>>Don Walsh: I fell in love with my planet,
the oceans, a half century ago.
As you saw in the video clip, I grew up on
the San Francisco Bay.
Oh, they're going to slow my slides.
I was going to skip those because they were
all used up.
Well, I'll stroke through them pretty fast.
I grew up on San Francisco Bay, and as the
clip intimated, I could watch -- in fact,
I watched them build the Golden Gate Bridge.
I was raised by a single working mother, didn't
have any toys.
That was my mega toy.
And I watched those ships go out and disappear
over the horizon, come back in, and I wondered
what was there.
What is it?
Well, I found out what was there and beneath
it.
And through the mechanism of being in the
Navy, I, in 1959, joined the bathyscaphe Trieste
program.
It was owned by the Office of Naval Search.
The Trieste it was built by August and Jacques
Piccard.
You heard from the younger Piccard yesterday.
With all the three generations of explorers,
a truly remarkable family in exploration.
And I was a submarine officer at the time
and went into that project thinking, "Well,
this is kind of interesting."
The Navy had asked for volunteers, and so
I thought, "Well, that looks like a thing
to do.
I can find out what's inside the ocean," and
I put my hand up, and I was selected.
I met their high standards because there was
only one volunteer.
Me.
[ Laughter ]
>>Don Walsh: There's a lesson there for all
of us.
A lot of people are uncomfortable with new.
If something is new, then if we've never had
it, how could we want it?
That kind of sort of philosophical tail-chasing.
But I put up my hand and a year later I'm
on the bottom of the deepest place of the
world, ocean, along with Bertrand Piccard's
father, Jacques Piccard, and that was quite
a day at the office, I must say.
And after we came back up to the surface,
Jacques and I were sitting topside waiting
to be picked up by a boat.
It was a nine-hour dive.
And we were thinking, "Well, how long before
somebody comes back here and does really useful
work?"
Because we're sort of test pilots.
We're doing engineering tests of the platform.
You know, can it go down seven miles, come
back up, and do effective work?
The answer was yes.
And we finally came to the point that, "Well,
maybe about two years, somebody will come
back."
Well, we were off by 51 years.
It was Jim Cameron last year that actually
came back for the second time.
Is this important?
Yes.
Because if we don't understand the deep ocean
trenches and those basic processes, then we
can't understand the general tectonic makeup,
if you will, of the crust of our planet.
But we're just not going there now, and Sylvia
talked about this lack of interest in marine
research.
And of course the daunting task for us today
is how do we talk about 71% of our planet,
a volume of 360 million cubic miles -- you
could put all of the people on our planet
in one cubic mile -- how do you talk about
that in 10 minutes?
It's almost insulting to you, so all we can
do is sort of nibble around the edge, so I
hope you -- our generalities are here today.
It's only because this would deserve a much
broader treatment.
Well, anyway back to Guam.
We did the dive.
It -- and thought that this would launch a
whole new wave of deep ocean explorations,
manned explorations of the ocean.
Well, it didn't happen.
And one of the problems today is that only
10% of the world ocean has been adequately
explored.
10%.
90% is left to go.
How are you going to do that?
There's not enough money in all the treasuries
in the world to build a fleet of research
ships that could do that 90%.
And if you could build them, how are you going
to populate them?
What kind of universities are going to, you
know, grind out Ph.D.s in ocean science.
We don't have it.
We can't do it.
We have to find other ways.
And so we're increasingly looking at robotics,
unmanned vehicles, things of this sort that
can do a lot of the dumb science in the ocean.
That is, doesn't require presence of a human.
And that's where folks like you come in.
The AUVs that can be programmed and go off
and do work in the ocean, ROVs on the end
of tethers.
There will still be room for man exploring
the ocean.
>>> And woman.
>>Don WalshAnd woman.
I'm sorry.
Thank you.
[ Laughter ]
>>Don Walsh: Mankind.
Humankind, okay?
[ Laughter ]
>>Don Walsh: And the thing is that it's hard
to quantify that, but you all know that from
the space program.
They've been asking that since the beginning:
Why man?
And it's sort of imprecise.
All I can say is when the first lunar lander
went up there and unmanned, picked up some
stuff, came back to Earth, I didn't go outside
and look up.
I thought, "Well, that's good.
Nice technological feat.
Well done, everybody."
But when Neil and Buzz were up there, I went
out on my deck and I looked up and I said,
"There's two of me, two of me up there."
I connected with it.
And I think that's the important thing.
But Jim, I guess, put it more inelegantly
last year after he made his deep dive and
said, "What kid wants to grow up to be a robot?"
So there will always be room for the trained
mind and the trained eye in the ocean, in
addition to all the machines.
But the heavy lifting, that 90 -- 80% I'm
talking about, 90% that needs to be looked
at, will have to be done with unmanned systems.
I see no easy way around it.
Okay.
Coming back to my particular journey, I had
hoped that there would be a big rush of building
more submersibles to do more work in the ocean
because what they do is they take the trained
eye and the trained mind into the environment.
In situ work.
Think about field sciences, biology and geology.
The biologist doesn't send some graduate student
out on a motorcycle and say, "Go out and get
some stuff and bring it back and we'll see
if we can figure out what's going on."
The geologist doesn't send somebody out in
a pickup truck, "Pick up a couple rocks and
bring them back to the lab and we'll try and
figure out what's going on."
They go into the field.
They observe the landforms, they observe the
biota, how the creatures are interacting with
each other.
Then you take your samples.
But since 1870, the beginning of oceanography,
that's how we've done it.
We're on an opaque interface, in a ship, reaching
into the ocean with artificial hands and cameras,
later -- artificial eyes -- bring up some
crushed stuff and saying, "Tell me all about
it."
It's like flying over New Mexico in the dark
in a balloon and lowering down a grapnel hook
and bringing up a gila monster, maybe a fireman,
a Toyota pickup truck, and then you go and
give a learned paper at Aspen about the characteristics
of this landform we call New Mexico.
A little silly and maybe I overexaggerated,
but the point is you have to be inside the
sea for so much of this work.
Especially in the observational sciences.
Now, a chemist doesn't care.
Chemical oceanography, you can't see chemistry
by looking out a window.
But in certain parts of our work, it's very
important.
So the way ahead is going to be very difficult
because we're not making national investments
in the oceans like we should.
No country is.
And what concerns me, as Sylvia intimated,
you know, sea level is rising.
First of all, because our planet's warming
up, the water in the ocean swells up, so a
lot of that sea level rise right now is due
to the warming of the oceans.
It's swelling up, if you will.
But it also -- the warming of our planet is
melting the ice, land-bound ice.
The ice on the -- the Artic ocean, yeah, that
comes and goes and it will probably be ice-free
by 2030.
The sea ice, that doesn't make any difference.
It's floating already.
But 11% of the freshwater on our planet, the
ice on our planet, is in Iceland.
I'm sorry.
Greenland.
And that's melting.
Now that -- you have an annual cycle.
It comes and goes.
But now it's not coming as much as it's going,
and all of that going into the ocean is raising
sea level.
Not a lot, but when it all melts, sea level
would rise about between 15 and 17 feet.
It will be a long time from now if that happens.
The Antarctic is now beginning to lose land
ice into the southern ocean, and when that
all melts, then you're probably going to look
at a sea level rise of about 280 feet.
So it's worth thinking about.
There are already nations on our planet that
have gone to the U.N. and said, "Look, by
2050 or 2040, we're going to have to get up
and leave."
Think about that.
An entire nation is going to have to move.
Where are they going to go?
These are serious problems, folks.
You can't build sea walls.
You're not going to keep it out.
8 out of 10 nation -- cities in the world,
8 out of 10, are coastal cities and they're
going to flood.
We saw in Sandy, we had the water surge, storm
surge, over the southern part of Manhattan
island.
That's about what we would have if the ice
in Greenland melted.
That rise.
Which was just temporary, but it came up over
the southern part of Manhattan island.
Goodbye Wall Street.
Probably not a bad thing, but nevertheless
--
[ Laughter ]
>>Don Walsh: -- this is irreversible.
Nature operates in a very subtle and irresistible
way, and we can't stop it.
What we've got to do is plan to get ahead
of it.
And we can't do that planning unless we understand
the damn ocean because that's driving all
of this.
So it's very, very important.
We've got to pay attention.
Whether you live in Santiago or St. Louis,
Shanghai or San Francisco, it affects every
one of us every day, and few of us really
understand that.
In the words of the great guru of communication
theory, the late Professor Marshall McLuhan,
he said "On Spaceship Earth, there are no
passengers.
We're all crew.
So let's get all hands on deck."
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
>>Don Walsh: I'm sorry you stared at that
graphic for a long time, but while Sylvia
was talking, I was reintegrating my talk,
and then the little teaser that they showed
you video, that used up most of my stuff,
so I just -- I stand in front of you as a
guy that just articulated a talk he hadn't
heard before, so we're all in the same boat.
Excuse the pun.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
