60 Minutes - 9/25/2022: The Secretary of State, Inside the Committee, Rescuing Reefs

Episode Date: September 26, 2022

On this edition of “60 Minutes,” Scott Pelley sits down with Secretary of State Antony Blinken to talk about hot-button issues including the U.S. response to Russia's war on Ukraine, tensions with China and more. Bill Whitaker goes deeper into the Jan 6 insurrection and the continuing investigation. Anderson Cooper goes diving with marine biologist hoping to save coral reefs. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. If Russia stops fighting, the war ends. If Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends. Antony Blinken has a world of trouble on his hands. The Secretary of State faces dangerous tensions between China and Taiwan and Vladimir Putin's threat to turn Ukraine into a nuclear war. Is there anyone in the Kremlin who can tell Vladimir Putin no

if he decides to launch a battlefield nuclear weapon? Tonight, you're going to hear from a former senior staffer inside the January 6th committee, which resumes public hearings on the Capitol siege Wednesday. Wait a minute. Someone in the White House was calling one of the rioters while the riot was going on? On January 6th. Absolutely. And you know who both ends of that call? I only know one end of that call. I don't know the White House end, which I believe is more important. But the thing is, the American people need to know that there are link connections

that need to be explored more. By acting as natural buffers, coral reefs prevent billions of dollars in damage to the U.S. each year. The state of Florida, which has been hit by 18 hurricanes over the last 40 years, has one of the largest barrier reefs in the world.

But nearly 90% of the living coral in the Florida Keys has disappeared. The situation is so serious that marine biologists are finding innovative ways to try to rescue the reefs. And part of that, believe it or not, involves meddling with the sex lives of coral. How do coral have sex? I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi.

I'm John Wertheim. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. The new BMO VI Porter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks. More points. More flights. More of all the things you want in a travel rewards card.

And then some. Get your ticket to more with the new BMO VI Porter MasterCard. And get up to $2,400 in value in your first 13 months. Terms and conditions apply. Visit bmo.com slash viporter to learn more. After humiliating defeats in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin told his people that the U.S. is bent on destroying the Russian homeland. On Wednesday, he drafted 300,000 reservists and threatened nuclear war. This is not a bluff, he said. Ukraine dominated this past week's annual gathering of the U.N. General Assembly in New York, attended by President Biden and more than 120 world leaders.

Friday, we met the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, to talk about a world of challenges and Putin's nuclear threat. How concerned should Americans be about the prospect of nuclear war? Scott, we've heard a lot of irresponsible rhetoric coming out of Vladimir Putin, but we're focused on making sure that we're all acting responsibly, especially when it comes to this kind of loose rhetoric. We have been very clear with the Russians publicly and as well as privately to stop

the loose talk about nuclear weapons. Privately, the United States has been in communication with the Kremlin about these threats of nuclear war. Yes, it's very important that Moscow hear from us and know from us that the consequences would be horrific, and we've made that very clear. You call the nuclear talk loose talk, but isn't Vladimir Putin telling us what he's going to do And we've made that very clear. You call the nuclear talk loose talk.

But isn't Vladimir Putin telling us what he's going to do if he is backed any further into a corner? Vladimir Putin has a clear way out of the war he started. And that's to end it. If Russia stops fighting, the war ends. If Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends. Is there anyone in the Kremlin who can tell Vladimir Putin no if he decides to launch a battlefield nuclear weapon? They have a chain of command, whether it works or not, to be seen. But I think what you're pointing to is a larger challenge, and that is the Achilles heel of autocracies anywhere. There is usually not anyone who has the capacity or the will to speak truth to power. And part of the reason I think Russia has gotten itself into the mess that it's in is because there is no one in the system to

effectively tell Putin he's doing the wrong thing. In our interview last week, President Biden told us that he had a message for Vladimir Putin on the use of nuclear weapons. Don't. Don't. Don't. He went on to say the U.S. response would be consequential. What did he mean by that? I'm not going to get into what the consequences would be.

Any use of nuclear weapons would have catastrophic effects for, of course, the country using them, but for many others as well. If you can't give us specifics about a U.S. response, can you tell us that the administration has a plan? We do. Is it a plan that would prevent World War III? President Biden has been determined that as we're doing everything we can to help the Ukrainians defend themselves, as we're doing everything we can to rally other countries to put pressure on Russia, we're also determined that this war not expand, not get broader. Excuse me. As we were speaking to Secretary Blinken, news broke that a U.N. investigative commission had found evidence of rape and torture of children in Russian-occupied Ukraine.

The panel goes on to say, based on the evidence gathered by the commission, it has concluded that war crimes have been committed in Ukraine. What does justice look like for Ukraine? Justice looks like accountability. Accountability for those who perpetrated these war crimes, these atrocities, as well as for those who ordered them. And it's one of the reasons, Scott, why we're doing everything we can to support those who are trying to compile the evidence and to investigate and ultimately to prosecute those responsible. To prosecute? You believe there should be war crime trials?

I was in Ukraine a couple of weeks ago. One of the places I visited was a city called Erpin, and I saw residential buildings, building block after building block, totally bombed out. This was the totally indiscriminate use of force. Wherever the Russian tide recedes, what's left in its wake is very clear evidence of atrocities and war crimes. The bodies I saw were not fake. Atrocities were laid before the UN Security Council last Thursday,

drawing from the Russian foreign minister a dubious defense. When Sergei Lavrov says that the atrocities have been staged and it is Russia that is the victim, Tony Blinken is sitting there thinking what? This is Alice in Wonderland. It's the world upside down. Up is down, white is black, truth is false. But here's the thing, Scott. All of these words, all of these words ring totally hollow to every member on the Security

Council. So this spewing of words is not having an effect. On the contrary, I think it just shows the total disconnect between Russia and virtually the entirety of the rest of the world. At the moment we spoke to the Secretary, Russia was hurrying through what it calls elections to force these areas of Ukraine's occupied east and south into the Russian Federation.

These so-called elections are a sham, period. They go in, they put in puppet governments, local governments, and then they proceed with a vote, which they'll manipulate in any event, in order to try to declare the territory Russian territory. It is not. It will never be recognized as such. And the Ukrainians have every right to take it back. Blinken came to our interview after meeting China's foreign minister. China has been raising pressure on the democratic island of Taiwan, which, in our conversation last week, President Biden pledged to defend with force. So unlike Ukraine, to be clear, sir, U.S. forces, U.S. men and women, would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion? Yes. But official U.S. policy is and has been for decades to remain ambiguous about

defending the island. China has acted increasingly aggressively when it comes to Taiwan. That poses a threat to peace and stability in the entire region. The Chinese foreign minister must have asked you to explain the president's remarks. Well, we had a conversation about our different approaches to Taiwan, and I reiterated what the president has said and what he said clearly and consistently. Our continued adherence to the one China policy, our determination that the differences be resolved peacefully, our insistence that peace and stability be maintained in the Taiwan Straits, and our deep concern that China was taking actions to try to change that status quo. That's what the issue is.

Blinken warns that turbulence in the Taiwan Strait would wash around the world. Taiwan itself were anything to happen. It is where virtually all the semiconductors are made. One of the reasons we're now investing so heavily in our own capacity to produce semiconductors here in the United States. We design them, but the actual production is done in a handful of places, and Taiwan produces most of them. If that's disrupted, the effects that that would have on the global economy

could be devastating. Last week on 60 Minutes, the president of Iran told Leslie Stahl he would consider re-entering the deal to restrict Iran's nuclear weapons program. The Trump administration had canceled it. Blinken doubts that Iran is serious. Iran has continued to try to add extraneous issues to the negotiation that we're simply not going to say yes to. We will not accept a bad deal. The response that they've given to the last proposals put forward by our European partners

have been a very significant step backwards, and so I don't see any prospects in the very near term to bring this to a conclusion. Antony Blinken is 60. One of his grandparents was born in Ukraine. His stepfather survived the Holocaust, and his father was a U.S. ambassador. Blinken has spent 30 years in foreign policy for Democrats, mostly in the Senate and the White House. That's him in the back of the room during the strike on Osama bin Laden. His philosophy on American diplomacy is robust engagement with what he calls humility and confidence.

If we don't engage, if we're not leading, then one of two things, either someone else is, and probably not in a way that's going to advance our interests and values, or no one is. And then you tend to have chaos. You get a vacuum that's filled by bad things before it's filled with good things, because the world does not organize itself.

There's not a single big problem that's affecting the lives of our citizens that we can effectively solve alone. Whether it's climate, whether it's COVID, whether it's the effect of all of these emerging technologies on our lives, we have to be working with others to try to shape all of this in a way that's actually going to make our people, as well as other people, a little bit more secure, a little bit more prosperous, a little bit more full of opportunity. Given January 6th, given the fabricated controversy over the election results, do you find that countries around the world are worried about the stability of the United States? It's no secret that we have challenges within our own democracy.

They're playing out before the entire world. We don't sweep them under the rug, even when it's painful. So I'm able to say to other countries that bring these up, yes, we've got our problems, but we're confronting them. We're dealing with them. You might do the same thing. Your father was U.S. ambassador to Hungary. And as we sit here on Friday afternoon, he passed away last night.

And I wonder why you decided to keep such a busy schedule the day after that tragedy in your family. My dad was 96 years old. He was in so many ways my role model. He built a remarkable business, one of the leading investment banks in this country over many years. He led a life of dignity, of decency, of modesty, that is something I've very much aspired to. And so I guess I thought that honoring everything that he shared with me, the best way to do that was to continue doing my job. That job, for the foreseeable future, will be consumed with a question that has defeated generations of diplomats.

How to keep a small war in Europe from igniting the world. Are there any talks currently that we may not have heard about? There are no talks because Russia has not demonstrated any willingness in this moment to engage in meaningful discussions. If and when that changes, we will do everything we can to support a diplomatic process. Is Vladimir Putin losing this war? He's already lost in terms of what he was trying to achieve. Because keep in mind, what he said very clearly from the start is his objective was to erase Ukraine's identity as an independent country.

That has already failed. The Ukrainians are fighting for their own land. They're fighting for their own country. The Russians are not. And these Russian soldiers who are being thrown into this conflict, often not knowing where they're going or what they're doing, this is not something that they want to be fighting for. The Ukrainians are fighting for their own future.

They're fighting for their own land. They're fighting for their own lives. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast, chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s,

including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Tonight, you're going to hear from a former senior staffer inside the January 6th committee, which resumes public hearings on the Capitol siege Wednesday. Members of the committee aren't happy that Denver Riggleman, an experienced military intelligence officer and former Republican congressman, is talking to 60 Minutes about the work he did for them. Nor are they thrilled he's written a book about his time on the committee

called The Breach. Riggleman has a history of swimming against the tide. Once a member of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, he was endorsed twice by then-President Trump. But after hearing what Denver Riggleman has to say tonight, it's unlikely the former president will be buying his book. Did it hit you at one point that this is way bigger than it appeared in the beginning? Absolutely. You get a real aha moment when you see that the White House switchboard had connected to a rioter's phone while it's

happening. That's a pretty big aha moment. You get an aha moment. Wait a minute. Someone in the White House was calling one of the rioters while the riot was going on? On January 6th. Absolutely. And you know who both ends of that call?

I only know one end of that call. I don't know the White House end, which I believe is more important. But the thing is, the American people need to know that there are link connections that need to be explored more. As senior technical advisor for the January 6th committee, Denver Riggleman, a former House Republican and ex-military intelligence officer, ran a data-driven operation pursuing phone records and other digital clues tied to the attack on the Capitol. From my perspective, you know, being in counterterrorism, you know, if the White House, even if it's a short call and it's a connected call,

who is actually making that phone call? Is there a simple, innocent explanation for that? Was it an accidental call from the White House that just happened to call numbers that somebody misdialed a rider that day on January 6th? Probably not. Denver Riggleman told us he uncovered a lot of disquieting information for the committee. Do you swear or affirm under penalty of perjury? Republican Vice Chair Liz Cheney recommended the former conservative congressman for the staff,

partly for his political experience, but mostly for his technical expertise. I think Liz and some of the other people recognized he does know how Congress works. He knows how the political system works. He was in the Freedom Caucus, but he also has a background in data intelligence. For two decades, he served as an Air Force intelligence officer, a contractor for the secretive

National Security Agency, and ran his own data analysis firm. Mr. Chairman. When the January 6th committee came calling, he assembled a small squad of data miners and analysts, like he'd had in the military, to comb through 20 million lines of data, emails, social media posts, phone records, texts,

anything to learn who did what leading up to and on January 6th. We're able to do things, phone records, texts, anything to learn who did what leading up to and on January 6th. We were able to do things, I think, in a way that had never been done before with millions of lines of data and to actually create a graph that shows how these groups actually intermingled. Now, you were able to identify, I believe, six centers of gravity? Yeah, there are six pretty big centers of gravity, or six groups that we looked at.

And really it came down to Trump team, Trump family, rally goers, unaffiliated DOJ charged defendants, Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, and others, which are state legislators, alternate electors, things like that. So when you have those six groups of people, you can actually start looking at the connections between them. Once he started connecting the dots, this complex graph emerged, which he presented to the committee.

Each thick line represents tens of thousands of calls and contacts among and between the groups. Zoom in to see the details. These are calls and texts from just one person of interest. Multiply that hundreds of times, and you end up with this graph Riggleman calls the monster. We don't have text content. What we do have is how long they talked, when they talked. That is very important. And really does suggest that there was much more coordination than the American public can even imagine when it came to January 6th. For example, the data revealed five calls in the weeks before January 6th

between the White House and this woman, a Stop the Steal activist named Bianca Gracia. The committee obtained this video from the evening of January 5th. Gracia was part of a clandestine meeting with the heads of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, the paramilitary groups that would breach the Capitol the next day. And, you know, when you have the White House switchboard and certain other cell phone numbers connected to Bianca Gracia, that is a link that needs to be investigated. The thread that needs to be pulled is identifying all the White House numbers and why we have certain specific people, why they were talking to the White House.

Specific White House phone records are kept secret to protect every administration. But in his book, The Breach, Riggleman wrote he begged the committee to push harder to identify numbers that showed up on the monster. I was one of those individuals, sadly, at the beginning, you know, where I was very, very aggressive about these link connections, getting those White House phone numbers. Did you express those concerns to the committee at the time? Yes. What was the response?

The response was, go forth and just do the best you can with the resources that we have. Riggleman requested $3.2 million, but only received a fraction of that. His team burrowed into the data. The motherlode dropped into their laps. Not just phone records, but more than 2,000 actual texts to and from Mark Meadows, former President Trump's chief of staff. There were numbers, but no names. So, Riggleman told us, his team made a giant spreadsheet, painstakingly identifying the people behind each number. And when they did, they were privy to the real-time thoughts of

Trump family members, former cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, conspiracy mongers, even a Supreme Court justice's wife. You've called the texts from President Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, the crown jewels. Why? It was a roadmap. It showed actually the evolution of the beginning arguments from alternate electors all the way through rally planning, all the way to day of. It showed conspiracy theories. It showed the saturation of QAnon. How'd you get them?

He gave them up. Do you think it was a mistake? You know, if you go back to the simplest explanation, I think he wanted to give up some of his text messages. By the way, this is a caveat. We don't know if we got them all. But what we got is pretty valuable. You have said these texts provide irrefutable, time-stamped proof

of a comprehensive plot at all levels of government to overturn the election. Irrefutable. Irrefutable. Early in the text messages, they were talking about alternate electors, you know, I think as soon as November 5th or November 6th. Right off the bat. Come on. Right off the bat. The first mention of January 6th was two days after the election. Donald Trump Jr. wrote the White House chief of staff, this is what we need to do, and laid out a rambling scheme to seat alternate electors, a plot the Department of Justice is investigating.

We get Trump electors, he wrote in part. It gets kicked to Congress 6 January 2021. Once again, he concludes, Trump wins. Many other texts were of bizarre election conspiracies, Chinese plots to install President Biden, entreaties to seize voting machines as part of God's plan, even a call from Republican lawmakers for President Trump to declare martial law and stay in power. From the sheer number of texts, it seems almost half the world had Mark Meadows' phone number. The Meadows text messages show you an administration that was completely eaten up with a digital virus called QAnon and conspiracy theories, an apocalyptic messianic buffoonery. You can look at the text messages as that roadmap, but it's also a look into the psyche

of the Republican Party today. People in the Republican Party would say, you're an opponent. You're the opposition. Of course you're going to say this. I would tell them this. I'm not their enemy. I'm just a guy trying to tell you that the data doesn't support that the election was stolen.

When we first started here... Denver Riggleman III is a proud son of Virginia. He told us his family never questioned going to church or voting Republican. I'm an Appalachian boy, man. In 2013, he settled here on 50 green acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, outside Charlottesville, where he helped his wife, Christine, pursue her dream of opening a distillery. It smells delicious. Oh, you want to

eat the air. It was Christine's bourbon that got him into politics. Frustrated with high liquor taxes and government red tape, he made an unsuccessful run for governor in 2017. Soon, a seat opened up in Virginia's conservative 5th Congressional District. He ran, and to his surprise, he won, and in 2018 found himself in the seat once held by James Madison. The accidental congressman I called myself. A Republican with a libertarian bent, he joined the Freedom Caucus, the most conservative wing of the party. He voted with President Trump 92% of the time,

but says his loyalty was questioned because he'd sometimes reach across the aisle to work with Democrats. Christine told us the beginning of the end was when Denver decided to officiate the wedding of two gay campaign workers. So you're this staunch conservative, and you officiate at a same-sex wedding. Yeah. Christina's driving there.

She goes, you know, honey, you might have the shortest political career in the history of Virginia. I said it'll blow over in two weeks. What happened? It didn't blow over. No, it was brutal. What did you think of how he reacted to the criticism? I think

he stood his ground and he doesn't regret doing it. He told us he also doesn't regret calling white supremacists cultural parasites after they marched on Charlottesville. QAnon and the conspiracy theories it promotes are a danger. Or denouncing QAnon from the floor of Congress. They were spreading this rumor that because of the gay wedding that I was trying to change the sexual orientation of children. You know, that really is a QAnon-based conspiracy theory. But his independence riled the Republican base. He lost his seat in 2020 to a Republican further to his right.

Do you consider yourself a Republican today? No. No. I left the Republican Party. I'm independent. I don't even want to call it independent. I'm unaffiliated. I'm just me. And this now unaffiliated ex-Congressman had a skill set that caught the attention of the January 6th committee. He joined the staff in August of last year. Riggleman's data team was first to identify a telephone number in Meadows' texts belonging to Ginny Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas texted links tied to QAnon, including this one, saying the Biden crime family and ballot fraud co-conspirators

are being arrested and detained and will be living in barges off Guantanamo Bay to face military tribunals for sedition. She added, I hope this is true. What did you think of those Ginny Thomas texts? Actually, as far as academically, it was hellaciously insightful. Insightful in what way? Insightful about how the conspiracy theories and sort of this digital virus had really metastasized in the GOP. You make it sound like an infection. It is an infection. But Ginny Thomas specifically, to see somebody like that, who has that type of access to the president and married to a Supreme Court justice,

pushing that type of nonsense to the chief of staff, to the president, that should be an eye-opener for everybody. Riggleman left the committee last April. He told us one reason they wouldn't subpoena Ginny Thomas. The committee provided 60 Minutes a statement that reads, in part, Mr. Riggleman had limited knowledge of the committee's investigation. He departed prior to our most important investigative work. The committee has run down all the leads that arose from his work.

Last week, Ginny Thomas agreed to be interviewed. As Hurricane Fiona left a swath of destruction across the Caribbean and North Atlantic this past week, it was a reminder of the devastating power of coastal storms. Scientists are predicting more intense weather because of climate change, but they're also warning that one of the best existing sources of protection from waves and floods is dying off. By serving as natural buffers, coral reefs prevent billions of dollars in damage to the U.S. each year, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The state of Florida, which has been hit by 18 hurricanes over the last 40 years, has one of the largest barrier reefs in the world,

but nearly 90% of the living coral in the Florida Keys has disappeared during that time. The situation is so serious that marine biologists have stepped up their efforts to find innovative ways to try to rescue the reefs. And that's what our story tonight is about. It involves strange underwater farms, the U.S. Department of Defense, and more than we ever thought we'd need to know about the sex lives of coral. We left Miami behind us and headed two miles off the coast with marine biologists Andrew Baker and Diego Lerman. They're old friends and colleagues, professors at the University of Miami, who've seen firsthand how the reefs have changed.

The whole of the Caribbean is seeing a lot of coral loss and die-off as a result of climate change, but also water quality and pollution. But Florida Keys probably leads the way in terms of the sheer amount of coral that's been lost. And that's why, in this spot in the ocean, the University of Miami has built something you'd normally visit on land to buy a tree or a rose bush, a nursery. This is our coral nursery. This is where we, just like you do on land, you grow your corals, you prune them, and then you put them somewhere else on a natural reef. Andrew, you guys, all right, don't forget to close your ambient breathing valve.

The water was murky and the current strong as we went to take a look. A nurse shark checked us out but quickly lost interest. Corals are often confused with rocks or plants, but they're actually colonies of tiny animals called polyps, whose calcium carbonate skeletons build the reefs and protect the shores. After a short swim, we came upon an area with 40 of these tree-like structures. Hanging from them, like Christmas ornaments, are pieces of living coral that have been pruned from healthy colonies all over Florida. They're positioned close to the surface so they get lots of sunlight and nutrients, and occasionally cleaned of macroalgae that can damage them.

Andrew Baker explained. And the great advantage of these nurseries is they allow us to grow lots of coral tissue very quickly. They grow faster in these trees than they do on the reef. Many of the corals growing here are important and threatened Florida species like staghorn and elkhorn. Every diver knows you're not supposed to touch coral, so it was odd to be handed a clipper and told to start cutting off pieces. We brought the staghorn coral I cut to an area nearby called Rainbow Reef that Professor Lerman and his team began replanting two and a half years

ago. He showed me how to use a special kind of cement to attach the newly cut pieces to the reef. With the current, it's a lot harder than it sounds. But even more difficult is making sure these corals don't get killed off by the same forces that destroyed their predecessors, water pollution, disease, and a phenomenon called bleaching, in which coral can lose their color and die because of rising ocean temperatures caused by climate change. We need to make sure that the corals that we put out are not just going to be the next set of victims for the next bleaching episode or the next stressor that comes along. In a sense, it sounds like you're trying to accelerate the process of natural selection,

try to find the corals which are hardier, which can survive in higher temperatures. That's exactly right. To do that, Professor Baker and scientists from the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago are using a technique that allows them to determine the future survivability of coral in a few hours on a boat anchored above the nursery. When we arrived, researchers were putting samples of Elkhorn coral just brought to the surface into these converted party coolers containing increasingly warm water to see which varieties would do best in higher temperatures. Ross Cunning is a research biologist with the Shedd Aquarium. So just like all of us are different genetic individuals,

and all of us humans vary in traits like height, all of these different genetic strains of elk horn coral will vary naturally in heat tolerance. So just because it's all elk horn coral doesn't mean it's all the same genetically. Right, and that's exactly what we want to get at, is the fine-scale individual variation among different elk horn corals. Then we can use those corals to optimize restoration programs by planting more of them on the reef. Scientists are also trying to breed the most heat- and disease-resistant coral together.

It's called selective breeding. Lib Williamson is a biologist at the University of Miami. Her lab is filled with vats of frozen coral sperm. So this is coral sperm? This is coral sperm that has been kept at these really, really low temperatures now for a year or more. Her work is similar to that of domestic animal breeders. She and her team mix the sperm with carefully chosen coral eggs

to create offspring that will be more likely to survive outbreaks of disease and rising ocean temperatures. I never thought I would ask this question, but how do coral have sex? So the idea is that all of the different colonies on a reef, they're all using cues from the environment to make sure that they release their eggs and sperm all at once so that they're able to mix with the spawn of other colonies. The sex life of coral is nothing to write home about. Most spawn only once or twice a year after a full moon, so scientists have to be ready to capture the sperm and eggs at the exact right moment.

We use very fine mesh nets with a jar at the top, and they slowly float their way up into the jar, and all we have to do is cap off the jar and take it with us. It literally looks like being in a snow globe underwater. It's amazing, it's totally incredible to be able to see it. This is where Williamson raises what she calls the coral babies she's bred. The blue light mimics sunlight filtering through the water, helping them grow. This particular brain coral baby that you're holding right now is actually the offspring of a coral colony here in Miami that we think is resistant to disease.

So you know the history of these polyps? Yeah, in many cases I collected them as eggs or sperm, or I put them together to fertilize them. I have been there really since birth, if you will. Do you feel like warm and cuddly toward coral? I really do. Because, I mean, it's not something that... They don't seem too warm and cuddly. I show coral baby pictures to people, and they usually don't want to see them. Today, they're growing slowly on small ceramic plates, but they may someday be growing in underwater nurseries and repopulating reefs. And you said this one's how old? Almost a year old. Corals in general grow

really slowly, but that's part of the problem with their conservation is that while we're losing these big old colonies on the reef, some of those are thousands or hundreds of years old. They've taken so long to grow,acing them isn't easy. But with less coral serving as a natural buffer, many communities need more protection right away from increasingly powerful storms that have been battering their shores. One way researchers hope to restore coral and provide more immediate protection along the coast is to create hybrid reefs. This is a small-scale prototype. The honeycomb structures on the bottom would be made of concrete and are designed to absorb wave energy immediately. The corals on top would provide more and more protection as they grow. When the waves break, they throw up a lot of spray. Inside the simulator at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science,

Professor Brian House and his team can create the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane with winds up to 155 miles per hour. Now we'll turn on the paddle and you'll see it really change a lot. Like they start hitting the, like right now, boom. Wow. Oh my God. And you see the waves are breaking preferentially over that structure. The simulator can test how well different structures and types of coral absorb wave energy and prevent damage on land.

So this is Category 5. Wow. The University of Miami is developing this hybrid reef for DARPA, which is the Pentagon's research agency. The Defense Department is looking for ways to protect its many military bases near the coast, like Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, which got destroyed by Hurricane Michael in 2018, causing nearly $5 billion in damage. DARPA plans to give the University of Miami up to $20 million to build a hybrid reef off the coast of Florida within the next five years.

What role does coral play in that as opposed to just a man-made honeycomb structure? Depending on the types of waves and things, you can have anywhere as high as 60% of additional dissipation of wave energy by having corals on top of the structure. They add friction to the surface. I mean, this isn't just a man-made structure that is static. Because of the coral, it would actually expand. It would continue to grow. That's one of the real exciting things about this.

It's essentially self-healing, and if it gets impacted by a storm, it can grow back. Professors Baker and Lerman will provide the coral on DARPA's hybrid reef with specific goals in mind. They have very ambitious goals for you. They do, and I think that reflects the scale of the problem, to be honest. We know that, for example, coral reefs are going to be facing increasing warming temperatures. So here's a project that's asking us to try to achieve what corals are going to face in 20 to 30 years within just a five-year time frame and then actually go well beyond that. So they're saying within five years that they want you to be able to find coral

that can resist a two-degree centigrade rise in temperatures in the ocean? That's right. Two or even three-degree centigrade warmer temperatures. Were you surprised that DARPA was interested in your work? We were surprised in the sense that it was the Department of Defense that was the first agency to come forward and say, hey, you guys, as a community, why don't you think big? DARPA also recently awarded contracts to Rutgers University to create a hybrid reef that'll use oysters rather than coral, and to the University of Hawaii, which is developing a different configuration of coral and other materials.

And DARPA is not the only government agency taking action. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is using nursery-grown coral to restore seven iconic reefs in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Push the other coral in. There are many potential obstacles to restoring coral reefs, as Diego Lerman and his team learned after Hurricane Irma hit Florida in 2017. It was a major setback.

We lost 90 percent of all of the corals that we had been growing for a decade. Wow. It was a huge loss. But we also rebuilt very quickly. There's not much anyone can do about a major hurricane, but perhaps the biggest criticism of restoring reefs or creating hybrid ones is that it's not possible to do this on the scale that's needed. Thank you.

You got it, man. There are some people who think this is like spitting into the ocean, that this is not going to be enough to counteract climate change. We get that all the time. But if we don't address this challenge in terms of maintaining coral resilience in the meantime while we deal with some of these larger societal problems, we won't have any coral reefs left by the time we get this other problem under control. Without a meaningful reduction of carbon gases to address climate change,

will you be able to rescue the reefs? Absolutely not. The mantra is we are buying time. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that with a 2 degrees Celsius increase in warming, 99% of the world's coral reefs could be irreversibly lost the next 30 years. I mean, that's a pretty dire assessment. That's right. So coral reefs are on their way to becoming probably the first global ecosystem that will lose as a result of climate change. So, you know, we have no time to lose. An update on a story we first reported last November about a growing number of aviation companies racing to develop a new generation of supersonic passenger jets.

One of them, the American startup company Boom, and its founder, Blake Scholl, had already built a single-seat test plane when we visited the factory. This is it? That's it. Oh, wow. Turning that test plane into a passenger transport called Overture was, as we said in our story, a long shot. And we are working with Rolls-Royce on a custom jet engine that will power Overture. You're working with Rolls-Royce.

It doesn't exist, this engine does not exist yet? It is a, it is a lightly customized engine. And part of that is Rolls-Royce's work, where they're kind of turning some design knobs. This month, the odds for success grew longer when Rolls-Royce withdrew from the partnership and left Boom actively searching for another engine maker. I'm Bill Whitaker.

We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.