Times of the Islands Winter 2020/21

green pages newsletter of the department of environment & coastal resources
Even further off the public radar were Navy Lieutenant
Don Walsh and Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard. In
a similar five-hour feat, they became the first humans
to venture into a different frontier, equally as alien but
closer to home: the deepest depths of the ocean. Despite
a series of non-essential instrument failures the morning
of the proposed dive, Walsh and Piccard took the bathyscaph
(a deep-sea submarine of sorts) Trieste down into
the Marianas Trench 220 miles off the coast of Guam
and 35,856 feet below the surface, two years before the
launch of Friendship 7.
What was the equivalent of a “small splash for
man but a cannonball for mankind” never panned out
into a dramatic show of technological will and military
might, but it nevertheless captivated the minds of ocean
explorers, scientists and engineers all over the world.
Mankind’s quest to reach new heights is only paralleled
by our desire to go deeper, stay longer and experience
what we never have before. Ocean exploration shares its
foundational values with space exploration, but has taken
a backseat in political priorities. The responsibility has
fallen on the people—the ones curious enough to ask
questions and daring enough to find answers.
Aboard the Trieste, Piccard describes watching bioluminescence
at different points along the descent and the
shocking moment they encountered a fish upon reaching
the bottom. There had been previous debate as to
whether or not fish could live that deep, demonstrating
that there was some type of deep ocean current supplying
these great depths with oxygen.
In 2000, the US National Oceanographic and
Atmospheric Administration claimed that as much as 95%
of our oceans remain unexplored. More recently, over
900 hours of video footage from sea floor mapping collected
during 2015 and 2017 captured 347,000 creatures
from the deep sea, less than 20% of which could be identified.
In 2018, Salinas-de-León and a team of researchers
found that a species of deep-sea skate, a relative to the
ray, was using warm water from hydrothermal vents off
the Galapagos Islands to incubate its eggs. The discovery
of such a nursery is important because hydrothermal
vents around the world are being targeted for mining,
as they are rich in mineral resources. There’s no telling
what other surprises lay in the deep oceans waiting to be
discovered, and it’s important we do so before they are
gone.
While much of this “final frontier” lies in the deep
sea, there is plenty of exploring to be done in our own
backyard. I would argue that the Turks & Caicos Islands
now play a much more important role in exploration than
they did in the 1960s, thanks to the invention of SCUBA
(Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus).
What we recognize as modern SCUBA equipment
has its origins in 1943, decades before we dreamt of a
space suit, yet a century after the first dive school was
established by the Royal Navy in 1843. We can thank
Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Emile Gagnan for the original
Aqualung, an apparatus combining the inventions of
a portable air tank and regulator that freed humans of
rudimentary dive suits weighing as much as 200 pounds.
Though these previous iterations captured the attention
of the 1867 World’s Fair, it was Cousteau and Gagnan’s
Aqualung and subsequent improvements that expanded
the accessibility of the oceans from beyond military enterprises
and into the recreational realm. The regulator, or
breathing piece, was streamlined in 1952, followed by
the first buoyancy control device, or jacket-type compensator,
in the 1960s and improved upon by SCUBAPRO in
1971. Slowly SCUBA-training organizations such as NAUI
(1960) and PADI (1966) began to appear, all before man
set foot on the moon.
SCUBA divers are always hungry to expand their
dive repertoire, and the 340 miles of reef offered by the
Turks & Caicos serve up something truly special. The
secret recipe? An exciting mixture of underwater geological
features and charismatic megafauna. A huge draw
to the Islands is wall diving, and several of the top dive
sites offer this opportunity. The walls are just as their
name suggests: vertical slabs of rock that plunge anywhere
from 40 feet to 7,000 feet down, though you will
need special training to go anywhere beyond the PADI
Advanced Open Water limits of 100 feet. Dive sites like
these can be found virtually all over the Islands, including
Providenciales, West Caicos, South Caicos and Grand
Turk.
Besides the walls, it’s not uncommon to find canyons,
cracks in the wall, and a few interesting wrecks. A mixture
of hard corals, soft corals and sponges grow along
the wall, making for intricate hiding and feeding spots for
various marine life. TCI waters have been known to host
sharks, dolphins, whales (seasonally) and spotted eagle
rays, to name a few.
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