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February 16, 2010 – At Sea, 34º 46’S, 072º 40’W
By Herb McCormick
The voyage Around the Americas was launched under the simplest of precepts: The continents of North and South America should be considered a solo island entity; surrounded by a shared, singular ocean; with challenges, communities, issues and solutions all linked together as a common whole. It’s a mouthful of a mission statement but its intent couldn’t be simpler: We (sometimes reckless) creatures of the land are utterly dependent on the (still bounteous and beautiful) sea around us, and we’d better take care of it, or it won’t take care of us.
Simple, right?
The 26,000 nautical-mile sea voyage itself is meant to confirm (and, frankly, romanticize) the logistical side of the argument. By setting forth from Seattle and basically executing a long series of what are essentially right-hand turns, we will return to Seattle, having circled one extended continent via one gargantuan ocean. Along the way, aided by a vast, interlinked network of ocean currents and weather systems, we’ve also come to realize that the hazier, more ethereal parts of the initial contention also ring true. Take the Arctic, for example, where diminishing sea ice is changing the entire equation: the social and economical make-up of historically subsistent communities, the natural world that shapes and defines those settlements, and the increasingly charged if tenuous relationship between the people and the wildlife, which is what binds it all together.
We’ve discovered (thankfully!) that the premise on which we launched this expedition was built on an extremely sound foundation. Along the way, however, we’ve also come to realize that the more one learns, the more that “simple” notion begins to get very murky and complicated.
Here in our travels through Patagonia, that point was recently underscored. The problems in Southern Chile – farm fishing, algal blooms, and poisonous shellfish – are certainly different than in the Arctic, but the long-term ramifications are surprisingly similar.
It bears repeating: One continent, one ocean.
Today, Ocean Watch is continuing a fast, tidy voyage from Puerto Montt, Chile, to Valparaiso, with an ETA for the city sometime around mid-time on Wednesday. The four-man permanent crew, and our Argentine mate Hosario Rosell, who’s been with us for several weeks now, have been joined on this leg by onboard educator Roxanne Nanninga and Kirsty Moen, who’ve rolled right into the regular watch system and have made an enjoyable passage even more fun. In some ways, it’s a shame we’ll be pulling into Valparaiso so quickly, just as the team is really starting to jell.
But Valparaiso, like every other stop, will no doubt yield new discoveries, just like Puerto Montt.
For it was there, during an open house aboard Ocean Watch, that we met Dr. Cristina Rodriguez of the Chilean Department of Oceanography, and specifically from an arm of that organization called Mariscope Chilena. Dr. Rodriguez is involved in a joint program with the European Space Agency (ESA) that’s monitoring marine life from space through a series of satellites that have proven to be great tools in the management of vast marine resources and aquaculture development in the waters through which Ocean Watch just sailed.
“South of Chiloe Island, where the Pacific Ocean meets one of the most beautiful areas of Chilean Patagonia, some micro-algal cells grew and proliferated in the Gulfs of Ancud and Corcovado,” she writes, as a co-author, in a story published in the ESA Bulletin. “Measurements in the sea could not reveal the extent but, from space, satellite instruments detected how this population of micro-organisms evolved.” Earlier this decade, minute traces of these lethal organisms contaminated the local shellfish; hundreds of people fell ill and two died; and the harvesting of shellfish in this vast reserve was shut down, and the waters themselves declared a national disaster.
Since then, the tide, figuratively speaking, has turned. Aboard Ocean Watch, transiting the two gulfs mentioned above, we were struck not only by the incredible beauty to which Dr. Rodriguez refers, but also by the legions of vast salmon farms that are tucked into just about every cove and cranny. (Such farms, of course, are double-edged swords themselves, as they require vast resources of food and energy for each fish produced and brought to market, but that’s a tale for another day.) Clearly, in a story like this, the wellbeing of we humans is of the utmost concern – and food produced in this region finds its way to tables across the interwoven Americas – but so too is the health and vibrancy of the local economy, the very fabric of life in western Patagonia.
A big part of the reason things have changed for the better is the satellite data that oceanographers have been able to access and utilize in such realms as fisheries management, marine habitats and coastal-zone management. There is certainly a troubling dichotomy in the richness of these Patagonian waters, as the offshore yield has dwindled dramatically due to over-fishing, but the area still offers “ideal conditions for salmon farming, to the point where the country became the world’s top producer by the end of 2004.”
Dr. Rodriguez writes, “Here, the coast of the South American continent is broken up into thousands of islands, which create a special environment of bays, fjords and channels with a complex geomorphology. The ocean dynamics produce great environmental variability, enhanced by the strong influence of fresh water from heavy rainfalls and continental glaciers. The region has hydrographical and ecological peculiarities that are not well understood, but which determine the biological variability of its marine communities.”
Clearly, there’s a lot going on here. The local waters are influenced by internal and external factors. Powerful currents and upwelling exists from the Roaring Forties to the equator, greatly effecting sea-surface temperatures, oxygen concentrations and nutrient influx, all of which play important roles in aquaculture. Via satellite imagery, such data comes to life in bold, vivid color. So, too, do algal blooms and rich concentrations of phytoplankton, busts and boons, in turn, to fisheries development.
In fact, writes Dr. Rodriguez, satellite observations “of maximum phytoplankton activity in a zone where marine mammals such as the blue whale had been recently seen…was thus proposed as a new, protected marine ecosystem.” On the other hand, these emerging technologies have enabled researchers to identify dangerous and deadly bacterial species detected in the area for the first time, the origin of which was likely ballast water spilling into the sea from ships from foreign countries.
For better and worse: One ocean.
The longer our voyage Around the Americas continues, the more we realize how a common strand ties everything together. Dr. Christina Rodriguez’s outstanding, ongoing research linking spiraling satellites and real-time ocean characteristics reconfirms that most fundamental suggestion. The blue sea and the blue sky; the depths below and the heavens above; the tiniest creatures bobbing in the waves and the ponderous two-legged critters wandering down the shore: For richer or poorer, come hell or high water, we’re all in this together.
Really: Is the concept too hard to grasp?
-Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson
*This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos
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