Bangor turns out to have its own film festival. Or at least; be part of a Wales-wide film festival. The WOW festival. I had never noticed! But this year I got an email about a specific film being screened. It was about the deep sea. I suspect they made sure to send it to everyone in Ocean Sciences. And it looked interesting!
On the day I was quite knackered from a heavy week, but it started at five. It was tempting to just stop working at half past four and bike to main campus. And I did. And to my surprise, the cinema was packed!
The film is basically about the Clarion-Clipperton zone, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; the largest known field of manganese nodules. These are lumps on the sea floor, roughly potato to sugarbeet size, that are full of the sort of metals industry wants for mobile phones and solar panels and whatnot. But they are also non-renewable; it takes millions of years to form them. And they are quite possibly crucial for the deep sea ecosystem.
The film was basically report of a scientific cruise with the James Cook, on which I sailed some ten years ago, which aim to go there, and to do as good as possible a job of inventorising what life is there at the bottom of the sea. If you don’t know what’s there, how can you effectively protect it?
Footage of the cruise was cut through with footage of negotiations about whether to mine or to protect the area. I can imagine people are keen on these metals for the energy transition, but at what cost?
The cruise also tried to find the traces of some trial mining in 1979. That sounds so hard! But they did it. The sea floor looked like it had been churned up yesterday.
The cruise had a robot with lights, cameras, a grabber and a hoover, and could therefore see and film what life was down there, and grab them and bring them to the surface. The scientists clearly had bleeding hearts when they decided to bring a creature up. They don’t survive it. But about 90% of the species there weren’t known to science, and you can’t legislate protection for what you don’t know exists.
A new species needs a name. The important one is the Latin one. But they get colloquial names too. And these speak of the weirdness of the animals found. The gummy squirrel. Barbie pig. Headless chicken monster. And a lot more! I was hoping to see a purple sock but that didn’t happen.
It was quite a long film and I was tired, and I skipped the Q&A session afterwards. But I was glad I had come! You don’t get to see footage of such a remote and deep ocean floor very often. And it was poured into a great narrative form. But I think everyone left that cinema a bit sad...
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| A crinoid (sea lily); they still exist! |
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| A Barbie pig, and the shadow of the grabber that tries to sample it |
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