WEBVTT 00:00:09.951 --> 00:00:15.460 The Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument was founded in 2009 and then expanded in 2014. 00:00:16.660 --> 00:00:20.250 Jarvis Island was one of those units and that's where we've been working over the last couple of days. 00:00:26.038 --> 00:00:30.480 Jarvis Island is about 1,000 miles south of Hawaii and just west of the Line Islands. 00:00:31.444 --> 00:00:33.080 I think it earns the name "remote." 00:00:34.281 --> 00:00:37.670 We are very far from the closest point of land or the closest major city, 00:00:37.870 --> 00:00:42.500 so some of the things that we have been looking at here have just been spectacularly pristine and beautiful, 00:00:42.700 --> 00:00:46.600 because, there's not really much out here besides wonderful wildlife. 00:00:51.949 --> 00:00:54.880 Prior to the Okeanos Explorer missions, there was very little mapping data 00:00:55.080 --> 00:00:58.300 and there had been no ROV dives conducted in this area. 00:00:59.269 --> 00:01:02.030 So, in the last couple of days, we've conducted five dives, 00:01:02.230 --> 00:01:05.200 which are the only ROV exploration that's ever been done here. 00:01:05.400 --> 00:01:07.500 Which is pretty exciting. That is very cool. 00:01:09.908 --> 00:01:13.160 The program here has essentially taken an area in which we knew, 00:01:13.360 --> 00:01:15.730 I think it's safe to say, barely anything about, 00:01:15.930 --> 00:01:18.550 and we mapped all these totally unknown seamounts. 00:01:20.783 --> 00:01:27.490 One of the striking things that we found were that these seamounts look very different than what the altimetery and satellite data suggested. 00:01:29.600 --> 00:01:32.140 This one was about a kilometer higher than we expected it to be. 00:01:33.800 --> 00:01:37.060 And we mapped right over the top of these three seamounts in the middle, 00:01:37.260 --> 00:01:40.210 and you can see peak, peak, but then flat on top here, 00:01:40.410 --> 00:01:47.220 that tells us maybe they formed at some different time, or different ways, or that maybe there are some different biological communities living on them. 00:01:50.106 --> 00:01:58.280 So we are building exploration from the ground up, and we are exploring on many scales, from hundreds of miles down to fractions of an inch. 00:02:01.940 --> 00:02:06.550 I've actually really been impressed with the variety of things we can still see, even in these very old terrains. 00:02:06.750 --> 00:02:09.580 Many of these seamounts are old volcanoes. 00:02:09.780 --> 00:02:12.150 They might have formed 70 million years ago. 00:02:12.350 --> 00:02:18.780 All the rocks, of course, have this thick manganese crust on them, but we've been able to really see some clear volcanic features. 00:02:18.980 --> 00:02:24.720 And of course we saw spectacular carbonate geology at Jarvis, just covered with different types of biology, 00:02:24.920 --> 00:02:26.630 giving all these different habitats. 00:02:28.110 --> 00:02:32.100 So there's this record of these things that went on tens of millions of years ago, 00:02:32.300 --> 00:02:35.330 to go down with the ROV and look at it today, which is just amazing. 00:02:37.565 --> 00:02:44.180 My first note about Jarvis is, "amazing"in all caps and I think that everybody said the same sort of thing, which is kind of stunning. 00:02:45.373 --> 00:02:48.110 One of the first things we saw was a ledge that was just bursting with color. 00:02:48.310 --> 00:02:52.320 Beautiful yellows and reds and purple ribbon corals. 00:02:53.034 --> 00:02:57.260 We'd all be stunned by the biology we're seeing, the sheer abundance of stuff, density of stuff, 00:02:57.460 --> 00:02:59.270 and then suddenly, we'd see something even more amazing. 00:03:00.899 --> 00:03:04.850 One of the things that we all got very excited about was a trio of brittle stars 00:03:05.050 --> 00:03:09.050 that managed somehow to nab a squid. That was just incredible. 00:03:10.500 --> 00:03:13.000 We saw these ledges that were packed with sea urchins. 00:03:13.200 --> 00:03:18.480 Then crinoids took over and all kinds of feather stars and brittle stars and other organisms. 00:03:22.260 --> 00:03:26.030 The sea cucumbers, the likes of which I've never seen before, and then we saw hundreds of them. 00:03:28.703 --> 00:03:33.400 And then we came to fields of these colorful sea fans and stony corals and sponges and... 00:03:35.265 --> 00:03:39.980 Definitely high densities in lots of places,which means that the abundance of animals is much, much higher. 00:03:42.293 --> 00:03:48.180 So if we are thinking about these monument areas, and areas that may be of interest for future resource extraction, 00:03:48.380 --> 00:03:55.550 it makes more sense to try to protect an area that has lots of individuals, especially if there is a high diversity. 00:03:55.750 --> 00:03:57.870 We want to have lots of different kinds of species. 00:03:58.070 --> 00:04:04.530 Let's make sure that we're protecting the right area of the seafloor, the part that has, literally, thousands and thousands of animals. 00:04:08.815 --> 00:04:11.720 The dives culminated in this spectacular, technicolor tableau. 00:04:13.411 --> 00:04:18.450 I mean, we were all gobsmacked.That was just so incredible. So beautiful just to look at. 00:04:22.272 --> 00:04:27.930 When we got close to it, it was just an incredible community of density and diversity, all right there, on a small scale. 00:04:28.130 --> 00:04:33.560 And so, to me, it was kind of at a small scale exactly what we're looking for on the big scale. 00:04:35.071 --> 00:04:39.570 So there's a lot of life down there, and in these places we might not expect it. 00:04:39.770 --> 00:04:41.010 Just incredible. 00:04:41.210 --> 00:04:45.090 It'd be wonderful to come back here and do some more hypothesis-driven science. 00:04:45.290 --> 00:04:50.670 My hypothesis when I first started this trip was that we were going to leave with more questions than we came with. 00:04:50.870 --> 00:04:52.250 Absolutely. I think that's true. 00:04:54.002 --> 00:04:59.060 One of the missions here of our work in Jarvis is really to provide some information about how we might manage these areas. 00:04:59.260 --> 00:05:03.440 And it's really hard to come up with a plan for how to manage something when we don't know what's there. 00:05:03.640 --> 00:05:08.690 So we're really laying down the first baseline information at these sites about the geology, biology, 00:05:08.890 --> 00:05:12.330 and we'll be able to track this baseline going forward. 00:05:15.089 --> 00:05:20.260 We know a lot about the waters right next to our shorelines, but we're way out here in the middle of the ocean. 00:05:20.460 --> 00:05:24.890 It's an important part of the planet, it's a vast environment, the Pacific Ocean, and yet, 00:05:25.090 --> 00:05:28.990 we don't know what's going on down below the surface of the water and so, to me, 00:05:29.190 --> 00:05:35.350 that's one of the importance of getting there, to be able to get the initial data, to even know, what are the questions we need to ask.