Serengeti in the Pacific

Earlier this week, the online version of Nature published a remarkable report which found that the eastern Pacific Ocean is the marine equivalent of East Africa's Serengeti Plain. In fact, the undersea area off the American and Baja California coastlines are home to an astonishing number of migratory species.

If the report had simply stopped there, those findings alone would have merited headlines. The report was also significant for the way scientists collected its compelling data. The decade-long project, known as The Census of Marine Life's Tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP), "attached electronic tags to oceangoing creatures and sent them out to do the research," according to a Washington Post report.

The project's methodology helped reveal new, precious information about the world underneath the Pacific's surface. It's a realm where, in the words of a Census of Marine Life official quoted in the Post story, "we were literally blind." Now, he added, we can see. "We know what's underneath now."

What went unsaid was that humankind would certainly benefit from knowing more about sea life than we currently do. Even with the TOPP report, the collective human knowledge of the Moon is greater than our understanding of the oceans' depths. Meanwhile, the urgency to illuminate the mysteries of the oceans' ecosystems and their interplay with marine and bird species increases almost exponentially.

Over a century ago, Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea popularized the concept of understanding the oceans' underwater kingdoms. Now, a glimmer of rational science has created a way for humanity to see the great life below the Pacific's surface. One has the uneasy sense, however, that we may never fully understand the nuances of marine environments. They're just too deep, in more ways than one.

The illustration, from the NOAA's Historic Coast and Geodesic Survey Collection, depicts Captain Nemo taking a star sight from the deck of the Nautilus.