Research crews will leave Ford Island this week to explore the staggering depths of the ocean around Hawaii, which humans have never seen before.
Using sonar and a remotely operated vehicle that aims to venture as deep as 16,250 feet, the 46-member crew plans to spend the next two months mapping unfamiliar seafloors and surveying deep-sea life off Johnston Atoll, the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument and the main Hawaiian Islands.
The remote vehicle will use its two robotic arms and 11 cameras to explore for the first time seamounts 60 million to 80 million years old and thousands of feet below the surface, providing high-definition images of what it finds for anyone with an Internet connection to access online.
The researchers will do all this aboard the Okeanos Explorer, which officials described Wednesday as the federal government’s only vessel fully dedicated to ocean exploration.
The 224-foot, nearly 1,600-ton converted naval vessel arrived in Hawaii earlier this summer for its first expeditions in the region since being converted for sea exploration in 2010, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researchers.
“We know so little about these ecosystems. We don’t know what we’re going to find,” Brian Kennedy, a NOAA expedition coordinator, said during a tour Wednesday of Okeanos, as crews prepared the ship for a Friday departure.
A big reason for the expedition, which actually just wrapped up the first of its four legs, is to learn what’s happening in these ecosystems hidden in the ocean’s deep reaches before such possibilities as industrial deep-sea mining become a reality, trip organizers say.
Areas such as the Papahanaumokuakea Monument and Johnston Atoll, which saw its federal monument boundaries expanded last year by President Barack Obama amid controversy, would be protected from such undersea mining operations, NOAA officials say.
However, other unprotected and mineral-rich zones similar to the depths outside Johnston are being eyed for mining, they added.
“We want to understand what’s inside and what’s outside the deeper resources of these monuments because they’re so poorly understood,” said Chris Kelley, a co-leader of the expedition and associate professor of biology at the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory.
“We want to get down here because this Johnson monument is smack-dab in the middle of this (mineral-rich) area,” Kelley added. The team wants to gather information on the corals, sponges and other deep-sea life at these sites “before something actually happens” — and perhaps make recommendations on where mining should be done, he said.
“They can’t run away if anything happens … they’re sort of stuck,” Kelley said of life on the sea floor.
At Papahanaumokuakea, the crew has some 20 dives planned for its remote vehicle to seek out and study dense coral and sponge communities along ridges at depths of up to 10,000 feet. Previous expeditions to the area using HURL’s Pisces manned submersibles could only descend a fraction of that depth, officials say.
In some ways the NOAA-led Okeanos expedition will build on mapping work started last year by the Falkor, a privately funded, state-of-the-art vessel that mapped parts of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. That expedition, which Kelley also helped lead, discovered 18 seamounts that hadn’t been mapped before.
Wendy Schmidt, who founded the Falkor’s operator, the Schmidt Ocean Institute, said last year that her group aimed to fill a void left by dwindling federal research budgets precisely at a time “when oceans are under attack” and need study the most.
“The fleet is dwindling,” Kelley Elliott, an expedition coordinator with NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, added Wednesday of shrinking government research budgets. “It’s not as robust as it used to be.”
Meanwhile, according to NOAA, about 5 percent of the world’s oceans have been mapped. The agency calculates that Okeanos can map an area about the size of West Virginia in one year — and that it would take 1,042 years for the vessel to map the oceans by itself.
The approximately three-month expedition around Hawaii and Johnston Atoll will cost $30,000 to $50,000 a day, Elliott said. Only two scientists will be aboard, but 23 other Hawaii-based scientists can participate remotely in the Okeanos’ dives using the ship’s satellite technology, she added. The system works well, she said, because the explorers don’t always know what they’re going to find — or which experts would be best to have on board.
The expedition will send its mapping data to the National Archives, from which Internet giant Google plans to add the data to its Google Maps feature, Elliott said. Additionally, the remote vehicle dives will all be live-streamed at oceanexplorer.noaa.gov, according to a NOAA release. Viewers will be able to watch as the vehicle records deep-sea life and collects specimens for further study aboard Okeanos.
“We’re trying to open-source the deep ocean,” Elliott said.
