As documentaries about Earth’s accelerating climate crisis go, Expedition: Saving Our Seas is surprisingly buoyant.
The ocean covers more than two-thirds of Earth’s surface. And “as the climate heats up, our seas are under pressure like never before,” narrator Auli’i Cravalho, the voice of the title character in Disney’s Moana, says at the opening of The National Geographic Society’s new documentary. The film documents how oceanographers are racing to document and mitigate climate change’s impacts on ocean and coastal habitats.
Despite that solemn mission, Expedition: Saving Our Seas is full of hope — and stunning visuals. The documentary offers a window into the scientists’ wonder and joy in their work as they discover new life forms in the depths of the Southern Ocean, or successfully nurture young corals threatened by warming in the Indian Ocean.
The film opens with a twist on the usual world map: At the center is one great ocean, surrounded by land. Trivia buffs know Earth has five oceans: the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern and Arctic. But geographic names aside, these five oceans are just one, linked by a global system of currents known as the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt.
“It’s this giant connected ocean that ignores all of the political boundaries, ignores all of the names we call them,” says Andrew Thurber, a biological oceanographer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, whose research is among those featured in the film.
The documentary loosely follows the current’s path as it zips around the world from project to project.
The first project in the documentary is Thurber’s. He’s on board a research vessel in the frigid Southern Ocean, which rings Antarctica. Using a remotely-operated vehicle dubbed SuBastian, Thurber and his colleagues are scanning the seafloor, hunting for the world’s southernmost hydrothermal vent.
Hydrothermal vents spew superhot, chemically-enriched seawater. In the generally nutrient-poor Southern Ocean, that makes these vents a potential food oasis to support deep sea life.
Throughout the night, as the ROV scans the seafloor, Thurber and his colleagues stay glued to the video it sends back, oohing and aahing as never-before-seen life-forms come into view. “It was a marathon of excitement,” he says now.
Then they see it: A large black smoker, the southernmost hydrothermal vent ever found. And all around it: swarms of pregnant female krill.
“That blew all of our minds,” Thurber says. Krill are the keystone species of the entire Southern Ocean food web, a crucial food source for baleen whales, seals, penguins and fish. But krill are threatened by both industrial fishing and climate change. This discovery, Thurber says, helps make the case for a marine protected area, a region where fishing and other human activities should be restricted.
From the Southern Ocean, the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt flows thousands of kilometers to the north, where marine ecologist Maiyai Taal Hocheimy is tracking how the rising waters of the Atlantic Ocean are encroaching on Banjul, the capital of The Gambia in West Africa. Her hope is that salt-tolerant mangrove trees along the coast, with their dense network of soil-retaining roots, might help hold back the sea in the coming decades — provided that the community can be enlisted to help maintain the mangroves.
I found Hocheimy’s work especially inspiring because she is working to shape the future of oceanography. In 2017, she founded the GREAT (Gaining Research Experience in Africa for Tomorrow) Institute, the first aquatic and coastal science research institute in The Gambia. The mangrove project recruited young local scientists to help conduct the research.
“The goal is to train the next generation of environmental stewards” Hocheimy says. “We have to show that mangroves have value, so they’ll understand and want to protect them. It is their future at stake.”
That sentiment is echoed many times in the film — the importance not only of enlisting young scientists but also centering local scientists who pose new questions that oceanographers who parachute in from other places may not think to ask, says marine biogeochemist Kristina Brown.
In the documentary, Brown, of the University of Manitoba in Canada, co-leads an expedition to explore the waters of Sherman Basin, a large bay north of the Arctic Circle in Nunavut, Canada. This region has been hunted and fished by Inuit people for centuries.
But it might change beyond all recognition in the next few decades, Brown says. So, the local Inuit community invited her to help create the first catalog of what species are present in the waters and on the seafloor. “[It’s] the first project I’ve been involved in where the local community both defined the research questions and have brought their own unique expertise to the research project.”
Watching how communities around the world are increasingly taking ownership of studies in their own waters was, for me, the most exciting takeaway of this documentary.
“We want to democratize access to the deep sea, to enable people who haven’t had access to these kinds of tools to ask more and new questions,” says Katy Croft Bell, the founder and president of the Ocean Discovery League, a nonprofit ocean exploration group based in Saunderstown, Rhode Island.
As a result of inaccessibility, little of Earth’s vast ocean has been mapped, particularly the deep sea. Bell’s organization is developing inexpensive technologies such as a hardy little camera and sensor system dubbed DORIS, for Deep Ocean Research and Imaging System. It can descend to 6,000 meters and costs less than $10,000.
Expedition: Saving Our Seas offers just a few scant minutes to each project before moving on around the globe to the next, so there’s no time to learn about each project in depth. But the overall takeaway of watching these vignettes, back to back, is that there is a young, energetic community of scientists taking on the challenge.
Mitigating climate change’s impacts on the oceans is, after all, a race against time. So it’s nice to think we might have all hands on deck.
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