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.

So, you know, I think the age of exploration is just beginning, not ending, on our planet.

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

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

NASA's annual budget for space exploration could fund NOAA's budget for ocean exploration for 1600 years.

Don't confuse facts with reality.

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.