Experiment

explorers and pioneers

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“I traversed the San Andreas fault off California, if you go off shore you can actually see the fault. Through the submarine we flew down between the two walls. It;s kind of you know, you get up these thermal vents and it’s pumping out black smoke, all the chemicals are precipitating out. It’s just like a chimney fire, it’s pumping out, and all these shrimp are living right on the fringe. If they go just a little bit, and they’re burned and dead. You see all this life living around the thermal vents.

Years ago, I found a new plant that nobody knew existed in freshwater in Yellowstone. And I also collected some samples from Yellowstone and gave them to the park service and found out that they had more life in the Nanoarchea range. They found more new life in those samples, than anybody had found anywhere in the world to date. We typically find new species of corals and fish that nobody knows about. Almost on every expedition we find something. We went out and found John F. Kennedy’s PT boat, PT-109, out in the Solomon Islands.

I’m trying to get back out to Indonesia in 2018, I think there’s a good chance we might. Indonesia is in the ‘Coral Triangle’. There are places that the Indonesian government has never let anybody in. That’s why I want to go.

There are two types of science, hypothesis driven science and exploration science. After so long in the institution model of doing research, I decided I had enough of skewed hypothesis chasing and embargoes on data for 3 years. With what we do, because it’s publicly funded, all of the data is immediately available and accessible.”

Dave Lovalvo, 5/16/15