What you can learn from an ocean

By Robert Kunzig, ENVIRONMENT Executive Editor

One of the most strangely exhilarating experiences I’ve had as a journalist happened in the spring of 2000, inside a shipping container on the deck of a ship in the Indian Ocean. The ship was the R/V Knorr, operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. A mile and half below us, a tethered robot was puttering over the ocean floor, and in the darkened control room inside the container, a dozen of us were grouped around the robot’s pilot, staring at the video from its cameras. In a few hours, we’d be steaming back to Mauritius after a month at sea.

Until we arrived, this region of the seafloor had been unexplored. With the ship’s sonar, the scientists had just mapped a new 4,900-foot-high volcano and baptized it Knorr Seamount. The robot was nosing around the top of that mountain, flying along a deep, five-foot-wide fissure—the rift separating the African tectonic plate from the Australian one. On either side stretched a landscape of black lava, which had erupted and then frozen into pillows, ropes, and corrugated sheets. It was a haunting, barren prospect.

Then something red flashed in the robot’s floodlights: Some nameless shrimplike creature, maybe four or five inches long, was swimming languidly along the fissure. We followed it for a bit, and in that moment, the presence of another lonely being, and the striking contrast of red on black, transformed this obscure underwater mountain into a place I felt connected to. I remember thinking, no other humans have ever set eyes on this place. It was a new experience for me.

Oceanographers who explore the seafloor have it often. Sometimes in those undiscovered places, though, they find human trash that has preceded them into the deep.

That’s the beauty and the heartache of the ocean today, World Oceans Day: so much left to explore, so much damage already. And so much possibility for doing better.

To celebrate World Oceans Day, National Geographic cartographers are adding a new one to our maps: the Southern Ocean around Antarctica (pictured above), which was previously part of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. Sarah Gibbens explains the reasons for the change. Meanwhile, Maya Wei-Haas takes us on a tour of deep geologic time, introducing us to oceans that have come and gone as the tectonic plates shifted around. And Laura Parker looks at the prospects for a global treaty to regulate plastic waste and keep it out of the ocean.

If you’re lucky enough to live near a coast, I hope you get a chance to walk along the shore and look at the waves. And maybe pick up a piece of trash.

Learn more about how the National Geographic Society is working to protect all of our oceans

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ONE MOMENT

Making a ‘clean’ car cleaner: How does the world get the cobalt and lithium needed to make batteries for electric vehicles without expanding mining in places like Russia, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Efforts to recycle and reuse vehicle batteries are rising as EV production ramps up, Madeleine Stone writes for Nat Geo. (Above, a worker inspects car batteries in a factory in Nanjing, China.)

CHARGE UP! 

TAKE FIVE

• Tearing out these dams will open rivers up for recreation—and save lives
• Why does the natural gas industry target vulnerable communities for pipelines?
• An e-bike for the post-pandemic city
• 10 books for thinking about the future
• Can cannabis fix its carbon problem?

FROM THE MAGAZINE

IN A FEW WORDS

FAST FORWARD

Building new stewards: How do you nurture a child’s love for nature? Nat Geo is launching an eight-week Planet Possible Challenge to do so, kicking off with an adventure with a homemade magnifier (pictured above in Maryland, as used by Grace Colley). Step 1: Let kids explore the living things in the ground cover and describe them. Step 2: After learning that the ground is more than dirt and grass, inspire them to protect it, Ella Schwartz writes for Nat Geo.

TAKE THE CHALLENGE

TEACHING THE NEXT GENERATION
• If kids see litter, help them pick it up. Too much trash can prevent plants from growing and disturb critters’ homes.
• If your family has been exploring a new area, clean your shoes afterward. Seeds of non-native plants can track in on the soles, and those invasive species can push out native plants that keep the ecosystem healthy.
• Kids might want to pick flowers to bring home but teach them to pick only a few. Removing too many plants from a habitat robs critters of food and shelter. Natural plants also prevent erosion.