Scientists recently discovered more than 50 suspected new species lurking far beneath the waves along a ridge in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The closest landmass is the remote island of Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, off the coast of Chile. These life-forms and likely millions of others are at risk of extinction due to human activity. But that doesn’t have to be the case.
Hunting for data to help establish new marine protected areas, scientists from around the world set sail aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Falkor (too) research vessel on an exploratory 40-day expedition that concluded in April.
The team used an underwater robot, SuBastian, to investigate 10 seamounts, or underwater mountains, along a range called the Salas y Gómez Ridge. Each of the seamounts is home to unique life-forms — from animals that look like translucent tangles of yarn to mutant starfish to glowing dragonfish.
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The ridge is an important migratory stopover for whales, seabirds, sharks, and sea turtles and spans nearly 1,000 miles across mostly international waters (only a small part of the ridge lies within Chilean jurisdiction). International waters are basically a free-for-all with no legal protections, leaving them vulnerable to industrial activity like fishing, shipping, and deep-sea mining.
Because of its importance to biodiversity, the Salas y Gómez Ridge is being considered for marine protected status once the United Nations High Seas Treaty is ratified. Many nations (the United States included) have signed the treaty, but only two countries — Chile and Palau — have ratified it, as nations must do in order to put the treaty into effect.
The treaty will allow nations to designate marine protected areas in international waters — if they can provide evidence that protections are needed to preserve the natural ecosystem.
Protections are critical because even small influences can have an outsized impact in the deep sea. The expedition’s chief scientist, Erin Easton, a biological oceanographer at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, says deep-sea ecosystems are particularly vulnerable because they’re filled with “long-lived, slow-growing life-forms, and they make up essential habitats for a diversity of other marine fauna,” such as migratory species that may use the areas as waypoints.
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Seamounts are also sources of valuable metals that can be targets of deep-sea mining efforts, but mining means stripping the top off a seamount, effectively killing everything that lives there.
Those at-risk seafloor dwellers include strange-looking starfish like the coronaster, which will spend almost all its life clinging to and slinking across rocks on the bottom of the ocean.
Given that seamounts are populated with many creatures that live nowhere else on the planet, destroying one may mean permanently extinguishing dozens or even hundreds of species. And the effects could snowball; damaging one could affect neighboring seamounts by, for example, covering them with plumes of sediment kicked up by nearby mining activity.
Safeguarding ridge animals like sea toads, which have perpetually melancholy expressions, could in turn support larger migratory animals, like sharks, that feed on them as they’re passing through.
“Climate change is causing the world to change faster than most organisms can evolve and adapt,” says Brian Kennedy, a deep-sea ecologist and member of the expedition team. “The wide range of threats makes it imperative to set aside areas of the world’s ocean to let nature take its course with the fewest stressors possible.”
Ashley Balzer Vigil is a science writer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a freelance environmental writer.