91av

ON Christmas Day 1862, during the height of the US civil war, the crew of the ironclad warship the USS Monitor sat down to a decadent dinner. On the menu was turkey, mashed potatoes, plum pudding and fruitcake – rare treats for the sailors who had spent months subsisting on mostly crackers and salted pork. But events were about to take a less festive turn.

A few days after the meal, the ship set out to join a military expedition down the east coast. One evening, as darkness fell, sleet and snow blew in sideways and the ship rode a rollercoaster of 9-metre-high waves. It took on water and, before long, came to a sorry end at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

If things had ended there, the Monitor would only be remembered by military historians. But that wasn’t the final chapter of its story. More than a century after it sank, the shipwreck became entangled in the politics of marine conservation and, in an unlikely twist, has ended up serving as a test bed for a new way to save the seas.

In its day, the Monitor was a state-of-the-art vessel. Designed by Swedish-American immigrant John Ericsson and built in a steelyard in Brooklyn, New York, in 1861, the ship had an innovative gun turret, the first of its kind to revolve. After being rushed into battle against the Confederate forces of the slave-holding southern states during the civil war, the Monitor defended a squadron of five wooden frigates against a Confederate ironclad near Hampton Roads, Virginia, in March 1862. “That was the first time that steam-powered ironclads [had fought] each other,” says historian , director emeritus of the USS Monitor Center. “It helped change naval warfare forever.” The duel even inspired leading naval powers of the time such as Great Britain and France to switch from wooden warships to iron ones.

Despite its high-tech armoury, the had its flaws. While its low-to-the-water profile served it well in battle, it was best suited for patrolling calm coastal waters and rivers rather than braving the high seas. “It almost sank two [other] times,” says Quarstein. In its final battle against the waves, 49 of the crew survived by reaching a nearby steamship. But 16 men were lost when the ironclad finally sank in the sea off North Carolina. It lay at the bottom, mostly forgotten, for decades.

In the early 1970s, scientists had been using sonar images to sift through shipwrecks in the so-called “graveyard of the Atlantic”. They found 22 other wrecks before identifying the Monitor, lying upside down on the sandy seafloor. Its iconic turret had separated from the main hull, but remarkably the ship’s remains were mostly intact.

Upon finding a wreck of such historical importance, Walter Jones, congressman for North Carolina, was concerned. The US Navy had abandoned its legal ownership of the Monitor, which meant that, potentially, others could dive to the wreck and take away pieces of this valuable heritage. Luckily, the research team had discovered the ship at a fortuitous moment. Just one year earlier, in 1972, the US Congress had passed a new law allowing the creation of marine protected areas.

The marine sanctuary programme

The empowered the government to designate coastal waters as national marine sanctuaries. These are places that typically are off-limits for the dumping of toxic materials or for polluting oil and gas exploration that taint waters elsewhere. But the Sanctuaries Act doesn’t ban all human activities that could harm the ecosystems: each sanctuary has a unique set of regulations.

In January 1975, after a long campaign by Jones, an area 1.6 kilometres in diameter around the Monitor became the first marine sanctuary in the US. The rules were strict – prohibiting the destructive fishing practice of bottom trawling and requiring permits for any diving activity. “They don’t want people to mess with the ship,” says marine biologist , president of the Marine Conservation Institute in Seattle. “So they keep activity, including fishing, away from it.”

Since then, the patchwork of protected areas has grown into the national marine sanctuary programme, a network of 15 reserves covering some 1.6 million square kilometres of ocean and Great Lakes waters. These sanctuaries encompass not only any shipwrecks within them, including more than 130 wooden schooners and steel steamships, but diverse ecosystems that include coral reefs, islands, coastal waters and deep ocean canyons.

Now, there are calls for the protection to go much further. In response to the declining health of the oceans, a movement of scientists and governments has set an ambitious target of protecting 30 per cent of the oceans by 2030, known as “30 by 30”. In December 2021, US president Joe Biden cited the national marine sanctuary programme as a crucial tool for making it happen in the US. So far, under Biden’s incumbency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has proposed two new sanctuaries: the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary off the coast of California and a new Hudson Canyon National Marine Sanctuary to protect the largest underwater canyon along the US Atlantic coast.

The future of the oceans

The US has established protected areas across 26 per cent of its water. Almost all of those are Marine National Monuments, created under a totally different law to sanctuaries, which offer a similar type of protection. However, beyond the marine monuments, the vast majority of US waters still have no high-level protection from fishing and other human impacts.

And just because an area is classified as a “marine protected” area doesn’t mean we are doing enough. “There’s still a gap between what the name of the statute implies and the reality out on the water,” says , a professor of environmental law at the University of California. Almost all sanctuaries ban oil, gas and mineral exploration, but many still allow fishing. Some even permit the deeply destructive practice of bottom trawling.

Despite the challenges, experts still believe national marine sanctuaries are the best bet for protecting the seas. “When the programme was originally built, they thought of it as a few iconic places that they’ll do their best to manage and protect,” says Morgan. “Now that we recognise there’s a lot of things eating away at the biodiversity in the fabric of marine life, it would be great if some of these areas were actually regeneration zones in the ocean.” The hope is that these areas could become places for life not just to survive, but to flourish.

As for the Monitor, there has been some success. In May 2022, a NOAA research project sent a remotely operated underwater vehicle to the ship’s resting place to conduct a survey, the first of its kind there in 20 years. The vehicle initially descended to the sea floor several hundred metres from the wreck before navigating towards the Monitor. As it got closer, the camera showed more and more fish swimming around the vicinity even before the vessel’s iron hull became visible.

Swarms of small, silvery bait fish swim around the wreck, pursued by larger jack fish, while bigger predators such as grouper and snapper fish spend their time closer to the bottom of the structure. Brightly coloured tropical reef fish shelter among the Monitor’s crevices and large groups of sand tiger sharks circle the wreck.

Despite being the smallest marine sanctuary, the Monitor has become a refuge for marine life. These protected areas are doing the business, then, says Beth Pike, director of the Marine Protection Atlas at the Marine Conservation Institute. “They just have to be well designed and well enforced.”

The designers of this innovative warship would probably have preferred if it had spent a little more of its life above the waves. But at least in a sense, the story of the Monitor does have a happy ending.