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Mobilising for the expedition

After nearly two days of travelling via Paris and Vancouver I finally arrived in Papeete, Tahiti to join the ship, Offshore Solution. The vessel is more usually employed in the oil industry so the crew are excited to have the opportunity to get involved in a National Geographic expedition.

I get to meet up with a good friend of mine, the explorer and National Geographic Pristine Seas Expedition Leader, Paul Rose. After catching up on some much needed sleep, Paul and I help load the expedition cargo onto the ship while waiting for the rest of the team to arrive.

A huge amount of cargo was loaded including the diving air compressors,

recompression chamber, six Zodiac inflatable boats and about 60 Pelican cases for the media team. A National Geographic documentary will be filmed of the expedition, so we have media teams for both surface and underwater filming.

Over the next few days the rest of the expedition team join the ship including Enric Sala, the Executive Director of .

The 22-person team is international, with members from the USA, Spain, Australia and the UK. After 3 days of loading the ship and checking equipment we depart for our first research site Flint Island in Kiribati.

The adventure begins...

Science plan

The aim of the National Geographic Pristine Seas programme is to identify the most pristine areas left in the ocean and persuade governments to protect them as the remaining examples of what our seas used to look like. In turn, these areas will be important as biodiversity and genetic reservoirs as increasing proportions of the sea are hopefully protected. Once pristine, or near-pristine areas are identified, expeditions are planned to investigate the biodiversity and gauge the value in protecting the area.

The data collected on the expeditions is used to support the government, in whose jurisdiction the area lies, to provide robust marine protection, or if they are reluctant to provide protection, to try and persuade them! To date, the Pristine Seas programme has played a part of, or led the creation of 23 Marine Protected Areas totalling over 6 million square kilometres.

Each expedition allows a snapshot of the biodiversity in the area using a variety of methods including; deep sea drop cameras, mesopelagic (40-100m) baited cameras, pelagic baited cameras, fish and benthic surveys, eDNA water sampling, foraminifera sediment sampling and terrestrial plant and animal surveys.

In addition, on this expedition we are also carrying out coral coring to look at the effect of the exceptionally warm 2015/16 season which caused widespread coral bleaching in the Pacific and coral photogrammetry mosaics to look at coral growth and succession post the 2015/16 event. We are also shark tagging to look at reef shark movements and installing a network of Aqualink buoys to measure water temperature, wave height and direction.

Together, this data will help give us a good oversight of the reef and associated pelagic diversity and the potential resilience of the reef to recover from warm water events. The Southern Lines are of particular interest to the Pristine Seas programme, as their first expedition was run to these islands in 2009 and there is additional data available from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 2013 and 2017, thereby providing a detailed time series of the condition of these remote reefs. Ecological theory suggests that more pristine reefs should be more resilient to warming events due to a full suite of species being present.

The plan with this expedition is to test this hypothesis after the 2015/16 bleaching event.

Flint Island

We have arrived at Flint Island! Pretty much everyone was up at dawn to watch our arrival at 0500. The island is around 400nm north west of Tahiti and very remote. Flint is only about 2.5miles long and 0.5miles wide, so pretty small. The island is surrounded by a fringing reef and covered with native vegetation and coconut palms that were planted for copra in the 1880s. Landing is very difficult and it took three attempts to land our terrestrial biologist through the surf. The only way to get Mike ashore was to swim him in with his gear.

As soon as the landing was complete we deployed the pelagic baited cameras and deep water drop cameras, before commencing diving operations. We have five Zodiac inflatables aboard so boating operations are pretty busy. We prepare and load our diving gear into the inflatables on the deck, before they are craned into the water and we climb in via a pilot ladder.

The island is spectacular against the deep blue sea. I really hadn’t expected the island’s terrestrial flora to be so dense.