The Tang.ɢwan-ḥačxʷiqak-Tsig̱is Marine Protected Area will be 133,000 square kilometres, covering underwater mountain ranges and alien ecosystems.
Cherisse Du Preez was staring at a monitor on the bridge of the Coast Guard ship John P. Tully as a single line worked its way across the screen. To her relief, the line was slowly rising, charting the shape of an underwater mountain as the sonar pings reflected off the bottom.
It’s not typical for a biologist to make this kind of finding. “As a marine biologist I expected to discover species, not mountains,” she quipped — but a recent surge in interest in that patch off Vancouver Island has enabled discoveries of all sorts: from new animal behaviours to new species to new deep-sea ecosystems, even mountains.
The story behind Tang.ɢwan-ḥačxʷiqak-Tsig̱is As the scientists aboard the John P. Tully celebrated their discovery on the bow of the ship, the pickup-truck-sized head of a sperm whale broke through the water’s surface nearby.
‘It’s not whether these animals are going to die, it’s how are they going to die?’ There are three unique, otherworldly ecosystems in the area to be protected: seamounts, deep-sea hydrothermal vents and methane seeps. The first two are best described in superlatives. The actual presence of methane seeps hasn’t yet been confirmed, but Du Preez says there’s “really strong evidence” that the protected area includes an enormous one.
That richness puts them in harm’s way for fishing, both bottom-contact trawling and fishing off the bottom. Everywhere Du Preez has looked there, she’s found abandoned fishing gear — up to 400,000 pieces of fishing gear on a single seamount, she estimates.Consider a mountain’s slope: At its lower reaches, the trees are big, broad and tall. Farther up the mountain, they dwindle until they disappear, leaving behind scrubby alpine vegetation and lichens.
“Four-thousand-year-old coral doesn’t adapt very quick. You just lose those animals, because they don’t get to move,” Du Preez said. “The punchline of the paper is the most depressing sentence I’ve ever written: It’s not whether these animals are going to die, it’s ‘How are they going to die?’ ” The vents are a marvel of nature, nurturing life far beyond the sun’s reach in a rare violation to the rule that the sun is the Earth’s ultimate life-giver.
The good news for hydrothermal vents is that they’re stable. They’re below the part of the ocean that’s losing oxygen. They’re below the part of the ocean that’s becoming more acidic and they aren’t being bowled over and scraped bare by trawlers. All they need is the absence of deliberate harm. “If deep-sea mining — or when — deep-sea mining happens, the plumes will be on the order of hundreds of kilometres squared, Du Preez said.
“Canada and the co-managing First Nations are about to protect hydrothermal vents and seamounts within their control, while the rest of the world is looking to exploit hydrothermal vents and seamounts in a way that … we’ve never done before,” Du Preez said.
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