Sylvia Earle:

We cooked up this idea of going on the nose of the submarine, like the ornament on the hood of a car, together down to the bottom of the ocean, and then I would step off at the maximum depth we could go, which turned out to be about 400 meters, 1,250 feet.

Creatures with lights down the side, they looked like little ocean liners. There are various kinds of jellies and crustaceans and little squids and the fish. It's like diving into a galaxy of these lights.

What's hard is getting people to understand why the ocean matters to them. If the ocean dried up tomorrow, life would also dry up. That's where most of the action on Earth is. It's 97 percent of the water on Earth.

They should know that, with every breath they take, every drop of water they drink, the ocean is touching them.

You should treat the ocean as if your life depends on it, because it does.

My name is Sylvia Earle, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on why the ocean matters to all of us.