Alan Stern Quotes

The one thing I've learned exploring the deep is that you just can't even begin to imagine some of the bizarre creatures that are down there.

The corals do not look much worn, but still appear to have been dead. There are some delicate shells of molluscs from depths beyond 500 fathoms, where they were certainly living.

Zero of Animal Life probably about 300 fathoms.

As we descend deeper and deeper in this region its inhabitants become more and more modified, and fewer and fewer, indicating our approach towards an abyss where life is either extinguished, or exhibits but a few sparks to mark its lingering presence.

The deep sea is a scary world.

There's a lot of animals in the open ocean - most of them that make light. And we have a pretty good idea, for most of them, why. They use it for finding food, for attracting mates, for defending against predators. But when you get down to the bottom of the ocean, that's where things get really strange.

If I go out in the open ocean environment, virtually anywhere in the world, and I drag a net from 3,000 feet to the surface, most of the animals - in fact, in many places, 80 to 90 percent of the animals that I bring up in that net - make light. This makes for some pretty spectacular light shows.

In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized. They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but algae-covered bones.

In the ocean, [bioluminescence] is the rule rather than the exception.

Finding animals that make light in the ocean is easy. Just drag a net through the water anywhere in the upper 3000 feet, and as many as 80-90% of the animals you catch can make light. The biomimetic lure that I developed imitates one of these - a common deep sea jellyfish called Atolla.

One of the things that's frustrated me as a deep-sea explorer is how many animals there probably are in the ocean that we know nothing about because of the way we explore the ocean.

It is clear that if we are going to understand ocean ecosystems, we need to understand the part that bioluminescence plays in those ecosystems.

Since my first dive in a deep-diving submersible, when I went down and turned out the lights and saw the fireworks displays, I've been a bioluminescence junky. But I would come back from those dives and try to share the experience with words, and they were totally inadequate to the task. I needed some way to share the experience directly.

To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantomlike, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts.

Maybe staying on the surface keeps her from returning to a place where she can't breathe.

We've explored very little of the ocean. We really don't know what's out there. But people think we've figured it all out.

The bottom of the sea is cruel.

I am fond of them, of the inferior beings of the abyss, of those who are full of longing.

I have in hands, now, specimens of bottom from t he Gulf Stream, obtained by Lieutenant Craven, and I can say that they are among the most interesting that I have ever seen.

Ten percent of the big fish still remain. There are still some blue whales. There are still some krill in Antarctica. There are a few oysters in Chesapeake Bay. Half the coral reefs are still in pretty good shape, a jeweled belt around the middle of the planet. There's still time, but not a lot, to turn things around.

I'd like to see the giant squid. Nobody has ever seen one. I could tell you people who have spent thousands and thousands of pounds trying to see giant squid. I mean, we know they exist because we have seen dead ones. But I have never seen a living one. Nor has anybody else.

I think there's so much we don't know and the unknown in the ocean; every 10 years or so, we find some fossil that's been there before mankind.

If you're going to make a lot of films about a particular group of animals, you might as well pick one that's fairly common. And octopus are: they live in all the oceans. They also live deep. And I can't say octopus are responsible for my really strong interest in getting in subs and going deep, but whatever the case, I like that.

Without the oceans there would be no life on Earth.

I really feel that there are things in the ocean that we have no idea about.