I am a geologist.

I mean, there is amazing amount of oil and gas and other resources out beneath the sea. It’s staggering.

There’s a long list of technologies that have now made it possible to carry out very precise search efforts in the deep sea.

My family came in 1635 from England and settled in Williamsburg. Shortly after, they split up; half went to New England and half stayed in Virginia. I’m a Virginian Ballard.

I believe in just enriching the economy. And we’re leaving so much on the table, 72 percent of the planet.

Well, when I was a kid, I grew up in San Diego next to the ocean. The ocean was my friend – my best friend.

Almost a quarter of our planet is a single mountain range and we didn’t enter it until after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the moon. So we went to the moon, played golf up there, before we went to the largest feature on our own planet.

It’s not a huge surprise that there are habitations at the bottom of the Black Sea.

There’s probably more history now preserved underwater than in all the museums of the world combined. And there’s no law governing that history. It’s finders keepers.

You don’t go to Gettysburg with a shovel, you don’t take belt buckles off the Arizona.