This TED Talk features biological oceanographer Angelique White, recorded live at TED at NAS 2019.

I'm a biological oceanographer. I have the absolute privilege of studying microbial lives in the Pacific Ocean.

So we'll talk about microbes in a minute, but I first want to

give you a sense of place, a sense of scale. The Pacific Ocean is our largest, deepest ocean basin.

It covers 60 million square miles. If you took all the continents and you put them together in a little

Pangaea 2.0, they'd fit snug inside

the Pacific, right, with room to spare. It's a massive ecosystem, from the blues of the open

ocean to the green of the continental margins. In this place, I get to study the base of the

food web, plankton. Now, in my research research and really in the field of microbial oceanography

as a whole, there's a theme that has emerged, and that theme is change. These microbial ecosystems

are changing in real and measurable ways, and it is not that hard to see it.

Oceans cover 70% of our planet.

So ocean change is planetary change, and it all starts with microbes.

Now, I have two vignettes to share with you, and these are meant to be love stories to microbes.

But I'll be honest that there's an aspect of it that's just a total bummer.

And beware, focus on the love, right?

That's where I'm coming from.

So the first thing to know is that the forests of the sea are

microbial and what I mean by that is that by and large plants in the open ocean are microscopic

and they are much more abundant than we realize these are tiny tiny plants and animals. They come in a variety of

shapes and sizes and colors and metabolisms. There are hundreds of thousands in a single

milliliter of seawater. You are definitely swimming with them when you're in the ocean. They produce

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