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The OceanX Summit returns to Singapore, clearing the deck for bold ideas and transformative experiences that shape the next era of ocean impact. October 7 marks its first day of convergence, uniting disciplines, industries and voices to accelerate solutions pushing the ocean agenda forward.
OceanX Co-CEO and Founder Mark Dalio opened the Summit by framing five frontiers shaping OceanX’s work: education, leadership, ocean science, the blue economy, and collaboration.
"The ocean," he said, "is entering a period of extraordinary possibility. Better tools are taking us deeper and sharpening the questions that follow every discovery: How do we accelerate exploration? Protect ecosystems while sustaining the people and economies that depend on them? Bring the next generation into the work?"
Exploration sparks curiosity. Education builds understanding. Storytelling creates connection. Partnerships turn ideas into action.
For OceanX, Singapore has become a second home and an important base for work across Southeast Asia. Mark Dalio invited the room to step beyond what they already know, leave with an idea that changes them, and build relationships that last beyond the Summit.
Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Energy, Trade and Industry (Trade) Gan Kim Yong reinforced the need for shared responsibility. “No single country can protect the ocean alone,” he said, calling for science and innovation that can lead to a sustainable ocean future.
“There is still much about the ocean that we do not know,” Gan Kim Yong said, underscoring the need for trained people, new tools, patient capital and reliable data to close those knowledge gaps. His charge to the room was clear: “Our responsibility must begin at home. But it must also go beyond our shores.”
His message was practical: understand our own coastlines, explore the deep alongside our neighbors, and invest in the people, technology and resources that turn discovery into informed decisions. The ocean crosses every border. What one country learns becomes more powerful when that knowledge is shared.
In “Into the Unknown,” CNN’s Will Ripley joined award-winning filmmaker and ocean explorer James Cameron to explore what keeps drawing Cameron back to the deep.
“Curiosity is what always pulls me back to the ocean,” Cameron said. That same curiosity shaped OceanXplorer, a ship designed not only for science, but for sharing discovery as it happens.
For Cameron, storytelling is how engagement begins. A child watching a humpback mother protect her calf might one day become a scientist. Robots can extend our reach, but a person who witnesses the deep firsthand can carry that experience back to the world.
Cameron also returned to the Titanic as a metaphor for humanity’s response to warning signs. The point was not that the wheel is out of reach, but that someone has to take it.
His advice to young people was simple: “Satisfy your curiosity and get excited about the real world.”
“The Power of Storytelling to Drive Change” examined how narratives can build trust, shape public attention, and support action.
National Geographic Society CEO, Jill Tiefenthaler, described storytelling as the organization’s “superpower,” built on a foundation of science and education. Awareness matters, but awe can move people from knowing to caring.
Award-winning filmmaker, James Honeyborne, pointed to Blue Planet II as an example of storytelling’s ability to build momentum around research and advocacy. Stories do not replace science or write policy, he argued, but they can help millions of people care about the work already underway.
His formula was direct: start with a hero and a problem. Entertain first, then earn the right to introduce the difficult message.
The takeaway: lead with emotion and human connection, keep science underneath every frame, and make room for younger generations as leaders now.
“New Mediums, New Mindsets” explored what happens when audiences move from watching the ocean to experiencing it.
The session began with three words from Pixar director, Andrew Stanton: “Make me care.” Immersive media offers one answer. Instead of receiving a message from a distance, audiences can become participants inside the story.
For Parley for the Oceans founder, Cyrill Gutsch, many ocean challenges are also design challenges: if the systems around us were designed, they can be redesigned. Associate Professor Ina Conradi connected art and science through a shared search for deeper understanding.
University of Oregon Professor Daniel Pimentel explained why immersion can feel personal. Build a virtual reef and watch it respond to warming water, and the brain begins to process that digital environment as something we helped create, and therefore feel responsible for.
The evidence is still emerging, and ocean-focused immersive experiences remain relatively few. But that gap is also an opportunity to tell more ocean stories and turn spectators into participants.
Education returned to the center of the conversation with OceanX's Mark Dalio, Tanoto Foundation's Anderson Tanoto, and Temasek Trust’s Jennifer Lewis.
Southeast Asia is home to some of the richest marine environments on Earth, and the young people growing up alongside them will inherit both the challenges and the solutions.
For Dalio, education is a pathway into advocacy, science, engineering, data, AI, and storytelling. For Tanoto, the future of AI depends on trustworthy foundations: “AI is only as good as its foundational data.”
That makes primary ocean data, and opportunities to learn by doing, essential. The ambition is to scale beyond the students who can board OceanXplorer each year, expanding into hackathons, impact challenges, fellowships, residencies, and curricula that can reach many more learners.
The goal is not simply to teach, but to ignite momentum that young people carry into their own communities.
The OceanX Changemakers: Emerging Leaders Spotlight showed there is no single route into ocean work.
OFF Immersive media fellows Ram Murugan and Lewis Kimaru arrived from very different relationships with the sea. Murugan grew up watching reefs change and helped build tools for 3D reef study. Kimaru grew up in central Kenya, far from the ocean, before curiosity and technology brought him into ocean storytelling. “Sometimes the future of the ocean begins with someone very far away, who is simply curious enough to ask a question, " he said.
Bodhi Patil reframed AI as “Ancient Intelligence,” asking whose knowledge is valued and urging leaders to include Indigenous people and young people in decision-making.
Brigitta Maria Andrea Gunawan emphasized what emerging leaders need most: opportunities to learn, tools, mentorship, and trust.
Technology, tradition, art, science, and lived experience all offer different ways into the same mission. The future of the ocean will need all of them.
Day 1 closed with “New Tools, New Territories: Building AI for an Unmapped Ocean,” bringing together experts in frontier AI, biodiversity, biological data, and cloud infrastructure.
For AI, the ocean presents a difficult classroom: vast, dynamic, sparsely observed, and fragmented across disciplines and institutions. The starting point is data.
Samples can now be sequenced aboard ships, while AI can interpret images, video, eDNA, and other information that once demanded far more manual processing.
“Data needs AI, AI needs data,” Snowflake co-founder Benoit Dageville said. Poor data can produce poor decisions, while better access and open sharing can help AI reveal patterns where observations remain scarce.
Google DeepMind’s Abhishek Modi offered a practical principle: start with what is available. Models can already make useful predictions even where datasets are imperfect or limited."Start where you are, basically. Better than not starting at all," he said.
Teaching AI the ocean takes good data, open sharing and a willingness to start before everything is known. Each new sample, shared dataset and answered question helps the machine find its stroke. With data that flows back to the people who gather it, more of us can learn to swim in the ocean's knowledge together.
OceanX's Roo Rise Expedition uncovered rich Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems, its importance, and its cost if left unprotected.
The Blue Economy is reshaping how we use and protect the ocean. Learn what it means and why it matters.
The future of ocean conservation depends on more than scientific discovery. It depends on people.
