07 January 2009
Newly Designated Marine Monuments Preserve Unique Ocean Habitat
Marine conservation effort protects 505,000 square kilometers
Washington — Three newly designated U.S. marine national monuments in the Pacific Ocean cover more than 505,000 square kilometers (195,000 square miles) and are home to active underwater volcanoes and sea vents, reef sharks, giant clams, hundreds of different species of fish and coral, and many types of seabirds and shorebirds.
President Bush on January 6 designated the Marianas Trench, Pacific Remote Islands, and Rose Atoll Marine National Monuments using the authority of the Antiquities Act of 1906, which allows the president to protect areas of “historic or scientific significance” on land owned or controlled by the United States.
“Resource destruction or extraction, waste dumping, and commercial fishing” will be prohibited, while allowing for “research, free passage, and recreation,” President Bush said before signing the proclamation.
The largest swath of ocean ever protected in this way comprises islands, atolls and ocean floor 50 percent larger in total area than all U.S. national parks combined. The monuments’ protected status is effective immediately and requires no congressional approval.
"This historic action by President Bush protects some of the world’s most unique and biologically significant ocean habitat," said Joshua S. Reichert, managing director of the Pew Environment Group. "Together with the Hawaii marine monument established two years ago, this marks the end of an era in which humans have increasingly understood the need to conserve vanishing wild places on land but failed to comprehend the similar plight of our oceans." (See “United States Creates World’s Largest Marine Protected Area.”)
"We are proud that President Bush has recognized the importance and richness of the Mariana Island waters," said Ignacio Cabrera, chairman of the Saipan-based Friends of the Monument advocacy organization. "We can now share with the world this special place our people have long cherished."
PROTECTING PRISTINE OCEAN
The Marianas Trench Marine National Monument includes the coral reef ecosystems around the three northernmost islands of the Northern Mariana Islands archipelago and the Marianas Trench, the deepest place on Earth, deeper than Mount Everest is high. It also includes approximately 21 active underwater volcanoes and hydrothermal vents.
“A fascinating array of species survives amid hydrogen-emitting volcanoes, hydrothermal vents that produce highly acidic and boiling water,” said Bush. Scientists speculate that life on earth began under similar conditions.
The Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument will protect the coral reef ecosystems around Kingman Reef, Palmyra and Johnston atolls, and Howland, Baker, Jarvis and Wake islands. These areas are home to hundreds of different fish species, endangered turtles, nesting seabirds, migratory shorebirds and apex predators, such as sharks, that are at the top of the food chain, said Jim Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, in a press conference January 5.
The Rose Atoll Marine National Monument will protect a coral reef ecosystem around a remote part of American Samoa. It has some of the broadest expanse of live coral cover of any place on earth, Connaughton said, and also contains giant clams, reef sharks and very large parrotfish.
“These remote places are in part protected by their remoteness, but nowadays there is no place in the ocean safe from illegal activities,” Enric Sala, a marine ecologist at National Geographic, told America.gov. “The fishing fleets of the world are operating virtually in every square mile of the ocean.”
Although commercial fishing is banned within the monuments, ships, submarines and aircraft retain rights of passage. U.S. military “activities, exercises, and surveys” also will be permitted, according to the White House.
SAFE FOR SCIENCE
Prior to Bush’s January 6 action, only 0.08 percent of the world’s oceans were protected from fishing and drilling, compared with 12 percent of land protected in national parks and reserves, Sala said, calling the proclamation “a great first step toward the protection of larger areas so that the protected areas in the ocean at least catch up with protection on land.”
Protecting these areas “is of huge scientific importance because it allows scientists to study ecosystems that more closely approximate the way the world used to be, which is essential for understanding how to better manage and perhaps restore the rest of the ocean that is so severely degraded,” Jeremy Jackson, professor and director of the Geosciences Research Division at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, told America.gov.
According to Sala, most scientific studies have been conducted on “degraded reefs,” so we do not have an unbiased understanding of how coral reefs function.
“If all you've done is to study car wrecks in a junkyard, you'll never know that the original function of the car was to transport people from here to there,” Sala said. “These pristine ocean sites would be the equivalent of a dealership where you can study an intact car. In other words, these places are the best instruction manual for understanding coral reefs and our impacts on these ecosystems.”
Said Jackson, “But even more than the science per se, these kinds of actions are essential, in my opinion, to have any hope of a healthy functioning ocean in the future.”
For additional details, see a transcript of the president's remarks and a related fact sheet.
