Time USA - April 14 2014 - Return of the Taliban by Time Inc

Author:Time Inc. [Time Inc.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Time Inc.
Published: 2014-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

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Ocean View

Like a Google map of the seabed, a new survey is documenting coral reefs--before they're gone

Photograph by Jayne Jenkins CATLIN SEAVIEW SURVEY

The SVII camera can take hundreds of photos of coral reefs, turning them into 360-degree panoramas

Bryan Walsh/Belize | 2870 words

There's only one way to lower a $20,000 custom-made underwater camera from a swaying fishing boat into the open sea: very, very carefully. And that's exactly how Manuel Gonzalez-Rivero's colleagues handled the SVII camera as they nudged it overboard, where the coral ecologist was bobbing in the bathtub-warm waters off the Central American country of Belize. Gonzalez-Rivero is based at the University of Queensland's Global Change Institute in Australia, but he was in the Caribbean working with the Catlin Seaview Survey, a scientific expedition that is assessing threatened coral reefs around the world. Once in the water, the cumbersome SVII--a beach-ball-size camera head with three separate lenses at the end of a 7-ft. (2 m) pole--was easy for Gonzalez-Rivero to maneuver. The camera's attached propeller sled saved the scientist the work of swimming as he covered more than a mile of Belize's protected Glover's Reef, part of the vast and endangered Mesoamerican Reef that stretches from southern Honduras to the eastern tip of Mexico.

Every three seconds, the lenses on the SVII--facing to the left, right and below the camera head--snapped pictures of the reef. Over the course of his 45-minute dive, Gonzalez-Rivero produced more than 900 detailed images of Glover's Reef, each one rich with data about corals and sea life. Back on the catamaran that served as the expedition's temporary base, those images would be processed to generate a precise three-dimensional image of the reef. Later, computers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography would analyze the pictures, giving scientists a quick diagnosis of the health of one of the most valuable marine ecosystems in the Caribbean. What's long been possible on land, thanks to satellites scanning jungles and deserts, is now feasible beneath the waves. "Every coral reef is different," says Gonzalez-Rivero. "This will allow us to see the reef as it really is."

And we have to see it today, because coral reefs may not be here tomorrow. It's a cliché to call coral reefs the rain forests of the ocean, but if anything, that understates their ecological value. They occupy less than 0.1% of the sea area, yet "between one-fourth and one-third of everything that lives in the ocean lives in a coral reef," says Nancy Knowlton, who holds the Smithsonian Institution's Sant Chair in Marine Science. Coral reefs support more species per square kilometer than any other marine environment, providing habitat, food and spawning grounds. And fish are not the only beneficiaries. The net economic value of coral reefs globally is almost $30 billion a year, and some 500 million people around the world depend on coral reefs for food, coastal protection and tourism.

At a time when climate concerns continue to mount--a widely watched March 31 report from a United Nations panel warned of drastic effects across the globe--coral reefs are under intense threat.

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