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When we. Oh, yes.

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Well, you might say that. Good afternoon, and welcome to this afternoon's talk is part of Oxford Green Week.

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Welcome to the Oxford Martin School. We're very lucky to have today two speakers on protecting the high seas,

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particularly lucky to have Alex Rogers on dry land because that's not so common.

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Alex is the science director for Rev Ocean. He's also was the founding director of the Sustainable Oceans programme here at the

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Oxford Martin School and is a visiting professor at the Department of Zoology here.

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He's internationally recognised for his expertise in deep sea ecology and human impacts on the oceans, and has worked extensively with governmental,

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intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations from Greenpeace to the UN International Seabed Authority.

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And he's just published a new book,

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which is over in Blackwell's in some numbers apparently called The Deep The Hidden Wonders of Our Oceans and How We Can Protect Them.

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And Alex Is is also consulting on BBC series Blue Planet and has been down.

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He was telling me to over 3000 metres in the submarines, so we will hear from Alex for about 40 minutes.

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We are, and he will talk to us about how the a network of marine protected areas in the high seas might look like.

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And then we're going to hear for about 10 to 15 minutes from William Gwilym Rolands,

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who is an expert on how we might enforce such an area of protected areas on the high seas because Gwilym is an expert on Earth observation,

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data and satellite imagery. Also part of the Oxford Martin programme on Sustainable Oceans.

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And after both have spoken, they will come back up here and we'll have plenty of time for questions.

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So if you could save your questions for the end and now hand over to Alex for insight.

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It's. So thanks, everyone for coming.

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I am going to talk to you about the high seas and particular thanks for making it in the dreadful weather at the moment.

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You probably feel like if all three nations get in. So I thought I'd just start by talking about what the high seas actually are.

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And essentially it's the waters beyond 200 nautical miles from the coast of Iceland.

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So it's outside of the control of any single state in terms of use of resources.

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And just to complicate matters in legal terms, the water column is actually treated differently to the seabed,

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saying the water column is termed the high seas, whereas the seabed is termed as the area.

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And the reason for that differentiation will become clear a little later in the talk.

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So all of the pale blue area you can see here on this map is what we call the high seas or areas beyond national jurisdiction.

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So the colour picks on this map for the exclusive economic zones of states at least a couple of bits over water.

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And it's a huge ecosystem, covers about 60 percent of the ocean area and nearly three quarters of the ocean's volume.

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So it's pretty much the biggest ecosystem on Earth.

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So where did this concept of the high seas actually come from?

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Well, you might be surprised to hear that actually came as from a justification for an act of piracy.

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And this was during the war between the Portuguese and the Dutch and Dutch actually seised the

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Portuguese vessel and justified it through this concept of Maurizio Parents Freedom of the seas.

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And there have been various arguments as to whether this is a good thing or not through the ages.

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But this has led to some rather strange, historic artefacts in terms of our zoning of the ocean.

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So, for example, if I just flip back here to the area, which is conceived as state territory three nautical miles from the coast,

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that was the distance over which you can fire a cannon from the shore and defend your waters.

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So really, my story, I guess, starts with the first modern oceanographic expedition lack of HMS Challenger in 1972 to 1876.

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Challenger was the first real modern oceanographic expedition in sample geology,

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biology, physical oceanography, and the ship pretty much went all around the world.

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Apart from the Indian Ocean,

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which you'll notice it managed to completely steer around the historical consequences of which we're still suffering from today,

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and I'll talk about that in a minute as well. Since Challenger, we've learnt a lot about the oceans.

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We know something about what the sea floor actually looks like.

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It's not completely flat. It's from chains of mountains, canyons, ocean trenches.

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So really quite a varied topography.

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But it's quite interesting that we've only actually accurately mapped something like 10 to 20 percent of the sea floor.

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So a lot of what you see here are best estimates, some of which are based on old soundings back from the 18th century or even further in the past.

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And this first picture of the ocean floor really was put together by Priestley's is Anne Marie Tharp,

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working on very primitive echo soundings post the Second World War,

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and Murray thought literally through what she thought at the bottom of the ocean looked like from these echo soundings.

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Although we now know much more about the ocean, there's no floor we don't know.

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And this is just one example you see here.

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It's estimated that there are about two million species in the ocean, of which we described about 200000.

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So 90 percent of life in the ocean is undescribed, and most of that hasn't been seen really by humankind.

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And if you look at the distribution of records of species in the ocean and this diagram kind of shows a graphic representation of time.

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So the warm colours here are where there are lots of species records in the cold colours where there's very few.

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What you see is as you move away from the land and deeper into the ocean, and we know less and less in terms of what's out there.

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And that also extends to ecosystems as well.

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And in fact, the deep water pelagic, which is the water column between the surface and the seabed, is the least explored ecosystem, probably on Earth.

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We've only investigated about 0.000 one percent of that particular ecosystem seamounts, which I'll talk to you in a minute about.

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We've investigated about one zero zero two percent of sea mounts are underwater mountains, and these are very important habitats in the ocean.

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Is that biological hotspots? So what we do know and what we have learnt about the ocean is that it produces a huge range of ecosystem services for us.

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And these are from very simple things simple to understand, such as the provisioning of fish for people to eat.

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And the ocean is still extremely important in terms of food security, particularly in terms of protein and supply nutrients,

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but also more complex processes such as nutrient cycling, for example, the carbon cycle and the production of oxygen.

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So something like one out of every two breaths you take in this room has actually come from marine phytoplankton in the oceans,

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and WWE has recently estimated that the goods and services provided by the ocean are worth somewhere in the region of 2.5 trillion dollars per annum,

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which makes it the seventh biggest economy on the planet.

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But of course, the planet simply couldn't, couldn't operate without many of these processes going on.

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So in fact, the ocean really is infinitely valuable in terms of supporting processes of money supply in Liverpool for us.

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So what does much of the sea floor up the high seas look like?

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Well, much. It looks like this fairly flat sediment.

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There's life throughout the entire depth range of the ocean, all the way down to nearly 11000 metres in the Mariana Trench.

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That life is adapting to low pressure to very small amounts of food and also low temperatures.

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And it's a very diverse fauna. One of the things we've learnt since 1960s is the diversity in the deep ocean is actually very high.

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The abundance and biomass of animal life declines as you go deeper.

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And this is because the supply of food decreases as you move away from the surface.

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Sources generally declines unless you're a scavenger, in which case you actually get bigger as you go deeper.

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But most of the diversity is actually in the small critters that live in the sediments or on the net around the moves like this.

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So there things like pollock eat worms, crustaceans and bivalve moss.

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And the worms, in fact, are the most diverse groups, certainly down to about half a millimetre in size.

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And the diversity of these animals is very, very high in surprisingly high.

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We are starting to get an idea of how this diversity is distributed horizontally if you like through the oceans on the sea floor.

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And what is seems a pattern seems to be one of the highest diversity at mid-latitudes.

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We think that's because that's where the highest supply of organic food is falling out from the ocean surface.

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And this is in contrast with shallow water marine life, which is its highest diversity in the tropics in the equatorial regions.

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The patterns of diversity with death were also very interesting,

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we see a peak in diversity of mid slope that's somewhere between 2000 and 3000 metres.

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So diversity, certainly in these segments,

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seems to actually increase as you go down deeper into the ocean before it starts to decrease as a result of lack of food.

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We're not absolutely certain about why this is, but it probably has something to do with interactions between species and the supply of food.

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But the deep passion the high seas don't all look like that.

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And in fact, there were some really remarkable habitats which occupy a smaller area of the seabed.

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And this is one of them. These are deep sea hydrothermal vents.

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These particular ones we filmed in the Southern Ocean back in 2010 at a depth of about two and a half thousand metres and a black cloud.

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So through it, you can see they're coming out. These chimneys are at about three hundred eighty six degrees C.

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And these are very, very interesting ecosystems because despite the depths and as you can see from this photograph here,

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I have abundant life around them.

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So what our hydrothermal vents and places where seawater penetrates ocean crust and comes into contact with extremely hot

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rock around a magma chamber underneath the seabed is a very complex exchange of chemicals between the seawater and the rock,

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and the seawater becomes really enriched in chemicals like hydrogen sulphide and various metals, so forth and so on.

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And it's these reduce chemicals, which are the key to the abundance of life around these vents.

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Because what's happening here is the bacteria are actually oxidising, some of these chemicals to release energy.

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So this is an ecosystem which is based on chemists synthesis rather than light energy and photosynthesis.

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And this was really a remarkable discovery back in 1977 when it was made.

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But it was remarkable for another reason as well because it showed us that we could

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get life in very different conditions to those which we previously considered.

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And in fact, now we've got evidence of hydrothermal ism elsewhere in the Solar System.

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This is a French problem and colitis,

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and you can see jetting off the bottom half of the Moon that these geysers of water and they're actually coming from

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the subsurface ocean on that plane and passing satellites have picked up the chemical signature of hydrothermal vents,

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actually Enceladus. So now there is a possibility of a second genesis of life in the Solar System because

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it's thought that vents one of the prime candidates for where life originated on Earth.

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We don't quite have work on hydrothermal vent organisms over the past 10 years.

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One of the things that was discovered after the 1970s was that the biota around these pens differs depending on where you are in the ocean.

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So the eastern Pacific fauna is characterised by these giant tubeworms, these animals, which are up to two metres tall.

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I don't have a gut. I don't have a mouth. They have symbiotic bacteria inside them.

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So far, it's also so acid fish, various other worms of mussels and so on.

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The Western Pacific is different and is characterised by having these snails with symbiotic bacteria, stalk barnacles and so on.

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The Atlantic is really different.

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It's characterised by these huge swarms of shrimps around the vents, and they carry their symbiotic bacteria on their appendages in their gills.

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The Indian Ocean, though, is very interesting because it is a kind of mix of the biota of the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean.

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So we have found shrimp, but we also have things like mussels and some of the crabs you'd associate with

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the Pacific and also some rather strange local animals like scaly foot now,

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which you can see in the photograph here.

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These animals are the only animals which secrete iron armour to protect them from the environment and from predators.

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So we wanted to understand why we were seeing these geographic connexions between these very different corners.

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And one of his answer was that there was dispersal through the Southern Ocean

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as subduction connects all of these other nations and the southern hemisphere.

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So we went down to look for these vents and we found them around places along a ridge called East Scotia Ridge,

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which is just to the south southeast of of South Georgia.

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As you can see from this map here and in places where that ridge was swollen up and it swells up because the magma chamber actually went to the ridge.

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We found hydrothermal vents, and this was really remarkable because people actually told us that we never do this work.

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And the reason was quite simple sublimation really is quite a ferocious place to go work.

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This particular storm took photograph of of the South Sandwich Islands.

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The swells were about 15 metres in height in management.

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That's probably as tall as this building, pretty much.

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But we were actually quite lucky. That was probably the only really ferocious storm we came across.

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And this is what we actually discovered.

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In fact, what we discovered was something totally unexpected and which poor little resemblance to any of the foreigners we'd seen elsewhere.

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What you can see on this video what it called yeti crabs. They're called yeti crabs because you'll see they have kind of furry bellies.

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You can just see the fuzz around the sides of these animals and actually grow sulphur bacteria on that fuzz and just kind of make off and eat it.

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As you can see, they're rather successful at doing this around these vents, and they occur in absolutely vast numbers.

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And these were a new species or is only one not yet known at the time.

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We also found various other new species, so these snails, which are so big,

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have symbiotic bacteria actually in England, thought they were a new species,

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a new Jenness and a new species of stool barnacle, which was somewhat related to the Pacific animals, but certainly not identical to them.

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And you'll also see the baby yeti crabs hiding out in these barnacles.

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But what was really odd was the things that were missing. We found none of the giant tubeworms known mussels, no crabs, no shrimp.

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And it seems that the very, very cold waters of the Antarctic basically keep our animals with certain types of life histories.

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And that's probably because the extreme seasonality of that system really

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counts against you if you've got a larva which actually feeds in the plankton.

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This single four week expedition basically changed our ideas about the distribution of the fauna around hydrothermal vents globally.

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So these different colours on this map represent different types of fauna that you that you actually find.

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Around these. So moving from vents, which are a kind of biological hot spot in the high seas to another biological hotspot, and that is seamounts.

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This is our own seamount, which is actually in the UK EEZ and just to the west of Scotland, the entendu and Seamount.

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The summit of that is probably in the region of 200 to 400 metres depth.

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We actually visited back in 2016 and sea mounts are very important because they kind of oases out in the high seas.

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So they're very important for predators foraging things like tuna, sharks, whales, turtles,

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seals and seabirds all home in the same places where they can forage for rich supplies of food.

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There are actually a lot of sea mounts in the ocean. This is from such a gravity map.

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We did for sea mounts and yashwant back in 2011, you'll see here over 3000 large events across the ocean, covering about five percent of the seafloor.

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So this is actually a major ecosystem. And I mentioned the Indian Ocean before as being a place which challenger appointed.

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Well, it seems that many other scientists avoided it as well, because we still have one of the most poorly explored parts of the oceans.

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And back in the I think it was 2010 2011, again, we actually visited the seamounts down in the southern Indian Ocean.

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And this is what we found again, very, very rich ecosystems.

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You see, the summer of this seamount is covered in corals and all sorts of other sessile organisms.

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There are also these large carnivorous fish swimming around somewhere.

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This is a rockfish along with a shot you can see in the background those fish grow to well over a metre long.

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They're really quite voracious predators. There's also clouds of more ones in the background there as well.

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This is sort a depth of about 200 metres from the summit of the same name.

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Deeper still, there were still large predators. This is about 1000 metres down, and you see here those six killed shot,

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which were actually probably one of the biggest predators we get at these deaths around.

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So they always come up and investigate our robots while they're down in places like this.

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We also found some really spectacular other communities.

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This is a deepwater coral reef at a depth of about thousand metres, and this has a very high diversity of other organisms associated with it.

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And in fact, we found many, many new taxa on this expedition.

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Here's a couple carnivorous sponge sea spider, both of which the tax on this generously named after me.

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I don't know whether that was an honour or some sort of veiled insult, but I'll leave it up to you to think about.

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But we really found this very high instance of undescribed species and bearing in

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mind most of our work was just focussed on the larger animals around these segments.

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So why should we really care about the high seas and about life in the high seas?

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Well, simply put, the high seas are highly connected to coastal waters.

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The ocean effectively functions as a single home.

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And what you see here are the distributions of various large marine animals throughout the year in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

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And you can see that these animals cross from the high seas into coastal waters and back out again.

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And in fact, there was a study done earlier this year where we actually looked at the connectivity

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between high seas areas and coastal waters in this case in the Indian Ocean.

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And you can see here from the colours represented on this chart that the high seas and

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coastal waters are connected over timescales of a couple of weeks to a few months.

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So clearly, the high seas are important, but all day under threat, and simple answer to that is yes.

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One of the prime targets for deep water fisheries are seamounts.

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And the reason they go out and fish these seamounts is because there are aggregations of fish,

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some of them very commercially valuable around the sea mounts.

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This is an orange roughy. They live for about 150 years.

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So these fish are very slow growing. They don't mature to let 30 or 40 years.

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So they're very, very vulnerable to overfishing.

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And in fact, if you look at many of the other species that are caught in these fisheries, they are also very long lived.

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Things like the cardinal fish told about the orange roughy lived through about 70 years old.

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So this is a major sustainability issue in itself.

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Of course, with fishing comes losses of fishing gear, which, as you can imagine,

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if you're trying to trawl across a mountain or sand, there is quite a high chance of losing it.

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And this is a photograph of a horror film of a ghost on one of us emails in the southern Indian Ocean.

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You can see that lobster there is completely tangled up in that in that line.

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And basically, it's dying, so this neck will just carry on fishing.

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A real surprise was this. These are lobster pots tangled up again on Melville Bank Seamount.

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This is the same seamount you saw the Blackfish and so on on.

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And this is a real surprise because this seamount was many hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from the nearest land.

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The other problem with this type of fishing is that because the fish die for the seabed, you have to catch them using bottom trawling.

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And of course, when you try to control through a fragile the world's coral reef, it completely obliterates the coral.

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So here you can see photographs from a fish seamount south of Tasmania and a seamount that hasn't been fish for orange roughy in Oreo's.

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And you'll see that the coral framework on the fish seamount is pretty much completely obliterated.

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And in fact, what we've discovered more recently is some of these corals are very, very long lived.

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Black corals, for example, can live to more than 4000 years old.

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Some of the sponges can live even longer, and there's good evidence that the sponge from the South China Sea can live up to 11000 years.

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And probably one of the longest lived organisms on Earth.

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Of course, with fishing comes all sorts of other trash is just a couple of bits we photographed on the Southwest Indian Ridge.

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But the really India story here came from the actual sediments you see here surrounding these objects.

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What we actually found was that the sediments were completely full of microplastics.

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Every single sample we took down to a depth of 1.5 kilometres was contaminated with plastic.

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Even all the animals had plastic on them or actually inside.

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And we actually looked at this in some detail, so we looked at the composition of the trash, if you like, and different parts of the deep ocean.

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And what you find is around the southwest things you reach. Most of the trash comes from fishing.

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Elsewhere, it comes from shipping and from the land and so on.

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And this has become a real problem. Now, something like five to 15 million tonnes of plastic pollution going into the ocean every single year.

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And along with that, a large quantity of microfibres as well.

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And it's estimated that if things carry on as they are,

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we would see an order of magnitude increase in this quantity of plastic going into the oceans by 2035.

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There are also other pollutants still affecting the high seas, legacy contaminants like PCBs,

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which is a type of flame retardant used in electronics and so on.

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There's a whole range of emerging pollutants which have now been found to affect the ocean as well.

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This is everything from chemicals in personal care products like shower gels to pharmaceuticals, plastics and so on.

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On top of that, of course, we've also got the effects of climate change, so we're seeing rising temperatures.

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The ocean has absorbed something like 93 percent of the excess heat produced as a

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result of global warming and also ocean acidification and ocean deoxygenation as well.

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And what are these things causing? Well, the heating of the ocean is causing a complete redistribution of the biota,

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so organisms are moving further north or further south away from higher temperatures.

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Animals are also getting smaller as well as a result from warming of the ocean.

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So in terms of fisheries, this is potentially quite a catastrophic situation because the fish stocks are moving away from low latitudes,

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basically from developing countries, and they're moving towards developed countries and they're becoming less productive as well.

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So this is an issue in terms of food security. Ocean acidification is caused by absorption of CO2 into the ocean, which is converted carbonic acid.

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And this reduces the amount of calcium carbonate in seawater.

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And this, of course, affects the secretion of calcium carbonate skeletons or shells.

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You can see an example here of a pelagic snail called a terrible to receive up fine.

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And this is a picture of one of the shells of these snails that was sampled from an upwelling area in the Antarctic.

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And you can see where the shell is actually corroding as a result of this acidification effect on top of a naturally low water.

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And finally, the effect that almost everyone forgets about ocean hypoxia,

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where the warming of the ocean is causing a lowering of mixing and that is causing a

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reduction of oxygen in the ocean expansion of what we call the oxygen minimum zone.

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And this effect is being estimated to have decreased habitat for the fish from

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tuna in the tropical north east Atlantic by about 15 percent between 1916 2010.

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As if that wasn't bad enough, we're now seeing new industrial activity starting up in the deep ocean.

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One of them is deep sea mining.

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This is a piece of one of those hydrothermal vent chimneys from the Southern Ocean, and you can see that it's almost solid copper.

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So these hydrothermal vent fields have rich mineral resources associated with them, but they're not the only mineral resources in the high seas.

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There are also cobalt crusts on seamounts and manganese nodules.

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These mineral aggregations on the seafloor in places like the Clarion Clipperton Fracture Zone in the tropical Pacific.

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And this map, which Gwilym very generously put together for me,

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shows where an organisation called the International Seabed Authority has licenced

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countries in areas beyond national jurisdiction to explore for minerals in the deep ocean.

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You see that big orange blob in the Pacific there. That's the clarion clipperton fracture zone, and the licence is for exploration.

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There cover the same area as the 20 largest countries in Europe.

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So all this is quite bad news, but there are things we can do about this.

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And one of those things is actually protect areas of the ocean using marine protected areas.

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This is very good for protection from extraction in terms of fishing.

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It also eliminates the side effects of fishing things like seabed impacts.

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You also preserve the population structure of species and also ecosystems really

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preserve those structuring organisms in the ocean like coral reefs and so on,

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which provide habitats for other organisms. Also, these MPAs actually may benefit in terms of.

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Actually pushing back against some of the effects of climate change.

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So there is a concept called blue carbon,

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where some of the activities in the ocean actually sequester CO2 into the deep ocean and lock it up from the atmosphere.

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So we recently put together a first concept of what network of marine protected areas might look like in the high seas,

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and scientific studies have suggested that an optimal area of protection for the ocean is probably around 30 percent.

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And that's because below that figure, you're basically not giving sufficient protection to various features in the ocean.

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Above that figure, you're getting diminishing returns for that area of protection.

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But having said that, even small MPAs can be quite effective.

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So how do we actually do this? Well, we used what's called systematic conservation planning,

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where essentially we used computer assisted method of identifying where these MPAs would would best be placed.

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And what this does is we specify in areas the ocean we want to actually protect.

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We specify what features of the ocean we want to protect.

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So it might be seamounts, threatened species, oceanographic features and so on.

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And we basically model where to put the protected areas to protect those features.

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But taking into account the economic impact of where those employees are actually situated.

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In this case, we calculated that economic impact through the estimated cost to fisheries placing those employees,

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and we used to call Markson to actually tell you this. So what types of features that we actually plug into this software?

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Well, was things like obviously fishing existing protected areas, but then oceanographic parameters like primary productivity impact,

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food being produced in the ocean places where you had very high or very low interannual variation in temperature,

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which were likely to be resilient to climate change, then by physical parameters like sea mounts,

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biological parameters like distribution of threatened species and also something about the biogeography or at least by geography.

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As we know, what you end up with here is very interesting because what we actually saw as a result of this

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exercise is essentially a network of protected areas which surround areas of usage for humankind.

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So instead of a land where you often have protected areas which are kind of isolated by large areas of human use,

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this approach actually produced almost the opposite situation where you end up with network protection around islands of human usage in the ocean.

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And it was very interesting that through the repeated runs of this software,

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we had places which came up again and again and again in terms of needing protection in the ocean.

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You see, one of these happens to be right over the clarion Clifton fracture zone.

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But there are various other areas which came out was very important because of the

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combination of conservation features that occurred in those parts of the ocean.

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So to summarise, all the high seas are a very important part of the ocean and perform critical ecosystem services for humankind.

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There was a very strong connectivity between the high seas and coastal waters.

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The high seas comprise a very diverse range of ecosystems, some of which have a high diversity,

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and there are threats which are degrading these ecosystems at present, and those are only going to get worse in the future unless something is done.

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And the 13.30 report was the first systematic attempt to really try and plan for spatial conservation of this entire ices area.

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And with that, I'd like to hand over to Gwilym to talk about how such areas could be enforced.

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Great, thank you very much, Alex.

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So, yeah, I'm going to sort of focus in on a perhaps a narrow question here of how we might monitor and enforce these these areas,

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which Alex has described in particular.

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I'm going to focus in on on sort of some of the technical aspects of different technologies which are being used to do this.

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So here I'm looking at a figure from the Pew Charitable Trusts,

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which show some of the technologies which are used to monitor the activities of vessels at sea.

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And these range from a variety of satellite technologies to track vessels, as well as image vessels,

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as well as sort of electronic monitoring CCTV if you like on board vessels, drones, as well as a sort of ship based drones, if you like as well.

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Broadly, we can split these into two different types of data.

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We have collaborative data and we have non collaborative data as a collaborative data.

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Our tools are things essentially where you have to have some sort of hardware on board a vessel to have a sense of what that vessel is doing.

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A non collaborative tools that are things such as your sort of satellite imaging or your drones where essentially

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you can monitor aspects of of what vessels may be doing without having to engage directly with that vessel.

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If we talk about these sort of remote areas of the ocean, such as the ones that Alex highlighted,

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it's quite hard to imagine how you would monitor these without some sort of satellite technology.

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And I'm going to show you some examples from the UK Blue Belt programme, in particular from the Ascension Islands,

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where we've we've done quite a lot of work and how you might monitor activities in relation to protected area such as this.

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So the UK Blue Belt Programme for those that don't know is is a is a an intense on the

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part of the UK government to to designate four million square kilometres as NPA by 2020.

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And a lot of this is being focussed in the UK overseas territories where you find the bulk of the biodiversity.

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So focussing in on Ascension Island. So this is an overseas territory in the southern Atlantic.

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It's very small islands less than 100 square kilometres in area, and that's a very small population, less than a thousand people living there.

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And for anybody that sort of wants to delve down into the details of what I'm saying is that the reference,

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the paper there, which is freely accessible online, you can get into that.

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But in terms of where this essentially island is in relation to the fishery of the Atlantic,

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you'll see that it sits at the southwest sort of southeast corner of the sort of bulk of longline activity in the Atlantic.

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So it's a prime candidate for protection. And we were able to look at how you might monitor this area for for designating an MPA.

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And this was moving, as I said, towards the UK government sort of blew out commitments to ascension.

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On the left hand figure. There you'll see the sort of charted out the history of fishing in relation to Ascension.

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So in blue, we've got periods where the Ascension Island is either exclusive economic zone around Ascension was was a licenced

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fishery or we had a lot of fishing activity in and around the red area periods at times when the easy was closed.

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And then we had a period where we were looking for the study,

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where we had a sort of mix management approach, where half of the exclusive economic zone was was closed.

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The fishery an MPA, no take MPA, if you will, and half of it was was open.

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We had these two periods in 2016 and 2017 where we brought a lot of different satellite

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technologies to bear to understand the activities of vessels in and around ascension,

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as well as sort of looking at the economics of the fishery.

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And this is just to show that for one of those periods where the fishery was open inside that that sort of red circle,

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you can see that the colours in there so that the hot spots of fishing activity

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in particular up in the north northwestern quadrant of the Ascension Island,

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easy. Now I'm going to draw for this next part on some dates called automatic identification system data.

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So this is it's one of those collaborative tools where essentially you have transponders on ships

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and you can use this to track the activities of fishing vessels as they go about their business,

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essentially. But this was developed actually as a safety of life at sea to using VHF radio

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to communicate between ships and shore to give a sense of the sort of course,

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direction speed of different vessels. But these these radio signals don't just go horizontally, they also go vertically.

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So an interesting study which put sensors up on the International Space Station discovered that you can detect these things in space,

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and there are now constellations of satellites roving around the world which detect these air

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signals from which you can get sort of footprints breadcrumb trails if you like a vessel activity.

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Putting all of that together for Ascension Islands. So that's what these sort of heat maps that you see for 2016 and 2017 below that show.

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So we have green low activity up to red high activity.

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And what you'll see around the Ascension Islands is which is sort of the inner circle, if you like.

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There's very little activity detected on this for this period.

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So this is a period where we have this managed fishery. And also this closed MPA.

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It's not just fishing vessels, actually, that we can detect using this.

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We can also look at other aspects of the sort of fishing industry so we can

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look at carrier vessels where fishing vessels might be offloading their catch.

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We can look at bunker vessels, which are vessels used to refuel these fishing vessels to keep them active and fishing sort of 24-7 365 days a year.

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And then we can also look at interestingly, if fishing buoys, so markets that are used to mop gear, long lines and so forth.

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One of the chief problems with this data is is that it's it's not obligatory for fishing vessels in particular to carry it.

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So a lot of vessels will be what we would call dark vessels in that case.

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And this is a big problem. Potentially, you've got a large fleet operating in and around the area that you might want to protect,

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which you just don't know what their activities are. So in this case, we look at another type of satellite data.

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This is something called synthetic aperture radar,

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and this is just basically like a radar that you might have on a ship which scans the horizon and detects that a big metal objects,

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you get a big return back. But in this case, operating from space from satellites,

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and you can see that little image thumbnail there where you see the presence of a vessel against the backdrop of the ocean.

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So if we look at detections and compare those now to our tracks, we can see where these dark vessels are operating.

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And in the case of Ascension Island, actually again, in response to these closures,

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they've moved outside of the easy and they're operating out in the high seas.

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So sort of putting that that picture together, what we see is that we have dark vessels operating in place of affiliation with the trackable fleet.

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And this does give us sort of a reasonable confidence that an MPI in Ascension Islands could

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be successful if it's not not just us carrying out the study that that a confident about that.

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So the UK government is now taking the bold step to to basically put its money where its mouth is and back an MP in Ascension.

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The other interesting thing is the licence uptake for that licence fishery really was very low.

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So the economics of that sort of mix management approach in Ascension just just didn't really work.

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So they are supporting a full no take NPA in and around Ascension Islands, moving to the sort of high seas context.

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So here you've got a different sort of data that I'm looking at.

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So this is something called vessel monitoring system. So this is a closed system.

387
00:46:36,320 --> 00:46:42,110
Essentially, you know, it's you need to be within the system to get access to this data,

388
00:46:42,110 --> 00:46:49,790
but you can do interesting things with with VMS data so you can have two way communication between vessels and shore.

389
00:46:49,790 --> 00:46:54,500
And you can now set up things such as what we call geo fences or virtual fences.

390
00:46:54,500 --> 00:46:56,990
So potentially you can.

391
00:46:56,990 --> 00:47:03,830
Although if you go out on the ocean and drive around in your boat, you will not know when you drive across that easy boundary or an MPX boundary.

392
00:47:03,830 --> 00:47:12,530
You could set up these virtual fences where as a as a boat driving around you would you would be alerted to the presence of an MPA,

393
00:47:12,530 --> 00:47:17,390
and you can also send targeted information for different gear types and so on.

394
00:47:17,390 --> 00:47:24,260
And a recent study by the Australian government using this approach reckoned that that just in the trial,

395
00:47:24,260 --> 00:47:35,190
they saved potentially four million Aussie dollars just in potential litigation costs through improved compliance.

396
00:47:35,190 --> 00:47:39,240
The other thing that we see that is sort of heartening, I guess,

397
00:47:39,240 --> 00:47:46,080
for the potential to have viable MPAs out in the high seas, is this this concept of flip the switch?

398
00:47:46,080 --> 00:47:53,490
So this is something coming out of the Western and Central Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation.

399
00:47:53,490 --> 00:47:59,790
And this allows coastal states to access the VMS of their waters and for the adjacent high

400
00:47:59,790 --> 00:48:06,120
seas of of other other flag states operating there that a signatory to this agreement.

401
00:48:06,120 --> 00:48:11,370
So you can imagine a similar thing operating in a high seas context where essentially states

402
00:48:11,370 --> 00:48:21,240
give permission for their vessels to be monitored in relation to these high seas closed areas.

403
00:48:21,240 --> 00:48:27,960
So just to sort of summarise really my broad feeling really is that where there is a will?

404
00:48:27,960 --> 00:48:33,180
There certainly are technical solutions to these problems of of this challenge of high seas

405
00:48:33,180 --> 00:48:38,100
marine protection and certainly is easier with within these coastal state jurisdictions.

406
00:48:38,100 --> 00:48:47,280
But really just the key points really to resolve around international cooperation and the institutions that will operate these.

407
00:48:47,280 --> 00:48:56,160
So the questions of who's responsible for the decisions on designation and how and by whom these MPAs will be monitored and enforced,

408
00:48:56,160 --> 00:49:01,530
those are the sort of critical questions in my mind to answer, and we've got an exciting study,

409
00:49:01,530 --> 00:49:06,860
just the plug being funded currently by the Prince Albert of Monaco Foundation.

410
00:49:06,860 --> 00:49:14,000
Looking at some of these questions through the Oxford Martin School programme.

411
00:49:14,000 --> 00:49:25,720
So that and I'm going to plug Alex's book, since he has added that Altovise slides available in all good bookshops and lots of.

412
00:49:25,720 --> 00:49:40,390
Witty titles, I guess. Thank you very much.

413
00:49:40,390 --> 00:49:49,660
OK, so we've got time for questions, I just want to warn you this is being filmed in live webcast, so if you're not comfortable with that,

414
00:49:49,660 --> 00:50:02,700
save your questions until afterwards and then come grab one of these two and that can I have a show of hands if any questions have this front, please?

415
00:50:02,700 --> 00:50:12,270
So there's a lot of work at the moment that's going into looking at alternatives for plastic that could be made out of aquatic plants like seaweed.

416
00:50:12,270 --> 00:50:20,700
Do you anticipate this having ecological consequences that could rival those caused by plastic waste?

417
00:50:20,700 --> 00:50:27,990
Actually, the really critical thing when you're looking at these alternative materials

418
00:50:27,990 --> 00:50:34,290
is that there's a full lifecycle assessment done on whatever material it is.

419
00:50:34,290 --> 00:50:39,120
And that means you look at, for example, the CO2 footprint of the material.

420
00:50:39,120 --> 00:50:42,960
You look at the consequences. If it's a biological material,

421
00:50:42,960 --> 00:50:54,090
you look at what may be necessary in terms of cultivating the plant material for that particular substance, whatever it is.

422
00:50:54,090 --> 00:51:04,680
And you look at the almost food miles, if you like, in terms of transport, of the raw material to where it has to be processed and sold as well.

423
00:51:04,680 --> 00:51:05,250
And in fact,

424
00:51:05,250 --> 00:51:19,860
some fire materials that may be suitable to replace plastics have turned out to not really come out that well from those lifecycle assessments.

425
00:51:19,860 --> 00:51:31,020
So you do have to really look at the whole lifecycle of those materials to understand what the impacts of those are going to be compared to,

426
00:51:31,020 --> 00:51:39,580
say, plastics like peat or whatever else it happens to be.

427
00:51:39,580 --> 00:51:48,120
And both of you have mentioned the the impact on the marine environment of lost fishing trawler nets with modern transponder technologies.

428
00:51:48,120 --> 00:51:57,070
Why don't we make it mandatory for all fishing nets to have transponders, so when they're lost, you can find them and recover them?

429
00:51:57,070 --> 00:52:07,240
That would be a sensible thing to do. Unfortunately, a lot of this problem comes from illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.

430
00:52:07,240 --> 00:52:11,950
So probably by far the worst problem is gillnets, for example,

431
00:52:11,950 --> 00:52:23,170
and it is possible to buy container loads of cheap monofilament gillnet and literally use it as a disposable asset in the ocean.

432
00:52:23,170 --> 00:52:32,770
So there's a major problem with without what we call IUU you fishing a lost fishing gear and you can't get those guys to basically obey the rules.

433
00:52:32,770 --> 00:52:44,380
But there are certainly other measures now being used, so fishing gear is now being essentially labelled with the name of the vessel is come from.

434
00:52:44,380 --> 00:52:54,430
There's mandatory reporting of hair loss in some fisheries that's been trialled off Norway and has been found to be quite successful.

435
00:52:54,430 --> 00:53:02,200
So people are waking up to the fact now that not only does this cause horrible suffering to the animals involved,

436
00:53:02,200 --> 00:53:06,850
but actually it causes significant economic loss to the fisheries as well,

437
00:53:06,850 --> 00:53:14,530
because those fish that these coconuts catching could be the fish that the fishing boats themselves catch.

438
00:53:14,530 --> 00:53:23,520
And so certainly in the better managed fisheries globally that they're trying to solve the problem.

439
00:53:23,520 --> 00:53:33,360
He's questioning. Thank you very much, both of you, because it's really interesting.

440
00:53:33,360 --> 00:53:41,790
It's like having your own special Horizon programme just presented for you and you're presented intelligently instead of with the gloss of the BBC.

441
00:53:41,790 --> 00:53:49,050
And they're nice. But thanks anyway. I'm intrigued and I was frightened all those some months ago.

442
00:53:49,050 --> 00:53:57,480
Was it when the stories were stories, the reporting of finding microplastics in almost everywhere you look?

443
00:53:57,480 --> 00:54:01,420
You think, oh, I suppose that's yeah, it would, it would be, wouldn't it?

444
00:54:01,420 --> 00:54:14,110
But I'm intrigued to know what we can say about how that's damaging the environment and how small microplastic become and not actually damaging.

445
00:54:14,110 --> 00:54:22,390
And how do we measure that? I'm not saying there isn't no damage. I just don't understand how you would assess it at those tiny little particles.

446
00:54:22,390 --> 00:54:32,440
Yeah. Well, that is kind of the million dollar question of at the moment that scientists struggling with what is the actual ecological

447
00:54:32,440 --> 00:54:39,400
consequences and the consequences ultimately for human health of all this material that's got into the food chain.

448
00:54:39,400 --> 00:54:50,830
Simple answer is at the moment, we don't know. What we do know is that certainly microplastics and nanoplastics are even smaller.

449
00:54:50,830 --> 00:55:01,440
Bits of plastic are able to leave from the digestive tract of fish into the tissues and even cross the blood brain barrier.

450
00:55:01,440 --> 00:55:08,250
So there is certainly plastic getting into the food chain, and not only is it getting into the food chain,

451
00:55:08,250 --> 00:55:15,510
it's getting throughout the bodies of the organisms that we do know that there

452
00:55:15,510 --> 00:55:22,470
is evidence in some organisms of inflammation associated with microplastics

453
00:55:22,470 --> 00:55:36,480
in the body and certainly some of the chemical markers a stress as a result of those materials in the body and that is suggestive of a problem.

454
00:55:36,480 --> 00:55:41,250
Most of the problem actually comes at a kind of more superficial biological level

455
00:55:41,250 --> 00:55:49,200
in that if your say a loved one on the beach or a out more or less feeding,

456
00:55:49,200 --> 00:55:53,790
you're taking up these microplastic particles and they're reducing the amount of

457
00:55:53,790 --> 00:55:58,350
actual food you're getting and potentially having to reject them from the body.

458
00:55:58,350 --> 00:56:05,310
And that has impacts on growth and reproduction, probably at the population level on those organisms,

459
00:56:05,310 --> 00:56:11,580
but that the more difficult question is about toxicity and that we don't understand.

460
00:56:11,580 --> 00:56:21,040
And that's going to need a much more robust and sophisticated approach to try and address that problem.

461
00:56:21,040 --> 00:56:27,640
I mean, one thing I will say is there's no doubt we're eating microplastics in my mind when we're eating seafood.

462
00:56:27,640 --> 00:56:35,830
But the inputs of microplastics to us via seafood is probably only a fraction of what we're taking in from other sources.

463
00:56:35,830 --> 00:56:48,070
So what we're breathing in, what we're taking in through water, so is being microplastics found in drinking water in all sorts places?

464
00:56:48,070 --> 00:56:56,410
What we're taking in through other forms of food as well? And then it's a question of, okay, well, this stuff's getting into the body.

465
00:56:56,410 --> 00:57:03,490
Is it crossing into the tissues and then is it dissolving in terms of the chemicals?

466
00:57:03,490 --> 00:57:09,460
It either contains what it's manufactured or it's absorbed because obviously

467
00:57:09,460 --> 00:57:17,290
plastics being a non-payroll material soak up a lot of organic pollutants as well.

468
00:57:17,290 --> 00:57:25,150
So it's one of those chemicals actually dissolve into the body after they've been taken up.

469
00:57:25,150 --> 00:57:30,590
But as I said, I think sea freight is probably a relatively minor source.

470
00:57:30,590 --> 00:57:39,240
For humans, anyway. Thanks very much, Alex.

471
00:57:39,240 --> 00:57:43,260
I'm wondering if you can tell us a bit more about the governance of the high seas,

472
00:57:43,260 --> 00:57:52,680
and so who's now looking at this 30 by 30 proposal for empires and how many nations around the table considering it?

473
00:57:52,680 --> 00:57:57,810
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's no coincidence we did 30 by 30 report.

474
00:57:57,810 --> 00:58:01,080
At the moment, there is currently, well, the ocean,

475
00:58:01,080 --> 00:58:07,320
the high seas kind of governed through something called the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea.

476
00:58:07,320 --> 00:58:13,530
And there is currently negotiations between all the signatory governments, and I can't remember how many that is.

477
00:58:13,530 --> 00:58:24,810
But it's a law, certainly all the big ones about developing a new implementing agreement for unconventional law of the Seas,

478
00:58:24,810 --> 00:58:31,800
specifically to protect biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction.

479
00:58:31,800 --> 00:58:42,780
And that's really important because at the moment, there is no legal framework to place marine protected areas in areas beyond national jurisdiction.

480
00:58:42,780 --> 00:58:51,480
Some of the fisheries management bodies have put protected areas out there specifically to protect from the effects of fishing.

481
00:58:51,480 --> 00:59:01,620
But it's quite easy for another state to just ignore those rules and go and do whatever they want to do in those protected areas.

482
00:59:01,620 --> 00:59:09,960
So these are really, really important negotiations are going on at the moment at the UN in New York.

483
00:59:09,960 --> 00:59:18,000
We're all hoping for a strong agreement. Obviously, there are certain states with different point of view who want a kind of weak agreement,

484
00:59:18,000 --> 00:59:34,930
which is likely to result in pretty much the status quo in terms of the way things are run at that level.

485
00:59:34,930 --> 00:59:42,490
I was also wondering with the 30 by 30 employees, he said one of the parameters one of the main ones is biodiversity.

486
00:59:42,490 --> 00:59:46,720
And for a lot of these regions, as you said at the beginning, they're incredibly difficult to measure that.

487
00:59:46,720 --> 00:59:50,620
Yeah. So how do you account for that in the planning? Because it's a crucial parameter.

488
00:59:50,620 --> 00:59:59,770
But yeah, well, in this case, what we picked on was specifically threatened species.

489
00:59:59,770 --> 01:00:02,260
I mean, we do have biodiversity information.

490
01:00:02,260 --> 01:00:11,830
So the data I showed you early in the talk showing where our species records are distributed in the ocean,

491
01:00:11,830 --> 01:00:17,020
that one comes from a system called the ocean by geographic information system.

492
01:00:17,020 --> 01:00:22,030
The problem is that the sampling is massively uneven across the ocean,

493
01:00:22,030 --> 01:00:30,850
so you have to kind of pick on some form of, you know, pseudo marker, I guess, for biodiversity in that case.

494
01:00:30,850 --> 01:00:38,110
That was certainly threatened species and I think also commercial species as well.

495
01:00:38,110 --> 01:00:41,130
So that's the kind of way we.

496
01:00:41,130 --> 01:00:49,080
Questioned her own safety because it was the best that we could take you given the information that's available, but we do,

497
01:00:49,080 --> 01:01:01,610
we are getting a better understanding of how biodiversity is distributed in the oceans, certainly in coastal seas anyway.

498
01:01:01,610 --> 01:01:11,390
OK. Oh, there is one more question that you had very briefly actually addressed the point of microplastics,

499
01:01:11,390 --> 01:01:19,580
which was already the subject of some questions, and it seemed that this was in very remote places.

500
01:01:19,580 --> 01:01:27,980
Can you comment on exactly in what places you made these observations and what is your opinion?

501
01:01:27,980 --> 01:01:33,300
What is the major source of these plastics was probably not fishing gear.

502
01:01:33,300 --> 01:01:44,700
No, 80 percent of plastics in the ocean are from land based sources, so only 20 percent are coming from shipping, fishing and other activities at sea.

503
01:01:44,700 --> 01:01:54,540
A good deal of that is coming down rivers. Top five countries, in terms of sources are all in Southeast Asia.

504
01:01:54,540 --> 01:02:00,600
So it's China, Thailand, Indonesia.

505
01:02:00,600 --> 01:02:09,240
Basically, countries within that region probably account for about 50 percent of the plastics going into the into the ocean.

506
01:02:09,240 --> 01:02:14,490
Once that material is in the ocean, of course, it moves away from the coastline.

507
01:02:14,490 --> 01:02:23,190
Some of it gets washed up. But some of it moves out into the ocean and it's broken up and fractured into these microplastic particles,

508
01:02:23,190 --> 01:02:31,860
and they end up being concentrated in the ocean gyres. So these are the large areas of circular circulation out in the middle of the ocean,

509
01:02:31,860 --> 01:02:38,130
the most famous of which is the called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,

510
01:02:38,130 --> 01:02:46,110
which is a rather dramatic name for an area where there's just the high density of this material than other areas around it.

511
01:02:46,110 --> 01:02:49,860
But then the material kind of goes missing,

512
01:02:49,860 --> 01:02:58,800
and we think that those missing fractions are either being essentially dissolved through biological or mechanical and chemical action,

513
01:02:58,800 --> 01:03:09,630
or it's sinking into the deep ocean. So that's plastics with a size fraction of below a millimetre.

514
01:03:09,630 --> 01:03:16,650
We know that these plastics get colonised by their own unique microbial field.

515
01:03:16,650 --> 01:03:22,470
That microbial fill may actually be active in terms of breaking material up.

516
01:03:22,470 --> 01:03:31,020
It's also active in terms of moving some very nasty pathogens around the ocean as well things like embryos.

517
01:03:31,020 --> 01:03:38,640
So we've got a good general idea of where this stuff is going up to a point.

518
01:03:38,640 --> 01:03:45,570
But there are many, many questions still to be answered about whether plastic is actually going.

519
01:03:45,570 --> 01:03:49,860
You know, is it just ending up as smaller and smaller pieces of plastics?

520
01:03:49,860 --> 01:03:59,160
We have really got effective way of even measuring nanoplastics in the environment at the moment.

521
01:03:59,160 --> 01:04:07,470
OK, we have one more question. I'm going to just ask a question, if I may, as the microphone goes across.

522
01:04:07,470 --> 01:04:17,280
This is organised as part of the City Council's Green Week, which is designed to inspire action amongst people in Oxford.

523
01:04:17,280 --> 01:04:25,980
I just wondered if there were a couple of things that you've talked about fishing into plastics that we could do in our daily lives.

524
01:04:25,980 --> 01:04:32,820
Is there anything and what would you recommend? Yeah, there's a lot. I mean, we can certainly reduce CO2 footprint.

525
01:04:32,820 --> 01:04:36,810
A very good way of doing that is to eat less meat.

526
01:04:36,810 --> 01:04:43,590
So apologies to any butchers in the room or other people that so maybe it's a simple fact of the matter.

527
01:04:43,590 --> 01:04:49,140
If you eat less particularly red meat, you are reducing your CO2 footprint.

528
01:04:49,140 --> 01:04:54,630
I count on you because of losing your car, something I try and do.

529
01:04:54,630 --> 01:05:00,150
And what if, in fact, we both live out to the west of the city?

530
01:05:00,150 --> 01:05:04,950
Think about food miles as well, where your feeds actually coming from,

531
01:05:04,950 --> 01:05:11,700
and all the usual things about switching off the lights, getting your power from renewable energy supplier on fish.

532
01:05:11,700 --> 01:05:23,160
There's some fantastic websites which can help you if you decide you're going to eat fish, it can help you to actually pick sustainable fish away.

533
01:05:23,160 --> 01:05:29,490
So the Marine Conservation Society of the UK do a very good guide to sustainable fish.

534
01:05:29,490 --> 01:05:36,220
WWF Guide So I think for several countries around the world, and if you're in the states,

535
01:05:36,220 --> 01:05:42,060
the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute also do a very good guide for.

536
01:05:42,060 --> 01:05:48,210
And of course, try not to use single use plastics because that is turning into a real.

537
01:05:48,210 --> 01:05:52,410
Well, it's actually turning into a planetary boundary problem.

538
01:05:52,410 --> 01:05:58,260
And so I mean, there's also because you've got the Marine Stewardship Council who you certify a lot of fisheries.

539
01:05:58,260 --> 01:06:03,510
So a lot of supermarkets, you'll see those little blue labels on fisheries products,

540
01:06:03,510 --> 01:06:09,780
which give a certain expectation of standards of the operations of that fishery.

541
01:06:09,780 --> 01:06:11,460
And the thing sort of thing.

542
01:06:11,460 --> 01:06:20,100
Just this week within the Oxford Waitrose store, I think it was with they sort of pushing the sort of zero packaging around food.

543
01:06:20,100 --> 01:06:24,630
So I mean, potentially encouraging supermarkets to move that way.

544
01:06:24,630 --> 01:06:28,680
So there's just less plastic in the supply chain.

545
01:06:28,680 --> 01:06:34,320
I think is is a big step forward. OK, thank you so much.

546
01:06:34,320 --> 01:06:43,680
Thank you both. Was really, really interesting. I was particularly surprised about the formula to the same MBA students at MBAs and the open ocean.

547
01:06:43,680 --> 01:06:50,160
You mentioned that it takes into account just the economic impact it will have.

548
01:06:50,160 --> 01:06:57,330
And I noticed one of the areas highlighted was the novel area North-East Atlantic,

549
01:06:57,330 --> 01:07:01,320
which has which is a major fishing ground specifically for trolling.

550
01:07:01,320 --> 01:07:04,530
And could you elaborate a little bit how they're going to be?

551
01:07:04,530 --> 01:07:14,730
Impact is taking into account how this way? Yeah, I mean, the impact is literally based on the amount of fish being caught in those regions.

552
01:07:14,730 --> 01:07:23,400
So it's the economic impact of fish catches in each polygon more or less.

553
01:07:23,400 --> 01:07:29,850
And the nafaa area is one which has been massively heavily overfished, as you know.

554
01:07:29,850 --> 01:07:39,540
I mean, it was the area where there was the great called collapse of Canada and all sorts of shenanigans going on in terms of how you view fishing,

555
01:07:39,540 --> 01:07:41,490
what we call high grading as well,

556
01:07:41,490 --> 01:07:51,720
where fishing boats were catching fish, keeping big ones and throwing back the small ones so they could get all their quota in terms of large fish.

557
01:07:51,720 --> 01:08:00,750
So there was a lot of activity there, which really wasn't very helpful in terms of those fisheries.

558
01:08:00,750 --> 01:08:07,620
The other thing about that location is there are a lot of what we call vulnerable marine ecosystems there.

559
01:08:07,620 --> 01:08:14,730
So sponge grounds, cold water, coral grounds. So a lot of fragile habitat.

560
01:08:14,730 --> 01:08:20,190
And also it's quite a rich area in terms of cetaceans and so on as well.

561
01:08:20,190 --> 01:08:26,100
So that's why it was popping up in terms of an area of conservation importance.

562
01:08:26,100 --> 01:08:31,560
It's also an area where you've got a boundary between cold and warm water.

563
01:08:31,560 --> 01:08:41,280
Those tend to be very productive areas and again, those were favoured in terms of our particular approach to this study.

564
01:08:41,280 --> 01:08:45,540
So it'll it'll that algorithm, if I understand it, is that applied.

565
01:08:45,540 --> 01:08:47,400
It tries to minimise the cost.

566
01:08:47,400 --> 01:08:57,390
But at some points, the biological benefit will be perceived as outweighing costs, so you could still be supplanting an economically viable fishery.

567
01:08:57,390 --> 01:09:03,630
Yeah. For perceived sort of good biodiversity gain, essentially.

568
01:09:03,630 --> 01:09:12,780
OK. Georgia, close that, and I do want just before we finish to draw your attention to an event next week,

569
01:09:12,780 --> 01:09:19,380
which may be of interest same time five o'clock on Tuesday in this room.

570
01:09:19,380 --> 01:09:27,270
We have Barbara Fenimore, who is the senior strategic director for Asia of the Natural Resources Defence Council.

571
01:09:27,270 --> 01:09:34,380
She'll be speaking about whether China will save the planet under the title from pollution dissolution.

572
01:09:34,380 --> 01:09:41,970
So 5:00 o'clock next Tuesday and do keep an eye on our website for other upcoming talks.

573
01:09:41,970 --> 01:09:48,750
There is a drinks reception out to which you are all warmly invited so as you leave, if you want to drink right, if you want to leave, go left.

574
01:09:48,750 --> 01:10:02,649
And perhaps we could just close by thanking our speakers one more time.