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Mapping the Ocean

Nature Conservancy

There's been lots of reporting on the decline of coral reefs in tropical seas.  Now comes word that we have coral right off the coast of Virginia -- an important piece of news for fishermen and for environmentalists who are mapping the oceans.

 

On a sunny weekday  last summer, Captain Monty Hawkins prepared to take fishermen cruising off the coast of Virginia and Maryland.

“Hey, Jay.  Tell those boys to throw the lines off.”

He’s been doing this for more than 30 years and has watched with dismay as it became more and more difficult to catch sea bass and flounder - fish that depend on reefs.  Government experts had  been saying there were no reefs off the mid-Atlantic, but Hawkins knew better, and when the Nature Conservancy announced a meeting of experts to develop a conservation plan for the mid-Atlantic, he decided to go.

“I actually turned my boat around, refunded my clients and drove to that meeting.”

Long ago, he says, there were acres of coral reef of the coast, but dredging for clams destroyed them.
“The hydraulic clam dredge is 15-20 tons of steel that’s pulled behind the boat, and it liquefies the bottom.”

Hurricanes also caused harm to increasingly small reefs, so Captain Monty decided to do something concrete.  After getting permits from the Army Corps of engineers, he began dropping 24 concrete blocks overboard each time he went out.

Credit Nature Conservancy
Jake Shaffer and Jake Knox, Captain Monty Hawkins' mates on the Morning Star, deploy concrete oyster castles to help expand the Jimmy Jackson Memorial Reef off Ocean City, Maryland.

After depositing more than 10,000 blocks on the ocean floor, Hawkins says reefs are coming back - live coral growing on concrete.  

“Fishermen are always looking for a concentration of fish, so these reefs create that.  It’s a place for them to feed.  It’s a place for them to shelter.  It’s a place for them to spawn.”

Now, people like Monty Hawkins are playing a role in helping the Nature Conservancy create detailed maps of the world’s oceans.   

“We have better maps of the surface of mars than we do of the sea floor underneath us right now," says
the Nature Conservancy’s Jay Odell.

“Right through these waters, every year, the world’s most endangered large whale - the Northern Right Whale - swims.  The primary cause of mortality to this species is being hit by ships and entanglement in fishing gear.  We really don’t have good maps yet of where they swim.”

The project brings together data from people who go boating or surfing, along with information from the coast guard and department of defense, the fishing and shipping industries, and from on-going research by the Mid-Atlantic Ocean Observing System on whose board he sits.

“This ocean out here actually is pretty well wired.   There are satellites collecting information on things like sea surface temperature and ocean color, buoys out here that are measuring wave height and wind, an array of high-frequency radar that’s giving us really high resolution data on currents, and we’ve got the gliders, unmanned underwater sensors that essentially phone home with information.”

This high-tech fleet, deployed by the Navy and other institutions, is gathering information that could help predict hurricanes, monitor changes in ocean temperature and chemistry.  

“They look like yellow tubes with fins, and they’re deployed all around the world, and we’re starting to organize the glider efforts into what we’re calling glider palloozas. The gliders are being sent out at the same time to different parts of the global ocean and phoning home on the ocean conditions.”

And, Odell says, the new maps will guide future development to keep new enterprises - like offshore wind turbines - from coming into conflict with existing uses of the ocean.