EDITOR’S NOTE: Call to Earth is a NCS editorial collection dedicated to reporting on the environmental challenges dealing with our planet, collectively with the options. Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative has partnered with NCS to drive consciousness and schooling round key sustainability points and to encourage optimistic motion.
Sardinia, Italy
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One thousand meters (3,281 toes) under the Mediterranean Sea, a crab tangled in plastic is preventing to crawl throughout the rocky sea backside. At 240 meters (787 toes) down, a whole inhabitants of bamboo coral is being choked by fishing gear.
These are a few of the sights Italian marine biologist Ginevra Boldrocchi witnessed throughout a deep-sea exploration to the subaquatic world often called Caprera Canyon.
Found in the tough, blue waters spanning some 20 to 40 kilometers (12 to 25 miles) off the coast of Sardinia, Italy, Caprera Canyon is an enormous underwater valley that helps a wide range of marine life and helps hold our oceans in steadiness.
It is one among the Mediterranean Sea’s final nice frontiers, and one among its largest and most biodiverse underwater ecosystems — however it’s under threat from business fishing, excessive maritime visitors and air pollution.
In June, NCS joined One Ocean Foundation, a world nonprofit, on its first mission to deploy a remotely operated automobile (ROV) greater than 1,000 meters (3,281 toes) under the floor to discover the dense sea forest at the backside of Caprera Canyon, as a part of the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative.
As scientific undertaking coordinator for One Ocean Foundation and researcher at the University of Insubria, Boldrocchi led this mission to watch an setting no human had seen earlier than, informing the basis’s research of the canyon’s ecological significance.
Caprera Canyon cycles vitamins, shops carbon and offers a habitat for numerous marine species, from corals and turtles to sharks and dolphins.
“At the moment, the canyon has no kind of protection at all, so we are going to lose refuge for so many endangered species and we will lose a lot of biodiversity,” Boldrocchi instructed NCS.
After conducting analysis at the floor stage for years, One Ocean Foundation realized it was time to look deeper, to uncover what lies hidden on the seafloor of the canyon.
Since people can not bodily dive to the deepest elements of the canyon, Boldrocchi enlisted the assist of sailor-turned-engineer Guido Gay, who constructed a specialised underwater ROV able to exploring its excessive depths.
“The role of the technology in conservation is very important, because we need to see, to connect, to understand the environment in all details in order to protect it,” stated Gay.
Piloted by Gay, the battery-powered ROV surveyed a variety of depths from round 130 to 1,050 meters (427 to three,445 toes) — exploring rocky habitats, taking samples, and observing deep-sea organisms.
Scientists have a restricted understanding of the life varieties dwelling in the canyon’s deep waters, in response to Francesco Enrichetti, a researcher at the University of Genoa working with One Ocean Foundation on this expedition.
“This environment [is] completely unknown, and so we hope to find a rich marine animal forest,” he instructed NCS forward of the mission.
Since 2019, Boldrocchi has been accumulating knowledge to strengthen the case for designating the canyon a Marine Protected Area (MPA) — a measure that might safeguard it from overfishing, air pollution and different human impacts.
“The canyon is really a crossway between France [and] Italy, so you have all these traffic disturbances generating acoustic pollution, plus you have the problem with fishing activities like bottom trawling,” Boldrocchi stated. “A lot of these animals which are already considered endangered, end up in the nets and die.”
Much of Boldrocchi’s scientific analysis takes place close to the canyon’s floor, the place she collects samples at totally different depths to evaluate air pollution ranges and animal presence.
“We do Environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling to get all the biological traces which are present in our sea water to see all the animals which have passed by in the area [recently],” Boldrocchi stated.
Guardians of the deep sea: defending Caprera Canyon
To seize marine animal sounds and noise air pollution, Boldrocchi and her group deploy hydrophones roughly 20 meters (66 toes) under the floor and document audio for about 40 minutes on every expedition.
They additionally collect zooplankton samples, that are key bioindicators of air pollution. Zooplankton are tiny animals that drift close to the ocean’s floor, the place they feed on microscopic crops and function meals for bigger marine life. As the basis of the marine meals internet, these tiny organisms take up contaminants circulating all through the canyon’s waters.
“We look for mercury, cadmium, arsenic, iron, zinc; we look also at different kinds of contaminants, like DDT,” Boldrocchi stated.
DDT, now prohibited, was as soon as a extensively used pesticide.
“Even if [DDT chemicals] have been banned since the 1970s, we still find [it] everywhere, and they interfere with the hormones, with the growth, with reproduction [of marine life],” she stated.
After the expedition was full, the samples and video collected by the ROV have been analyzed on land. Their exploration revealed colonies of uncommon sponges, corals and quite a few fish species. It additionally confirmed the scars of human exercise — discarded fishing gear and litter, inflicting coral mortality.
“We observed a rare population of the soft bottom gorgonians, completely destroyed by the impact of these long [fishing] lines,” stated Enrichetti. Gorgonians are gentle corals, typically referred to as sea followers, that type tree-like buildings and present a house for marine animals.
Despite indicators of adverse human affect discovered at the canyon, there have been encouraging discoveries. One Ocean Foundation’s analysis has recognized the presence of the endangered Mediterranean monk seal — proof that Caprera Canyon might function an vital feeding floor for the species.
“We find it basically every time we have sampled, not only each month, but in multiple areas,” Boldrocchi stated. “And this is very good news because it means that the monk seal little by little is repopulating and is coming back in Sardinia.”
In 2024, the canyon was acknowledged as a Mission Blue Hope Spot — a website thought of important to the planet’s well being. Building on that momentum, Boldrocchi and the One Ocean Foundation plan to concurrently pursue a number of layers of safety for the space in the coming years.
“Once we get all the data we need, we are going to move in three different directions — we are going to chase the Important Marine Mammal Area (IMMA) recognition, the second is the Fisheries Restricted Area (FRA), and in the meantime we start working in the direction to get an MPA,” Boldrocchi stated.
She stated they plan to make use of the ROV knowledge to assist their proposal for the FRA in 2026, after they’ll formally current their findings to Italian and EU authorities.
“We want to show that we have an important community also in the bottom that deserves to be protected,” Boldrocchi stated.