I want to take you back to this timeline and show you the part of it that makes me as an ocean scientist so excited to wake up in the morning, so excited to get underwater every chance I get. And that's right here, 2017, today, the present. The thing that is so exciting to a marine biologist is we're just beginning to take our first baby steps forward in an industrial revolution in the oceans. We're just beginning to farm with great intensity under the water in the oceans. We're just beginning to build power plants in the sea. We're just beginning to harvest ocean resources with industrial strength. And that's exciting because what that means is we get to decide and become architects for the future of our oceans. We get to decide what parts of this history that we created on land we want to cherry pick the prosperity and the growth that came from the first industrial revolutions. And what part of that history want to leave behind? We cannot and we will not, for example, light any part of our oceans on fire 13 times, right? This opportunity, this exciting opportunity for the oceans, I want to unpack a little bit more together through the currency of species extinction. Probably a lot of you who have heard scientists already speak about a six mass extinction, the beginnings of a six mass extinction. Now, the idea there is that humans are influencing our planet with the same intensity, with the same force as did the asteroids that when struck the planet, right? And these were serious biological events, right? These were events that drove the dinosaurs extinct. It seems that humanity is the new asteroid. Now, we can see the footprint of the six mass extinction beginning here on land and a plot like this. This is a curve that plots out cumulative number of animal extinctions on land. The rate of acceleration here is really what's striking and really what's characteristic of the beginnings of a six mass extinction. Where this rate really starts to take off is about here, about the time of the first industrial revolution. And that's very likely because it was during this period that we started changing ocean or changing terrestrial habitats, changing the homes for land animals in a significant way. If we go to freshwater ecosystems, we see the same face, the same signal of the six mass extinction occurring present in our rivers and in our lakes. Now, where's the optimism that I was talked about? It's right here. As an ocean scientist, an amazing amount of optimism. It's in this flat line. This is the plot of extinctions in our oceans. In the same time that we've created hundreds of extinctions on land and in freshwater ecosystems, we've only created 15 extinctions in our oceans. Is this good news stable or how fragile is this? We can answer this question through a hypothetical. We can take all of the endangered animals in our oceans. These are species that scientists say are at a high risk of going extinct. If we hypothetically push them extinct, we can see where that takes us. Unfortunately, when we do this hypothetical, it takes us from this happy place here in our oceans all the way up there. It seems we're sitting on an extinction cliff in our oceans. It seems that it would be all too easy for us to ignite a six mass extinction in the oceans. Business as usual, we push these endangered species over that cliff and create a six mass extinction in our oceans. So, I want to ask a question that probably some of you are thinking and that's because it's a very legitimate question, which is, who cares? So what? So what if dozens or hundreds more species on our planet go extinct? Let's answer that question through the story of this animal. This is one of those endangered brain animals, the sea otter. I'll say the obvious first. This is a damn cute species. So, I think it's fair to say that our planet would be less without the membership of this special animal here with us. We can probe deeper than that. Sea otters like any species on our planet do not exist in isolation. They are embedded in complex ecological networks that link them to hosts of other many other species on our planet. This is just a view of what decades of research on sea otters give us of this complex ecological network that surrounds this one species. We've learned, for example, that sea otters are interactively linked to sea lions, to whales, to seals, to fish, to sea urchins, to kelp, to barnacles, to gulls, sea stars, eagles, fisheries, even atmospheric carbon dynamics. Wow, right? It seems that driving a sea otter extinct would not simply be blacking out a pretty face in the portrait gallery of life. What we're really talking about is pulling a wheel out of the machine of life. These are all systems thinkers. If we lose a CEO from a corporation, if you delete a circuit from a motherboard, if we have an organ that fails in our body any time that you remove one node from a complex network, that causes cascading change. Sometimes that change can be minor. Sometimes that change can be catastrophic. In the case of the sea otter, it's in fact a very important CEO. When marine scientists go to places, for example, to islands that have healthy populations of sea otters, we see scenes like this. Very lush underwater forests, which recruit hundreds of other species of fish and ocean animals. When we instead go to islands nearby that have lost sea otters, we see scenes that look like this. What happens is sea otters are important consumers. When they're lost from ecosystems, you see explosive growth of herbivores that eat up these forests and we lose a lot of diversity, a lot of species. We ended with relatively barren seafloors in our oceans. So the choice becomes for fishermen, for example, what kind of ocean would they choose for ecotourists? Which of these oceans would they choose? For all of you, which ocean future would you choose? For me, the scariest part of extinction is not that we're changing the number of species on our planet, but we're changing how our planet works. I mentioned earlier that I think a very important trigger in the process of igniting the six mass extinction on land was mass habitat modification. We have a view, a sense of how that looks on land. This, for example, is a satellite view of deforestation in the Amazon. Now, can this same mass scale habitat modification happen under the water? Can it happen in our oceans? I think the answer is yes. I'll show you some examples. The reason why we ask that question is that if this was the driver for the start of a six mass extinction on land, it may also be the trigger for a six mass extinction in our oceans. So some examples. This is a picture, a satellite picture of a section of our oceans. Every single dot in this picture is a fishing vessel. The plumes that are rolling out behind each of these fishing vessels are sediment plumes that are kicked up as the vessels drag weighted nets along our ocean seafloor, collecting just about anything and everything that they can scoop up. So wave after wave after wave after wave after wave of vessels doing this, our ocean amounts to about 50 million square kilometers of ocean that's impacted. This is a vast section of our ocean. In some parts of the ocean, this has minor impacts. In other parts, it's like underwater clear cutting. Here's another example. This is an important and exciting emergent industry, but it's one that could have a really important impact on ocean habitats. Deep sea mining. Deep sea mining used to be science fiction. Now we have the capability to send 300 ton waterproof robots down to the deepest parts of the ocean to harvest minerals, things like this. This is a nodule, metallic nodule from the deepest parts of the ocean. And this sort of illustrates the complexity here in this business. So this nodule contains rare earth elements that you can find in my iPhone, that you can find in my laptop that are in our computers, but it's also important ocean habitat. This species, for example, which is a brand new species, it's so new, we don't even have a name for this species. Scientists are presently just referring to it as the Casper octopus, because it kind of looks like a cute little ghost. At the end of 2016, scientists discovered that these Casper octopus lay their eggs and they breed on these same nodules. There's something very exciting happening, though, in the world of deep sea mining. And that is that we are writing a new rule book for where and how deep sea mining will occur in our oceans. And this will affect a vast section of the seas. Over a million square kilometers of oceans have already been gazetted in seabed mining claims. In the Pacific, in my ocean backyard, this section of seabed mining claims is actually wider, or just about as wide as the continental United States. And incidentally, the same section out here in the Pacific of mining claims is an area that when scientists go to do biological surveys, 90 percent of the species that they encounter are brand new to science. That octopus, Casper the octopus, not an anomaly, that's the norm in this unexplored and brand new section of our oceans. This new rule book is really exciting. The rules that come out have to work for industry, but they also have to work for biodiversity, and they have to work for ocean habitats. Now, not only are we modifying ocean habitats and the raw architecture of the seas, we're also unfortunately filling that space up with our junk, our own trash. There are five trillion, with a T, trillion pieces of plastic in our oceans. And ocean life really has no idea what to do with this stuff. Often it confuses it for food. This, for example, is a collection of plastic fragments that came out of the body of a stranded loggerhead sea turtle. These same kinds of fragments you find in fish, fish species that we see in our fish markets, fish species that we put on the dinner plates in front of our kids. Doing a little bit of simple math, I estimated that today for every one ton of tuna that we take out of the oceans, we put two tons of plastic back into our sea. That is a trade imbalance that we cannot continue to sustain. No conversation about ocean futures, no conversation about ocean habitats would be complete without a conversation about climate change. Probably all of you know that 2016 was the hottest year on record. Many of you likely know that 2016 was also the worst coral bleaching event we've ever seen on record. And that's incredibly consequential. Climate change is causing our oceans to heat up, to become more acidic, and to become harder places to breathe in. You don't need a marine biologist to tell you that an ocean that is hotter, more acidic, and harder to breathe in is a bad place for ocean life. This coral bleaching affected corals all over our oceans. It either damaged them or killed corals. In Japan, this killed 70% of the country's largest coral reef. In Australia, it killed 67% of the northern section of the Great Barrier reef. This really matters. These are underwater rainforests. So I hope you're beginning to sort of absorb what I think is a very important realization that we are developing new powers to radically modify our oceans. That we're beginning to exercise these powers. That the exercise of these powers is shaping the future of some very important ocean species. We met some of those, right? The deep sea octopus, the sea otter, the loggerhead sea turtle. In the last couple moments, I want to talk about one more species that it's impacted by the change that we delivered to our oceans. That's us. The things that we're doing to our oceans now, the future that we develop for the oceans, will affect our bodies, our wallets, and our homes. Our bodies, our wallets, and our homes. That's pretty consequential stuff, right? Let's have a look at some of that together. Our bodies. The oceans are a fridge, a refrigerator essentially, that's full of some of the world's most nutritious, free-range food. We estimated that 845 million people on our planet are kept away from diseases associated with malnutrition as a result of ready access to healthy seafood. In many parts of our world, what this sort of boils down to is that communities are having seafood and rice for dinner or they're simply having rice for dinner. Our wallets. The oceans as a global asset have been valued at 24 trillion dollars. If the oceans were a nation, they would have the seventh largest economy in the world and provide hundreds of millions of jobs annually. This is clearly not an asset in our global portfolio that we want to devalue any further. Lastly, our homes. Climate change, as we talked about, is affecting life underwater, but it's also affecting life on the seashore, our lives. Climate change is causing the ocean waters to heat up. Any time a fluid heats, it expands. It's also melting ice. That water goes into the oceans and cause our sea levels to rise. By 2100, scientists estimate that sea levels may rise two meters across our planet. This is a view on three places in our world of what sea level rise of that magnitude could look like. Why did I choose these three places on our planet? Because they illustrate that nobody, that nobody is immune to the impacts of climate change. Even if you choose not to believe in climate change, it's still going to flood your basement. Scientists expect that sea level rise alone will cause trillions of dollars of damage to coastal communities that will create a new wave of refugees. Hundreds of millions of refugees will be displaced by rising tides. This is not a future that any intelligent president, that any intelligent global leader will want their name attached to in our history books. We can leave that behind and I want to kind of circle back to where we started. I believe that this is the most important period ever in the history of our oceans. We have some very, very exciting decisions to make together. And I mean together, scientists, leaders in business, leaders in policy, leaders in society, we get to decide what an industrial revolution is going to look like for our oceans. We get to decide whether or not we want to start a six mass extinction in the oceans. The largest ecosystem on our planet, the only ecosystem on our planet where the six mass extinction has not yet been detected. These decisions are really going to matter. This is no longer a matter of saving the whales. This is very much about saving ourselves. I want to pivot from here and talk briefly about some technologies. The grand challenge, as I mentioned, for oceans going forward is to figure out some way to take more from the oceans while somehow harming our oceans less. Technologies, I think, and proper intelligent engagement of technologies, I think, is going to make a real difference in getting us towards that future. Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, once said or once described the feeling of a ship leaving harbor and going out to see as this immersion into this grand world of emptiness. Now if you fast forward 150 years from that period, we see a very different kind of ocean. This is our ocean in 2017. This is not a map. This is a collection of data processed through some smart algorithms. It's collected from sensors on ships that travel our global oceans that shows us ship activity, shows us and tracks all these vessels. You don't need a map anymore because vessel activity is so high that it outlines the borders of all the continents on our planet. Now this is really impressive view, but it's a very useful view for an ocean scientist. It allows us to do some very exciting things. We can, for example, help fishermen tell good stories of good behavior out on the oceans and tell those stories to their consumers so they can help get premiums for their products. We can look down from space at protected areas and make sure that we can enforce them the way that we wanted to with law. It can also do some very exciting things for high seas biodiversity. High seas of this vast section of oceans out here, out here, out here, out here. Over 60% of our oceans are beyond our national boundaries and what this data can do is help a new United Nations process which is developing a treaty for biodiversity in the high seas. It's a really exciting thing. However, I'd argue that drawing up new laws for a space on the planet that you can't see is a potentially bad idea or you can do less unless you're able to actually look in on these places. This new ocean big data is helping us very effectively look in on those parts of our planet, understand them more, and do more ambitious things with this emerging treaty. Not only can we track humans out there on the high seas and out there in our global oceans, we can track an animal that is much more exciting, much more interesting to me, many of them and that's animals like sea birds, like sea turtles, like dolphins, like seals. There are a whole package of new technologies that help us attach electronics to these animals and have them tell us their stories. We're in essence bringing the sea turtles and sharks and seals into the Internet of Things and when we do that we put their data stories next to our data stories and we can do some very impactful, very impactful things for oceans. We can make sure, for example, that we don't put hooks and nets in the pathways of endangered species. There are other tools that help take us deeper and our understanding deeper into the oceans. Our lab, for example, uses a sound camera to track the migration and the movements of manta rays up the coast. Colleagues at Stanford put video cameras on the backs of whales to understand what they eat and the mechanics by which they eat. There is a next generation of ocean robots that is emerging in our seas. Some of these robots model after ourselves, some of them are actually modeled after ocean animals, which is a pretty smart thing to do, actually, because the bodies of ocean animals are the incarnations of thousands of years of trial and error. They're living solutions, some pretty hard ocean problems. The tuna, for example, is a wonderful solution to high efficiency travel through the oceans. The crab, our diminutive crab, has a super-intelligent solution for high stability walking and high flow conditions. We also have some very exciting new technologies that are helping us become ocean farmers and this is really going to matter in such a big way. In 2014, 2014 was the first year ever that people ate more fish that came from farms than came from the wild. That's a transformative event. That's as big as when we on land stopped hunting and gathering in the wild and started growing our food at home. We're now seeing that same kind of revolution in agriculture underwater. Now, this revolution has to happen right and technology is going to help us. They're going to help us do it in a clean way, help us do it in a smart way, help us do it in a way that doesn't step on the vitality of our wild fisheries. We also have an exciting set of technologies that are helping us plug into the gigantic battery that is our oceans to extract new and clean power. We have offshore wind power, wave energy, tidal energy, ocean thermal energy. Wave energy alone has been estimated to have the technical potential as 400 small nuclear power plants. The great challenge for these new ocean power technologies is increasing the efficiency by which we take energy out of the oceans so that we get to mainstream these new technologies, these ocean technologies into our packages, our mainstream packages of green energy. There are dozens of other technologies I could sample, sort of just leave it there. The thing that is really impressive to me is that on the technology front, our creativity and our ingenuity is in a way the thing that's kind of getting us into trouble in the oceans. It's the thing that's expanding our footprint in the seas. But our creativity and our ingenuity is also very likely to be our own salvation in the oceans. Thoughtful engagement of these technologies, bringing new technologies online for our oceans are going to help us in a major way, in a major way to make the oceans that we absolutely want and to make that future that we absolutely want and to make that future for our oceans that we absolutely are going to need. Thank you.