The Galapagos Effect: Exploration and Research on the Move

Image Galapagos Conservancy

When it comes to things that we know about the ocean we are still pretty much like young children looking out into the endless horizon. Recent discoveries in Galapagos Island -the homebirth of the Evolutionary Theory have shocked the scientific community. The slogan; “All is Discovered and Explored” needs urgent revision. 

Over 70 new seamounts were discovered in the Galapagos platform below waters we used to think we knew well. This new discoveries -made in an area which has been fully explored forces us to ask the question how much do we really know about global oceans. The call from Paris COP 21 UN Summit of Agreement of Nations on climate change and further exploration and research adds to the unexplored  to create the “Galapagos Effect”. 

"We've just begun to scratch the surface as far as characterizing this environment," Dan Fornari marine geologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution WHOI and co-principal investigator stated.  

To the day only 10% of the Galapagos platform has been mapped. A similar percentage of global platform has been studied. 

“We see tremendous value in how these types of studies can inform our understanding of the Galápagos archipelago," Fornari ended it. 

Galapagos Conservancy GC -organization working in the mythical islands for more than 25 years recently spoke about the secrets which Galapagos still keeps to itself. President of GC Ms. Wendy Rayner in the letter “Preserving Galapagos in 2016” dated January 4 said...

“There is so much yet to be discovered and understood in the natural world. Every day we are reminded of what we don’t know about our oceans and our landscapes, even in a world which seems so digitally knitted together. Our wild places continue to provide a context for our human behavior, and we would do well to listen to the natural world…”

Galapagos Conservancy even after working more than two decades with Galapagos-based, national, and international organizations and individuals to ensure the scientific research recognized to be surprised about the news of new discoveries. 

“...Discovery on land is overwhelmed by discovery in the Galapagos waters,” Ms Rayner president of GC stated referring to the discovery made by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution WHOI in partnership with the Charles Darwin Foundation. 

WHOI´s International team discovered over 70 seamounts which were not known to science. What is shocking and interesting about this discovery is not only the new seamounts -known for being biodiversity hotspots but the fact that they were discovered in Galapagos. It can be considered that since Darwin first travelled to the islands, Galapagos has become an epicenter of scientific studies. Conservation and management policies of the Government of Ecuador have preserved Galapagos through history. Still in this much explored environment the ocean floor has not been fully scanned. 

“The Galápagos Islands have long offered researchers a natural laboratory in which to study unique volcanic features and a diverse population of native plants and animals. Although the creatures and islands have been well documented since Charles Darwin's revolutionary research in the 19th century, there's still much to be discovered beneath the waters that surround the remote Pacific Ocean island chain,” WHOI recognized. 

“Seamounts are biodiversity hotspots and are important for migratory species passing through Galapagos waters, including many species of sharks and whales,” GC President stated. 

On December 9 WHOI made public its findings. “During a three-week expedition in August, an International team led by WHOI, working with the Charles Darwin Foundation and in close collaboration with the Galapagos National Park Directorate, conducted the first scientific expedition to map and characterize the seamounts on the Galápagos platform and the diverse marine life that these underwater mountains support.”  

"The well-known islands comprise only about five percent of the volume of the Galápagos, while the massive submarine volcanic platform is largely unexplored," Adam Soule WHOI geologist and chief scientist on the expedition adding "That's part of what makes this work so exciting."

WHOI also teamed up with the Dalio Ocean Initiative, scientists from Boise State University, University of California-Berkeley, Oceanographic Institute of the Ecuador Army INOCAR. The team worked aboard the M/V Alucia ship navigating the fascinating central and western areas around the internationally known Islands of Santiago, Santa Cruz, Floreana and Fernandina.

The Galapagos platform is the single cause for the richness of the Galapagos ocean waters and the Galapagos island. Rising tall from the depths of the Pacific ocean the islands are but the tip of a massive submerged underwater mountainous system. This system has not been fully chartered but it is there where one of the most boosted upwellings systems in the planet take place and where powerful oceanic currents converge globally. Upwellings occur when cold waters rich in nutrients reach a platform and escalate and interact with warmer surface waters. Wind, pressure, salinity, temperature and ocean and atmospheric elements cause the “mixing” of the cold and warm waters causing an “upwelling” of nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen which when they come in contact with warmer waters are filled with microorganisms such as plankton which feed on the vertical column.

Rich plankton formations in turn attract the entire ocean food web. Larger fish, to whales or sharks and turtles, soft and hard corals and even ocean birds, they are all linked to the “upwelling”. The international fishing sector and local fishermen are also linked to the upwelling. They follow the plankton clouds just a the schools of fish do for the big catch. International food markets are replenished in this cycle as well. 

“The edge of the continental shelf is a key location where dense, nutrient rich water ‘upwells’ to the surface, stimulating growth at the base of the food web,” said co-author Glen Gawarkiewicz, a senior scientist at WHOI.  “This water is normally sandwiched between colder, fresher water on the shelf and warmer Gulf Stream waters offshore. Understanding changes in this region has important societal and economic implications.”

What we see above ocean waters is the Galápagos group of islands or “archipelago” and they are beautifully made up by 13 major volcanic islands but underwater is where the action is...a massive submerged platform acts as the base for the islands to rest upon. The Galapagos platform rises 3 kilometers above the seafloor. 

Until recently, the platform and the surrounding deep-water seamounts had not been explored using modern, high-resolution survey and sampling methods.

The team led by WHOI mounted a sonar on the hull of its Vessel Alucia and a scanner-sonar on the WHOI Remotely Operate Vehicles ROVs which took to the depths in the scientific mission. WHOI used high resolution sonars, scanners and cameras to create the complete visualization of the Galapagos platform. ROVs Deep Rover 2 and Nadir submerged to collect biological and geological samples to compose a even more complete picture. During the submersible dives, more than 150 rock samples and 300 biological samples were collected and catalogued. Samples and data which the team collected are still today being analized. 

WHOI scientists ventured and dared to say that the seamounts discovered were formed and molded during the last ice age -about 26,000 years ago. This would make the new seamounts rather young from a geological perspective. The dating of the seamounts has ecological “implications regarding the evolution and past movements of animals between the islands”.

Experts highlighted that the basin is active both on land as well as underwater in volcanic activity and ocean crust generation and crust destruction cycles.

One of the main objective of the study is to understand the magmatic processes on the Galápagos Platform, “which is currently based almost exclusively on samples from the volcanoes collected on land”. "We will be conducting geochemical analyses on the samples to determine the link between the volcanic systems below and above the waterline," Dorsey Wanless -Assistant Professor at Boise State University and co-principal investigator added. 

The findings of the WHOI led Expedition will be used in the updating of the management and conservation plan of the Galapagos Marine Reserve -a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

Teeming fish and teeming marine invertebrates, species of economic importance, new species for science, rich and diverse communities, deep-water hard corals, soft corals like gorgonians and vase sponges are some of the discoveries made by the cameras mounted on WHOI´s deep water exploration ROVs. 

"Seamounts are biodiversity hotspots and essential stepping stones for migratory species, including many threatened shark, turtle and cetacean species," Pelayo Salinas de León Senior Marine Ecologist at the Charles Darwin Foundation stated. "We still have many months of samples and data analyses ahead of us but this expedition highlights the need to include some of these seamounts as protected areas in the ongoing re-zoning of the GMR -Conservation Plan of the Marine Reserve," Salinas de Leon ended it.

This study also acts as a call for more research to be done in the field of platform exploration and the understanding of upwellings -a natural key for endangered species and marine sanctuaries or high profile economic ocean areas. 

WHOI in September took on the study of another ocean platform and also found that the platform and upwelling system is not fully comprehended. Using glider bots WHOI collected data from the platform of the Gulf off the coast of Massachusetts. 

“I just find it extraordinary that the Pioneer Array gliders were out for a month, and we have already identified a new shelf break exchange process,” said Gawarkiewicz a leading scientist. “It just goes to show how much more we have to learn in the shelf-wide ecosystem.”

WHOI´s Team was there in Massachusetts to study the unique and particular behaviour of cold and warm water in the platform which acts out in a rather unusual way. The basin is of global interest because waters found there that travel from near the Arctic as well as Mid-Atlantic. “This process can greatly affect shelf circulation, biogeochemistry and fisheries,” WHOI stated. 

In 2006, scientists using satellite imagery observed an elongated body of warm water from a Gulf Stream warm-core ring intruding along the shelf edge, extending hundreds of miles from Massachusetts towards Cape Hatteras. It took years for a team to finally take ROVs underwater to understand why water was intruding. Autonomous gliders were used to gather information to answer this question. 

“Understanding changes in this region has important societal and economic implications,” WHOI said about the Massachusetts Platform but this is just as true to any other platform where strong upwelling occurs. 

WHOI finally unravelled the equation which described the unusual behaviour of the Massachusetts upwelling. The equation included alterations in salinity, temperature, density and other components which defined the relationship of upwellings relationships that take place between cold and warm ocean waters. 

The changes in temperature, density and circulation all have major implications for the fisheries in the area.

“I showed the glider data to a group of commercial fisherman back in April, in Rhode Island, and they were very surprised,” said Gawarkiewicz. “They couldn’t believe the temperature can change by that much, that quickly,” Gawarkiewicz said.