Alaska is one of my favorite places on Earth. The vastness
of it, the beauty of it, the natural wonders is something to
behold.
The people in the region use the term "Imam Suga" and that
roughly translates to "people of the sea."
The people in Alaska are all heavily connected to the ocean.
It's not just their subsistence resources, it's their economic
resources, you know, it's their transportation. It
literally is everything to them.
Being able to lean on the expertise of the people that
live in this region and work in this region is what makes
everything that we do possible. NOAA Ocean Exploration is a
federal organization that is tasked with exploring the deep
sea. Before these Seascape Alaska expeditions, we knew
very little about the deep waters in Alaska. It's one of
the least explored states in the country and it has the
largest contribution to the exclusive economic zone.
There's a lot of interest from the community and from
scientists around the world in knowing what kind of habitats
and what kind of potential geohazards might be in the
region. Alaska is very difficult to map. It's
difficult to access and things are changing rapidly. Seascape
Alaska is a regional mapping campaign and it's born out of
the National Ocean Mapping Exploration and
Characterization Strategy for the US EEZ. It's designed to be
a campaign for mapping all of US waters by 2040. This
kind of information is used for safe navigation, aquaculture
siting, and even hazard mitigation and adaptation so
sea level rise, tsunamis, earthquake hazards, all of
those things. On these NOAA Ocean Exploration expeditions,
they did basic mapping but then they also went to specific
priority areas that were identified by their
stakeholders to, you know, take a closer look. In one of the
mapping expeditions, we discovered a new seep out in
the Aleutians and it was just providing this incredible
imagery that we were seeing in the sonars. From that, we were
able on the next expedition go down and dive, look at the seep
and characterize it further. Scientists around the world
were kind of shocked by the diversity of this seep. "Those
are some healthy looking tube worms. Look at those! This
really is a needle in a haystack situation, very often."
Findings like that really show our expedition model at work
and what our capabilities are.
Additionally, we found a number of potentially new species,
maybe even a new genus, which is really exciting.
The more that we know, the more that we understand, the more
that we can protect and conserve, that just has
far-reaching benefits that we'll be seeing for years. The
deep-sea and coastal ecosystems are one ocean and what happens
in the deep sea directly relates to what happens in the
coastal ecosystem. To understand the ocean as a whole
picture is such a valuable piece that we're missing in a
lot of communities. Community engagement is just super
important to everything that we do. We have been working with
partners in Seward to set up a Seward science symposium.
Scientists in the region can collaborate together and start
conversations that hopefully will have far-reaching benefits
moving forward.
We also have a community art project creating a mural in
Seward where local artists have taken some of the imagery that
we've collected and found inspiration from that and
allowed members of the public to come and design their own
tiles and have a little part to play in the telling of this
story. I'm so glad that the NOAA Ocean Exploration team
reached out to us and they were willing to share their science
with our community and our community gets to share back.
Definitely encourage if you're out there to interact with the
citizens in the community, especially the tribal residents
who have been there since forever. In many cases, those
people have been watching the ocean for much longer than any
of us have and that knowledge has been passed down through
generations far before scientists were here doing
research. So, incorporating that into research and
discovery is crucially important.