Ocean trek offers break from politics
I’ve been screaming at my computer. Regardless of where you stand in your political decision-making process, the cacophonous sound of multiple, grown adult humans forcefully interrupting one another is torturous, subjecting many of us to a crippling, nails- on-a- chalkboard, and all-pervading version of internet purgatory. I chose to distract myself by tuning into the livestream of the E/ V Nautilus Expedition, a two-week undersea research quest examining the Central Coast’s deep ocean, and a window into marine science that is spontaneous, untamed and visceral.
From Oct. 3 through Oct.16, a team of scientists with the Ocean Exploration Trust webcasted its journey to a global audience while piloting remotely operated vehicles through coldwater coral forests and over fields of sponges from San Francisco to Big Sur. The scientists even revisited the site of a “whale fall,” the final resting place of a baleen whale who died at the surface of the ocean and then sank down thousands of feet to the seafloor where it nurtured an entirely new ecosystem with its decaying corpse.
Peering into every nook and cranny, ROVs hovered over terranean seascapes, traversing the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary while documenting their findings via transects. You may remember one of the last missions in 2018 when the Nautilus famously revealed an octopus garden on Monterey Bay’s Davidson Seamount, primarily populated by brooding mother octopus — a shaded locale under the sea, where everyone seemingly liked to be.
I love a genuine science geek. I’ve always assumed that Bill
Nye and I would get along swimmingly, and I’m still a fangirl of the original version of Ben Affleck when he played C.T. Granville in the PBS ocean science education special,
The Voyage of the Mimi. But there is nothing, and I mean nothing, that compares to the wizard-commentary of ROV scientists in real time. It’s like cheering at a professional ball game of sorts, but instead of whooping it up over a goal or a home run or an impossible shot sealed at the buzzer, scientists-turned-sportscasters explode in high-pitched and fast-paced, partially formed sentences of garbled facts, ecological considerations, and unadulterated glee. “Oh, there’s some eggs. She has eggs! Look at how shiny those eggs are!” and “Ohhh there’s a bunch of gastropods. Oh, look a shimmer! Oh wow, would you look at that. My goooooodness.” These are grown adults who interrupt one another too, but, unlike current political “debates,” it’s due to sheer disbelief about what they are collaboratively unveiling. It is music to my ears.
As part of their reconnaissance mission, Nautilus investigators sought to further define life and habitats in Pioneer Canyon. A region in the northern stretches of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, Pioneer Canyon was partially opened in January 2020 to bottom trawling, a notoriously destructive method of fishing known for mowing down fragile seafloor communities. The Ocean Exploration Trust team hopes that, “information and data collected during this expedition will help to inform policy decisions for vulnerable species.” Their findings will contribute to our collective knowledge of the state of our beloved benthos. Since the early 2000s, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has chronicled pollutants from tires, to plastic bags, to microplastics, debris collecting on rocky outcroppings and accumulating in primordial crevasses.
Roaming the deep ocean is often compared to launching rockets into outer space, with both referred to as explorations of “the final frontier.” Humans cannot survive in our natural form in the deep- sea environment, the cold and immense pressure of water literally weighing down on us would crush our bodies to smithereens. While it is unfairly portrayed as a lifeless and vast expanse of nothingness, deep sea communities are masterfully functioning and vibrantly complex ecosystems, and serve as a carbon sink, gifting humans an unreturnable favor as we pollute our climate with unbounded emissions. The earth is 60% covered by water that is more than 5,250 feet deep.
As I watched the ROV glide over parts unknown, I couldn’t help but remember the wonky 1980s classic film, “The Gods Must Be Crazy.” A Coca- Cola bottle is littered from an airplane and falls from the sky into the bush of the Kalahari Desert, an isolated region with no connection to the outside world. Instead of assuming the trash is the direct result of unchecked corporate pollution, the hunter who retrieves the bottle brings it back to his tribe where it undermines their balance and stability. They conclude that returning the bottle from whence it came is the most appropriate strategy to keep the peace.
In the version of the movie remake that’s playing in my head, humans are deranged outsiders existing beyond the laws of nature’s web, who mistake their mortal characteristics as god-like. They go about their business on land and above the ocean, apathetically tossing their plastic pollution, Coke bottles included, and their carbon dioxide, into an amorphous, abyssal zone beneath them that is expected to absorb and absolve all sins. In my alternate ending, scientists and educators righteously ring the alarm bell. Something is wrong, deeply wrong, and the out- ofsight- out- of-mind mentality is no longer working. We hit rock bottom.
But then, we rise. We begin to ardently believe in science. We take our lessons from that whale who died at the surface, and who, even in its death, became a regenerative presence for its deep ocean cohabiters. Like that whale, we long to be virtuous ancestors for future generations. We stop consuming garbage and making more garbage by proxy. We vote for political leaders who hold our health and happiness and agency as tightly as they hold their own, and who recognize that nonhuman life is deserving of a seat at the stakeholder table.
We vote on behalf of ourselves. We vote on behalf of perfect strangers. We vote on behalf of the octopus mamas mystically nesting on the transformative edge of a dormant underwater volcano. For all that is good and wild and diverse in this beautiful and improbable world, we vote.