TIME magazine's Bryan Walsh has posted a beautiful, in-depth story about Sylvia Earle and Mission Blue. Traveling from the Galapagos to the Sargasso Sea, and through oceans around the world, the profile tells Sylvia's story as a pioneering ocean scientist -- and details her lifelong quest to protect the ocean, one "hope spot" at a time. F...

Climate change, coral bleaching, ocean acidification, overfishing ... it can be easy to feel depressed about the ocean. But when you look at the big picture of ocean health, some good news emerges. Marine conservation researcher Ben Halpern calls himself an “ocean optimist.” But getting there wasn’t easy -- it’s taken more than eight years of r...

Bren Smith wants to create thousands of decent jobs, transform how we harvest food from the oceans, and blunt the effects of climate change and marine degradation -- all at the same time. His big idea: small-scale marine farms. As a fisherman in Newfoundland, Bren Smith (TEDxBermuda Talk: The least deadliest catch) saw his livelihood vanish whe...

  [embed]https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_dalio_how_to_build_a_company_where_the_best_ideas_win[/embed] The past few weeks have brimmed over with TED-related news. Below, some highlights. Exploring the ocean like never before. A school of ocean-loving TED speakers have teamed up to launch OceanX, an international initiative dedicated to di...

"Thousands have lived without love; none without water," said Sylvia Earle as she stood on the TED stage five years ago, accepting the 2009 TED Prize. Wearing a blue blazer and an aura of resolve, Earle quoted this verse from poet W.H. Auden as she laid out a bold wish for the world: that we all wise up to the gravity of human impact on our ...

  Closing out the weeklong Our Ocean conference at the State Department, on Tuesday US president Barack Obama pledged support for a proposal to create almost 700,000 square miles of newly protected ocean — no-fishing, no-drilling zones around US island territories. The protections would allow the ocean to rejuvenate, and perhaps replenish...

The massive layer of ice covering Greenland melted at a faster rate in July than at any other time in recorded history, with 97% of the entire ice sheet showing signs of significant thaw. The unprecedented rapid melting, which was captured in images taken from several satellites and released by NASA, alarmed scientists and deepened fears about...

Forget aerial drones. Underwater drones are where the action's at, at least according to OpenROV founder and TED Fellow David Lang. Imagine climbing into the cockpit of your own personal submarine, zooming and diving through the depths of the ocean and exploring otherwise-unreachable underwater worlds -- all without needing to know how to swim....

Sylvia Earle is a fearless 78-year-old woman. In the new documentary Mission Blue, we watch her dive with sharks in the deep blue sea and fearlessly dodge fishing nets as she swims through the middle of a major fishing operation. The film offers a bold new view of the famed oceanographer whose relentless pursuit of saving the ocean takes her ...

This probably sounds obvious, but it’s worth saying again: The oceans are a gorgeous, rich and diverse ecosystem that have inspired and supported humanity for millennia. But the oceans are also choked with plastic and becoming more acidic by the day. People are overfishing, which threatens the survival of fish species -- and also the survival of...

Scientist Sylvia Earle (TED Talk: My wish: Protect our oceans) has spent the past five decades exploring the seas. During that time, she's witnessed a steep decline in ocean wildlife numbers -- and a sharp incline in the number of ocean deadzones and oil drilling sites. An original documentary about Earle's life and work premieres today on Netfl...

Sylvia Earle is always on a mission. She launched the ocean conservation campaign Mission Blue in 2010 after winning the TED Prize, establishing protected marine “hope spots” around the world. And last weekend, Earle dove 63 feet beneath the ocean's surface to visit Fabien Cousteau, the grandson of legendary underwater explorer Jacques Coust...

A flying device combined with some nifty software is serving up invaluable information about the health of whales -- and our oceans. Back in 2011, researcher Iain Kerr was having a frustrating day chasing sperm whales on the Gulf of Mexico. Kerr, CEO of the nonprofit Ocean Alliance and chief scientist of Parley SnotBot, would wait to spot a...

TED Fellow Lauren Sallan is a paleobiologist who analyzes "big data" -- the fossil record -- to study large-scale evolution. As she says: "I want to know why some fishes win and others lose." Here's the story of her talk, in amazing work from illustrator and animator Dennis Moore.    

Right here in our solar system, three small ocean-containing moons are intriguing researchers, who think they might just harbor the conditions for existence to begin. Draw a Venn diagram with two overlapping circles, label one “oceans” and the other “planetary moons,” and look at where the two spheres intersect -- that’s where our search for al...

David Lang wants to make investigating the mysteries of the ocean accessible to anyone curious and adventurous enough to dive deep. Here, the co-founder of OpenROV -- a community of citizen ocean explorers and creators of low-cost underwater robots -- recounts his blistering journey from office job to fledgling maker to inventor of a robot tha...

TED Prize winner Sylvia Earle inspired all of us to care deeply about the ocean and to think deeply about how we can protect it. But the ocean is vast and the challenges are numerous. Where do we begin to understand the complex beauty that is the ocean? One great place to start: The new mission-blue.org. It's a home for ocean news and initia...

“Imagine yourself standing on a beach, looking out at the ocean -- waves crashing against the shore, blue as far as your eyes can see." This is the opening line of Scott Gass’ TED-Ed lesson, “How big is the ocean?” But the animated video gives you much more to think about than sand between your toes and waves tickling a white sandy paradise. I...

Underwater, there’s a world full of the bioluminescent and colorfully firework-like creatures. This is what David Gallo showed us in his classic talk from TED2007, “Underwater astonsihments.” The most interesting part: We have only explored about 3% of the world’s oceans, Gallo explains and, in this talk, he shares some views of that fascinatin...

We are saddened by the news that ocean photographer, filmmaker and storyteller Mike deGruy died yesterday in a helicopter crash in Australia. Mike was truly one of the great teachers and advocates for the oceans, as you can see in his TED Talk, filmed aboard Mission Blue in 2010: In this talk, as in his photography and his many films,...

The United States has long been known for its national parks. But last month, Barack Obama created a single marine reserve that covers significantly more area than all of them, combined. On August 26, 2016, Obama expanded the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument to 582,578 square miles around the northwestern islands of Hawaii. The m...

Enjoy these fascinating reads from across the Internet: TED-Ed's own Rose Eveleth looks at the science of building sandcastles, and directs our attention to a robot that can build one far more long-lasting than humans can. [Smart Planet] . Is the suffix “-ome” -- as in genome, phenome and the secretome -- overused? In this article, ev...

Ocean exploration has been the Cousteau family business for three generations. In this fascinating Q&A, aquanaut Fabien Cousteau discusses everything from why we need underwater cities to what it's like to beat your grandfather's world record. In 1963, Jacques Cousteau lived for 30 days in an underwater laboratory positioned on the floor of...

This past Monday, swimmer Diana Nyad made her fourth attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida. Though this attempt ended when weather and jellyfish conditions took a turn for the worse, we can look back at her talk from TEDMED 2011 to understand how she — and all of us — found "grace in the face of defeat." From her experience and that of other T...

Planet Earth doesn’t exactly have a birthday. But every year on April 22, we celebrate Earth Day -- the anniversary of the moment the environmental movement went mass. According to EarthDay.org, Earth Day was founded in 1970 by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson, who called for a “national teach-in on the environment” after witnessing the terrible e...

This image of a mysterious person emerging from the ocean looks like a shot from a James Bond movie. But as journalist Andrew Blum explains in today’s fascinating talk from TEDGlobal 2012, the photo actually reveals how the World Wide Web can stretch across continents—through a series of cables running for thousands of miles under oceans. ...

Thursday marked the first-ever TED en Español speaker event hosted by TED in its New York City office. The all-Spanish daytime event featured eight speakers, a musical performance, five short films and fifteen one-minute talks given by members of the audience. The New York event is just the latest addition to TED’s sweeping new Spanish-la...

On February 4, 2012, ocean filmmaker and educator Mike deGruy was killed in a helicopter crash while on assignment in Australia, along with pilot and filmmaker Andrew Wright. DeGruy (pronounced "degree") was an Emmy-winning science documentarian and a mainstay of Shark Week; he also worked on James Cameron documentaries about the Titanic and Bis...

How colorful is the ocean floor? And what exactly do you do when you run out of air underwater? Yesterday, we invited all of you to talk with oceanographer Sylvia Earle about her adventures as a deep sea diver. Earle is a TED Prize winner and the subject of a new documentary, Mission Blue, which gives an inside look at her lifelong mission t...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Ken Mogi, a Ph.D and researcher from the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Tokyo, bears a flag nearly twice his height, bright blue, covered with images of koi fish and Japanese letters. He begins by reminding us about a tragically transformative day in his country on March 11, 2011 that would change tens if...