The Mariana region is one of those places where plates are converging,
one plate’s going underneath another,
creating lots of volcanism,
and most of it’s underwater, so in the Marianas, there’s nine islands, but there’s over 50 submarine volcanoes.
The Marianas Trench Marine National Monument is made up of three units.
We call them “island unit,” which is the northern bit of the Marianas trench.
It contains the water and the sediment of the area surrounding the three northern islands, Uracas, Maug, and Asuncion.
You then have what we call the “volcanic unit,” which is made up of the hydrothermal vents and the underwater volcanoes
stretch all the way down the arc and then it’s made up of the Marianas Trench, deepest trench on Earth.
When we’re writing the ecosystem science plans for the three monuments, we definitely make sure that local input is part of writing these ecosystem science plans.
It’s crucial because basically, this is their environment.
This is their traditions.
This is their home.
Growing up in Saipan, I’ve learned a lot about the Chamorro ways of fishing and just the Chamorro culture and the values.
A lot of the Chamorros and the Carolinians, they really rely on our resources, especially marine resources.
A lot of these monuments are not abstract ideas.
As we sit here and we think way out there in the ocean, this is their backyard. This is where they live.
This is what they lived off of, this harvested, a lot of the fish and it’s part of who and what they are.
And so, it’s critical. They’re part of any kind of planning, any kind of research or science that is done out there.
So we want the future generation to be able to see what we see.
If we talk about the Marianas Trench Marine National Monument, here we have a very unique area where we have a lot of volcanology.
We have a lot of shifting geological movement.
We have hydrothermal vents that are there and the unique biota living on these vents.
Among the fantastic sites, we found a seamount that’s erupting almost continuously and
that was really exciting because it was the first place in the world where we could see an active, deep-ocean eruption occurring.
And yet there was still life living around the top of the seamount.
It’s so deep that there’s no sunlight from the surface, so the whole ecosystem is based on the chemistry of these vent fluids.
And so we’re really interested in understanding the relationships between the chemistry and the biology and the volcanoes and the geology.
Another incredible place had liquid CO2 coming out of the seafloor.
That had only been seen at one other place before.
Another place we went to had pools of molten sulfur on the seafloor.
The sulfur was black because it had so much iron mixed in.
The places we found with lots of sulfur seemed to have a lot of very dense biological communities.
At that site, there were flatfish that hadn’t been seen before, the first vertebrate we’d found.
The interesting thing about the deep-ocean vents is that we were completely unaware of them until 1979 or so, when they were first discovered.
And we discovered all kinds of new lifeforms that we had no idea existed.
And it’s really a fundamentally different kind of life on Earth.
If there is life on other planets, it’s going to be some microbe that’s living in the ground or maybe on a moon with some ocean under a bunch of ice,
and so it’s going to be more like these hydrothermal environments than the surface life on Earth.
The Marianas, it’s so unique.
We started working there. We discovered all of these new sites, new species, new phenomena.
There’s so many things that we’ve never seen before.
All that contributed to the understanding that this really is a special place and should be designated as such, as a marine national monument.