maybe back in the the 1960s,

when I was seven or eight years old,

watching Jacques Cousteau documentaries on the living room floor

with my mask and flippers on.

Then after every episode, I had to go up to the bathtub

and swim around the bathtub and look at the drain,

because that's all there was to look at.

And by the time I turned 16,

I pursued a career in marine science,

in exploration and diving,

and lived in underwater habitats, like this one off the Florida Keys,

for 30 days total.

Brian Skerry took this shot. Thanks, Brian.

And I've dived in deep-sea submersibles around the world.

And this one is the deepest diving submarine in the world,

operated by the Japanese government.

And Sylvia Earle and I

were on an expedition in this submarine

20 years ago in Japan.

And on my dive, I went down 18,000 feet,

to an area that I thought

would be pristine wilderness area on the sea floor.

But when I got there, I found

lots of plastic garbage and other debris.

And it was really a turning point in my life,

where I started to realize

that I couldn't just go have fun doing science and exploration.

I needed to put it into a context.

I needed to head towards conservation goals.

So I began to work

with National Geographic Society and others

and led expeditions to Antarctica.

I led three diving expeditions to Antarctica.

Ten years ago was a seminal trip,

where we explored that big iceberg, B-15,

the largest iceberg in history, that broke off the Ross Ice Shelf.

And we developed techniques

to dive inside and under the iceberg,

such as heating pads on our kidneys

with a battery that we dragged around,

so that, as the blood flowed through our kidneys,

it would get a little boost of warmth

before going back into our bodies.

But after three trips to Antarctica,

I decided that it might be nicer to work in warmer water.

And that same year, 10 years ago,

I headed north to the Phoenix Islands.

And I'm going to tell you that story here in a moment.

But before I do, I just want you to ponder this graph for a moment.

You may have seen this in other forms,

but the top line is the amount of protected area

on land, globally,

and it's about 12 percent.

And you can see that it kind of hockey sticks up

around the 1960s and '70s,

and it's on kind of a nice trajectory right now.

And that's probably because

that's when everybody got aware of the environment

and Earth Day

and all the stuff that happened in the '60s with the Hippies and everything

really did, I think, have an affect on global awareness.

But the ocean-protected area

is basically flat line

until right about now -- it appears to be ticking up.

And I do believe that we are at the hockey stick point

of the protected area in the ocean.

I think we would have gotten there a lot earlier

if we could see what happens in the ocean

like we can see what happens on land.

But unfortunately, the ocean is opaque,

and we can't see what's going on.

And therefore we're way behind on protection.

But scuba diving, submersibles

and all the work that we're setting about to do here

will help rectify that.

So where are the Phoenix Islands?

They were the world's largest marine-protected area

up until last week

when the Chagos Archipelago was declared.

It's in the mid-Pacific. It's about five days from anywhere.

If you want to get to the Phoenix Islands,

it's five days from Fiji,

it's five days from Hawaii, it's five days from Samoa.

It's out in the middle of the Pacific,

right around the Equator.

I had never heard of the islands 10 years ago,

nor the country, Kiribati, that owns them,

till two friends of mine who run a liveaboard dive boat in Fiji

said, "Greg, would you lead a scientific expedition up to these islands?

They've never been dived."

And I said, "Yeah.

But tell me where they are and the country that owns them."

So that's when I first learned of the Islands

and had no idea what I was getting into.

But I was in for the adventure.

Let me give you a little peek here of the Phoenix Islands-protected area.

It's a very deep-water part of our planet.

The average depths are about 12,000 ft.

There's lots of seamounts in the Phoenix Islands,

which are specifically part of the protected area.

Seamounts are important for biodiversity.

There's actually more mountains in the ocean than there are on land.

It's an interesting fact.

And the Phoenix Islands is very rich in those seamounts.

So it's a deep -- think about it in a big three-dimensional space,

very deep three-dimensional space

with herds of tuna, whales,

all kinds of deep sea marine life

like we've seen here before.

That's the vessel that we took up there

for these studies, early on,

and that's what the Islands look like -- you can see in the background.

They're very low to the water,

and they're all uninhabited, except one island

has about 35 caretakers on it.

And they've been uninhabited for most of time

because even in the ancient days,

these islands were too far away

from the bright lights of Fiji and Hawaii and Tahiti

for those ancient Polynesian mariners

that were traversing the Pacific so widely.

But we got up there,

and I had the unique and wonderful scientific opportunity and personal opportunity

to get to a place that had never been dived

and just get to an island and go, "Okay, where are we going to dive?

Let's try there,"

and then falling into the water.

Both my personal and my professional life changed.

Suddenly, I saw a world

that I had never seen before in the ocean --

schools of fish that were so dense

they dulled the penetration of sunlight from the surface,

coral reefs that were continuous

and solid and colorful,

large fish everywhere,

manta rays.

It was an ecosystem. Parrotfish spawning --

this is about 5,000 longnose parrotfish spawning

at the entrance to one of the Phoenix Islands.

You can see the fish are balled up

and then there's a little cloudy area there

where they're exchanging the eggs and sperm for reproduction --

events that the ocean is supposed to do,

but struggles to do in many places now

because of human activity.

The Phoenix Islands and all the equatorial parts of our planet

are very important for tuna fisheries,

especially this yellowfin tuna that you see here.

Phoenix Islands is a major tuna location.

And sharks -- we had sharks on our early dives,

up to 150 sharks at once,

which is an indication

of a very, very healthy, very strong, system.

So I thought the scenes

of never-ending wilderness

would go on forever,

but they did finally come to an end.

And we explored the surface of the Islands as well --

very important bird nesting site,

some of the most important bird-nesting sites in the Pacific, in the world.

And we finished our trip.

And that's the area again.

You can see the Islands -- there are eight islands --

that pop out of the water.

The peaks that don't come out of the water are the seamounts.

Remember, a seamount turns into an island when it hits the surface.

And what's the context of the Phoenix Islands?

Where do these exist?

Well they exist in the Republic of Kiribati,

and Kiribati is located in the Central Pacific

in three island groups.

In the west we have the Gilbert Islands.

In the center we have the Phoenix Islands,

which is the subject that I'm talking about.

And then over to the east we have the Line Islands.

It's the largest atoll nation in the world.

And they have

about 110,000 people

spread out over 33 islands.

They control 3.4 million cubic miles of ocean,

and that's between one and two percent

of all the ocean water on the planet.

And when I was first going up there,

I barely knew the name of this country 10 years ago,

and people would ask me,

"Why are you going to this place called Kiribati?"

And it reminded me of that old joke

where the bank robber comes out of the courthouse handcuffed,

and the reporter yells, "Hey, Willy. Why do you rob banks?"

And he says, "cause that's where all the money is."

And I would tell people, "Why do I go to Kiribati?

Because that's where all the ocean is."

They basically are one nation

that controls most of the equatorial waters

of the Central Pacific Ocean.

They're also a country

that is in dire danger.

Sea levels are rising,

and Kiribati, along with 42 other nations in the world,

will be under water within 50 to 100 years

due to climate change

and the associated sea-level rise from thermal expansion

and the melting of freshwater into the ocean.

The Islands rise only one to two meters

above the surface.

Some of the islands have already gone under water.

And these nations are faced with a real problem.

We as a world are faced with a problem.

What do we do with displaced fellow Earthlings

who no longer have a home on the planet?

The president of the Maldives

conducted a mock cabinet meeting

underwater recently

to highlight the dire straits of these countries.

So it's something we need to focus on.

But back to the Phoenix Islands,

which is the subject of this Talk.

After I got back, I said,

okay, this is amazing, what we found.

I'd like to go back and share it with the government of Kiribati,

who are over in Tarawa,

the westernmost group.

So I started contacting them --

because they had actually given me a permit to do this --

and I said, "I want to come up and tell you what we found."

And for some reason they didn't want me to come,

or it was hard to find a time and a place, and it took a while,

but finally they said, "Okay, you can come.

But if you come, you have to buy lunch

for everybody who comes to the seminar."

So I said, "Okay, I'm happy to buy lunch.

Just get whatever anybody wants."

So David Obura, a coral reef biologist, and I went to Tarawa,

and we presented for two hours

on the amazing findings of the Phoenix Islands.

And the country never knew this. They never had any data from this area.

They'd never had any information from the Phoenix Islands.

After the talk, the Minister of Fisheries walked up to me

and he said, "Greg, do you realize

that you are the first scientist

who has ever come back

and told us what they did?"

He said, "We often issue these permits

to do research in our waters,

but usually we get a note two or three years later,

or a reprint.

But you're the first one who's ever come back and told us what you did.