The Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument was founded in 2009 and then expanded in 2014.
Jarvis Island was one of those units and that's where we've been working over the last couple of days.
Jarvis Island is about 1,000 miles south of Hawaii and just west of the Line Islands.
I think it earns the name "remote."
We are very far from the closest point of land or the closest major city,
so some of the things that we have been looking at here have just been spectacularly pristine and beautiful,
because, there's not really much out here besides wonderful wildlife.
Prior to the Okeanos Explorer missions, there was very little mapping data
and there had been no ROV dives conducted in this area.
So, in the last couple of days, we've conducted five dives,
which are the only ROV exploration that's ever been done here.
Which is pretty exciting. That is very cool.
The program here has essentially taken an area in which we knew,
I think it's safe to say, barely anything about,
and we mapped all these totally unknown seamounts.
One of the striking things that we found were that these seamounts look very different than what the altimetery and satellite data suggested.
This one was about a kilometer higher than we expected it to be.
And we mapped right over the top of these three seamounts in the middle,
and you can see peak, peak, but then flat on top here,
that tells us maybe they formed at some different time, or different ways, or that maybe there are some different biological communities living on them.
So we are building exploration from the ground up, and we are exploring on many scales, from hundreds of miles down to fractions of an inch.
I've actually really been impressed with the variety of things we can still see, even in these very old terrains.
Many of these seamounts are old volcanoes.
They might have formed 70 million years ago.
All the rocks, of course, have this thick manganese crust on them, but we've been able to really see some clear volcanic features.
And of course we saw spectacular carbonate geology at Jarvis, just covered with different types of biology,
giving all these different habitats.
So there's this record of these things that went on tens of millions of years ago,
to go down with the ROV and look at it today, which is just amazing.
My first note about Jarvis is, "amazing"in all caps and I think that everybody said the same sort of thing, which is kind of stunning.
One of the first things we saw was a ledge that was just bursting with color.
Beautiful yellows and reds and purple ribbon corals.
We'd all be stunned by the biology we're seeing, the sheer abundance of stuff, density of stuff,
and then suddenly, we'd see something even more amazing.
One of the things that we all got very excited about was a trio of brittle stars
that managed somehow to nab a squid. That was just incredible.
We saw these ledges that were packed with sea urchins.
Then crinoids took over and all kinds of feather stars and brittle stars and other organisms.
The sea cucumbers, the likes of which I've never seen before, and then we saw hundreds of them.
And then we came to fields of these colorful sea fans and stony corals and sponges and...
Definitely high densities in lots of places,which means that the abundance of animals is much, much higher.
So if we are thinking about these monument areas, and areas that may be of interest for future resource extraction,
it makes more sense to try to protect an area that has lots of individuals, especially if there is a high diversity.
We want to have lots of different kinds of species.
Let's make sure that we're protecting the right area of the seafloor, the part that has, literally, thousands and thousands of animals.
The dives culminated in this spectacular, technicolor tableau.
I mean, we were all gobsmacked.That was just so incredible. So beautiful just to look at.
When we got close to it, it was just an incredible community of density and diversity, all right there, on a small scale.
And so, to me, it was kind of at a small scale exactly what we're looking for on the big scale.
So there's a lot of life down there, and in these places we might not expect it.
Just incredible.
It'd be wonderful to come back here and do some more hypothesis-driven science.
My hypothesis when I first started this trip was that we were going to leave with more questions than we came with.
Absolutely. I think that's true.
One of the missions here of our work in Jarvis is really to provide some information about how we might manage these areas.
And it's really hard to come up with a plan for how to manage something when we don't know what's there.
So we're really laying down the first baseline information at these sites about the geology, biology,
and we'll be able to track this baseline going forward.
We know a lot about the waters right next to our shorelines, but we're way out here in the middle of the ocean.
It's an important part of the planet, it's a vast environment, the Pacific Ocean, and yet,
we don't know what's going on down below the surface of the water and so, to me,
that's one of the importance of getting there, to be able to get the initial data, to even know, what are the questions we need to ask.