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Oceans 2001: Uncertainties and Accomplishments
By DON WALSH
Don Walsh served 24 years in the Navy, during which time he was involved in many aspects of Navy oceanographic activity. He now heads International Maritime Inc., which he founded in 1975.
It was a year shaped by the forces of several events, some predictable and some not. At the beginning, it seemed that the change of White House leadership from Democrat to Republican would assure President George W. Bush smooth sailing, with Republicans then in control of both houses of Congress.
There was disappointment in the nation's science and technology community that the new administration's first budgets proposed reductions in most areas of special interest to that community. And there were other indicators that the future might be more constricted than during the eight years of the Clinton administration. Perhaps most troubling was the extremely slow pace with which the new president appointed his most senior scientific officials, such as the presidential science advisor and the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The defection on 24 May of former Republican Sen. Jim Jeffords, who declared himself an Independent, changed the political balance. The razor-thin Republican majority in the Senate changed to a one-vote Democratic majority. Administration programs would no longer be a slam dunk on Capitol Hill.
All Senate committee chairmanships also changed, and the former (Democratic) "ranking minority members" now became chairmen. Several are old-time friends of the oceans. Most prominent among the latter is Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.).
The replacement of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C) by Sen. Joseph Biden Jr. (D-Del.) as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee signaled an end to the almost traditional blockage of any proposal that the United States ratify the United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty, as had been urged for years by several presidents, numerous members of Congress, and a number of government agencies.
From February through early September, the Republican administration and the House of Representatives learned to work with the Democratic-majority Senate. The mostly healthy workings of a government by consensus were in play. The budgets for science and technology moved ahead. As in past years, the national ocean programs were being treated fairly on Capitol Hill.
However, hovering in the background was a national economy that was showing serious signs of weakness. Even as Congress was approving the president's tax-reduction program, there were indications that the projected federal budget surplus might rapidly dissipate and perhaps completely disappear. By the end of the year the American people learned that the current recession had "officially" started in March 2001.
Then came the terrorist attacks of 11 September. In addition to the massive distraction caused to the normal functioning of government, there were new demands on the public purse for a wide variety of remedial actions. The president received authority to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on terrorist-related R&D (research and development) programs, but for the oceanic community there were several questions unanswered. Would some of this money come from ocean-related programs--and if so, how much and from what programs? Or, conversely, would some go into ocean-related programs--probably for port and harbor-security research?
The shaky economy took additional hard hits, initially in the stock market. But there also were long-term economic problems caused by the terrorist attacks. The travel industry suffered major damage, to cite but one example.
How did all of this affect the national ocean program? The short answer seems to be that most government agencies with substantial ocean-related responsibilities kept up with inflation, and some obtained budget increases.
The U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy: "Making the Map"
The National Ocean Policy Act, passed in the summer of 2000, ordered the new president (whoever it might be) to establish a Commission on Ocean Policy within 90 days of taking office in January 2001. That deadline was not met, however. President Bush did not make the appointments to the 16-member Commission, in fact, until mid-June. The nominations came equally from both houses of Congress and the administration; the congressional nominations were divided (though unequally) between Republicans and Democrats.
The Commission is required to review and assess all U.S. ocean and coastal activities and to identify shortcomings and weaknesses, then develop recommendations for fixing them. The Commission's report is to be submitted to the president and Congress within 18 months of the Commission's first meeting--then the Commission expires. The White House will have 120 days to review the report before forwarding it to Congress with recommendations for implementing actions.
There were two Commission meetings in 2001--one in September, the second in November. Both meetings were held in Washington. The members were briefed on the status of the government's ocean programs. During the September meeting the members chose Adm. James D. Watkins, USN (Ret.), a former chief of naval operations--and former secretary of energy, as well--to serve as chairman. As it turned out, Watkins's most recent position--president of the Consortium on Ocean Research and Education (CORE)--provided ideal preparation for his new leadership role.
Future meetings of the Commission will be held at various cities throughout the United States to ensure the members receive representative feedback from various segments of the oceanic community. Individual commissioners have been encouraged to do their own fact-finding as well.
More than a hundred committees now advise Washington's officialdom on the state of affairs in their respective areas of expertise. The Commission on Ocean Policy could have greater influence than most. The members have a huge task to complete in only 18 months, but could make a significant difference.
Advice From Outside: The Pew Commission Continues Its Work
Prior to 2001, there was little to report on the work of the private-sector Pew Oceans Commission. In 2001 the members became more active. The stated intent of the Pew Commission is to conduct a national dialogue on the policies needed to restore and protect the living marine resources in U.S. waters. After reviewing the best scientific information available, the Commission is scheduled to submit its formal recommendations this year in a report to Congress and the nation.
The experts on the 17-member Commission hail from outside the federal government. The panel is chaired by former White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, who succeeded former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman last year when she was appointed by President Bush to head the Environmental Protection Agency.
In 2001 the Commission visited New York, Maine, Hawaii, and Iowa to gather data and to educate the public about its activities. Pew Commission members have briefed the newly formed Presidential Commission on Ocean Policy, and also have testified before Congress (twice).
On the surface it might seem that much of what the Pew Commission has been and is doing might be a duplication of the presidential commission's work, but there are important differences. The Pew Commission focuses on threats to living resources in U.S. waters and on the measures needed to restore and sustain the health of the marine environment. The presidential commission has a much broader mandate--i.e., to review and evaluate all U.S. uses and regulations of the oceans. Some overlap exists--especially in the conservation area--but this is not really a problem. Because the Pew Commission is independent of government, it is free to offer a second opinion on critical ocean issues.
The calendar of the Pew Oceans Commission has it completing its work in April 2002, about a year ahead of the presidential commission. The Pew report can help the presidential commission, therefore, by ensuring that members of the latter have fully considered all ocean conservation and management issues in the public domain.
Kyoto Moves Into the Shadows
In July, President Bush put even more distance between the United States and the Kyoto Protocols. President Clinton had supported the protocols, but the Republican-dominated Senate did not. The current Democratic-controlled Senate probably would be more receptive to the United States ratifying the protocols, but President Bush is opposed.
There may be some good reasons for the president's position, but many moderate world leaders have expressed disappointment, realizing that the protocols would have little effect if the United States is not a party.
The Bush administration does support a reduction in greenhouse gases, however, and President Bush said he would work with U.S. allies to find ways to achieve such a reduction.
In the second half of the year it appeared that a lot of the "push" toward reaching an international accord without U.S. involvement had moderated. Perhaps some of this was due to the global economic slowdown. It seems more likely, however, after the events of 11 September and the new focus on fighting international terrorism, that the Kyoto accords simply were pushed into the shadows. Nonetheless, the problems addressed at Kyoto are serious ones and many of them--particularly the need to contain and reduce global atmospheric pollution--will not just go away.
Perhaps the most useful aspect of the current stand-down on Kyoto is the possibility that the Bush administration may reconsider and modify its stand. The positive early results from the war on terrorism has shown that the president can grow in the job and is both able and willing to take constructive action based on advice of his advisors.
The UNESCO Convention On Undersea Artifacts: No More Treasure Hunters?
In November, the 32nd General Conference of the United Nations Education, Science, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) adopted the "Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage." The vote was 87 States voting "yes" and four States (including the United States) voting "no"; there also were 15 abstentions. The convention was the product of four years' work by some 350 delegates and experts from 90 nations. It will come into force as international law when the parliaments of 20 of the signatories have approved it.
Basically, the convention seeks to govern how underwater cultural resources can be used. It recognizes that today's ocean technologies permit location, visitation, and salvage at almost any depth in the ocean. There are several million undiscovered shipwrecks and former human dwelling sites on the floor of the world ocean; most if not all are now "reachable" through the use of modern technology. The writers of the convention feared that much of this cultural heritage could be destroyed by treasure hunters.
"Cultural heritage" has been defined as any man-made artifact more than 100 years old. But treaty signatories are permitted to postulate shorter time frames. Under the convention, salvage activities to recover artifacts from the seabed will be prohibited, except for those carried out by legitimate archaeologists.
"Tourists"--e.g., sport divers--are not specifically forbidden from visiting undersea sites, but they cannot remove anything from them or disturb them in other ways. Permissions, both for archaeological investigations and for "non-invasive" activities such as tourism, will have to be obtained first from the nation with legal jurisdiction over the site, but under convention regulations this will not be easy. Other access problems could develop that were not anticipated in the very brief time (a mere four years) it took to draft the convention, which seeks (perhaps too ambitiously) to protect every man-made artifact on the floor of the ocean.
The convention may have certain other unanticipated negative outcomes. Few marine archaeologists have the financial resources needed to work at sites in water deeper than SCUBA depths (100-130 feet). Any deeper, and the costs of working on the seafloor escalate dramatically--e.g., submersible diving operations at the site of the legendary HMS Titanic are $40,000 to $50,000 per day, and the transit costs to and from port are not included in that sum. Marine archaeologists simply do not have that kind of funding, and probably never will. The bottom line is that a global ban on shipwreck salvage equates to a virtual termination of deepwater exploration for cultural artifacts; the end result is a pyrrhic victory at best.
Touring Famous Shipwrecks: Look But Don't Touch
The most powerful warship in the world, the German battleship Bismarck, was sunk on 27 May 1941 after a six-day running battle with forces of the numerically superior British Royal Navy. Only four days earlier the Bismarck had blown up the battlecruiser HMS Hood after a mere six minutes of gunfire. HMS Hood took a direct hit to one of its main magazines, and only three men survived out of her crew of 1,415 officers and men.
The score was settled when the Bismarck was pounded at point-blank range by two British battleships and a heavy cruiser. It took only three hours for the Bismarck to sink, and only 115 survived from her crew of 2,206.
She remained lost until 1989 when the famed underwater explorer Dr. Robert Ballard, using a ship-towed sonar and camera system, found her approximately 380 miles southwest of Cork, Ireland. Extensive photos were made of the wreck, sitting upright on the seafloor in 15,666 feet of water. But it was not until last year that underwater "tours" of the famous battleship's final resting place began.
In June 2001, the Deep Ocean Expeditions company chartered the Russian research ship Akademik Keldysh and its two Mir manned submersibles for the first Bismarck tour. Each Mir could carry two passengers and a Russian pilot to depths as great as 20,000 feet. On board the Keldysh were three movie and television crews and two teams of photo journalists. Two Bismarck survivors also were on the expedition, as were six paying participants, each of whom paid $37,000 for a 12-hour dive to the famous warship.
A total of eight dives were made to the wreck. Each dive permitted about five hours "bottom time," and all were strictly "look but don't touch" operations. Bismarck is rightly considered to be a "war grave" and special permission was required from the German government to make the dives. Additional approval was sought, and received, from the Bismarck Comrades Association. The only thing "taken" from the site were photographs and sober memories of a place where more than 2,000 men lost their lives. On one of the dives a Mir submersible placed a special memorial plaque on the deck of Bismarck that simply reads: "The Living Remember the Dead."
About a month after this first expedition, another tour group, organized by Blue Water Recoveries Ltd. of England, visited the site and used a combination of ship-towed devices and an unmanned remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to carry out extensive investigations and take a number of photos.
After its Bismarck tour, the Blue Water team went 1,100 miles across the Atlantic to the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland to search for the HMS Hood, which no one had seen since she sank over 60 years ago.
After conducting search operations in 9,200 feet of water, the team located the wreckage field and used its ROV to investigate it, mapping and assessing the area during several days of operations. The imagery produced from the Bismarck and Hood sites became the basis for two television specials and a book on the final battle between the two ships.
The Hood also is a war grave, and for that reason Blue Water had to seek permission from the British government and concurrence from the HMS Hood Association. The visitors placed an appropriate memorial plaque on the wreck to commemorate those lost in the great sea battle of 60 years before.
Three Miles Down: Not Exactly a Galleon ...
In 1999, during the successful search for Astronaut Gus Grissom's Liberty Bell 7 space capsule, researchers detected what seemed to be a particularly interesting sonar target on the seafloor, 16,000 feet below. Experts believed it was a ship--a very old one. What made this target particularly interesting was that its location was along the track the Spanish treasure fleets took when en route from Havana to Spain. Moving north with the Gulf Stream, they would make final landfall at Bermuda before heading east across the Atlantic. Could the unidentified image be one of those ships?
In July, a group of investors chartered Keldysh and the Mir submersibles to conduct diving operations at the site. The two-masted wreck, 90 feet long, was found on the first dive. Although not a treasure ship--its primary cargo was coconuts--it was indeed old. But it was in fact a rather ordinary trading vessel carrying household goods and commodities.
Over a period of three days, six dives were made to the wreckage and over 100 artifacts were recovered, including household items, navigation instruments, and the owner's cashbox, which contained about 1,300 coins. The newest coin was dated 1809, which indicates the vessel sank about that time, or a year or so after.
The collected artifacts are now being preserved in Florida and research is moving ahead to try to identify the ship. The best estimate is that it was an American vessel that traded between the United States, Bermuda, and the Caribbean.
This was the deepest historical shipwreck ever investigated by a marine archaeologist. However, it is unlikely that the site will be visited again. Operational costs are simply too high, and antiquarian coconuts have little value to collectors.
Kursk and Ehime Maru : Deep-Sea Salvage Writ Large
In August 2000, the Oscar II-class submarine Kursk sank with all hands (118 officers and men) in 365 feet of water while operating in the Barents Sea. It now seems certain that the cause of the sinking was an accidental weapons explosion in the submarine's forward torpedo room.
An initial on-scene salvage effort by divers recovered 12 bodies. Further recovery was not possible due to the condition of the wreck. Russian President Vladimir Putin promised, though, that Kursk would be raised by September 2001 to recover as many bodies as possible and determine what caused the explosion.
A difficult task for the divers lay ahead, because the Kursk was now an 18,000-ton hulk several hundred feet under a sea that is often racked by bad weather. Yet in terms of object size and water depth there was little about the salvage job that required new science or technology. The salvage contract was awarded to the well-known Dutch firm Mammoet, which subcontracted parts of the job to another Dutch company, Smit International.
In the primary stage of the operation divers had to cut away the sub's badly damaged bow section. Then the huge barge Giant-4 was put into position over the Kursk. On the barge was an array of hydraulic winches, each of which tended a single lifting cable. Divers then attached 26 cables along the length of the barge's hull. To reduce the suction that would start after lifting began, high-pressure water hoses were used to flush out the mud that had accumulated around the submarine's hull. Inch by inch, the computer-controlled winches lifted the submarine clear of the seafloor.
When the Kursk had been lifted up to about 100 feet below the barge it was secured by both cables and clamps. The next step was a slow 60-mile tow to port. On arrival, the Kursk was carefully transferred to a floating drydock for a final lift clear of the water. By mid-December, 80 bodies had been recovered.
The second major underwater salvage project in 2001 was the raising of the 750-ton student training ship Ehime Maru, which was accidentally sunk off Hawaii in February when the nuclear-powered attack submarine USS Greeneville collided with it while surfacing. Nine people died and the United States promised Japan that the vessel would be raised to recover their bodies.
Since the Ehime Maru was in 2,000 feet of water divers could not be used for the recovery; instead, an ROV system was employed. The prime contractor for the initial rigging and lifting was the Dutch company Smit-Tak. The operation would be the deepest recovery of a ship ever attempted.
With the assistance of the ROV, lifting lines were attached; a Smit-Tak barge then did the actual lifting. After the ship was clear of the seafloor it was moved to relatively shallow water (about 115 feet); at that point, Navy divers went inside to recover the bodies of eight of the nine missing people. After the recoveries, the Ehime Maru was taken into much deeper water (6,000 feet) and lowered to the bottom. The entire salvage operation had cost the U.S. government over $60 million.
Mother Nature Turns Up the Heat in the Arctic Ocean
From July through October of last year the joint U.S.-German "Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge Expedition" studied the Gakkel Ridge at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. The ridge is a prominent feature of the 40,000-mile-long mid-ocean ridge system that girdles the world ocean. The "rift valley" running down the center of the ridge is where new seafloor crust constantly is being created--along the entire length of this underwater "mountain range." The Atlantic section of the ridge passes through Iceland, permitting direct and almost "real time" observation of the new seafloor during its creation.
U.S. nuclear submarines had frequently reported hearing tectonic rumblings coming from the Iceland area, but until last year no major research expeditions had visited the region to investigate the reports. The group participating in the nine-week 2001 expedition included a team of U.S. oceanographers working from the new Coast Guard icebreaker USCGC Healy and German scientists working from the ice-strengthened research ship Polarstern. The expedition group worked tirelessly in ice-covered seas and discovered several underwater volcanoes as well as a large hydrothermal vent field along the ridge. In addition to mapping the seafloor, carrying out seismic studies, and photographing numerous sites, and sights, never before seen by man, the expedition also retrieved many physical samples from the seabed.
The Mid-Ocean Ridge cruise was Healy's maiden expedition. Perhaps to celebrate a very successful first mission, Healy continued on through the ice to the North Pole and became one of the few surface ships ever to reach that legendary point.
A "Lost City" in the Sea: Interesting, But Not Atlantis
Just over a year ago, U.S. marine scientists discovered a massive hydrothermal vent field in the mid-Atlantic at latitude 30o North. Because of the scope and size of the field, it has been named "The Lost City." Some of its vent chimneys--the largest ever seen--are the height of a fairly tall office or apartment building: 180 feet or so. The previous record--held by a vent named "Godzilla" that had been discovered off the Washington Coast--was 130 feet. Vent chimneys are built up from accretion of the materials that flow from the vents. As the mineral-laden hot water is chilled by the surrounding seawater it forms cones encircling the water jet.
As often happens in ocean research, the scientists on the December 2000 mid-Atlantic expedition were not aware that such a seafloor structure existed. They were looking at a place on the ridge where an unusual seamount, 12,000 feet high, had been mapped, hoping to study its geology and formative processes. Discovery of The Lost City was one of those wondrous surprises that continue to mark the advance of oceanography today. Perhaps the oceanographers' motto should be to "Expect the unexpected."
The Gulf of Mexico's "Zone of Death"
First charted in 1974, it covers a large patch of the river's bottom located south and west of the Mississippi Delta where there is too little oxygen to sustain living things. For that reason it is called, appropriately, "the Dead Zone." And it continues to grow. Although its size can vary with the seasons and by the years, its measurements in 2001 showed it to be as large (8,000 square miles) as the State of Massachusetts.
It was created, apparently, by "overfeeding" of the coastal waters near the mouth of the Mississippi River where fresh and salt water meet. The river, which drains 31 states, carries large amounts of nutrients from upstream industrial, municipal, and agricultural runoffs. This fertilizer permits a rapid buildup of plankton, which take up oxygen from the water faster than it can be replaced. At this point the organisms die off, and the reduction of their remains uses up even more oxygen. Few things can live in the Dead Zone; animals that can swim away are able to escape, but those that have limited mobility soon perish.
As with so many other things in life, development of a theoretical solution is infinitely simpler than implementation of an actual one. What is needed to begin with is extensive riverside management of land runoffs. Without it, the Dead Zone will continue to increase in size, and will greatly damage the multibillion dollar coastal fishing industry along a large swath of the U.S. Gulf Coast. The problem is understood in terms of cause and effect. It remains to be seen, though, if politics and human nature will permit remedies to be applied.
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