The seamount expedition continues

We are pushing on to our last two seamounts, Sapmer Bank and Atlantis. Middle of What Seamount (MOW) was a very difficult site to work in. The boundary between sub-tropical waters and the sub-Antarctic was running right across the seamount while we were there so tremendously strong currents swept across the entire area. Our Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) was stuck fast to the seabed in several places, unable to move because of the water sweeping past. Despite our tribulations we did manage to glean enough information to get some idea of the life at MOW. We saw some of the famous orange roughy, the fish that live to 150 years old or more and which have been heavily targeted by the fishing industry. Very prominent were small lantern sharks. During many dives with the ROV glowing lights could be seen in the distance and these were the eyes or light organs of these strange animals swimming around in the deep. Other fish avoided them so they must be predators. We also saw areas apparently damaged by trawling, although unlike other seamounts there was no evidence here of lost fishing gear or trash. Some areas were simply breathtaking. Looming out of the darkness on cliffs of ropey lava were trees of bamboo corals over 2 meters in height. Elsewhere we found tremendously rich gardens of bright purple and yellow corals as well as large trumpet-shaped sponges smothered in bright red and yellow crinoids. Above and amongst the coral hovered oreos, another long lived deep-sea fish, with glowing yellow eyes and with a very characteristic swimming motion involving the undulation of the dorsal and ventral fins. This was a fantastic sight and again demonstrates that some of these areas are not completely destroyed. Management of fisheries in such areas is of all the more importance to conserve what remains of these striking but very vulnerable ecosystems.

We also had to contend with bad weather again over this seamount. The previous evening we had winds of more than 60kts and the sea rose fairly quickly to give everybody a poor night’s sleep. It even stopped us working for about 24 hours. Yesterday we were able to recommence with oceanographic measurements in the afternoon. Plans were changed again to accommodate the gap in work. This has been a very busy cruise for me managing a lot of shifts in work schedules for one reason or another. Everyone remains buoyant on board, and there is the looming prospect of finishing science and then steaming home for Christmas, something that everyone is looking forward to.

Mountaineering in the Indian Ocean

We are just into week three of the cruise. Coral seamount was reluctant to give up its’ secrets and we have contended with bad weather and various minor issues with equipment. In the end, however, we have documented incredibly an incredibly beautiful deep-sea ecosystem inhabitated by many remarkable animals. Particularly striking have been the corals and the sponges. The former range from white stony corals with bright orange polyps to tree-like octocorals, including a remarkable species which is bright purple. The sponges are often a creamy white colour but are remarkable for their amazing forms, from vase-like dimpled colonies to enormous undulating brain-like shapes, trumpets or plates. Almost everything comes with its’ resident other creatures. For example, the corals almost always come with a particular species of brittlestar, some large with snake-like arms. Squat lobsters inhabit almost every coral and sponge, their golden eyes reflecting the lights of the ROV. Miniature glass-like lobsters swim about by flapping their tails when the ROV lands near a coral. Hermit crabs, giant snails and carpets of anemones are also things we have observed. We have also seen evidence of human impacts, all the way out here more than a thousand miles from the nearest land. We are constantly accompanied by seabirds and I’ve counted more than 40 great wandering albatrosses from the vessel. There are also shy albatross, cape pidgeons, white chinned petrels and others. We have also seen sperm whales diving on Coral Seamount, a witness to the importance of this feature to ocean predators. More surprising perhaps was the fact that we also saw fur seals around the seamount summit. I had no idea that such relatively small creatures would be seen so far out to sea.

Everyone is working incredibly hard. For me, organising the various types of work we are doing around the weather is a complex and daily task. The other scientists are very busy recording information, collecting and preserving samples, analysing the chemistry of seawater and the flow of currents around the seamounts. Even mapping these features with acoustics has been hampered by difficult conditions. The crew remain positive and cheerful and everyone looks forward to mealtimes, the cooking has been great.

Yesterday (November 21^st) we arrived at a new seamount, Melville Bank, one we know has been heavily fished in the gold rush for orange roughy in the early 2000s. This fish, in case you are not aware, lives to as much as 150 years old and does not reproduce until it is 30 or 40 years of age. It is very vulnerable to overfishing and the “goldrush” fishery on the South West Indian Ocean ridge only lasted a few years before stocks collapsed. It is rumoured that a lot of fishing gear was lost on the seamounts and we look forward with some trepidation as to what we may find on this seamount. On the acoustic maps it is incredibly rugged, with cliffs and steep slopes. Tomorrow we will dive and find out for the first time what lives on Melville Bank, for no other human has seen what this seamount looks like underwater...

The Seamounts Cruise Gets Going

After a very pleasant day or two at Cape Town RRS James Cook sailed at 14.00 on Monday 7^th November. It was a beautiful sunny day and the ship moved smoothly out of the Waterfront harbour and out to sea. We all stood on the foredeck taking photographs of Table Mountain as the ship swung to the east to take up the first station. Cape fur seals were lying in rafts dotted here and there and would lazily swim off or suddenly dive as the vessel approached. Cape gulls drifted past and gannets flew low over the water passing by without heed to the ship. We made a stop and deployed the CTD (Conductivity, Temperature, Depth), a large metal frame with water sampling bottles and instruments for measuring temperature, oxygen concentration and fluorescence (chlorophyll) in the water column. After this it was time to calibrate the multifrequency echosounders we use to look at the behaviour of the animals living in the water column during the trip. This was a very fiddly operation requiring the suspension of a small metal sphere underneath the hull-mounted echosounders of the ship using a combination of three lines deployed from what resembled fishing rods over the side of the ship. We had heard horror stories about how long this operation could take but we were very lucky with calm weather and immediately managed to get echoes from the sphere. Outside fur seals swam around the ship. They were very sociable, often gathering in small groups, prodding each other with their noses or scratching or grooming themselves with teeth or flippers. Occassionally one would hang, tail up out of the water and head down on the surface. At one point out metal sphere and lines suddenly moved back towards the stern of the ship and we were quite suspicious that the seal’s curiosity had got the better of them and they had come to investigate our calibration sphere. We could see the seals diving on the echosounders as they were blowing trails of bubbles as they dived down to 70 or 80 meters below the ship, occasionally coming up chasing small fish (we had seen a large male trap some fish between the harbour wall and the ship while it was moored in Cape Town and then proceed to gorge itself for half an hour or more). The whole operation was completed by 02.00 on Tuesday morning, much quicker than we were expecting, at which point we recommenced our journey towards the first seamount, Coral. The moon appeared between clouds and the ships wake was bright blue green with bioluminescence, an amazing sight.

IPSO - Every Second Breath

Any of you, wherever you are, whatever you are doing can pause now and connect directly with the ocean. Just breathe.

That breath came from the sea.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/oceans-on-brink-of-catastrophe-2300272.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jun/20/marine-life-oceans-extinction-threat

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13796479

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/20/ipso-2011-ocean-report-mass-extinction_n_880656.html

http://www.earthtimes.org/conservation/marine-species-risk-mass-extinction/1053/

http://crisisboom.com/2011/06/21/worlds-oceans-in-shocking-decline/

http://www.rferl.org/content/science_panel_grave_ocean_stresses_threaten_extinctions/24241383.html

http://www.euronews.net/2011/06/21/environmental-doomsday-unless-oceans-respected/

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110621101453.htm

http://britishecologicalsociety.org/blog/blog/2011/06/21/the-state-of-our-oceans/

http://www.globe-net.com/articles/2011/june/21/are-the-world%E2%80%99s-oceans-on-the-brink-of-disaster.aspx?id=7142

You can only love what you know

It’s August, the holiday season, when many of us will be taking trips to the coast and spending time next to the oceans. Many of us will even go “rockpooling” or fishing with a small net. The oceans are a source of fascination for many of us, harbouring strange and colourful animals. I am amazed at how early this fascination can begin. My two daughters, aged 3, now regularly demand to look at the “shark book” or the “fish book” and both will sit either side of me and identify “hammerhead shark” “leopard shark” or “blue shark”. They are particularly fascinated by the shark’s large teeth and that sharks are a bit scary and might eat you, which of course happens very rarely (even more rarely nowadays that we have decimated many shark populations). Their capacity to absorb information is a constant source of surprise to me. They are also identifying eels, stingrays, corals, sea anemones and sea horses. Of course, it helps when your dad is a marine biologist.

Several things occur to me when the girls are displaying proto-marine biologist behaviour. The first is what will the oceans look like when they are my age or older. Unfortunately, at the present rate of degradation, the oceans will be a poor place even compared to today. Many corals reefs will be gone completely. Those remaining will be under severe stress and probably a mix of coral and algal species, a shadow of the reefs my wife and I dived on when I was younger. Wild-caught fish will be a rare and expensive luxury. Many more stocks will be gone with some projections suggesting that all the major fish stocks targeted today will have collapsed by 2050. Dead zones will have spread, as will the toxic red tides that poison everything they come into contact with. It’s a pretty depressing picture and it is the future generations that will suffer from our carelessness.

The other thing that occurs to me is that young children have an innate fascination with the natural world. I guess mine are very lucky in that they are privileged to live in a comfortable house, they have plenty to eat and have parents that are interested in their welfare. This fascination is stimulated by the fact that mum and dad will answer all their questions on what animals they see and so on and they will take an active interest in what they are looking at and doing (snails are particularly popular, being examined for many minutes while they come out of their shells, as are butterflies, which are pursued around the garden, and froglets). It is great that such young people are so interested in the world they live in, which begs a further question. Why is it that so many people seem to lose interest in the world they live in when they get older? This of course is not a simple question. Life for many of us is fast-paced and stressful. Getting a few minutes to consider our place in the world and how to live in it is difficult. We’re bombarded by a huge advertising (brain-washing) machine to attempt to attain a lifestyle lived by the “rich and famous”. This happens to such an extent that many of us will buy luxuries that we cannot afford even to the detriment of basic requirements for life, such as nutritious food. Amazing.

There are many people (I am no exception), organisations, and even the governments calling for changes in our lifestyles, to live a life of lower consumption of resources, and pointing to various aspects of the degradation and destruction of the natural world. Many people now simply switch off when the next environmental doom story is put before them in the media. This is because these events do not affecting them directly but moreover, I am convinced in many cases it is because they have ceased caring. Perhaps we are targeting the wrong people or more correctly the wrong generation of people. Education about the importance of the Earth in supporting life, including human life, and the role which plants, animals and ecosystems have in maintaining the Earth system must begin at the earliest age. Only then will people grow up with enough passion about the environment that they actually care about the way in which they live. As the saying goes, you can only love and care for what you know about. It was how I got interested in the oceans. Spending hours on a small beach in Ireland and time out fishing with my grandfather and uncles and even, dare I say it, sitting in front of the TV with interested parents watching the “World About Us”, “Jaques Cousteau” and “Life on Earth”.

Evidence of the decline of ocean surface phytoplankton since the turn of the century

5th August 2010

You may have seen the press coverage of the paper by Boyce and colleagues (Nature 466: 591-596). The paper relates a clever study where scientists have examined chlorophyll data obtained through various methods, including very primitive ways of assessing the transparency of the sea, to figure out how levels of primary production have changed since 1899. For those of you who find that confusing let me explain. On land, the primary producers are the plants that we are all familiar with, grass, trees, shrubs and so on. These plants use the sun’s energy to trap (fix) carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide and they use this to synthesise organic molecules (photosynthesis). These form the basis of the energy that drives life and the molecules that form structures, enzymes and so on. Animals graze plants and this energy and material is used by them to grow, and these animals in turn are eaten by other animals (predators) and so on, forming successive layers or trophic levels of food chains, many of which go to form foodwebs. In the oceans, carbon is fixed through the same process of photosynthesis but in this case most of the work is done by tiny cells, phytoplankton, that live in the surface layers of the ocean (upper 150m depth). The phytoplankton are grazed by zooplankton, tiny animals that also live in the surface layers of the ocean, and these in turn are preyed on by larger animals, including fish and so on up to the large marine predators we are familiar with such as sharks and tuna. Some very large animals also graze on zooplankton, such as baleen whales short-circuiting lengthy food chains which lose a lot of the energy of primary production at each step.

Whilst people are familiar with the process of photosynthesis on land, and they are aware that plants can be used as food (cereals like wheat etc), they may not be aware that about half of the production on Earth takes place in the oceans. We do not directly consume phytoplankton but we do eat fish, that ultimately live off the phytoplankton, and which feed many millions of people and provide a livelihood for many others. However, photosynthesis also has other critical effects that are important to maintaining the balance of the Earth’s life support system. These include the production of oxygen, a by-product of photosynthesis, and the draw-down of CO₂ from the atmosphere into the deep ocean. It is the latter that has meant that the oceans have taken up nearly half of humankind’s CO₂ emissions. The oceans are providing us with food, with the air we breathe and they clean up the atmosphere through the process of photosynthetic primary production.

The paper by Boyce and colleagues (2010) demonstrates that the concentrations of phytoplankton in the surface layers of the ocean have declined in 8 out of 10 of the major ocean regions of the world. This is occurring mainly through an effect of global warming. When the surface layers of the ocean are heated up they have a lower tendency to mix with the cooler deeper layers, a process called stratification (layering) of the surface of the oceans. The phytoplankton only live in the surface waters because they require sunlight to photosynthesise and therefore to live. However, they also require nutrients other than carbon to synthesise organic molecules, particularly nitrogen and phosphorus but also other nutrients such as sulphur and iron. As the phytoplankton grow in surface water layers they use up these nutrients and their growth becomes limited. The phytoplankton cells undergo a form of starvation. Tropical oceans are naturally stratified, whilst in temperate seas stratification occurs during the summer but storms during the winter mix up the surface layers of the oceans with deeper, nutrient rich water, annually replenishing the nutrients phytoplankton need to grow. Global warming has increased the level of stratification throughout the oceans and thus has caused a decrease in global primary production by phytoplankton through reducing the supply of nutrients from deep water to the oceans surface.

The simple fact is that almost all life in the oceans, with the exception of chemosynthetic communities that are based on chemical energy, depend on surface production by phytoplankton. Even the deepest living organisms live off the rain of dead cells and occasional carcasses descending from the surface layers of the ocean. Much of this material arrives in the deep sea in the form of marine snow, aggregates of dead phytoplankton cells, cast off skins of zooplankton, faecal material etc. The reduction in surface primary production will have impacted almost other marine life in the oceans, even reducing the production of the fish that we eat. That this has been happening for so long is disturbing. It seems that even by the turn of the twentieth century production was declining as a result of industrial activity, a long time before we became aware of climate change.

A tale of two blow outs

I have been silent for about six months. My apologies but after being away four months at sea I had alot of catching up to do! It has been a lively if depressing six months for the oceans.

We all know about the Gulf of Mexico disaster. The Deep-Water Horizon exploded on the 20^th April 2010, sadly with the loss of eleven workers from Transocean, the operators of the semi-submersible drilling rig. Subsequent events have been difficult to follow despite the massive publicity surrounding the blowout and oil spill. For example, it is difficult to get an estimate of the quantities of oil that have been released. Official estimates are that approximately 35,000-60,000 barrels of oil a day were being released (some estimates are as much as 100,000 barrels a day). This means that over the 83 days prior to the well being capped on the 12^th July somewhere between 461,895,000 and 791,820,000 litres of oil were lost from the well (a US barrel being equivalent to 159 litres). Although it is estimated that some 131,461,200 litres have so far been captured and burned that still means hundreds of thousands of tonnes of oil have been spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. 8.35 million litres of dispersant have also been released onto the ocean surface or injected into the well head. This is a concern because of the toxicity of the these chemicals. The dispersant used was a medium-toxicity dispersant, not the least toxic or most effective modern dispersant available.

The effects on the ecosystem are devastating. Over two thousand seabirds have been found dead, along with more than 470 turtles and over 60 marine mammals. Many more will have died at sea and not been found or even burned in efforts to get rid of the oil. The oil is washing up onto the shores of the US Gulf states which harbour more than half of the coastal wetlands of the lower 48 states of the USA. 97% of the fish and shellfish commercially landed in the region depend on these wetlands and estuaries to some extent. This coastline is already suffering from rapid erosion in some areas and the destruction of plant life within wetland areas may accelerate this process and threaten many dependent species. Less visible will be the effects in the deep ocean. The Deep-Water Horizon well, also known as the Macondo prospect, lies at between 1500 – 1600m depth on the flanks of the Mississippi Canyon. This is the most important conduit of organic matter from the Mississippi River to the deep ocean. Several plumes of oil or oil / dispersant have been reported in deep water reaching many miles from the well head, although this has been disputed by BP and sampling has only detected small quantities of oil. The effects of the oil and dispersant on deep-seabed life, and on life in the water column is unknown. However, it has been shown that deep-sea animals in this area can accumulate some of the toxic fractions of oil (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) so affects on the ecosystem may be expected.

All this is occurring on top of many other human impacts, the Gulf of Mexico is undoubtedly an ecosystem that is under severe stress. For example, a seasonal dead zone has developed in the northern Gulf of Mexico since the 1970s. The cause has been the massive quantities of runoff of agricultural fertilisers from the catchment of the Mississippi River. Nitrates and phosphates fertilise the ocean stimulating blooms of marine algae which then die. As these cells sink they are broken down by bacteria which use the oxygen in the water column suffocating other marine life. Overfishing has also caused large-scale changes in the ecosystems of the Gulf of Mexico, removing large predators such as sharks, often as by-catch and causing knock-on effects in the ecosystem. The coral reefs of the wider Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean are in a state of severe degradation, affected by overfishing, pollution, coastal development, disease and climate change impacts which cause mass bleaching. The Deep Water Horizon disaster represents just one further wound to a system that in many respects is collapsing. Judging from the impacts of other oil spills, it will take at least tens of years for the system to “recover” from the effects of this massive spill.

This could not be said for another part of the world where another blow-out occurred last year. This blow out occurred in the Montara Oil Field, to the north of Australia in the the Timor Sea on the 21^st August, 2009 and lasted for 74 days. You could be forgiven for not hearing about the blow out in the northern hemisphere, it hardly registered in the news, although it was mentioned in some broadsheet newspapers in the UK. As with the Deep-Water Horizon, the Montara oil spill appears to have occurred through technical failure of the drilling / well equipment. The rig, the West-Atlas was owned by a Norwegian-Bermudan company, Seadrill and operated by PTTEP, a company that ultimately belongs to PTT, the state oil company of Thailand. In this case, though, the spill occurred in a region that is poorly explored and understood but one which a recent study (Halpern et al 2008, Science 319: 948-952) classified as one of the least impacted regions of the world’s oceans. This region, which lies within the “coral triangle” could be regarded as one of nature’s remaining treasures yet has now seen a large oil disaster.

With the Montara blow out it is even more difficult to ascertain just how severe the spill was and how it has affected marine life. The Australian Government have so far not released the official report of the inquiry into the accident, raising suspicions that weak regulation could be a contributory factor to the accident. However, it is suspected that the spill of light oil and gas condensate may have covered an area of up to 90,000km², compared to figures of 6500km² estimated for the Deep Water Horizon. It is suspected that the spill may have affected sea birds, sea snakes, turtles and dolphins, but there is little available information. What has been claimed is that there have been major declines in fisheries on the coasts of the Indonesian islands of Timor, Sumba and Pasir, particularly for red snapper. This has affected up to 7000 fishers in this area, who have lost there livelihoods with reports that many have had to move away from the area completely. The Australian Government are reported to be investigating the truth of these claims. This affect is reminiscent of the Exxon Valdez in 1989, where local fish stocks crashed following the oil spill and some, including the important herring fishery in the area, have never returned.

I find it rather ironic that this spill should have occurred in Australian waters, almost un-noticed, in the shadow of the publicity surrounding the grounding of the Chinese coal carrying ship the Shen Neng I on the Great Barrier Reef, a situation which the Australian Prime Minister of the time described as “outrageous”. He also reportedly stated that there was “no greater natural asset for Australia than the Great Barrier Reef”. The vessel was reported to have crushed two miles of reef as it took a “short cut” on its way to an Australian port and to have contaminated half a mile of the coast with oil. The Montara blow out was far more serious, who is responsible for this outrageous accident in one of the most pristine areas of the world’s oceans? Even more serious for the Great Barrier Reef and other coral reefs around the world are the large quantities of fossil fuels, including oil, gas and coal, that are being burned, releasing CO₂ into the atmosphere. This is causing mass coral bleaching and ocean acidification, both of which are already impacting the growth of these reefs and which will, by the end of century, have sealed their fates if we continue on the current trajectory of carbon emissions. These facts, for the degradation of coral reefs through mass bleaching and acidification are indisputable, they are happening and can be observed, seemed to have escaped the attention of governments such as Australia, who are digging coal and pumping oil out of the ground as fast as they can to use domestically or to sell as exports.

Lack of joined-up thinking on environmental issues is just one area which we all need to pay attention to. It is apparent that we simply do not value marine ecosystems for the services and products they provide for humanity. The oceans are part of the Earth’s life-support system. Everything from food, the production of oxygen, nutrient recycling, coastal protection, temperature regulation and so on are worth billions upon billions (for coral reefs figures up to $375 billion per annum for goods and services to mankind) to humankind, especially when that value is considered over future years and for future generations. These figures are not considered when a new oil or gas development is planned and the risks from it assessed. The Environmental impact assessment for the Macondo prospect was particularly unimaginative in considering the scale of a catastrophic accident that could arise at the site. With respect to beaches and wetlands in the area BPs Exploration Plan, dated March, 2009, BP stated:

“An accidental oil spill from the proposed activities could cause impacts to [beaches, wetlands, shore birds and coastal nesting birds]. However, due to the distance to shore (48 miles), and the response capabilities that would be implemented, no significant adverse impacts are expected.”

This was despite BP estimating, in the same document, that a catastrophic blow out could release 162,000 barrels of oil a day.

It is clear that the Environmental Impact Assessment, Drilling Plans and other requirements for oil exploration by the US government are wholly inadequate in terms of assessment of the real risk and potential cost of serious accidents. Whilst the finger of blame has been firmly pointed at BP, they are a commercial company operating according to the rules and according to the logic of the market-based economy where they answer to their shareholders. Here, poor regulation of the industry is at least partly to blame for the sub-optimal and inadequate response following the accident.

We are all shareholders in the planet and all depend on the environmental services provided by ecosystems, particularly the oceans. It is critical that governments pay much closer attention to how extractive industries operate.

· We should ask the question as to whether or not an operation should be allowed to take place, are the risks it poses outweighed by the benefits over the medium to long term. This must be done with full knowledge of the ecosystems in which the operation is proposed. One of the problems of the Montara blow out, in the Timor Sea, is that much basic scientific information on the region is simply missing. The baseline scientific work on documented what is present in the region and how the ecosystems are structured has not been done.

· Is the operation being carried out according to best modern practices and are the right procedures in place for the worst case of catastrophic failure that we can imagine.

· Using “fisheries speak” the right monitoring, control and surveillance protocols must be in place to ensure industrial compliance to rules and regulations. In the event of an accident, it is critical that lessons are learnt.

· Follow-up investigations and monitoring of environmental impacts are critical in reducing the possibility of future accidents and in refining responses to catastrophic events so that environmental harm is minimised. It is notable that this has not been done adequately for many oil accidents, for example, the previous Gulf of Mexico Ixtoc I explosion and oil spill.

· Finally, industry should pay substantial bonds that are released back to them following the operation on the basis of environmental performance. Such bonds should be in place to pay for the management and clean-up of a catastrophic accident should it happen.

Important in all this is good communication between industry, the responsible government (or authority on the high seas), and other stakeholders in the marine environment.