United States Committed to Protecting World’s Oceans

03 October 2008

President Bush praises progress on 2004 Ocean Action Plan

By Daniel Gorelick
Staff Writer

Washington — The United States has met or is on schedule to meet all initiatives proposed in the president’s Ocean Action Plan, a program announced in December 2004 to protect and preserve Earth’s oceans and coastal resources, according to a statement by the White House.

“Our oceans are vital for our planet,” President Bush said in a speech marking the opening of the Sant Ocean Hall at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington on September 26. “The Ocean Action Plan is helping to protect our planet’s most essential natural resource.”

The president drew attention to several related achievements since the program began: a reduction in the number of fish stocks listed as overfished; restoration and protection of 1.2 million hectares of wetlands, including the largest watershed restoration in the world in the Florida Everglades; and the creation of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, one of the largest marine conservation areas in the world. (See “United States Creates World’s Largest Marine Protected Area.”)

“The ocean is a vast ecosystem crucial to our existence, yet scientific and public understanding of the ocean is still limited,” said Cristián Samper, director of the museum. “That’s why the new Sant Ocean Hall, the most ambitious renovation in the museum’s history, is so vitally important. It will greatly expand our knowledge of this extraordinary ocean planet we call home.”

Protecting Tropical Reefs

As part of the Ocean Action Plan, the United States provided $8.4 million for the Coral Triangle Initiative to help Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, the Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste enhance coral conservation, promote sustainable fisheries and ensure food security.

The Coral Triangle covers almost 640 million hectares, an area equal to half the size of the United States, and contains more than 600 species of coral and 3,000 species of fish, according to the World Wildlife Federation (WWF), a private organization that supports the initiative.

“From a conservation perspective, the biodiversity and resources of the Coral Triangle make it the marine equivalent of the Amazon," said Kate Newman, WWF’s managing director of the Coral Triangle program.

The U.S. Agency for International Development is providing an additional $26 million for ongoing marine and coastal management programs in the area of the Coral Triangle Initiative.

Updating Alvin

Exploring beneath the sea is another part of the president’s Ocean Action Plan.

The National Science Foundation is providing $21.6 million to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to construct an improved human-occupied, deep-ocean submersible. With a depth capability of 6,500 meters, it will be able to descend into 99 percent of the global ocean. The current submersible, Alvin, has a depth capability of 4,500 meters and can reach only 63 percent of the ocean’s floor.

Manned deep-sea submersibles allow scientists to see details of the seafloor with their own eyes. Submersibles also are used to sample rocks, sediment, fluids and sea life. Scientists aboard Alvin made several notable discoveries, including the initial identification of hydrothermal vents and the first survey of the wreck of the RMS Titanic.

Monitoring Seas From Space

NASA plans to launch a satellite, Aquarius, which will help determine ocean climate variability and its effects on weather. Aquarius will monitor sea surface salinity — the amount of dissolved salts in the water — which varies throughout the world.

Small variations in salinity can have dramatic effects on ocean circulation and the exchange of water between Earth’s oceans, atmosphere and land. Tracking changes in salinity will help to predict climate fluctuation, according to NASA scientists.

Aquarius will measure salinity nearly simultaneously over a large area of the Earth, something which has been impossible to do using land-based techniques. Salinity never has been measured in 24 percent of the global ocean.

The Aquarius mission is an international partnership with Argentina’s space agency, Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales. More than 17 academic, corporate, government and international institutions also are involved in the mission, according to Earth and Space Research, a nonprofit research institute headquartered in Seattle. Its president, Gary Lagerloef, is principal investigator for the NASA mission.

Argentina is providing the spacecraft and additional science instruments, while NASA provides the Aquarius salinity sensor and the rocket launch.

President Bush concluded his remarks at the museum by stating: “All Americans have a responsibility and obligation to be good stewards of our environment.”

A transcript of the president's remarks and a related fact sheet are available on the White House Web site.

More information on the Sant Ocean Hall is available on the Web site of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.

Additional information on the Aquarius mission is available on the NASA Web site.

More information on the improved submersible is available on the Web site of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.