The Lost Continent by David Alexander Baker

Author:David Alexander Baker [Baker, David Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Published: 2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

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Katie Morgan, who had been at Biosphere 2 since she was an undergraduate intern, shared some of the history of the ocean as we followed catwalks and descended a stairway hidden behind walls of artificial rock. We left the soaring, cathedral-like chambers and entered the guts of the place, with giant tubes and ducts and whirring pumps that drove the ocean’s waves and currents.

The original iteration of this coral sea was a sort of Frankenstein ocean, made with manufactured seawater combined with ocean water trucked in from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, which contained essential plankton and microbes. To this soup of Pacific microbes and artificial seawater, 1,465 Caribbean corals were brought up from the Yucatán in Mexico, some of them massive old colonies with their own contingents of microbes and critters. In all there were thirty-four species of stony corals shipped on a four-day journey to Arizona in specially designed aquarium trucks that included lighting and current flow. Then the corals were cemented in place with epoxy in an artificial ocean built at four thousand feet of elevation in a temperate climate with a strong seasonal diurnal variation at the base of a mountain range nearly a thousand miles from the nearest tropical reef.

Abigail Alling was the marine biologist on the original project in charge of the ocean. During the course of the first closure, she had mighty struggles to maintain the health of the reef. Algae threatened to choke out the corals and had to be removed by mechanical scrubbers and often by hand. In the winter, the coral colonies adapted to the low light and short days. Then spring happened. “It was remarkable to see how the shallow corals that had been in such low light during the winter months started to show bleaching,” she told me via video chat from her new project in Bali. Back then, she’d had to move the bleaching corals lower in the basin by hand to keep them healthy. She learned to actively manage the ocean to keep its corals in balance.

More challenges ensued. Diseases, latent hitchhikers from the Caribbean, began to emerge with the increases in light and warmer weather. Octopuses that had also hitched a ride from the Yucatán munched through helpful invertebrates, threatening the health of the reef, and had to be removed. But with her ongoing labors, the ocean stayed healthy. “We really learned from each other. We were working together…me and the ocean,” she said.

By the end of the two-year experiment, this symbiosis led to a dramatic success. Of the original thirty-four species of corals, all but one species survived, and 75 percent of the corals survived overall. Most notably, there were thirty-eight new coral recruits. These corals were not only surviving, they were breeding. The scientists knew they were recruits, Alling told me, because they were living on the tank walls, and they hadn’t put any corals there.

After the collapse of the overall Biosphere 2 project, the ocean was neglected.

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