Everything I'm going to present to you was not in my textbooks when I went to school ... not even in my college textbooks. I'm a geophysicist, and [in] all my Earth science books when I was a student - I had to give the wrong answer to get an A.

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

Remember to always dream. More importantly, work hard to make those dreams come true and never give up.

Great is the person who plants a tree knowing he will never sit under it.

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.

I am really dedicated to understanding the planet/creature on which we live and know that means I must go beneath the sea to see 72 percent of what is going on.

The fact that this chain of life existed [at volcanic vents on the seafloor] in the black cold of the deep sea and was utterly independent of sunlight - previously thought to be the font of all Earth's life - has startling ramifications. If life could flourish there, nurtured by a complex chemical process based on geothermal heat, then life could exist under similar conditions on planets far removed from the nurturing light of our parent star, the Sun.