For the first time, marine biologists have teamed up with artists to create an accurate illustration of a seamount usually cloaked in darkness at the bottom of the sea.
Researchers from Schmidt Ocean Institute (SOI) collaborated with a scientific illustrator to depict underwater seamounts on the edge of the US Exclusive Economic Zone in the central Pacific.
“We know so little about life in the deep sea that the marine ecologist who studies these areas in some ways have more in common with the natural historians of the 1700s and 1800s than we do with our modern terrestrial contemporaries,” says Brian Kennedy, a deep-sea ecologist at Schmidt Ocean Institute.
This idea inspired them to work with artist Constance Sartor to create beautiful but scientifically accurate pictures of the diverse life found on this ecosystem.
"The early natural historians were often amazing artists as well as gifted observationalists who could see patterns in the natural world then capture them on paper to share with their colleagues,” Kennedy says.
The team believe that their creation is the first detailed visual depiction of a seamount. “Compared to mountains on land, it's far more challenging to study seamounts because of the fact that they're hundreds of feet underwater and typically surrounded by darkness,” says Sartor, a scientific illustrator.
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"During our Schmidt Ocean Institute research cruise, it took over four days to collect data on portions of each of the four faces of the seamount and I used patterns in the data to help determine what the entire seamount looks like."
The image is based on a map of the seamount created by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) during an expedition that discovered more than 100 species of coral – some found as deep as 1,500 metres.
“I often think about the fate of the oceans; about how much they suffer from both their immensity and their invisibility beneath the surface,” says Randi Rotjan, a biologist at Boston University who led the expedition team. “We can’t 'zoom in' on features underwater the way we can on land, using a terrain layer on a map app. But what if we could?!”
Bringing the seamount to life through this artwork can help people better understand these ecosystems and want to protect them.
“Art is such a beautiful way to showcase science, and in this case, it’s really the only way,” says Rotjan. “It’s finally a way to really 'see' this underwater mountain for the first time”.
Image credit: Brian Kennedy, Constance Sartor, Randi Rotjan, Schmidt Ocean Institute and Boston University.
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