Phil Gingrey Quotes

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.

The Deep Flight Challenger technology is a game-changer for ocean exploration.

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.

People have said I belong in a rubber room because I look for wrecks, and when I find them, I just do a survey. I don't look for treasure or artifacts.

When I was a little kid, I always wanted to be an oceanographer.

I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.

The quickest way to destroy ocean science is to take human explorers out of the water

If you compare NASA's annual budget to explore the heavens, that one year budget would fund NOAA's budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years.

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.

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.

Right up until the late 18th century, when the first weighted lines were used to probe the ocean depths, many people believed the seas were bottomless - the watery equivalent of infinite outer space.

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 want everybody to go jump in the ocean to see for themselves how beautiful it is, how important it is to get acquainted with fish swimming in the ocean, rather than just swimming with lemon slices and butter.

Neither does man have gills for living in a water environment; yet it is not sinful to explore the depths of the oceans in search of food or other blessings.

The Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there's an alien world here on Earth.

Of course there is still unexplored terrestrial territory, but most of it is waterlogged. Submersed secret places, such as the Challenger Deep, which today lure hi-tech adventurers like Richard Branson and James Cameron, will undoubtedly provide welcome fodder for 'National Geographic.'

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.

The ocean is the last frontier of human empirical knowledge; even the contours on that eighth-grader's globe are the product of a mix of scientific measurement, inference and conjecture.

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

I swam with my first shark in the 1980s. I was 20 miles off the coast of Rhode Island, working with a group of marine scientists. Late in the day, a 5-foot long blue shark swam into our chum slick. For the next hour, I marveled at the animal's stunning indigo color and the elegant way she moved effortlessly through the sea.

The oceans have been a part of my life for as long as I remember. As a child, I spent hours playing in the surf off Cape Cod. In college, I fished along the rocky coast of Nova Scotia with my school's fishing team.

Before you can exploit, you explore.... When President Reagan signed the paper defining our Undersea Exclusionary Zone, we doubled the size of the United States land. But unlike the Louisiana Purchase where we had a Lewis & Clark Expedition to survey the new land, we don't know what we have.

I had wanted to place the Eye-in-the-Sea at an oasis on the bottom of the ocean, in some site rich with life that was likely to be patrolled by large predators. The first time I got to test the camera at such a place was in 2004, in the north end of the Gulf of Mexico, at an amazing location called the brine pool.

The amazing thing about the sea is that it is perhaps the last truly unexplored frontier; most oceanographers estimate that only about ninety-five per cent of the sea has been studied. Meanwhile, the oceans are believed to contain more animals than exist on land, a majority of which have never been discovered.

I have made hundreds of dives in submersibles, with each dive holding the promise of seeing an organism or a behavior that no one has ever seen before. But I have always wondered about the animals and behaviors that we're not seeing because our bright lights and loud thrusters scare them away.