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Census of the seas begins

KACHEMAK BAY: Brenda Konar shoots an anxious glance over her shoulder but keeps chiseling. The Pacific Ocean hasn’t gone away. In fact, it’s gaining on her.

Wedged between slimy boulders, the marine biologist hacks at the crusty stuff clinging to the ragged shoreline of the Kenai Peninsula. Frigid seawater seeps through the duct tape patch on her rubber waders.

Her knuckles bleed. Soon, the world’s second-largest tides will submerge this speck called Cohen’s Island, located 250 miles southwest of Anchorage.

“We’re in so much trouble,” Konar mutters into the wind and rain. Halfway around the world, Mike Vecchione shudders as Russian deckhands slap the metal hull of his tiny submarine. In any language, that echo means “Good to go!” To where? Two slow, dark miles (Three slow, dark kilometers) to the bottom of the North Atlantic, to a spot disconcertingly named the “Charley Gibbs Fracture Zone.” The pressure down there would crumple a truck.

The Smithsonian biologist curls on a cushion as a crane dangles his vessel over the ocean like a drip from a faucet. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he whispers.

From pole to pole, in virtually every ocean, scientists from two dozen nations are wrapping up preliminary field studies. Together the studies will serve as the foundation for the most extensive project of its kind — the Census of Marine Life.

The census seeks a fundamental understanding of all life that relies on the largely unexplored seas covering most of Earth, increasingly beleaguered by pollution, overfishing and climate change. This unprecedented field guide to millions of species is supposed to be completed in 10 years. It could cost as much as $1 billion, much of it funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and governments.

It’s a staggering budget. But it’s a fraction of the $55 billion seafood trade or what it costs to clean up a major oil spill.

For sheer grandiosity, the census rivals the Digital Sky Map, another Sloan project seeking to pinpoint 100 million celestial objects in one-quarter of the entire night sky.

In some ways, the marine census is even more ambitious. Certainly, it’s riskier.

Biologists must contend with the same hazards that sailors have been dodging since Odysseus tempted Poseidon’s wrath. That means hurricanes, sharks, icebergs, shoals and riptides. Sinking boats and busted equipment. The census is divided into six topics. Besides Pacific shorelines and the North Atlantic sea floor, scientists are examining the Gulf of Maine, hydrothermal vents, coastal salmon runs and the worldwide habits of large fish and mammals. —AP

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