From global sea census, a treasure trove

By Juliet Eilperin - Washington Post

A lone deep-sea snail living within a hot-water fissure on the ocean floor. The migratory tracks of great white sharks crossing ocean basins. Audio recordings of schools of fish the size of Manhattan, swimming in concert.

These are just a handful of the discoveries that came out of the Census of Marine Life, a decade-long project completed Monday. Encompassing more than 2,700 scientists from 80 nations and territories around the world, the census sought to answer a basic but daunting question. In the words of its International Scientific Steering Committee Chairman Ian Poiner: "What did live in the ocean, what does live in the ocean, and what will live in the ocean?"

Ten years after the study was launched, much of the sea remains unknown. At its start, only 5 percent of the ocean had been seriously explored, and even now, there are no observations for 20 percent of it, while more than half of the ocean has been subject to just minimal exploration.

Still, the project has, in the words of co-founder Jesse Ausubel, "defined what is unknown" about the ocean, and shed light on how it functions. "The oceans are richer than we imagined, more connected than we imagined, and they're more altered," said Ausubel, census vice president and program director for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The $650 million initiative, $75 million of which came from the Sloan Foundation, launched 570 expeditions that journeyed from Antarctica to the tropics. Ranking as one of the world's largest scientific collaborations, it produced more than 2,600 academic papers and collected 30 million observations of 120,000 species. Researchers have formally described 1,200 new species and identified about 4,800 others.

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