Mariana region is one of those places where plates are converging one plates
going underneath another creating lots of volcanism and most of its underwater
so in the Marianas there's nine islands but there's over 50 submarine volcanoes
the Marianas Trench plane national monuments made up of three units we call
them Islands unit which is the northern bit of the Marianas Trench
it contains the water and the sediment of the area surrounding the three
northern islands Arrakis bog in Asuncion you then have what we call the volcanic
unit which is made up of the hydrothermal vents and the underwater
volcanoes stretch all the way down the arc and then it's made up of the
Marianas Trench deepest trench on earth when we're writing the ecosystem science
plans for the three monuments we definitely make sure that local input
it's part of writing these ecosystem science class it's crucial because
basically this is their environment this is their traditions this is their home
growing up in Saipan I've learned a lot about the Chamorro ways of fishing and
just the Chamorro culture and the values a lot of the tomorrow's and the
Carolinians they really rely on our resources especially marine resources a
lot of these monuments are not abstract ideas you know as we sit here and we
think way out there in the ocean this is their backyard this is where they live
this is what they lived off of this harvesting a lot of the fish and it's
it's part of who and what they are and so it's critical they're part of any
kind of finding any kind of research or science that's done out there so we want
the future generation to be able to see what we see
if we talk about the Marianas Trench marine National Monument here we have a
very unique area where we have a lot of Volcanology we have a lot of shifting
geological movement we have hydrothermal vents that are there and the unique
biota living on these vents among the fantastic sites we found a cement that's
erupting almost continuously and that was really exciting because it was the
first place in the world where we could see an active deep ocean eruption
occurring and yet there were still life living around the top of the seamount
it's so deep that there's no sunlight from the surface so the whole ecosystem
is based on the chemistry of these vent fluids and so we're really interested in
understanding the relationships between the chemistry and the biology and the
volcanoes and the geology another incredible place had liquid co2 coming
out of the sea floor that had only been seen at one other place before
another place we went to had pools of molten sulfur on the seafloor the sulfur
was black because it had so much iron mixed in the places we found with lots
of sulfur seem to have a lot of very dense biological communities and that
site there were flatfish that hadn't been seen before the first vertebrate
we'd found the interesting thing about the deep ocean vents is we were
completely unaware of them until 1979 or so when they were first discovered and
we discovered all kinds of new life-forms that we had no idea existed
and it's really a fundamentally different kind of life on Earth if there
is life on other planets it's going to be some microbe that's living in the
ground or maybe in some on a moon with some ocean under a bunch of ice and so
it's it's gonna be more like these hydrothermal environments than the
surface life on Earth the Marianas it's so unique we started working there we
discovered all these new sites new species new phenomena there's so many
things that we've never seen before all that contributed to the understanding
that this really is a special place should be designated as as such as a as
a marine National Monument
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