my name is dan ferrari i'm at the woods hole oceanographic institution in the geology and geophysics department i'm a senior scientist there and i've been here at woods hole for about the last twenty three years my passion in life is to study deep sea volcanism volcanoes on the deep ocean floor our features which are very important because they are one of the things that actually is very critical to the evolution of the earth there mission rich system that snakes its way through the bottom of the ocean that is over sixty thousand miles long and it is a feature which is the largest volcanic feature on the planet  it's much more active than any volcanoes on land but because it is under water anywhere from fifteen hundred meters to almost four thousand meters deep people never see it and so people really don't know that there which generally is not very explosive not like the kind of volcanoes that you have in indonesia or in that or above oceanic trenches where the ocean crust is going underneath the continents  ridges because of the heat and chemical exchanges that are taking place between the ocean the volume of the ocean and of the water that gets heated up because of this hydrothermal activity meaning the heating up of  was in the middle of the atlantic ocean for instance back in the early one nine hundred but it wasn't until you have modern eco sounding meaning the way that you determine the depth of the ocean that people understood that it was in were the first to really recognize their importance and especially their importance in terms of plate tectonics plate tectonics is is is a process which is fundamental to our planet and actually other planets to the solar system but it's been very important in our planet because it is actually controlled where the continents have been moving around over hundreds of millions of years and the kinds of features that are developed and in fact it has a big impact on where you might find mineral deposits and ultimately where you end up having different kinds of biology on land because if you can imagine that north  america and europe and africa and south america were all connected once in one big continent you can understand how in some of the fossil records those animals may have actually been dispersed throughout those areas but maybe the same animals so we have lots of different lines of evidence that were coming together in the early one thousand hundreds and into the middle of one thousand nine hundred and then it was also matched by the kinds of studies that were done to understand that ocean ridges that ping them and by understanding what the types of structures were along the middle ridge one of the ways that we study mid ocean ridges is not only through understanding their topography or biffin a tree in the case of the things underneath the water but it's also by looking at the detailed structure of the features that are there in a similar way that you could fly in an airplane over the grand canyon or over some very prominent topographic feature on land we to and we make bathymetric images of features that are underneath the water and in doing so we can tell a lot about how they have evolved over time meaning hundreds of thousands or millions of years and that's very important because it allows us to understand the evolution of the of the spreading process that takes place throughout the world's oceans mid ocean ridges are the place where the spreading is actually occurring so the the crust of the earth at the middle ridge is zero wage meaning it's very very young versus an area for instance off japan or an area near the continental western continental margin of the us maybe tens of millions or hundreds of millions of years old because that's a place where the oceanic plate is going underneath the continental plates so we have used a lot of acoustics in our ability to map the the oceans that  gives us a way to if you will pull the plug on the oceans and drain the water out so that we can see the topography that is underneath it and by studying that topography and we are able to then understand the evolution of that terrain but also in sampling that terrain by dredging or by going down with submarines either human occupied submarines or remotely operated vehicles we can sample and map the ocean floor in a way that really hadn't been able to be done fifty years ago or sixty years ago so this is a very young science it's a very young perspective that we have on this very fundamental part of the planet i mean when you think about it you know at sea for spreading really even as a wild idea in some naturalists mind there were naturalists in the in germany and in in italy and in other places that had this idea this notion that maybe the continents were actually joined across the atlantic but it wasn't until the one nine hundred fifty s and one nine hundred sixty s that you had scientists who were then studying oceanography because oceanography is a very young science that we're actually studying the the terrain underneath the ocean and they were studying many aspects of the ocean crust and oceans and the chemistry of the oceans to understand how what its role was in the evolution of our planet so the one of the i think important things is to understand that while it's easy to ignore what goes on underneath the oceans it actually has a very big impact many people nowadays especially are aware of how important the for climate and climate studies have really demonstrated that we have had a significant impact over the last several hundred years on not only the chemistry of the oceans they become more acidic as well as the temperature of the oceans  so the oceans really have a very important role to play i'm a marine geologist so i mostly study the container of the oceans meaning the ocean basin but oceanography in general is something that's very critically important to twenty first century society and and the more we know about the ocean and the ocean floor and and and ocean processes the better off will be we've also clearly had a all of these studies are involved in oceanographic science whether you're a chemist or a biologist or a physical oceanographer that studies the physics of how water moves around or whether you're a marine geologist or geophysicist like me  are the kinds of topics that are critically important to understand and it's one of the reasons why we are always looking for great students to enter into the field of oceanography because it is a very young field and there's still many things to left to be discovered one of the very important things that has evolved over the last i would say decade to fifteen years is the use of robotics in studying the oceans and that's been a very exciting field because right now we have the ability to map the bottom of the ocean with as great a detail as people on land have to be able to map either a shoreline or a specific feature on on land  they use various combinations of laser line scanning or lidar imagery to map at centimeter level the kinds of features that occur on land underneath the oceans we can use autonomous underwater vehicles robots that have very high for high frequency sonars that operate very close to the bottom so that you can actually make the same kind of digital elevation model of the bottom of the ocean that you can on land and so as a result of that our understanding of features has gone from being able to understand things that are maybe a kilometer on a side using satellite altimetry data to about maybe a football field or so on a side using multi being betha metric data and now using autonomous underwater vehicles a viz we can now map things that are a few centimeters certainly submitter and coupled to the ability to actually take high definition cameras and imagery down to the bottom of the ocean we now have the ability to map and understand features on a scale that's relevant to whether something is causing something else meaning if you're imaging a  and you're looking at some animals within the flow of that hydrothermal vent you can actually image it at high resolution you can map the hydrothermal vent using the autonomous underwater vehicle to understand whether those processes are related the behavior of the animals versus the behavior of it so it's something that has really revolutionized i think ocean sciences and it's also allowed us to do a whole other range of type of studies which is time series studies you can actually bought that's able to measure things on the bottom of the ocean over longer periods of time and then you can either stay there with a submarine or with a remotely operated vehicle and the next level of that which is equally exciting is of ocean bottom observatories these kinds of observatories are actually in operation right now the ocean observing initiative by the national signed science foundation is a program that has taken i would say almost ten years to develop and it's now actually functioning off the coast of oregon and washington there is an observatory and several areas there ocean networks canada has an observatory off the west coast of  french are operating an observatory in the middle of the atlantic at ups at a seamount south of the islands so this is the kind of thing where scientists are realising that in order to better understand processes in phenomena they have to actually look at them twenty four seven  have to have the ability to monitor and measure them and so we're doing that and equally important is our ability to monitor seismic hazards offshore as you know seismic hazard offshore can create tsunamis these very large ocean waves that are can be very destructive and having the ability to have sea floor observatories and networks of ocean bottom seismometers is very important to that as well so for me one of the things that over my almost forty five year career as a scientist and as an oceanographer a marine geologist has been to put together some of this information that we've gleaned from these studies over the past several decades and especially the sort of high resolution imagery that we've been able to acquire at various mid ocean ridges of the volcanic terrain in the hydrothermal terrain and in collaboration with several other colleagues that i've worked with over the last few decades we have spent probably the last ten years writing a book called discovering the deep so this is a book which is just on the mid ocean ridges as a way to understand the the ocean crust  which is extremely dynamic and is as active as any type of terrain and feature that you'd find on land and has sort of within it the the whole spectrum hope will capture people's imagination and especially young kids it's got lots of great pictures of the types of volcanic terrain which is pretty fantastic in the types of fantastic animals that you see  to basically reveal that in this book with these high resolution images and the text which is written for a pretty broad audience too so it's something which we hope will engage future scientists and will  further to further help people understand this fantastic terrain that is underneath the oceans and ridges all of this of course really relies on funding and most of the funding in countries  outside the us and especially the us is funded by public money and those public dollars coming from my and your tax dollars are critically important to scientific research i think we've seen in the past that there has been somewhat of a reluctance to understand how science really works and that's one of the things that i feel is very important in my role as a scientist is to both engage in and train young researchers and young minds engage kids to want to become a scientist but they need to know that they have a few and i think the more our congresspeople and law lawmakers and leaders know that science is crucial for society and is very important to the progress of society and also for the proper stewardship of our planet i think the better off will be and so science funding is something which is very critical it is a in my view an extremely good use of tax dollars and it's something which has to be recognized as a real priority and i always you know whenever i'm giving sort of public lectures i always mention the fact that you know in the one nine hundred fifty s after world war two there was a real important recognition of the role that science played in the war effort and that's something which has i think been lost over the years it's something which recognises the ability for scientists to make a substantial contribution to society in many ways that we can't really imagine and you know if you just sort of look down at your hands and you look at your wrist watch which is probably a small little microchip in a computer or if you look at your or your phone and your your your ability to make communications and to you know have a small computer which is more powerful than one what went up in the first space launch you know that's something which has been  all sort of piece of evidence for the progress of science and how important fundamental it's been to the progress of society and so i think it's really important for us to recognize how important science is to society and in terms of the oceans even though they're covered by water they're critically important to study and it's something that really we should have as a priority for the twenty first century is the study of the oceans and the study of the ocean floor