 Our Ocean. It covers two-thirds of our planet, yet we've only explored five percent of it. Crushing pressures, extreme temperatures, and all-consuming darkness make exploration nearly impossible. The ocean remains the greatest mystery on Earth. What's going on down there? What discoveries await us? What new and fascinating forms of life will we find? The $7 million Shell Ocean Discovery X Prize is a global competition challenging teams to create safer, faster, and affordable ways of exploring the deep sea. This includes a $1 million bonus funded by NELLA for breakthroughs in chemical and biological sensors. The grand hope of this competition is to catalyze change, to bring forward newer technologies sooner and faster and better. We will only protect what we love and we can only love what we know. The most fundamental piece of understanding anything is a map. We need to map the oceans because it's a big unknown. We have better maps of Mars and the moon. What's the last frontier? There's so much to know. I think of Google Maps. Google was able to map all of the Earth data and share it publicly. If we can do that same type of thing in the ocean, I think it will create new industries. What lies under our ocean? Grand Canyons and Mount Everest. I really hope we find some aliens. I mean that would be awesome. Years ago I was involved with locating a very famous shipwreck called the Bismarck. This is an enormous ship, 50,000 tons on the seabed. They say that the deep sea is our world's largest museum. We just don't have access to it right now. Current technology has us mapping the ocean floor in a couple hundred years and we are going to try to do it in 10. Some of these technologies are so novel, some of the ideas proposed are so amazing and outside the box. It's really going to change how we map the seafloor. After two years of development and testing, judges have narrowed it down to nine finalist teams. Not just something that ends, it's something that inspires others and eventually creates an ecosystem of change. For us this competition is not the end but it's the means. Winning the prize isn't the goal. It's what we can do after. If we're going to survive as a species, we have to protect the oceans. And you really can't protect something that you don't know. It all comes back into managing our resources as a planet and you can't do that if you don't know where they are and you need a map to know where things are. We're going to get a picture of our world that we never knew before. We'll find out our history. We'll find out biology. We can get new medicines from the ocean. We can find new lives. It's going to be amazing.