Treasure hunter finds silver, gold, and more beneath the sea | Bradford Baker | TEDxFultonStreet

humans aren't supposed to be here it's freezing cold it's 34 degrees and the pressure is three tons per square inch that's 6,000 pounds per square inch we're 15,000 feet below the surface of the ocean do you want to see what it looks like it's so dark you can't even see your hand in front of your face it is unbelievable to be here I've spent the last two decades of my life exploring the wealth of the oceans and the treasures they are as a time of this story I was chairman of Odyssey Marine Exploration and what I've done is tried to find the riches of the ocean but the real riches aren't necessarily the treasure that we're finding I'm going to show you some of that today the real riches are what will determine our future and I'll share with you that today as well let's start with Winston Churchill in 1941 Churchill needed money to pay for the war and he ordered India to send silver bars so the gira sopa was filled with silver bars and other cargo and set sail from Calcutta to England but Hans Ming Gerson had other ideas in u-boat 101 where he was captain he shot one torpedo that sunk the gara sopa into the icy cold waters of the North Atlantic off the coast of Cork Ireland we went looking for this ship on this ship we were looking for 2,800 silver bars each of them weighing about 70 pounds and the size of a loaf of bread our search area was marked by the star down on the bottom it's about 200 square miles and if we find the ship it's worth over a hundred million dollars is the control room of our ship the brain center and from here we deploy the sensitive instrumentation that will help us find it magnetometers look for metal objects and of course this ship has a lot of metal on it it's not an easy game though it's an expensive game and others have tried and failed spending millions of dollars and you know what we've kind of been failing too with this we spent 90 days looking for it and it's September late September and the weather is about to turn on us so we have to figure this out pretty quickly or else we're going to have to shut it down for the season and sure enough we get a reading that looks pretty interesting to us so we want to look at it further so off the side of the ship we deploy our ROV and this is basically an expensive robot that has a lot of cameras on it and we go down there drop 15,000 feet this is deeper than the Titanic it actually takes three and a half hours to drop that deep so we get down to the bottom and our light shines on this and this is the first thing we see and then our light shines on this and finally our light shines on this the hole that the torpedo made in the side of the ship we knew we had found our ship we had found the gira sope but at in a real sense we knew that we'd only really done the easy part the hard part was still ahead we'd spent days looking for the gira sopa but we were going to have to spend months bringing up the cargo that was on it what happens is that ship was at 15,000 feet underwater and what we were having to do was like I can open or cut every deck of the ship apart one deck at a time until we finally found the silver bars it's not easy to do this at 15,000 feet and we brought up the first silver bar and we look at it and it kind of doesn't look like silver it's yellow and silver is not supposed to be yellow and we were pretty concerned so in fact if you look look on the screen you see the silver on the right looks like silver but those on the right have a yellow tinge to them maybe maybe they were counterfeit silver balls that wouldn't be good to spend 125,000 dollars a day to run a ship to bring up counterfeit silver bars or maybe they weren't silver at all or maybe they had arsenic in them and if our crew touched these bars they could get sick so we are pretty concerned we didn't know what we were up against and so what we had to do is drill a hole through one of the bars and I that'll make you cry right to just drill a hole through a bar but we did to see if the impurity went all the way through and sure enough when we tested it it did go all the way through but do you know what it was gold I love pollution don't you so we brought up twenty seven hundred and ninety-two silver bars a hundred and ten tons of silver from the ship and sure enough we did sell it for over a hundred million dollars you want to see one Wow T it's right here and that's what they look like now this is size of a loaf of bread as you can see if I put my hand up next to it it weighs a little over 70 pounds and this is one of the original bars that was pure 0.99 silver I think we only got thirty or so of those bars the rest of them were all had impurities in them and what we had to do was riri fine them in order to sell them which is what we did there's over three million shipwrecks all over the world in all the oceans but yet when I look out in the ocean of course it's easy to look at bars like this and say wow there's so much money there but the real wealth of the oceans are in the mysteries and the things hidden underground seventy percent of the world is underwater and we live on the 30% this is above the ground it's getting pretty crowded up here and if you look at the population in 1960 there were three billion people up here with us well if you project it out to 2050 there's nine billion people how are we going to feed these people and how are we going to provide the energy and the raw materials for all the things that we need that's my question and you know I think I have the answer and that's it's going to be in the ocean and the 5% we've only explored 5% of the ocean and it's going to be in the 70% of the world that we just just know so little about we probably know more about the moon than we do the ocean you know the first thing we need to do is feed all these people how are we going to feed 9 billion people we've got to become more efficient at farming and one of the ways to do that is with fertilizer fertilizer is phosphate when you look at a bag of fertilizer the middle numbers actually phosphate well phosphate is a dirty business mining is never easy and in fact what you have to do is build a road to cut down a bunch of trees to dig a big hole that's maybe two or three hundred feet deep and then you use lots and lots of water which you end up polluting in order to put that bag of fertilizer in a store this is really interesting this is the longest conveyor belt in the world and you know where it is Morocco Morocco controls 80% of all the phosphate in the world Saudi Arabia only owns about 12% of the oil can you see how much control this one country is going to have on the food resources for the world while we were looking for these silver bars we found something that was really interesting to us off the coast of Mexico we found which we think is probably one of the largest phosphate deposits in the world it's a world-class deposit and what's really great about this phosphate mine is it sits right on the surface we don't have to dig 200 or 300 feet down to get to it we don't have to build a strip mine and go through all these things that are really bad for the environment but we can just pull it up from the ocean floor bring it up to our ship process it and what's left is really just sand and maybe some shells which we return but with very little environmental impact this is actually a strip mine the largest strip mine in the world is in Chile in a rainforest so every time that you need copper you're really kind of cutting down a tree and getting it from a rainforest that just doesn't seem right and you know we're going to need a lot of copper you know why we're going to need so much copper well here's why Tesla's Tesla's have believe it or not an electric motor in them and that electric motor is made with copper a Tesla uses three times more copper than a internal combustion engine does windmills are the same way a lot of copper in a windmill in order to feel good about the green economy and we all drive around in these beautiful electric cars we're cutting down rainforests and building roads and ruining the environment and so what we want to do is try to find a way to build that Tesla efficiently and we think we can do that so our goal is to go out into the ocean and find these deposits of copper gold silver and phosphates that are sitting on the ground of the ocean that have been brought up if you think of the molten metal in the core of the earth coming up through smokers and hitting the cold ocean water and just sitting there on the ground for us to take so much easier than mining and destroying the environment so we have found a way to do good things for the environment at the same time that we feed and provide the resources for the world ahead you know when I started this business I I got into it really for personal wealth because well let's face it finding shipwrecks just as a fun thing to do and when you find a lot of these it could make you wealthy right or make our shareholders wealthy as I was doing this I discovered that there's a lot that's being done for Humanity through what we're doing today we started our discussion at 15,000 feet in the darkness and yet now when I go down deep into the ocean I don't think of darkness I see light I see a bright light for future generations thank you very much you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 452,062

Rating: 4.1568074 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Science (hard), Adventure, Agriculture, Entrepreneurship, Farming, Food, Materials, Mining, Oceans

Id: jaocaZsp1DE

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2015