Steve Haddock

In conjunction with her book on the deep sea, Claire Nouvian has organized an exhibit at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. It runs until May 8th 2008. I was fortunate enough to be able to travel to France to help a little with the set-up and witness the grand opening.

I arrived during the big transit strike, so the Métro was not an option. Instead we got around the city (as freezing cold as it was!) using the fancy velib system. Locals and tourists (if they can figure out the registration process) can check out bikes from any of dozens of stations, ride them across town, and return them at a site near their destination. This was a fun and convenient way to get around and learn a bit about the environs, rather than emerging blinky-eyed from a subterranean cavern.

Paris is certainly a beautiful city, although the ubiquitous cigarettes seem to be considered invisible and biodegradable.

One of the motivations for making the trek to the exhibit was the chance to see some of my photos used as advertisements on the Métro walls. I was imagining a little poster-sized version, so I was stunned to see them blown up about 200 times larger than life, in gilded frames at several of the stations. Because most trains weren’t running when I was there, I didn’t actually spot one of the posters until my last night in the city. I set up to take a photo (above) and my camera battery died after a single shot! I took several mental photos and headed home.

The exhibit is being hosted in the Natural History museum, on the grounds of the Botanical Gardens. It makes for a nice walk in the afternoon sun.

Claire and her colleague Sara worked feverishly into the night preparing captions and content for the exhibition. Their office was in the top floor of the Geology Hall, so it was a common site to see the lonely glow from their skylight against the night sky.

The banner showing Peter Batson’s photo of a cranchiid squid, which also graces the cover of the book.

One of the unique things about the exhibit is that there are specimens of actual deep-sea organisms, in addition to the photos and video. The museum’s taxidermist Christophe was more used to working with animals that have fur and feathers, but he applied his tricks of the trade to marine animals with skill and enthusiasm.

Christophe’s son and the museum’s other taxidermists had to build all of the tanks that were used in the exhibit. Animals were suspended by fine transparent line in natural postures — painstaking work when they have to be positioned in liquid.

The displays are a mixture of photos (above and below) and actual organisms (the line in the middle). Photos were grouped by theme and habit, with the “red zone” shown above. In the large format pictures, we could see details in our own pictures that were never apparent in the small prints we were used to looking at.

Some of the smaller organisms were housed in tanks that line the wall. Originally, the tanks were just sitting there, brightly lit in the wall. This is where David Shale, Sara, Claire’s friend Sabine, and I stepped in. We went and got black foam-core and matte-board and started cutting masks and light blockers to generate an eerie deep-sea light. Since David is a professional photographer, the analogy that came to mind is that lighting can make or break a photo. We wanted these animals — plucked to the surface from thousands of meters deep — to get the visual presentation that they deserved.

I think the organism tanks look a lot more dramatic after being “blacked out”. My favorite are some radiolarians (technically now cercozoans) — deep-sea amoebae who live in intricate glass lattice capsules. We collected these from about 1200 meters and embedded them directly in transparent resin.

The “black zone” with darkened tanks and a couple of scary looking deep-sea animals. The fish would fit easily in the palm of your hand, and the medusa on the right is about the size of your fingertip.

Another perk of having your photos used in an exhibition is that they make postcards of them! I hope that people can take a bit of the mystery of the deep sea with them when they leave the gallery. If you are in France before May 8th, you should go by and check it out. You won’t see anything like it anywhere else.

In the past couple of weeks, the sunsets over Monterey Bay, California, were noticeably redder than usual. It was popular to speculate whether this could be due to Southern California fires that were so rampant at the time. It seemed plausible, but they also seemed really far away. (We’re located just south of San Francisco, about 450 miles [725 km] north of San Diego.) The answer became clear when the spectacular satellite images of the fire were released, particularly the one from 22 Oct 2007. (Notice several fires in Baja California as well.) There was indeed a plume reaching to the mouth of the bay.

The environmental influence of the fires, beyond the charred ground left behind, was impressive: I measured the area covered by the heavy white smoke in this satellite image as about 168,000 square km (41 million acres). Moderate smoke covers at least 600,000 sq. km (~232,000 sq. mi; 60M hectares), and it stretches offshore more than 950 km (almost 600 miles).

Given their scale, what long-term effects might such fires have on the oceans?

In one week, these Southern California fires were estimated to have released 7.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. About 5% of that amount would have been released as ash [ref]. Upon entering the ocean, these sooty particulates can have many effects, potentially both increasing or decreasing productivity via shading, sedimentation, adsorbing molecules, decreased albedo (less light reflection), and the input of nutrients. In one study, smoke from fires was implicated in a large coral reef die-off. The authors speculate that iron, a nutrient that can stimulate growth in trace amounts, was deposited with the soot, leading to an algal red tide and coral asphyxiation. Who needs butterfly wings when you have a raging inferno?

Once the rains begin, the increased ash and silt in runoff entering the ocean will give the fire another chance to affect marine ecosystems, potentially interfering with benthic filter-feeders, altering productivity, tweaking kelp forest dynamics, and annoying surfers. It will be interesting to monitor the residual effects through the coming year and beyond.

While the local marine impact remains to be seen, in a global context, the environmental effects of these episodic fires may be relatively minor: smoke regularly clouds the skies over large parts of Brazil and Indonesia.

As distinct as the elements seem, there is no way to escape the many interconnections between them.