Undersea mountain is a test bed for sickly oceans

ON BOARD THE ARCTIC SUN RISE－Clad in diving gear or oilskins and gumboots, a team of scientists and activists spent weeks in the South Atlantic, enduring storms and choppy seas to check up on a place almost no one has heard of.

Their mission: To monitor an underwater mountain for clues of global warming and plastic pollution－and vet the impact of a 12-year-old ban on trawling.

The researchers with Greenpeace sailed a thousand kilometers northwest of Cape Town, South Africa, to Vema Seamount, one of the most remarkable yet little-known features of the Blue Planet.

The volcanic mountain rises a colossal 4,600 meters from the ocean abyss－almost as high as Mont Blanc, the highest point in Europe.

Its conical peak, eroded to a flat top by waves over thousands of years, reaches to just 26 meters from the surface.

Aboard the research ship the Arctic Sunrise, specialist divers shared jokes as they put on bright orange-and-black dry suits, strapped on air cylinders and ran through final checks of high-resolution cameras.

They then jumped out through the pilot door, disappearing in the deep blue waters for about 45 minutes－a twice-a-day ritual, weather permitting.

Below the waves, the divers took samples and recorded an inventory of sea life.

Vema is an ocean oasis－its shallow summit is bathed in sunlight, enabling algae, kelp and black coral to grow, which in turn draw fish and crustaceans.

The divers resurfaced, elated.

"There were lots of fish around us, just swimming around us, in a big circle. It was absolutely awesome to see. Beautiful!" said Dutch diver Sander Jansson.

Vema－named after a vessel which discovered it in the 1950s, lies in international waters.

Little more than 1 percent of ocean areas lying outside national jurisdictions benefit from some form of international protection, according to the United Nations' Ocean Action website.

Vema is fortunate to be one of the very few areas of the deep seas that enjoys such a shield.

In 2007, an intergovernmental fisheries science and management body, the South East Atlantic Fisheries Organization, or SEAFO, banned bottom trawling on Vema and other submarine mountains, known as seamounts.

Some of the species at Vema have clearly flourished since then.

"There is so much life down there," said marine biologist and expedition leader Thilo Maack.

"There is crayfish, there's a lot of seaweed, there's a lot of sponges and fish of any kind".

He added: "This is just a perfect example of what happens if we leave nature on its own for a certain period of time. Even if it was overfished, it will replenish."

Need for protection

Marine conservation organizations are pushing for ocean havens to be vastly expanded.

Greenpeace has mounted a pole-to-pole Arctic-to-Antarctic expedition to lobby the UN to come up with an international legally-binding treaty that would protect at least 30 percent of the world's deep oceans from human activities and industrial fishing by 2030.

The UN is negotiating new policies which should be finalized at a global conference early next year.

Francois Engelbrecht, professor of climatology at South Africa's University of the Witswatersrand, said the plight of the oceans was like the fight against climate change: Both must be addressed at a planetary level.

"The entire Earth system is connected. It is a coupled system, and changes in one part of the world sooner or later affect many other parts of the world," he said.

"So the international efforts to protect the oceans and to mitigate climate change are in fact an effort that requires tremendous international cooperation."