As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in the first half of 2020, humans around the world stopped moving and making, resulting in a 9% drop in the greenhouse gas emissions at the root of climate change.

Almost overnight, the Himalayas became visible from a distance for the first time in years. Rivers flowed free of toxic pollutants and the air sparkled with blue skies in major cities like New Delhi and Los Angeles. While internet rumors of swans and dolphins returning to Venetian canals were debunked, the idea that “nature is healing” in 2020 quickly took root. 

Unfortunately, any silver lining from the pandemic remains murky in the oceans. 

At the American Geophysical Union 2020 Fall Meeting last week, a team of scientists, including Christopher Sabine, SOEST oceanography professor, shared the results of their research that showed no detectable slowing of ocean acidification due to COVID-19 emissions reductions. Even at emissions reductions four times the rate of those in the first half of 2020, the change would be barely noticeable. 

“It’s almost impossible to see it in pH,” said Nicole Lovenduski, University of Colorado associate professor and lead author of the study. “So has this solved ocean acidification? No, it has not.” 

On the bright side, the researchers now have a better idea of where to look for the signs if emissions reductions are having an impact on the Earth system, what they will look like and the resources they will need to gather that data. 

Lovenduski analyzed data shared by a group of Canadian modelers, who ran a suite of experiments to see how the climate has been impacted by the reduction in emissions in 2020. Using a fingerprinting technique on the data often used to differentiate humans’ impacts on the climate from non-human impacts like volcanic eruptions, the team separated COVID-19 emissions reductions from non-human influences on the oceans. 

While they found no perceptible change in ocean acidity, their analysis showed that by 2021, the oceans will be absorbing slightly less carbon from the atmosphere due to COVID-19 emissions reductions. 

“What this suggests is that pretty much immediately, the exchange of carbon between the ocean and atmosphere responds to the change in the loading of carbon in the atmosphere because we’ve decreased our emissions,” said Lovenduski. 

The ocean is a major climate change buffer, absorbing a large fraction of the carbon dioxide that human activity emits into the atmosphere and a significant portion of resulting heat. This mitigates the immediate impacts of climate change but as the ocean heats up the water expands and contributes to rising sea levels. Additionally, increased carbon in the ocean causes ocean acidification, which is detrimental to coral reefs and a significant swath of ocean life. 

However, if emissions are mitigated year after year to avoid the worst global warming scenarios, there is a chance to slow the rate of ocean acidification in the long term.

While it is too soon to measure ocean changes from the COVID-19 related carbon emissions reductions, there is a network of ocean observatories regularly making the measurements necessary to detect the signal when it does show up.

“We are constantly monitoring the carbon concentrations in the ocean and the atmosphere around Hawai‘i,” said Sabine. “If emissions continue to drop, we are well positioned to document the positive impact that will have on our ocean chemistry and the health of our coral reefs.”  

Studying the COVID-19 signal in the ocean provides a unique opportunity to understand how implementing the emissions reductions called for in the Paris Agreement will benefit our state and the world.

Read more on West Hawaii Today and UH News.

A new tool developed by University of Hawai‘i Sea Level Center director Phil Thompson with funding from NASA’s Earth Science Division helps decision makers and others assess how sea level rise and other factors will affect the frequency of high tide flooding in U.S. coastal locations in the next 50 to 100 years.

High-tide flooding, also known as “sunny day” or nuisance flooding, is an increasingly frequent occurrence in coastal areas around the United States. The Flooding Days Projection Tool is an online dashboard that projects the number of high tide flooding days per year for 97 U.S. cities, based on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) impact thresholds. These thresholds provide a safety gap between regular high tide water levels and conditions that result in flooding. Coastal communities are built to a certain elevation above sea level with these natural fluctuations in mind.

The tool is based on projections of sea level rise and the height of the highest astronomical tides, which vary on a predictable 18.6-year cycle that’s determined by the Moon’s orbit around Earth. Over multiple decades, changes in the Moon’s orbit cause cyclical variations in the height of high and low tides in certain regions. These changes occur slowly.

“Tides aren’t as constant as people think they are,” said Thompson, who is also an assistant professor in the SOEST Department of Oceanography. “They change on long time scales.”

When high tides get lower, the net effect of sea level rise on flooding is reduced. The tool predicts this will happen in many U.S. locations from the mid-2020s until the mid-2030s, when high tides will once again get higher. When increases in high tides synch up with increases in global or regional sea level rise and other factors that cause sea levels to vary, there’s a potential for rapid increases in coastal water levels and associated impacts. For regions where the rate of sea level rise is already accelerating, such as along the U.S. West Coast, the cycle will exacerbate those impacts.

“We’ll observe a rapid increase in high tide flooding days for regions around the globe,” Thompson said. “For a place like California, the height of high tides will increase 3 to 5 centimeters over 10 years, on top of a similar increase from sea level rise that’s driven by climate change.”

Thompson says this will result in numerous changes. For example, assuming NOAA’s intermediate sea level rise scenario, beginning in the mid-2030s, the frequency of high tide flooding events each year in the Los Angeles coastal area will go from fewer than 10 to more like 40. In San Diego, annual flooding events will increase from 15 to more than 60. And in San Francisco, they’ll go from fewer than 10 to almost 40 per year.

“The last time this lunar cycle increased high tides, we couldn’t see the impacts because sea level rise hadn’t pushed these events over the flooding threshold yet,” said Thompson. “But next time we will, because sea level rise is ongoing.”

Content courtesy of Alan Buis, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment, researchers, including Alexander Krot at the Hawai‘i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, used paleomagnetic records to determine when carbonaceous chondrite asteroids, some of which are rich in water and organics, first arrived in the inner solar system. The research helps inform scientists about the early origins of the solar system and why some planets, such as Earth, became habitable and were able to sustain conditions conducive for life, while other planets, such as Mars, did not.

The research also gives scientists data that can be applied to the discovery of new exoplanets, planets that orbit stars outside of the solar system and the search for other habitable planets.

Some meteorites are pieces of debris from outer space objects such as asteroids. After breaking apart from their “parent bodies,” these pieces are able to survive passing through the atmosphere and eventually hit the surface of a planet or moon.

Studying the magnetization of meteorites can give researchers a better idea of when the objects formed and where they were located early in the solar system relative to the sun.

The CV (Vigarano type) carbonaceous chondrite Allende fell to Earth and landed in Mexico in 1969 and has since become one of the most studied meteorites. It is the largest carbonaceous chondrite on Earth and contains pebble-sized objects—calcium-aluminum inclusions—that are thought to be the first solids formed in the solar system.

New experiments by University of Rochester graduate student Tim O’Brien, the first author of the paper, found that magnetic signals in the meteorite were not actually from the dynamics of a planet forming an iron core, as prior researchers had interpreted. Instead, O’Brien found, the magnetism is a property of Allende’s unusual magnetic minerals produced during metasomatic alteration experienced by the CV chondrite parent asteroid.

“The metasomatic alteration recorded by Allende resulted from water and carbon dioxide-rich fluid-rock interaction at about 300-400 degrees Celsius about 3-4 million years after formation of the solar system and is quite unique among carbonaceous chondrites,” said Krot.

Having solved this paradox, O’Brien was able to identify meteorites with other minerals that could faithfully record early solar system magnetizations.

John Tarduno, co-author and lead professor at the University of Rochester’s magnetics group, combined this work with theoretical work and computer simulations. These simulations showed that solar winds draped around early solar system bodies and it was this solar wind that magnetized the bodies.

Using these simulations and data, the researchers determined that the parent asteroids from which carbonaceous chondrite meteorites broke off arrived in the Asteroid Belt from the outer solar system about 4,562 million years ago, within the first five million years of solar system history.

The analyses and modeling offers more support for the so-called Grand Tack theory of the motion of Jupiter. While scientists once thought planets and other planetary bodies formed from dust and gas in an orderly distance from the sun, today scientists realize that the gravitational forces associated with giant planets—such as Jupiter and Saturn—can drive the formation and migration of planetary bodies and asteroids. The Grand Tack theory suggests that the inner and outer solar system asteroids (non-carbonaceous and carbonaceous, respectively) were separated by the gravitational forces of the giant planet Jupiter, whose subsequent migration then mixed the two asteroid groups.

“This early motion of carbonaceous chondrite asteroids sets the stage for further scattering of water-rich bodies—potentially to Earth—later in the development of the solar system, and it may be a pattern common to exoplanet systems,” said Tarduno.

Read also on University of Rochester News.

Some corals managed to survive a globally unprecedented heatwave, in a first-ever study that provides new hope for the long-term survival of coral reefs in the face of climate change. 

“The devastating effects of climate change on coral reefs are well known,” said Julia Baum, affiliate faculty at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa’s Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) and senior author of the study. “Finding ways to boost coral survival through marine heatwaves is crucial if coral reefs are to endure the coming decades of climate change.”

Published recently in Nature Communications, the study presents the discoveries made by the international research team as they tracked hundreds of coral colonies on reefs around Kiritimati (also known as Christmas Island), throughout the 2015-2016 El Niño. Heat stress from that El Niño triggered the third-ever global coral bleaching event, causing mass coral bleaching and mortality on reefs around the world. Its epicenter was Kiritimati, where the heatwave lasted an unprecedented 10 months.  

Worldwide, coral reef fisheries are worth US$6.8 billion annually, and are a vital source of food and income for hundreds of millions of people in tropical island nations. In the lead-up to the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030), there is a renewed and global call to reverse the cycle of decline in ocean health. 

“Understanding how some corals can survive prolonged heatwaves could provide an opportunity to mitigate the impact of marine heatwaves on coral reefs, allowing us to buy time as we work to limit greenhouse gas emissions,” said Danielle Claar, who led the study as a University of Victoria (UVic) doctoral student and is now a NOAA Climate and Global Change postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington. 

Climate change threatens the world’s coral reefs because corals are highly sensitive to the temperature of their surrounding waters. During a heatwave, corals release the algae that live in their tissues and produce food for them, causing the coral to turn completely white—a phenomenon known as coral bleaching. Prolonged bleaching often causes corals to die from starvation. If they can reclaim their food source within a few weeks, they can usually recover.  

To date, coral recovery from bleaching has only ever been observed after heat stress subsides. With global climate models predicting that heatwaves will continue to increase in both frequency and duration, a coral’s ability to recover its food source during a prolonged heatwave is essential to its survival. 

“Observing corals recovering from bleaching while still baking in hot waters is a game changer,” said Baum, who is also a marine biologist at UVic.

Baum adds that corals only exhibited this capacity if they were not also exposed to other types of human-caused stressors, such as water pollution. Until now it’s been unclear if local reef management could help improve corals chances of surviving climate change.

“We’ve found a glimmer of hope that protection from local stressors can help corals,” said Baum. 

“Although this pathway to survival may not be open to all corals or in all conditions, it demonstrates an innovative strategy for survival that could be leveraged by conservationists to support coral survival,” added Claar. 

The research was partially supported by a US National Science Foundation grant to former HIMB Director Ruth Gates.

Content courtesy of University of Victoria News.

Read more on West Hawaii Today and UH News.

A small group of volcanic islands in Alaska’s Aleutian chain could actually be part of a single, previously unrecognized giant volcano in the same category as Yellowstone, according to work from a research team, including Helen Janiszewski, SOEST Earth Sciences assistant professor, who will present their findings at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting next week.

The Islands of the Four Mountains in the central Aleutians is a tight group of six stratovolcanoes named Carlisle, Cleveland, Herbert, Kagamil, Tana and Uliaga. They are all what scientists call stratovolcanoes—steep conical mountains with a banner of clouds and ash waving at the summit, probably what most people would sketch if asked to draw a volcano.

Stratovolcanoes can experience powerful eruptions, such as that of Mount St. Helens in 1980. However, these events are dwarfed by the much rarer phenomenon of a caldera-forming eruption, which has potentially global consequences. A caldera is created by tapping of a huge reservoir of molten rock, magma, in the Earth’s crust. When the reservoir’s pressure exceeds the strength of the crust, gigantic amounts of lava and ash are released in a catastrophic explosion.

Researchers from a variety of institutions and disciplines have been studying Mount Cleveland – the most active volcano of the group—trying to understand the nature of the Islands of the Four Mountains. They have gathered multiple pieces of evidence showing that the islands could belong to one interconnected caldera.

Caldera-forming eruptions are the most explosive volcanic eruptions on Earth and they often have had global effects. The ash and gas they put into the atmosphere can affect Earth’s climate, and trigger social upheaval.

For example, the eruption of nearby Okmok volcano in the year BCE 43 has been recently implicated in disruption of the Roman Republic. The proposed caldera underlying the Islands of the Four Mountains would be even larger than Okmok.  If confirmed, it would become the first in the Aleutians that is hidden underwater.

“We’ve been scraping under the couch cushions for data,” said co-author Diana Roman of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington D.C,, referring to the difficulty studying such a remote place. “But everything we look at lines up with a caldera in this region.”

Despite all these signs, Roman along with John Power, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey at the Alaska Volcano Observatory and the study’s lead author, maintain that the existence of the caldera is not by any means proven. To do that the study team will need to return to the islands and gather more direct evidence to fully test their hypothesis.

“Our hope is to return to the Islands of Four Mountains  and look more closely at the seafloor, study the volcanic rocks in greater detail, collect more seismic and gravity data, and sample many more of the geothermal areas” said Roman.

The caldera hypothesis might also help explain the frequent explosive activity seen at  Mount Cleveland, Roman said. Mount Cleveland is arguably the most active volcano in the North America for at least the last 20 years. It has produced ash clouds as high as 15,000 and 30,000 feet (above sea level).  These eruptions pose hazards to aircraft traveling the busy air routes between North America and Asia.

“It does potentially help us understand what makes Cleveland so active,” Power agreed. “It can also help us understand what type of eruptions to expect in the future and better prepare for their hazards.”

A team using a data-driven approach and machine learning to forecast cloud cover for the solar industry was named the winner of the University of Hawaiʻi Breakthrough Innovation Challenge on November 19. The annual entrepreneurial competition is hosted by the Shidler College of Business’ Pacific Asian Center for Entrepreneurship (PACE).

Nimbus AI’s project provides an effective solution to solar power grid managers to make quick decisions based on cloud cover forecasts. UH Information and Computer Science (ICS) assistant professor Peter Sadowski, ICS graduate student Kyle Hart and Atmospheric Sciences assistant professor Giuseppe Torri were awarded first place and a $5,000 prize.

“Machine learning is progressively becoming a very important component of our life, and it will likely have many interesting applications in the near future,” said Torri. “Personally, it is very exciting to combine this new technology with atmospheric sciences to help solar grid managers make better, more cost-effective decisions.”

Prior to the final event, contestants submitted a 2-minute video detailing their breakthrough idea and its market potential. A preliminary judging panel selected the finalists. PACE then matched the finalists with business mentors to help the teams further identify commercial opportunities for the idea and develop a 5-minute presentation.

“This pandemic has spotlighted major problems in our world,” PACE Executive Director Peter Rowan said. “Entrepreneurs are born to solve these problems. The Breakthrough Innovation Challenge gives University of Hawaiʻi students a platform to share their innovations and ideas that evolve in their labs and minds because of a desire to provide real solutions. These students are bright examples of a hopeful future.”

Judges selected Polu Energy as winner of the $2,500 second place prize for their submission proposing to generate renewable energy with ocean water. Next-Gen Antiviral Respirator won a $1,000 prize that was determined by votes from audience members for their idea for protecting frontline workers with innovation in full-face respirators.

The challenge, which was hosted online for the first time, was sponsored by one of the state’s largest CPA firms, Accuity LLP. The finalists presented their ideas to a judging panel comprised of David Hijirida, CEO of Simple Finance; Wes Johnston, managing director of Venderity Capital LLC; Julia Okinaka, president of Accuity Consulting Services; and Barry Weinman, chairman of the board of directors, Kineticor, Inc.

More on the UH Breakthrough Innovation Challenge

Now in its 10th year, the UH Breakthrough Innovation Challenge is an entrepreneurial competition that exposes UH students in all disciplines to entrepreneurial and innovative ways of thinking; provides a platform for participants to showcase their ingenious ideas to offer more efficient, stronger, better and novel products or services; and brings recognition and attention to outstanding entrepreneurs at UH.

The challenge matches competitors with business mentors and teaches students to research market opportunities, seek customer validation and determine the commercial potential of their idea. It is organized by the Pacific Asian Center for Entrepreneurship in partnership with the UH Mānoa College of Engineering and the William S. Richardson School of Law.

Read more on UH News.

Oceanographers Richard Zeebe and Joji Uchikawa were recently awarded four grants from the National Science Foundation totaling nearly $1.25 million to study climate change events in the Earth’s history and to better constrain the timing of these phenomena.

“We aim to develop new high-fidelity dating tools for deep-time sedimentary records and discover potential effects of seawater chemistry changes on abundance and isotope ratios of elements such as lithium and boron in marine carbonate fossils,” said Uchikawa, a researcher in SOEST’s Department of Oceanography.

“The studies will also provide new insight into the chaotic history of our solar system,” said Zeebe, a professor in the same department.

Once the life cycle is over for marine microorganisms such as foraminifera, their central spherical shell made of calcite (CaCO3) is buried in marine sediments. Abundance and isotopic composition of certain elements in the calcitic shells are sensitive to physical and chemical (for example, temperature and pH) condition of seawater at the time of shell formation, providing valuable “time capsules” for researchers to study past changes in the Earth’s climate. 

Changes in seawater temperatures for the past 65 million years are derived from stable oxygen isotopes of benthic foraminifera. Dating of these records requires reliable chronology. By studying the patterns of changes in planetary orbits, Zeebe aims to establish an astronomically-tuned chronology extending back to 66 million years ago.

By establishing astronomically-tuned chronology and investigating the controls on chemical and isotopic signatures of carbonate fossils, new research projects by Zeebe and Uchikawa will fine tune the tools to study the history of the Earth’s climate system and global carbon cycling. Understanding the swings and timing of past climate events serves as a foundation for predicting future climate change, particularly, due to greenhouse gas emissions.

Twice as much freshwater is stored offshore of Hawaiʻi Island than was previously thought, according to a University of Hawaiʻi study with important implications for volcanic islands around the world. An extensive reservoir of freshwater within the submarine southern flank of the Hualālai aquifer has been mapped by UH researchers with the Hawaiʻi EPSCoR ʻIke Wai project. The groundbreaking findings, published in Science Advances, reveal a novel way in which substantial volumes of freshwater are transported from onshore to offshore submarine aquifers along the coast of Hawaiʻi Island.

Watch a video summary of the findings on YouTube.

This mechanism may provide alternative renewable resources of freshwater to volcanic islands worldwide. “Their evidence for separate freshwater lenses, stacked one above the other, near the Kona coast of Hawaiʻi, profoundly improves the prospects for sustainable development on volcanic islands,” said UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) Dean Brian Taylor.

Paradigm shift

Through the use of marine controlled-source electromagnetic imaging, the study revealed the onshore-to-offshore movement of freshwater through a multilayer formation of basalts embedded between layers of ash and soil, diverging from previous groundwater models of this area. Conducted as a part of the National Science Foundation-supported ʻIke Wai project, research affiliate faculty Eric Attias led the marine geophysics campaign.

“Our findings provide a paradigm shift from the conventional hydrologic conceptual models that have been vastly used by multiple studies and water organizations in Hawaiʻi and other volcanic islands to calculate sustainable yields and aquifer storage for the past 30 years,” said Attias. “We hope that our discovery will enhance future hydrologic models, and consequently, the availability of clean freshwater in volcanic islands.”

Co-author Steven Constable, a professor of geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who developed the controlled source electromagnetic system used in the project, said, “I have spent my entire career developing marine electromagnetic methods such as the one used here. It is really gratifying to see the equipment being used for such an impactful and important application. Electrical methods have long been used to study groundwater on land, and so it makes sense to extend the application offshore.”

Kerry Key, an associate professor at Columbia University who employs electromagnetic methods to image various oceanic Earth structures, who not involved in this study, said, “This new electromagnetic technique is a game changing tool for cost-effective reconnaissance surveys to identify regions containing freshwater aquifers, prior to more expensive drilling efforts to directly sample the pore waters. It can also be used to map the lateral extent of any aquifers already identified in isolated boreholes.”

Two-times more water

Donald Thomas, a geochemist with the Hawaiʻi Institute of Geophysics and Planetology in SOEST who also worked on the study, said the findings confirm two-times the presence of much larger quantities of stored groundwater than previously thought.

“Understanding this new mechanism for groundwater…is important to better manage groundwater resources in Hawaiʻi,” said Thomas, who leads the Humuʻula Groundwater Research project, which found another large freshwater supply on Hawaiʻi Island several years ago.

Offshore freshwater systems similar to those flanking the Hualālai aquifer are suggested to be present for the island of Oʻahu, where the electromagnetic imaging technique has not yet been applied, but, if demonstrated, could provide an overall new concept to manage freshwater resources.

The study proposes that this newly discovered transport mechanism may be the governing mechanism in other volcanic islands. With offshore reservoirs considered more resilient to climate change-driven droughts, volcanic islands worldwide can potentially consider these resources in their water management strategies.

This project is supported by the National Science Foundation EPSCoR Program Award OIA #1557349.

Read also on The New York Times, Cosmos, UH News, Earth.com, Science Daily, Big Island Video News, Maui Now, Honolulu Star-Advertiser, West Hawaii Today and New Scientist.

The 2018 eruption of Kīlauea Volcano was one of the largest volcanic events in Hawaiʻi in 200 years. This eruption was triggered by a relatively small and rapid change at the volcano after a decade-long build-up of pressure in the upper parts of the volcano, according to a recent study published in Nature Communications by earth scientists from the University of Hawai‘i (UH) at Mānoa and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

Using USGS Hawaiian Volcanoes Observatory (HVO) data from before and during the 2018 eruptions at the summit and flank, the research team reconstructed the geologic events.

“The data suggest that a backup in the magma plumbing system at the long-lived Puʻu ʻŌʻō eruption site caused widespread pressurization in the volcano, driving magma into the lower flank,” said Matthew Patrick, research geologist at the USGS HVO and lead author of the study.

The eruption evolved, and its impact expanded, as a sequence of cascading events allowed relatively minor changes at Puʻu ʻŌʻō to cause major destruction and historic changes across the volcano.

A cascading series of events of this type was not considered the most likely outcome in the weeks prior to the onset of the eruption.

“This form of tunnel vision, which gives less attention to the least likely outcomes, is a bias that can be overcome by considering the broader, longer history of the volcano,” said Bruce Houghton, the Hawai‘i State Volcanologist, earth sciences professor at the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology and study co-author. “For Kīlauea, this consists of widening the scope to consider the types of behavior seen in the first half of the 20^th century and perhaps earlier.”

“Our study demonstrates that eruption forecasting can be inherently challenging in scenarios where volcanoes prime slowly and trigger due to a small event, as the processes that build to eruption may be hard to detect and are easy to overlook on the scale of the entire volcano,” said Patrick. “It is also a cautionary tale against over-reliance on recent activity as a guide for future eruptions.”

The State of Hawai‘i absorbed a significant amount of the economic and social cost of the 2018 eruption and likely will do so again as Kīlauea and Mauna Loa continue to erupt, suggested Houghton. Studies like this, which probe the more subtle influences of the behavior of these volcanoes, are targeted at reducing the costs, human and physical, of the next eruptions.

With future work the research team aims to adopt diverse approaches to understanding the subsurface structure and movement of magma on Kīlauea’s East Rift Zone.

Read more on NSF Discoveries, West Hawaii Today, Science Daily, UH News, Big Island Gazette, Hawaii Tribune-Herald and KHON2.

The largest aggregation of fishes ever recorded in the abyssal deep sea was discovered by a team of oceanographers from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UH, USA), Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI, USA) and the National Oceanography Centre (NOC, UK). Their findings were published recently in Deep-Sea Research.

“Our observations truly surprised us,” said Astrid Leitner, lead author on the study, who conducted this work as graduate researcher in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST). “We had never seen reports of such high numbers of fishes in the sparsely-populated, food-limited deep-sea.”

The researchers, including Leitner, Jennifer Durden (NOC) and professors Jeffrey Drazen (Leitner’s doctoral research advisor) and Craig Smith, made the observation on an expedition to the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ). The CCZ is a large region stretching nearly from Hawai‘i to Mexico, which is being explored for deep sea mining of nodules containing metals such as copper, cobalt, zinc and manganese.

Abyssal seamounts, deep underwater mountains whose summits are 9,800 ft (3,000 m) below the sea surface, dot the deep seascape and are some of the least explored habitats on the planet. During the expedition, the research team sampled three of these seamounts and their surrounding plains as part of an effort to establish an ecological baseline prior to extraction activities.

On the summit of one of the three previously unmapped and completely unexplored seamounts, the team captured on video a swarm of 115 cutthroat eels (Family Synaphobranchidae) at a small bait package containing about two pounds (1 kg) of mackerel. A few eels were caught in a baited trap and identified to be of the species Ilyophis arx, a poorly known species with fewer than 10 specimens in fish collections worldwide.

These eels were observed at the top of all of the seamounts, but not on the surrounding abyssal plain. The findings provide evidence for an abyssal seamount effect (where these mountains can support much higher numbers of animals than other surrounding habitats), and also indicate these eels are likely to be seamount specialists.

After returning from the expedition, the team determined they had documented the highest number of fishes ever been recorded at one time in the abyssal ocean—almost double the previous record.

“If this phenomenon is not just isolated to these two seamounts in the CCZ, the implications on deep sea ecology could be widespread,” said Leitner, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. “Our findings highlight how much there is still left to discover in the deep sea, and how much we all might lose if we do not manage mining appropriately.”

Read more on Miami Herald, KITV4, MSN, The Fresno Bee, UH News, and Science Daily.