OCEAN-FOCUSED INNOVATION

Despite decades of warnings, humanity continues to treat the ocean as an inexhaustible resource and a bottomless dumping ground

- Bertrand Piccard

In 1960, my father, Jacques Piccard, reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench nearly 11,000 meters below sea level. The mission was not to make headlines, but to disprove a dangerous misconception. Some experts had claimed that no life could survive in the crushing darkness of the ocean's depths, and that assumption had led to proposals to use the deep sea as a dumping ground for nuclear waste. But my father and his team encountered living fish — a discovery that prevented a potentially catastrophic mistake.

My father's mission underscores what exploration has always meant to my family. It is not about conquest and domination, but rather curiosity and understanding. Studying nature expands not only the frontiers of our knowledge, but also the scope of our responsibility as planetary stewards.

Today, the ocean is under greater threat than ever, and not only because the United States has just set the stage for private companies to pursue deep-sea mining in international waters. Despite decades of warnings, humanity continues to treat the ocean as an inexhaustible resource and a bottomless dumping ground. We are suffocating it with plastic, heating it with emissions, poisoning it with chemicals, and depleting it by overfishing. But the biggest danger is subtler: As was true in 1960, there is glaring gap between what we know and what we are doing.