Pacifico
Registered
Good evening all,
This will be my first post on scubaboard although I have been making use of the website's forums for almost one year now. I am an advanced open water diver with just approxiamtely 80 dives. The following is a personal reflection but please feel free to ocmment with your thoughts and opinions.
Perhaps some of us on scubaboard, at some point, have stopped to imagine and wonder what it would have been like to roll back into the ocean 5 to 10 thousand years ago on a prehistoric liveaboard trip. At that time, many of the reefs and inshore environments would have teemed with large predatory fish (large snappers and groupers, sharks etc...). Dugongs, manatees and whales would have been common visitors throughout coastal and oceanic environments of the Indo-Pacific and the Tropical Western Atlantic. Most of the coastline adjacent to such places would have been wild and intact and human influences would have been at the very most undetectable. I imagine crown of thorn outbreaks, intense tropical cyclones, El Nino Southern Oscillation events and major tectonic activity would have been the only sources of local punctuated degradation. With the baseline of today's average coral/rocky reef, these reefs of the past would inequivocally have been the pinnacle of such terms as awesome and spectacular.
Time and again, we come across people seeking areas of pristine corals, significant diversity of most taxonomic groups and the presence of large pelagics - those last unspoilt and preserved edens. The unfortunate reality is that this is likely what most reefs and locations in the Indo-Pacific boasted before humans began having a significant footprint on the planet's marine ecosystems. The Wider Caribbean was also likely completely different from what we know it to be at present.
I, dreaming of diving today's last pristine areas, have glanced over many a map looking for any island or speck of land in the tropics that might return little to no information regarding its surrounding waters off a web search. They do exist - Ducie, Henderson, Oeno, Sala y Gomez, Southern Line Islands, Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, Chagos, Clipperton, Wake Island, Kingman Reef, Howland and Baker etc... These are remote outposts lost in the vast expanse of the hydrosphere that make the most adventurous among us divers dream of discovery and the feeling of being on the edge of some final frontier. However, even these locations do not lie beyond the tentacules of modern society's influence. The world has indeed changed and few if any coastal reefs have not been spared the many detrimental impacts of rapid development.
If someone asked me where I would go diving if the realm of possibility were without limits, I would, without hesitation, tell him/her that I would drift along the seward slope of some continental reef in the Indo-Malayan Archipelago 10 000 years before present revelling in the splendor of the ocean at its most raw and primeval.
Jose
This will be my first post on scubaboard although I have been making use of the website's forums for almost one year now. I am an advanced open water diver with just approxiamtely 80 dives. The following is a personal reflection but please feel free to ocmment with your thoughts and opinions.
Perhaps some of us on scubaboard, at some point, have stopped to imagine and wonder what it would have been like to roll back into the ocean 5 to 10 thousand years ago on a prehistoric liveaboard trip. At that time, many of the reefs and inshore environments would have teemed with large predatory fish (large snappers and groupers, sharks etc...). Dugongs, manatees and whales would have been common visitors throughout coastal and oceanic environments of the Indo-Pacific and the Tropical Western Atlantic. Most of the coastline adjacent to such places would have been wild and intact and human influences would have been at the very most undetectable. I imagine crown of thorn outbreaks, intense tropical cyclones, El Nino Southern Oscillation events and major tectonic activity would have been the only sources of local punctuated degradation. With the baseline of today's average coral/rocky reef, these reefs of the past would inequivocally have been the pinnacle of such terms as awesome and spectacular.
Time and again, we come across people seeking areas of pristine corals, significant diversity of most taxonomic groups and the presence of large pelagics - those last unspoilt and preserved edens. The unfortunate reality is that this is likely what most reefs and locations in the Indo-Pacific boasted before humans began having a significant footprint on the planet's marine ecosystems. The Wider Caribbean was also likely completely different from what we know it to be at present.
I, dreaming of diving today's last pristine areas, have glanced over many a map looking for any island or speck of land in the tropics that might return little to no information regarding its surrounding waters off a web search. They do exist - Ducie, Henderson, Oeno, Sala y Gomez, Southern Line Islands, Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, Chagos, Clipperton, Wake Island, Kingman Reef, Howland and Baker etc... These are remote outposts lost in the vast expanse of the hydrosphere that make the most adventurous among us divers dream of discovery and the feeling of being on the edge of some final frontier. However, even these locations do not lie beyond the tentacules of modern society's influence. The world has indeed changed and few if any coastal reefs have not been spared the many detrimental impacts of rapid development.
If someone asked me where I would go diving if the realm of possibility were without limits, I would, without hesitation, tell him/her that I would drift along the seward slope of some continental reef in the Indo-Malayan Archipelago 10 000 years before present revelling in the splendor of the ocean at its most raw and primeval.
Jose
