Mission Blue Page #5

your mom's gonna come home with

a five-gallon bucket of algae

and recruit you out into the

garage to start laying it out

and show you the right way to label it

and, you know, these sorts of things.

Those aren't typical,

so, you know...

But it's what we always did.

As a kid, we were constantly being

yanked out of school mid-semester,

and we'd travel with her

kind of all over the place,

wherever she would happen to go.

We were able to get a

broader education that way,

even though it wasn't as

traditional as... as most.

When I came to the Caribbean as part

of the Tektite mission in 1970,

the reefs here

were full of life.

Today... those reefs are gone.

It's happening all

over the world.

About half the corals

are gone, globally,

from where they were

just a few decades ago.

The ocean is dying.

You're saying that the

oceans are in crisis.

Yes.

How so? What's... If they're

so big, if they're so huge...

'Cause they're the biggest thing

on Earth, right? The oceans?

We used to think there's

nothing that we could do

that could harm the ocean.

And we tried, right?

We tried pretty hard

to harm the ocean.

And it was frustrating us, so

we upped the ante a little bit.

There needs to be a

real rethinking.

Unless we just decide that

nature is gonna be a museum

in a few small places...

what we really have to address

is the problem of us.

The biggest threat is there

are far too many people

and our appetites

are out of control.

Not just our appetites for food,

our appetite for wood, our

appetites for fossil fuels.

The biggest problem is releasing

carbon dioxide into the atmosphere

that drives these great

climate change events.

Starting in 1980, we began

to actually measure

the amount of ice deliberately correlated

with the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

It tracks. It tracks like this.

The warming trends, CO2 in the

atmosphere, the melting in polar ice.

There's this cognitive link

that people just aren't making about

the role of ocean in climate.

They don't understand the ocean is

this great regulator of temperature,

of the movement of heat

around the planet.

What we're doing to the ocean, what

we're doing to the planet as a whole,

comes back to us

in bigger storms,

more powerful storms,

more frequent storms.

Nobody wants that to happen.

And if we don't want

that to happen...

we will make the connection between

what we're doing to the living ocean

and how that affects the predictability...

of our future.

Our relentless pursuit

for oil and gas,

for energy, continues to

wreak havoc on our oceans.

But ironically, it's

these same industries

that have led to breakthroughs

in underwater exploration.

There is a new tool in the sea.

It moves with the ponderous

rhythms of a mechanical monster.

But actually, it is

a new vehicle...

a personal submersible.

It can withstand water

pressure to 2,000 feet.

Normally, a diver making a

six-hour dive to that depth

would spend 20 days

in decompression.

A diver using JIM for

six hours at 2,000 feet

can surface, open the

hatch and walk away.

But now a new use for the

JIM suit is to be tested.

Dr. Sylvia Earle is

a marine biologist.

Great.

Her question...

"Can scientists use the JIM suit

for dives beyond 1,000 feet?"

If successful...

she will be the first woman to walk

the sea floor beyond 1,000 feet.

I've known Sylvia probably

30-some-odd years.

I think I first met Sylvia in Hawaii

when she was diving in the JIM suit.

I was working with Maui

divers at the time,

and so I just kind of hung around

and helped out where I could.

Ready? Yes.

Let me close you up.

The JIM suit was mounted on

the front of a little sub,

and the idea was that the sub and

Sylvia would descend together,

with the sub being

the safety mechanism

in case something went wrong

with Sylvia in the JIM suit.

Holokai, Holokai. We're

neutrally buoyant.

Sylvia is secured and the divers

are backing us off the LRT.

We are at 100 feet

and going down.

All systems go.

Roger that.

Coming up on 1,150, Sylvia.

How's your systems?

Systems fine. I'll

give you a check.

I see it! Oh! It's the bottom!

It's that thing that

explorers love to do,

which is to just get as far

away from humanity as they can.

In a way, ironically,

it puts you more in touch

with your own humanity.

Looking at a landscape

that hasn't changed in

billions of years...

you just feel the sense that

your lights only go so far,

everything out beyond the

lights is unexplored,

it's still unobserved.

So there's this almost egoless sense of...

of humility

before the vastness

of the unknown.

I had this great opportunity

for two-and-a-half hours

to walk around and explore

the ocean 1,250 feet down.

I asked them to turn off the lights so

we could have a completely dark ocean.

Except it wasn't

completely dark.

It was amazing.

The astronauts on the

moon, the first time,

they could just

look at each other.

I was surrounded by creatures.

Fish swimming by with little

lights down the side.

And there were thousands of

sparkles and flashes everywhere.

It was... I mean, I was...

just like a little kid.

And that must have been...

Was that scary?

No.

The scary part is always

getting on the highway...

...to drive to your submarine.

We say we want to go to the moon, and

10 years later, we're on the moon.

Why can't we say now,

"I wanna walk around

at 37,800 feet,

the bottom of the ocean,

seven miles down"?

And, "Let's do it."

The JIM suit really

fired in me...

the desire to do something

to make it easier,

not just for me, but for everyone,

to gain access to the sea

because only 5% of the ocean,

even today, has been seen.

Let alone mapped and explored.

And I began talking with an engineer who

was associated with that project...

and we got into a lively discussion

about those claws on the JIM suit

and I didn't realize he had

actually designed them.

I was so critical.

I insulted him.

"Oh, I thought I had

a good manipulator

and she says it's a stupid

piece of machinery."

And he went back to

England where he lived,

and what he came back with

was absolutely magnificent.

His name... Graham Hawkes, written...

with such dexterity and finesse

that he could have used

the manipulator arm

to sign a check that

would've cleared the bank.

I was... I was hooked.

It was on this project that she

met her husband, Graham Hawkes.

He is an engineer and inventor who

defected from the aerospace field

when he realized that the last frontier

was not space... but the deep ocean.

What I remember was

Sylvia saying,

"Why can't we go to the

bottom of the ocean?"

I'd spent, I think, five years getting

from 1,500 feet to 2,000 feet,

and here is Sylvia saying,

"I wanna go to 37,000 feet."

When Graham Hawkes and I

first began collaborating,

we wanted to go to

the deepest sea.

Well, I wanted to go anyway.

And then, I'm thinking...

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