Indonesian and American scientists have been discovering more about the Sangihe Talaud deep sea in North Sulawesi in their joint expedition with ships equipped by Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV) to take cameras that can cover areas of 6,000 meters below sea level.
The high definition cameras taken by ROV operated from the US' Okeanos Explorer ship, have managed to record a wide variety of undiscovered critters, coral and sponges as well as organisms such as octopus, shrimps, snails, crabs, sting rays and urchins.
"The pictures of many unidentified organisms can be monitored from the Exploration Command Centers *ECC* in Jakarta and Seattle, Washington. They can be accessed through the Internet," US scientist Webb Pinner told the press, who visited the ship, owned by US National and Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, at Bitung seaport in Manado on Tuesday.
Pinner, who is responsible for Telepresence-sharing operations in real-time with those in ECCs, said that his team, consisting of 37 experts and technicians, confirmed the rich diversity of lives surrounding deep sea volcanoes in North Sulawesi waters, particularly in Sangihe Talaud.
On Tuesday, an Indonesian ship, Baruna Jaya IV, owned by Indonesia's Technology Application and Assessment Agency, with about 50 Indonesian experts and technicians on it, joined Okeanos Explorer to compete in the expedition scheduled to end on Aug. 7.
The expedition was under the flag of the Indonesian-US-Deep-Sea Exploration of the Sangihe Talaud (Index Satal) 2010, which is a follow-up of an MoU signed by the US Ambassador to Indonesia Cameron R. Hume and the director general of research and the Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Ministry Gellwynn Jusuf in May.
Noorsalam Rahman Nganro, a biologist from the Bandung Institute of Technology, involved in the joint expedition, said the conventional biological science only studies areas up to 200 meters below sea level. The ongoing research would likely contribute significantly to the progress of biological sciences, he said.
"This is a great leap in biological sciences. The finding will encourage scientists to further study those species and their ecosystems," said Noorsalam, adding the discovered species during the expedition were only a small part of the total number of deep sea lives, whose number could reach hundreds of thousands.
"We believe that so far only about 5 percent of sea resources have been explored. But the most important thing is not how many species we can find from the expedition, but how can we benefit from what we have found in the deep sea," Noorsalam told The Jakarta Post.
Santiago Harera, an expert with the Okeanos Explorer responsible for data collection, added that further research was needed to have a closer look at the great potential of deep-sea organisms and habitats, whose energy source came from deep-sea hydrothermal vents through chemosynthesis, instead of the sun through photosynthesis for another organism.
"What we have now are only pictures. Studying samples of those organisms will help scientists discover more about the deep sea organism," he said.
Noorsalam said although exploitation of deep sea resources could not be implemented immediately, experts believed that those resources could be turned into resources with economic value, such as renewable energy resources, medicine and food resources.
"As we currently have experienced shortages of various resources from the land, it is time to turn to the sea, which may answer various food security challenges and energy shortages. But there is still a long way to and much work to do to discover more," he added.
Sugiarta Wirasantosa, an Indonesian coordinator of the expedition, said it was a great opportunity for Indonesian scientists to cooperate with their American counterpart, and the expedition was part of the mutual cooperation between the two parties.
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