| | |  Editorials | Environmental | August 2008 
Sub to Explore Undersea Islands
 Sandra Dibble - San Diego Union-Tribune
go to original
| | The DeepSee, shown near Cocos Island off Costa Rica, has room for a pilot and two passengers, and includes searchlights and external cameras. (Undersea Hunter Group) | | |
Dark underwater mountains rise off the coast of Baja California Sur, too deep for scuba divers and virtually unexplored. This week, scientists began diving hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the Gulf of California, searching for new species and insights that could help protect the region's commercial fisheries.
“We know less about this area than we know about the surface of Mars,” said Exequiel Ezcurra, the leader of the expedition that began yesterday and ends Sept. 5. Ezcurra is provost and director of the Biodiversity Research Center of the Californias at the San Diego Natural History Museum.
From whale sharks to giant manta rays to bottlenose dolphin, scientists have long documented the variety of life that thrives in Mexico's Gulf of California. But little is known about areas farther below on seamounts and deep-sea reefs.
The dozen scientists participating in the project are taking turns inside a tiny yellow submarine with a robotic arm and 360-degree view, collecting samples and taking photographs and videos to document the world sometimes described as islands under the sea.
The team includes researchers from Universidad National Autonoma de Mexico, the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California Sur, the Centro Interdisciplinario de Ciencias Marinas in La Paz, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.
Joining the expedition are marine biologists, ecologists, oceanographers, and taxonomists specializing in a range of underwater species.
“Nobody has seen what we're going to see in this expedition,” said Vivianne Solis-Weiss, a seaworm expert from the Universidad National Autonoma de Mexico.
Ezcurra is calling it a “bioblitz,” or rapid assessment of the region's biodiversity.
The areas to be surveyed are, at their deepest points, shallow enough to receive significant amounts of nutrients from the surface but too deep for much light to pierce through.
“That's the area that's completely unexplored,” said Ezcurra, former director of Mexico's National Institute of Ecology. With marine scientists focused on the deeper and more shallow parts of the sea, this zone had been overlooked, he said.
 Dubbed the world's aquarium, the Gulf of California separates the Baja California peninsula from Mexico's mainland. With 39 percent of the world's species of sea mammals and a third of its cetacean species, its environmental importance overshadows its relatively small size.
In 2005, the United Nations declared 244 uninhabited islands in the gulf and their surrounding waters a World Heritage Site. The Mexican government has designated several of the gulf's seamounts as conservation priority areas, even though little is known about them.
“This would add knowledge and elements for the conservation of the richest parts of the sea,” Ezcurra said.
Some of the deepest parts of the gulf have been documented by scientists researching hydrologic sea vents some 6,500 feet below sea level in an area known as the Guaymas Basin. Scuba divers have explored the marine life that's close to the surface, up to 120 feet.
Seamounts are typically extinct volcanos that rise from the ocean floor but do not reach the surface. The tips of some may be submerged thousands of feet, but others rise close enough to the surface to be accessible to scuba divers.
Scientific interest in seamounts has grown over the past decade. Nobody knows for sure how many there are: About 15,000 have been identified worldwide, but researchers estimate they number closer to 100,000, said Karen Stocks, assistant research scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UCSD.
Stocks has been compiling research on the biology of seamounts on a Web site called Seamounts Online. The underwater mountains “have the potential to tell us a lot about how species arise in the oceans and how they move around,” Stocks said. “It seems like some seamounts have a lot of endemic species.”
Also driving interest in seamounts is the threat from overfishing by deep-sea trawlers. “Some are being fished very heavily,” Stocks said.
The expedition happened almost serendipitously. The sub's owner is Steve Drogin, a retired San Diego real estate developer and underwater photographer, who offered the use of his submarine free to the museum for a worthy project. The DeepSee, as the submarine is known, has room for a pilot and two passengers, and includes searchlights, a robotic arm and external cameras.
Ezcurra took up the offer from his friend Drogin. He joined Scripps scientists Brad Erisman and Octavio Aburto to assemble a team of experts and raise $300,000 to underwrite expenses, including the use of the research vessel Argos. Donors include the Walton Family Foundation, the Nature Conservancy and Mexico's National Institute of Ecology.
“We have so few opportunities to get into the water and see what things lie beyond scuba depth,” said Bruce Robison, an oceanographer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute who is preparing his own expedition to the gulf's seamounts. “Any chance we have to explore is incredibly valuable.”
Robison is leading a multidisciplinary team planning to spend three months in 2010 in the Gulf of California, studying its biology, geology and chemistry. “We may learn more about what we can expect in the future off the coast of California” from the higher temperatures in the gulf, Robison said.
The specialists who are part of the San Diego Natural History Museum's expedition hope they will discover species.
Ezcurra said he believes they will see much biodiversity on the underwater mountains, if his experience on land is any guide. “It wouldn't surprise us, but to actually measure that is important.”
Sandra Dibble: sandra.dibble(at)uniontrib.com |
|
| |
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us