T&T’s deep sea: Riches waiting to be uncovered

Seigo­nie Mo­hammed

Cli­mate Change Ed­i­tor

seigo­nie.mo­[email protected]

De­spite sci­en­tists mak­ing ex­tra­or­di­nary dis­cov­er­ies in Trinidad and To­ba­go’s deep sea, Dr Di­va Amon says they have bare­ly scratched the sur­face, and the coun­try must now take greater charge of un­der­stand­ing and man­ag­ing what lies be­neath its wa­ters.

The ma­rine sci­en­tist, who led the month-long Deep Won­ders of Trinidad and To­ba­go ex­pe­di­tion, said high ex­plo­ration costs have his­tor­i­cal­ly kept much of the deep ocean out of reach, while re­search con­duct­ed here has not al­ways re­mained in the coun­try.

“Es­sen­tial­ly, re­searchers come from rich­er coun­tries, do the re­search here, and then leave with the da­ta, with the sam­ples, with the knowl­edge, and do not ac­tu­al­ly leave any­thing in coun­try,” Amon told Guardian Me­dia.

She de­scribed the prac­tice, which is not unique to T&T, as “para­chute sci­ence.”

“Of­ten sci­en­tists are not trained in coun­try,” she said.

Amon said this meant pre­vi­ous re­search had not al­ways fil­tered in­to lo­cal sci­ence, gov­er­nance, man­age­ment or pub­lic aware­ness.

The lat­est ex­pe­di­tion was de­lib­er­ate­ly dif­fer­ent. Led by lo­cal sci­en­tists aboard Schmidt Ocean In­sti­tute’s re­search ves­sel Falkor (too), it mapped more square kilo­me­tres of seafloor, de­tect­ed more bub­ble streams and con­firmed more cold seeps than had ever been known be­fore.

“Make no mis­take, we are just scratch­ing the sur­face still,” Amon said.

She al­so point­ed to in­for­ma­tion al­ready be­ing gath­ered through off­shore en­er­gy ac­tiv­i­ty.

Amon said oil and gas com­pa­nies are not re­quired to make their maps or en­vi­ron­men­tal da­ta avail­able to re­searchers or the pub­lic.

“There is so much that has been col­lect­ed that is locked away,” she said.

“And it would ben­e­fit sci­ence in so many ways. It would ben­e­fit the pub­lic.”

Her com­ments come as en­er­gy ex­plo­ration moves far­ther in­to T&T’s deep wa­ters. Amon said es­tab­lish­ing base­line sci­en­tif­ic in­for­ma­tion is im­por­tant to un­der­stand­ing the po­ten­tial im­pact of such ac­tiv­i­ty.

‘It has to come top down’

The ex­pe­di­tion al­so found ev­i­dence that hu­man ac­tiv­i­ty has al­ready reached places peo­ple had nev­er be­fore seen.

“On every sin­gle dive we went on, de­spite the fact that we were amongst the first peo­ple on the plan­et to see these places, we found our trash,” Amon said.

“No one had ever been there be­fore. And yet our trash was al­ready there.”

Fish­ing nets, plas­tic bot­tles and plas­tic bags were among the de­bris en­coun­tered.

But Amon said re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for chang­ing the coun­try’s re­la­tion­ship with its ma­rine en­vi­ron­ment should not rest pri­mar­i­ly with fish­ers or in­di­vid­ual con­sumers.

“It wouldn’t be to the fish­ers. It wouldn’t be to the av­er­age per­son who goes to the gro­cery. It would ac­tu­al­ly be to the gov­ern­ment,” she said.

Amon be­lieves stronger laws and en­force­ment should form part of the re­sponse.

“We need bet­ter laws and we need them to be ac­tu­al­ly im­ple­ment­ed.”

T&T cur­rent­ly has one ma­rine pro­tect­ed area, Buc­coo Reef. Amon point­ed to the coun­try’s com­mit­ment un­der the Glob­al Bio­di­ver­si­ty Frame­work to pro­tect 30 per cent of its land and sea by 2030 as an op­por­tu­ni­ty to do more.

“We can pro­tect enor­mous parts of our ocean and still use oth­er parts,” she said.

Amon al­so wants Caribbean coun­tries to take greater own­er­ship of deep-sea re­search, even float­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a shared re­gion­al re­search ves­sel.

“Why don’t we have our own ship and share it amongst the coun­tries?” she asked.

For Amon, the dis­cov­er­ies have shown both how much T&T pos­sess­es and how lit­tle has been seen.

“This ex­pe­di­tion has proven we have so much here in our wa­ters, so much to un­cov­er, so many dis­cov­er­ies to make, and dis­cov­er­ies that re­al­ly could change our coun­try, right, and the way we think about our coun­try.”