(soothing music)
- [Crew] In five, four, three, two, one.
- [Crew] 1,200 meters.
- [Chris] Everything in the
ocean has a story to tell.
It's huge, it's dark, it's cold.
How do you access this space?
Simply by having a presence you see things
that no one has ever seen before.
You discover animals that
are completely new to science
or phenomena that no
one knew was occurring.
- You periodically come across something
that is so magnificent that
you didn't expect to see,
and it's just breathtaking.
- Tomorrow the winds will blow,
they'll pump nutrients to the surface
and everything about
the system will change.
Where things are, who's there,
how fast they're growing.
- We're in a position to be able to share
our discoveries and our love of the ocean
in ways that were never possible before.
(upbeat music)
- There are no departments
of chemistry or biology
or engineering, for that matter.
We are all mixed together,
and that's very unique.
- Each side can inspire the other
to ask challenging questions
and come up with innovative answers.
- A scientist will know
what they're looking for,
but the engineer can
illustrate the possibilities
beyond what the scientist first imagined.
- And that's the trick is
understanding those differences
in language and how we put them together
in order to realize the kind of device
that we're trying to build.
We marry that science and
engineering partnership
with our marine operations personnel,
and the only way to make all that work
is to have a group of
dedicated professionals
to operate the vessels,
to operate the equipment, to recover it.
It's really that three-legged stool,
science, engineering, operations,
that allow us to do the things that we do
and work as a team.
(upbeat music)
Oceanography is a contact sport.
We have to not only immerse
ourselves in that realm
but we also have to acquire material,
we have to manipulate that material.
- [Kelly] MBARI's here in Moss
Landing because of the access
to deep water that we
can get to so quickly.
If we were to drain Monterey
Bay you would see a canyon,
equivalent size to the Grand Canyon.
- So we get these deep,
cold, nutrient-rich waters
fertilizing the upper ocean.
It gives us an incredible opportunity
to understand that
connection of the deep sea
to our coastlines where most
of our fisheries come from.
- One of MBARI's guiding principles
is to make our measurements
in the natural habitat
rather than hauling the animals out
and studying them in our world.
- It's important that
discoveries that we make
have an impact and tackle
problems like climate change,
like ocean acidification,
and exporting that knowledge,
making it available to the whole world.
(upbeat music)
One of the really unique
things about MBARI
is our partnership with
the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
We have the opportunity to bring
fundamental science and technology,
and marry that with their
amazing global reach
that communicates important
issues about the ocean
to the public, to policymakers.
We really want to be transformational,
as opposed to just
incremental, in the work we do.
- Oceanography is in the
middle of a robot revolution,
with platforms that can take us to places
we couldn't be at times
we couldn't be there.
It's really a fundamental shift
in how we think about things.
- We have new ways of assessing fisheries.
Better ways of managing
precious resources.
We're sitting on this mountain
of highly curated information here
that was being mined to extract
quantitative information
like who's there, how
many, how do they relate
to changes in the
environment and so forth.
- [Kelly] And that gives
us an incredible ability
to think about these
things at a grand scale
and to make those connections
that are really challenging,
but that's what we need to do.
- [Amanda] Just by studying
anything in the ocean,
you are studying climate change.
- The ocean is absorbing
a tremendous amount
of carbon dioxide and
absorbing a lot of the heat
that's being produced, and the question is
what does that mean for the ocean?
What does it mean for the
life that depends on the ocean
and what are the
consequences in the future?
- [Kelly] How changes at
one step have implications
through the entire ocean food
web, in atoms to ecosystems,
and all the way up to humans on Earth.
(inspiring music)
- I don't know anywhere in
the world where you have
this confluence of the
place of Monterey Bay,
the opportunity of
science-engineering partnership
and the charge to do
something that's high risk,
long duration, unknown
outcomes, and at the end of that
the expectation that you will
just share it with everyone.
You will essentially give it away.
- Every time we answer a
question we have 20 new ones.
Often, we think we know what's happening,
and then the biology surprises us.
- It's really amazing how
much MBARI has been able
to be the ambassador for the
open ocean and the deep sea.
- That's why MBARI is here.
We're supposed to do things
that might not be possible
by any other approach.
I don't imagine there's
another place quite like it.
