Biologists are about to enter a lost world deep in the greatest tract of unexplored territory on the planet. They plan to probe under the Arctic ice into the Canada basin, a steep-sided submarine hole the size of Alaska thought to have been isolated from the surrounding ocean for millions of years.
The study, announced last night, is part of one of biology’s great adventures: a $1-billion, 10-year census of marine life supported by 300 researchers from 53 countries.
After centuries of whaling, fishing and naval hydrographic surveys, marine biologists know something about life in coastal waters and fishing grounds. But almost 60% of the planet surface is an abyssal plain up to three miles below the waves. Almost none of this region, which oceanographers call the benthos, has been studied.
Biologists believe that the featureless muddy plains of the deep ocean could be as rich in life as the savannahs and prairies of the continents.
”If you look through all of history, the total amount of sea bottom that has actually been sampled and looked at biologically is about one ten thousandth of one per cent,” said Ron O’Dor, chief scientist to the international census of marine life, and a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
”One of the cruises last year found 400 undescribed species. There is an enormous amount we don’t know about this abyssal plain. It is the largest habitat on the planet.”
With $600 000 from a New York charity, the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, researchers from Russia, Europe, the US and Canada will study the Canada basin.
It is a vast still pool of saltwater walled by steep ridges, up to 3 800 metres below the Arctic Ocean ice. Immediately north of Yukon Territory and Alaska, it is linked to the Pacific by the shallow Bering Strait, and shielded from the North Atlantic by a submarine mountain range called the Lomonossov ridge, which rises to within 1 400 metres of the surface.
During the cold war it was the playground of Soviet and US nuclear submarines.
”The turnover of water in the basin is the slowest on the planet,” O’Dor said.
”Calculations indicate that it takes at least 500 years for water to turn over or to exchange. There are not a lot of predators coming into the area, and it is very cold, so things grow very slowly. If things grow slowly, they die slowly and so it could well be that we are going to find a kind of lost world.”
Using submersibles, sonar, underwater cameras, ice-breakers, divers and old-fashioned dredgers and trawls, the researchers will explore the living world of this freezing stillness before it changes for ever: the winter Arctic ice sheet has been shrinking and thinning for 30 years.
”Models of global warming suggest that the Arctic ice may disappear,” O’Dor said. ”If that is true then that entire ecosystem will cease to exist.
”If we don’t look at it now we will have no way of understanding the changes to come. That is important to all kinds of people, indigenous populations around the Arctic who live off the biology, the whales and seals and walruses.” – Guardian Unlimited Â