Savaging Strange Stygian Seas

Paul Watson
29 juin
5 min de lecture

By Captain Paul Watson

We need not voyage to a planet like Pandora to plunder and pillage alien cultures.

We need only travel into a nearby realm more alien to humanity than the surface of Mars, a world of living creatures so radically different from life on the surface than anything we could have ever imagined before the recent age of deep-sea exploration.

Welcome to the black, cold and crushing pressure of the deep dark sea.

The abysmal depth of the sea remains a mysterious place, uncharted, unexplored, unappreciated and misunderstood. The Seventies rock band America described it best as, “the ocean is a desert with its life underground and a perfect disguise above.”

Beneath the sparkling surface of the sea, descending into inky deep waters, the separation of light from darkness merges one world into another, revealing a wondrous enchanting realm, abundant with a diverse complexity of exotic life forms, all perfectly adapted to the Stygian black depths of a world beneath a world, a world where humanity enters as an unwelcome extranektonic invader whose base interests are not beneficial to the living world of the recently discovered (by us) abyssal nether-regions.

Deeper into the darkness, the intensity of synchronized choruses creates a cacophony of sound reminding the otherworld traveler that this is not an empty void but rather an enclosed universe in of itself.

Further descent into the oppressive blackness is accompanied by the oppressive water pressure where the unwelcome human explorer is just a hairline crack away from catastrophic annihilation, a place unforgiving of error, where the veil of darkness encapsulates a traveler like a claustrophobic cocoon of impending violent destruction.

It is there, where a new world begins, vibrant in life, dazzling with bursts of bio-luminesce, where viciously fierce competition for survival forces diversity to spring from a myriad of ecological opportunities.

It is a realm of constant precipitation of organic matter, drifting ever slowly, falling upon diverse thriving communities of living creatures going about their business on and around nodules of slow growing crystalline minerals leached from the ever-falling organic rain. Where exotic worms and mollusks live out their lives in the deep benthic mud, moving endlessly, churning the thick muck into a rich benthic soil that supports the myriad array of crawling, floating, swimming communities above.

For hundreds of millions of years, hidden from the world on the surface, yet dependent upon the organic rain from above, the origins of which are generated from an empyrean sphere unknown and unknowable by all the creatures dwelling in the vast immensity of the benthic realm.

In return for the resources received, life in the depths captures and entombs carbon in a process that regulates the gases of the atmosphere, where deep diving whales retrieve elements from dismal depths, spreading by way of cetacean defecation upon the ever-moving living shrouds of oxygen generating phytoplankton.

It is a world of giants with intimidating tentacles and razor-sharp beaks, of fishes whose monstrous appearance and predatory instincts were evolutionarily designed by the forces of darkness, danger, and pressure. The presence of surface-dwelling invasive terrestrial primates, something they have not been prepared for nor have had time to adapt to.

Scattered upon the benthic floor lies the ugly clutter of useless trash discarded thoughtlessly from the surface. Non-biodegradable materials that assault vibrant living communities, restricting movement, influencing behaviors, extinguishing life; foreign materials, plastic bags, monofilament nets, nylon lines studded with lethal hooks, canisters of toxic materials, radioactive waste, the refusal of a mysterious shadowy arrogance alienated from the natural world.

This is a world as foreign as anything we could find on remote planets throughout the galaxy. Fellow planetary citizens of a world inside a world that our deep-sea technologies opened with probing scientific excursions in the very recent past.

This invasive exploration into the Cimmerian dark depths must be done responsibly, inspired by the quest for knowledge and not motivated by profit and greed. We must never forget that this is not our world to do with as we please.

Exploring the aquatic nether world presents us with the opportunity to plan and design an ethical code for all scientific exploration, to go to where we have never been without causing harm or disruption, to travel into alien realms with respect for all life guided by the golden rule of doing onto all other species as we would wish to have done onto us.

The deep ocean depths are now more threatened than ever before and in addition to the constant fall of plastics, toxic chemicals, radioactive wastes and ever-increasing levels of noise and the escalating threats of climate change, there is a relatively new emerging industry of deep-sea ocean mining.

And that, my fellow surface dwellers, is a threat that could not only eradicate the life that we know very little about but also life as we know it on the surface.

The extraction of mineral rich nodules from the seabed has the potential for global devastation.

THE CONSEQUENCES

Marine life, especially less mobile organisms, would be killed from direct contact with mining equipment operated on the ocean floor. Siltification would be immediate and deadly. The warm wastewater produced by the machinery’s cooling systems would also cause destruction from over-heating and toxicity.

Deep sea mining would impair reproduction and feeding because of intense noise of the machinery and light pollution from artificial lighting attached to the machinery. Noise pollution would adversely impact whales. Many deep-sea species are long-lived, slow to reproduce, and are relatively rare. Ferro manganese nodules take millions of years to develop into potato sized rocks, and these rocks are homes to trillions of marine organisms. Destruction of these ecosystems would cause a major extinction event of a diversity of species.

On the surface, the waste discharge of hundreds of millions of tons annually of silt would spread over very large areas as the sediment slowly falls to the seabed, a process that because of currents could take many years. This drifting sediment would leach oxygen from the sea and would affect the temperature, PH, and toxicity in the seawater. The clouds of sediment would also cause mass suffocation to pelagic fish populations, which in turn would cause diminishment of seabirds, sea turtles and marine mammals.

The impact on climate change would be immense. The sea is the world’s largest carbon sink and absorbs some 25% of all carbon dioxide emissions. Phytoplankton is a major producer of oxygen and sequesters enormous levels of CO2. The destruction of biodiversity on the seabed and on phytoplankton on the surface would be catastrophic.

2026 is the year this horror will be unleashed, and it is coming to an Ocean near you.