[Nekton team launching Omega Seamaster II submersible]
[Ray swimming underwater]
[Maldivian scientists at work in submersible underwater]
[Scientists examining samples taken from ocean off Maldives coast]
[Ocean Census press briefing]
Professor Alex Rogers (interview): “Well, at the moment, our knowledge of where life is in the ocean, how much of it there is, is very limited. And without that knowledge, we can’t modify our human activities to conserve that life for future generations.”
[Various sea creatures]
[Ocean Census press briefing]
Yōhei Sasakawa (interview): “People are too focused on outer space, however, little is known beneath our feet – the ocean. That’s why it’s so important to bring attention to the ocean through these new discoveries.”
[Various coral reef]
Aya Naseem (interview): “We’re moving to a 1.5 degrees rise in global temperatures by 2030, and at that rate, corals of the world will be reduced by more than 90%. So unless we can drastically reduce global carbon emissions, coral reefs will not survive.”
[Aerial shot of field research station]
[Aerial shot of Oxford University Museum of Natural History]
[Statue of Charles Darwin]
[Specimens and exhibits brought to Oxford by early explorers]
Professor Steve Widdicombe (interview): “It is an ambitious endeavour, but ambition is what we need at the moment. The thing that strikes me about this project is that it recognises and values the foundational science that’s needed to underpin scientific discovery in the oceans. It’s all well and good looking for the next big science paper, but without understanding what animals live where and what they do, we cannot hope to understand how our oceans are going to respond in the future or how we can best protect them.”
[Falkor Too, Schmidt Ocean Institute ship, on sea trials]
[Schmidt Institute team working with equipment on ship and underwater]
Dr. Jyotika Virmani (interview): “The idea is with that video footage of thousands and thousands of hours of underwater footage, we need to label everything. That’s the first step. And so training programmes, machine learning to identify and label automatically will then allow us to know what’s in that video. And then using that data it can then feed into AI.”
[Aerial of Wellcome Sanger Institute]
[Scientist loading gene sequencing machine]
[Scientist extracting DNA]
Mara Lawniczak (interview): “There’s so much of the ocean that is undiscovered in terms of its species richness and diversity. And the people who will be out there capturing and collecting these organisms and describing and seeing them for the first time and preserving them in such a way as they can come here (to the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge) and we can generate that baseline understanding of their genomes. And forever more there’s a record of what that organism’s DNA looked like, and this will be really important as we move forward to try to understand what is out there and are we doing a good job at protecting it.”
This script was provided by The Associated Press.