The Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands (PLOCAN) successfully delivered the plenary session “Atlantis 2050: The Future Underwater” to an audience of nearly two hundred secondary school students from Gran Canaria gathered at the ÍNSULA 2025 science outreach event. This science fair has been running since Tuesday at the Gabinete Literario in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
Today’s session transformed classical mythology into a call for scientific and technological action, creating an inspiring experience that connects academic knowledge with professional opportunities in the blue future.
José Joaquín Hernández Brito, PLOCAN’s director, led the conversation—moderated by journalist Lorena Sánchez—in a session that held the audience’s attention through an immersive narrative journey: from wonder and mystery to urgency, hope, and finally a direct call to action.
The inspiring dialogue format, together with the guest’s presentation, fostered a strong connection with the youth audience, using an engaging narrative, everyday examples, and interactive challenges that resonated with the students.
The presentation was structured in four strategically designed acts: “Wonder: The Underwater Dream,” “Challenge: The Ocean’s Problems,” “Discovery: The Ocean’s Superpowers,” and “Call to Act: Atlantis 2050.”
“We have an ocean that is our life-support system. Human civilization has immense capabilities, but we are using them in ways that do not amount to sustainable use of the oceans. As in Atlantis, we will bring about our own destruction if we cannot change and create a model of sustainable use of resources,” explained José Joaquín Hernández Brito.
“We need to eliminate the planet’s pollution processes, such as plastic discharges, overfishing, and gas emissions—climate change and ocean acidification. We are acting as if the ocean were infinite, but it is a finite environment; and if we are not able to understand how it works and manage it sustainably, our life-support system will disappear—and our civilization with it,” he added.
During his talk, the director presented PLOCAN as a European benchmark infrastructure and outlined its goals and capabilities.
“The Canary Islands occupy a special location, one that makes it possible to serve as a laboratory for the technologies needed for the ocean we want. That is what Canary Islands institutions—and in particular PLOCAN—are striving to do: to develop those technologies in time, so we can change the model and manage the ocean properly,” he stated.
PLOCAN’s director encouraged the students attending the event to be curious, creative, and committed, leaving them with the final message that “you are the generation that can make Atlantis 2050 a reality.”
PLOCAN’s participation in ÍNSULA 2025 reinforces the organization’s commitment to science education, environmental outreach, and inspiring new generations of blue innovators.
