About the Expedition
National Geographic's Ocean Now is an exploration, research, and conservation project that aims to find, survey, and help protect the last healthy, undisturbed places in the ocean. By carefully studying how marine ecosystems work without human interference, we can learn how to help healthy reefs thrive, help unhealthy reefs recover, and better preserve the ocean, which covers more than two-thirds of our planet.
Cocos Island and the Gemelas Seamounts
During September 2009, National Geographic Fellow Enric Sala, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Sylvia Earle, and a team of leading marine scientists from Central America and across the globe are gathering together in Costa Rica. Destination: Cocos Island—Isla del Coco, ringed by some of the most shark-rich waters anywhere—and the submerged and all-but-unexplored summits of the Gemelas (“Twin Sisters”) Seamounts.
The Ocean Now team is working with local marine scientists and conservation organizations to document these aquatic ecosystems. The data, they hope, will help to establish new scientific baselines for intact—and critically important—environments.
If you dive, you’ve probably heard of Cocos. Renowned ocean explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau called it “the most beautiful island on Earth.”
Cocos is legendary for its schools of hammerheads, plus its white tip reef sharks, whale sharks, dolphins, tuna, marlin, turtles, and manta rays.
Rising seawater, cold and nutrient-rich, helps creatures flourish off Cocos’ shores. Rife with large marine predators, many “pelagic” or migratory, Cocos is a Serengeti of the sea.
Above water, Cocos is shrouded in rain forest and cloud forest, bedecked with waterfalls, alive with endemic creatures. Even if you’ve never pulled on a pair of fins, you already know this lush volcanic island. Scholars have argued that Cocos helped inspire both Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Real pirates hid real treasure here.
While Cocos has helped define the world’s image of an untouched island paradise for centuries, the Gemelas Seamounts have lurked, mostly unseen and unknown, beneath hundreds of feet of seawater. But marine creatures know them as fertile and important waypoints on their wanderings. These rich feeding grounds may be critical to the survival of many of the migratory predators that pass through them.
Expedition partners include Google, the Waitt Family Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Oracle Education Foundation, Cocos Island National Park, the Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, MarViva, Forever Costa Rica, and the University of Costa Rica.
Northern Line Islands
In 2005 and 2007, Dr. Enric Sala and a team of scientists traveled to the northern Line Islands in the North Pacific. There, the crew discovered a marine world that science never knew existed—one that hadn't yet been explored and damaged by humans, with an ecosystem little changed from its condition hundreds of years ago.
"We started at an island with 10,000 people and very degraded marine life," Sala explains. "We continued to an island with 2,500 people, then to one with ten people, and finally to one with zero people and a virtually intact ecosystem. It was a trip back in time, from degraded to pristine."
Southern Line Islands
During the spring of 2009, Sala and a team of scientists returned to the central Pacific—this time to the southern Line Islands, a province of the Republic of Kiribati located some 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) south of Hawaii. These are among the most remote and isolated atolls on Earth. They are rarely visited. No person calls them home.
The Ocean Now team spent six weeks visiting Flint, Vostok, Millennium, Starbuck, and Malden islands. They observed and documented water quality, fish populations, predator populations, and the health and diversity of the coral reef itself—the heart of the tropical marine ecosystem. Renowned terrestrial ecologist and conservationist Mike Fay conducted above-water transects on the islands. Enric and colleagues shared the experience as it unfolded on the Ocean Now blog and on Google Earth.
The expedition was the first comprehensive study of its kind. Researchers hope to use the data to establish a baseline model for healthy coral reefs, to quantify the effects of human activity on these ecosystems, and to devise a blueprint for the conservation of already degraded reefs.
Photograph of Cocos Island courtesy of Sarah Wilson
Photograph of northern Line Islands courtesy of Enric Sala