As documentaries about Earth’s accelerating climate crisis go, Expedition: Saving Our Seas is surprisingly buoyant. ,” Hocheimy says. “We have to show that mangroves have value, so they’ll understand and want to protect them. It is their future at stake.”
That sentiment is echoed many times in the film — the importance not only of enlisting young scientists but also centering local scientists who pose new questions that oceanographers who parachute in from other places may not think to ask, says marine biogeochemist Kristina Brown.
In the documentary, Brown, of the University of Manitoba in Canada, co-leads an expedition to explore the waters of Sherman Basin, a large bay north of the Arctic Circle in Nunavut, Canada. This region has been hunted and fished by Inuit people for centuries.
But it might change beyond all recognition in the next few decades, Brown says. So, the local Inuit community invited her to help create the first catalog of what species are present in the waters and on the seafloor. “[It’s] the first project I’ve been involved in where the local community both defined the research questions and have brought their own unique expertise to the research project.”
Watching how communities around the world are increasingly taking ownership of studies in their own waters was, for me, the most exciting takeaway of this documentary.
“We want to democratize access to the deep sea, to enable people who haven’t had access to these kinds of tools to ask more and new questions,” says Katy Croft Bell, the founder and president of the Ocean Discovery League, a nonprofit ocean exploration group based in Saunderstown, Rhode Island.
As a result of inaccessibility, little of Earth’s vast ocean has been mapped, particularly the deep sea. Bell’s organization is developing inexpensive technologies such as a hardy little camera and sensor system dubbed DORIS, for Deep Ocean Research and Imaging System. It can descend to 6,000 meters and costs less than $10,000.
Expedition: Saving Our Seas offers just a few scant minutes to each project before moving on around the globe to the next, so there’s no time to learn about each project in depth. But the overall takeaway of watching these vignettes, back to back, is that there is a young, energetic community of scientists taking on the challenge.
Mitigating climate change’s impacts on the oceans is, after all, a race against time. So it’s nice to think we might have all hands on deck.
