With fish darting amongst them in a blue lagoon, the Maldivian president and his top team have staged an elaborate stunt to publicise climate change.

Billed as the world’s first underwater cabinet meeting, President Mohamed Nasheed and 11 ministers, decked in scuba gear, held a meeting 4m (13ft) underwater.

While officials said the event itself was light-hearted, the idea is to focus on the plight of the Maldives, where rising sea levels threaten to make the nation uninhabitable by the end of the century.

Mr Nasheed, the country’s first democratically elected president, has become an important global voice for climate change since he won in polls last October.

“We have to get the message across through a course of action which resonates with ordinary people,” the president said, as the boat neared our destination.

“What we are trying to tell the people is that we hope there is a better deal at Copenhagen.”

The presidential speedboat took 20 minutes to arrive in the turquoise lagoon off Girifushi, in North Male atoll.

The cabinet then zipped themselves into diving suits and donned goggles and tanks of compressed air before jumping in the water.

Major Ahmed Ghiyaz, the co-ordinator from the Maldivian National Defence Force (MNDF), said all measures had been taken to protect the president, which included checking the coral for dangerous creatures.

“I am 99.9% sure there will be no harmful creatures,” he told the BBC before the dive.

“I’m sure there won’t be any sharks. The nastiest thing would be a moray eel, but we have checked the reef”.

A horseshoe-shaped table was set up around a dark green coral reef with blue tips and home to an array of sea creatures in one of the world’s most famed diving spots.

The president and his team took their seats at 1000 at the bottom of the lagoon, sitting at desks with name tags while colourful parrot fish and black and white damsel fish darted around them.

Using hand signals to gesture that they were OK, ministers then passed round an “SOS” to be signed - an agreement calling for carbon emission cuts.

“We must unite in a global effort to halt further temperature rises,” the message reads.

“Climate change is happening and it threatens the rights and security of everyone on Earth.”

Meanwhile, a handful of journalists kitted out in snorkel gear and swimming around on the surface tried to get a glimpse of the action below.

Emerging out of the water, a dripping President Nasheed removed his mask to answer questions from reporters and photographers crowded around on the shore.

“We are trying to send a message to the world about what is happening and what would happen to the Maldives if climate change isn’t checked,” he said, bobbing around in the water with his team of ministers.

“If the Maldives is not saved, today we do not feel there is much chance for the rest of the world.”

After the dive, the president told the BBC he had seen a stingray swim nearby during the meeting.

“There was a sergeant fish that was particularly interested in what was going on,” he said during a typically Maldivian lunch of fish curry and coconut juice.

“I’ve never been worried about reef sharks and I’ve been diving for a long time,” the 42-year-old added.

He says other Maldivians had heard about the event and wanted to get involved in some way.

On the island of Kuda Huvadhoo, some islanders reportedly created a sealed box and put their TV in it so they could watch the footage of the meeting underwater.

“They told me, ‘if the president is under water, then they want to be too’,” Mr Nasheed said.

But he was keen to push the need for action.

The 1192-island chain is at severe threat from rising sea levels, with 80% of its islands less than a metre above sea level.

“What do we hope to achieve? We hope not to die. I hope I can live in the Maldives and raise my grandchildren here,” says Mr Nasheed.

Phuket’s ‘Coral Reef Squadron’ sunk off Bang Tao Bay last November is 90 percent missing or destroyed, the Thai Dive Association admitted today.

Rainer Gottwald, head of the Thai Dive Association (TDA) technical committee, said TDA divers visited the site on Wednesday and were only able to find one of the 10 aircraft that formed the artificial reef.

Storms and heavy monsoon season currents were to blame, Mr Gottwald said.

Failure to follow instructions by some members of the team who chained the aircraft to large concrete blocks, and subsequent damage by trawlers,may also have played a role, he said.

The destruction of the site was ‘very upsetting’, given all the work and expense put into the project by the TDA and the numerous other agencies and organizations involved, he said.

The project was initiated by the Bangkok-based For Sea Foundation and funded to the tune of 4 million baht by the Cherng Talay Tambon Administration Organization, which hoped the reef would boost tourism in the area.

The project also received a great deal of private-sector sponsorship.

Mr Gottwald said the TDA would have to learn from its mistakes and would probably use train wagons instead of aircraft in future projects.

The ‘Coral Reef Squadron’ consisted of four Douglas C-47 Dakota Skytrain military transport aircraft and six Sikorsky S-58T helicopters.

The TDA divers were only able to find one Dakota during the dive on Wednesday, which followed a series of heavy storms, he said.

TDA divers will survey the area to try and learn more about the fate of the aircraft when sea conditions improve, he said.

Mr Gottwald said he did not think currents would carry the aircraft to the shore, because if that were going to happen it probably would have done so already.

The missing aircraft were probably buried beneath the sand, he said.

About 18 feet underwater off Key Largo lies a mystery ship, one of hundreds in just these waters.

It’s cargo, name and destination are unknown. All that remains of the wreck are planks of timber, iron rods and some pieces of coal.

State underwater archaeologist Roger Smith and his team will spend about two weeks mapping the site that has become a bountiful coral reef. In time they will also try to piece together what ship this was, its voyage and whether it should be nominated for the National Register of Historic Places.

The work is part of an ongoing effort to take an inventory of Florida’s shipwrecks and artifacts, which number around 300 just off Key Largo alone.

Named the “Marker 39″ wreck for its location just two miles off the coast of Key Largo, the remains hold many clues that could help unlock its secrets. A buoy has marked the spot since 1863, which could help date the shipwreck because it could be when the ship ran aground that people realized the area was dangerous.

Iron fasteners held the wood together and from what is left, it looks like it was about 150 feet long. So far, archaeologists are hypothesizing it was a barge because of its long, flat deck. Smith predicts it dates back to the 19th century, when there was a bustling business of carrying cargo, including coal, lumber and manufactured goods, up and down Florida’s coast. It may have been a steam ship because of the iron rods and steam pipes that were found on it.

“The Keys is a trap for ships, always has been, always will be,” he said. “There is all of this maritime history in the Keys. All these shipwrecks represent episodes in that history.”

The wreck was found by two volunteers in the 1990s diving along the channel between the shore and the large coral reef that runs parallel to the Keys.

Experts say there are about 400 ship groundings a year, some due to captain inexperience, some to weather and changes in water depth.

Smith says that when he dives a wreck, he is always looking for manmade objects to tell the story. This wreck doesn’t have many left. He believes salvors of the 19th century may have beaten him to them. They were otherwise known as wreckers. Some were fishermen and they would wait for a ship to be distress, and then come out and get the goods for a share in the profit.

“The law was, if you were the first salvor to negotiate with the captain, you got to be the salvor,” he said.

There is a Florida Master Site File where all the state’s historic sites are given a number for inventory. This wreck will get one too. The group has created a photo mosaic of the site. They will also map out the wreck and shoot video for people who will never dive it.

They will then take the pieces of coal they have brought ashore to the Florida Geological Survey and also search in the archival records of admiralty courts to see if they can find out what ship this is.

“Sometimes you never do find the name of a ship,” Smith said.

The ship itself is not very well-preserved. It’s exposed to the elements and not totally buried.

“Part of all this is detective work and making conclusions based on hard evidence,” he said. “You have to let the shipwreck tell its own story. Sometimes it’s tempting to hypothesize what a site might be.”

There are several references to ships going down in the area, said Brenda Altmeier, program support specialist at NOAA’s Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

She says she “can’t help but think of the people aboard … just the fear and panic,” she said.

This project is a partnership between the Division of Historical Resources and the sanctuary.

“It’s merging two sciences. it’s biology merging with archaeology,” she said.

Senior archaeologist Franklin Price said so far they know it wasn’t a sailing ship. It had no ballast or evidence of rigging to hold up a mast or sails.

Smith said there are many filters archaeologists have to get past when analyzing a wreck, including time, the sea and animals.

But the wreck has also become a breeding ground for new life. It is a bustling reef with hard and soft coral and home to many different kinds of fish including a great barracuda, a scorpion fish and even a spotted eagle ray.

Part of the effort is also to make sure more people get a chance to snorkel and dive in wrecks off the Keys, said archaeologist Daniel McClarnon.

Smith has also devised a seminar targeted towards people that certify scuba divers to educate them about respecting Florida shipwrecks called The Heritage Awareness Diving Seminar, which is taught around the state at different points during the year.

“We find, as archaeologists, that there isn’t any future, it’s just the past repeating itself,” he said.

Source

Beneath the waves of this sapphire-blue corner of the East China Sea, a team of divers was busily at work.

Hovering along the steep, bony face of a dying coral reef, some divers bored holes into the hard surface with compressed-air drills that released plumes of glittering bubbles. Others followed, gently inserting small ceramic discs into the fresh openings.

Each disc carried a tiny sliver of hope for the reef, in the shape of fingertip-size sprigs of brightly colored, fledgling coral.

This undersea work site may look like a scene from a Jules Verne novel, but it is part of a government-led effort to save Japan’s largest coral reef, near the southern end of the Okinawa chain of islands. True to form in Japan, the project involves new technology, painstaking attention to detail and a generous dose of taxpayer money.

The project has drawn national attention, coming after alarming reports in the last decade that up to 90 percent of the coral that surrounds many of Okinawa’s islands has died off. This raised a rare preservationist outcry in a heavily industrialized nation whose coastal vistas tend toward concrete sea walls and oil refineries.

The result has been what marine biologists call one of the largest coral restoration projects in the world, begun four years ago. The goal, say biologists, is to perfect methods that could be used around the world to rescue reefs endangered by overfishing, pollution and global warming.

They say they are using the Sekisei Lagoon Reef, which is named after the broad, shallow lagoon that it created, as a test bed for new techniques that they hope will one day make transplanting coral in the sea as routine as raising tree saplings on land.

“We have been replanting forests for 4,000 years, but we are only just now learning how to revive a coral reef,” said Mineo Okamoto, a marine biologist at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, who has led development of the palm-size ceramic discs. “We finally have the technology.”

Critics, however, say the project might be wasted effort. They say transplanting is futile without addressing the problems that caused the reefs to deteriorate in the first place, like coastal redevelopment and chemical runoff from terrestrial agriculture. There is also the bigger problem of rising ocean water temperatures, for which there may be no easy fix.

Here in the Sekisei Lagoon, which sits between the tropical islands of Ishigaki and Iriomote, another problem also becomes apparent: the puny size of the efforts to save a reef that stretches as far as the eye can see in almost every direction.

Since 2005, the project has planted around 13,000 pieces of coral, at a cost of some $2 million, said Hajime Hirosawa, a preservation officer at the Environment Ministry who helps oversee the transplanting. This is a far cry, he admits, from the tens of millions of pieces that need to be transplanted in this reef alone, which stretches over an area of about 100 square miles.

Worse, survival rates have been low, Mr. Hirosawa said. Only a third of the coral sprigs transplanted in 2005 have survived threats ranging from predators like the Crown-of-Thorns starfish to “bleaching,” an ultimately fatal condition caused when rising water temperatures turn coral a sickly white.

“Saving the reef is not something that we can do in three to four years,” Mr. Hirosawa said, “but more like 30 to 40 years.”

Still, say Mr. Hirosawa and others, the techniques have steadily improved, lifting survival rates. One change was to shift from placing new coral on flat sea bottoms, which proved vulnerable to typhoon-driven surface waves that broke off coral, to more protected vertical reef faces.

Another advance was the ceramic discs, which are baked at 2,700 degrees until hardened, but whose surface contains tiny pores that allow coral larvae to take root. Every spring, a team of a dozen divers has spent up to two weeks drilling holes and gluing in the discs.

While labor intensive, this method offers a more secure footing for the young coral than previous methods, like attaching coral pieces with wire and nails, Dr. Okamoto said.

The improved transplanting methods have become promising enough that the Environment Ministry says it plans to double the number of coral pieces planted next year, to 10,000.

While the project’s main goal is environmental, there are also geopolitical motivations. Tokyo plans a much larger and more expensive coral transplantation to try to strengthen the reef protecting Okinotori, a tiny, remote islet that Japan uses to claim economic control of a vast swath of the Pacific Ocean. The government wants to prevent a strong typhoon from wiping away the tiny outcropping, and with it the basis for Japan’s territorial claims, which have already been challenged by China.

There is also a friendly race among global scientists trying to develop the best coral transplantation method. Competing ideas vary from creating coral habitat with large concrete “reef balls” to the use of mild electric current to speed coral growth.

For now, the most common transplanting technique involves breaking off pieces of adult coral and affixing them elsewhere on the reef. Besides damaging the host coral, this method, while quick and easy, also means that most of the transplanted pieces share the host’s DNA, giving the reef a smaller and less healthy gene pool.

In the Japanese method, the discs are stacked underwater for 18 months near a healthy stretch of reef, allowing coral larvae released during spawning to naturally attach and grow on the ceramic surface. This ensures that each disc carries genetically distinct coral organisms, more closely replicating the results of natural reproduction.

“Japan’s methods are expensive and labor intensive, but they also bring more genetic diversity and thus healthy reefs,” said Baruch Rinkevich, a specialist in coral transplantation at Israel’s National Institute of Oceanography in Haifa.

In Sekisei Lagoon, healthy reefs are increasingly found only along the lagoon’s north side, where most coral still flourishes. This has led scientists to speculate that the north side may have evolved coral species adapted to surviving in warmer oceans. Starting next year, the divers will transplant northern coral to the lagoon’s more decimated southern side, said Shuichi Fujiwara, the diving team leader.

“This is absolutely worth doing,” said one of the team’s divers, Ryo Isobe, 26, who works as a diving instructor during the summer tourist season. “When I think of how colorful these reefs used to be, I know we need to do all we can.”