Paul Salopek in Djibouti city
Published April 25, 2013
During 32 years of fieldwork in the
deserts of Ethiopia, Tim White, the eminent American
paleoanthropologist, has brazened through every conceivable obstacle to his
research into human origins.
Flash floods have marooned his
vehicles in hip-deep pools of mud. Grazing wars between groups of nomads have
blocked access to promising fossil beds. And campfire visits by snakes and
tarantulas are so routine they rank as minor nuisances.
Yet nothing has stymied White's
pursuit of knowledge—or thwarted his scientific ambitions—like the
hard-eyed men in flip-flop sandals who, valuing doubloons above Darwin, set
sail hundreds of miles away in skiffs stocked with machine guns and rope
ladders: Somali pirates.
"No question, it's been a
serious setback," says White, who has waited years, in vain, for a
research vessel to drill crucial seabed cores off Somalia that would revolutionize the dating of
East Africa's spectacular hominid finds. "Piracy has stopped oceanographic
work in the region. There's been no data coming out of this area for years.
Zero."
White isn't alone in his
frustration.Scientists from around the globe,
specializing in subjects as diverse as plate tectonics, plankton evolution,
oceanography, and climate change, are decrying a growing void of research that
has spread across hundreds of thousands of square miles of the Indian Ocean
near the Horn of Africa—an immense, watery "data hole" swept clean of
scientific research by the threat of Somali buccaneering.
Major efforts to study the dynamics
of monsoons, predict global warming, or dig into seafloors to reveal
humankind's prehistory have been scuttled by the same gangs of freebooters who,
over the course of the past decade, have killed dozens of mariners, held
thousands more hostage, and, by one World Bank estimate, fleeced the world of $18 billion a year in economic losses.
The cost to science may be less
visible to the public. But it won't be borne solely by scholars.
Years of missing weather data off
the Horn of Africa, for example, will affect the lives of millions of people. A
scarcity of surface wind readings has already created distortions in weather
models that forecast the strength, direction, and timing of rains that sustain
vast farming belts on surrounding continents.
Shelving a Rosetta Stone
"This problem has been going on
a long time and with virtually no public awareness," says Sarah Feakins,
a researcher at the University of Southern California whose work on
paleoclimates has been hijacked by piracy fears. "All kinds of efforts are
made to keep the commercial sea lanes around Somalia open. Nobody talks about
the lost science."
Feakins's woes highlight the toll
the pirates have exacted, albeit unwittingly, on one earth science practice in
particular: seabed core sampling, which involves a miniscule global fleet of
expensive research vessels that—because they stay in place to drill—are sitting
ducks.
Oceanic sediment cores offer
researchers a valuable archive of Earth's climate history. Ancient pollen,
plankton, dust, and other clues collected from seafloors provide the bulk of
what scientists know about global changes to the planet's ecosystems over time.
In 2011, Feakins devised a novel way
of harnessing this technology to test one of the oldest questions of human
evolution: Did our ancestors actually climb down from trees because of
expanding savannas in Africa?
By poring over cores from the seas
off East Africa, she would be able to peel back layers of ancient, windblown
carbon isotopes associated with grasslands, settling the debate.
Her idea earned the coveted approval
of the Integrated Ocean
Drilling Program (IODP), an elite international scientific
organization that controls the most advanced drilling platform afloat—the JOIDES
Resolution, a gigantic, high-tech oceanographic ship topped with
a 200-foot-tall drilling rig.
The JOIDES Resolution, a high-tech
vessel equipped with a 200-foot-tall drilling rig.
Photograph courtesy Arito Sakaguchi,
IODP/TAMU
But when the location of her
sampling became known—near the Gulf of Aden, the bull's-eye of the Somali
pirate's hunting grounds—Feakins's project sank without a bubble.
"I'm using old cores from the
1970s now," she says. "It's all we've got."
The JOIDES Resolution is
deployed in the Indian Ocean until 2016. But during the past 18 months the IODP
has quietly dry-docked three major projects near Somalia.
One casualty was paleoanthropologist
White's dream proposal: drilling into the Indian Ocean seabed for ashes that
have wafted down from African volcanoes over the course of millions of years.
The ash, which is precisely datable
under the ocean because of continuous layering, would offer a game-changing
yardstick for correlating the ages of hominid fossils discovered throughout the
Great Rift Valley. In effect, the clearest picture yet of the human
family tree would be pulled, shimmering, from the sea.
"Rosetta," White says
forlornly, referring to the Rosetta Stone, the crucial artifact that enabled
19th-century scholars to at last decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Thousands of fossils, such as this
monkey skull, can be dated once drill cores are pulled from the ocean floor.
Photograph by Tim D. White
Gunboat Science
The IODP, which is funded by
scientific agencies in the United States, Europe, Japan, China, and India, says
it has little maneuvering room when it comes to piracy.
"We have always placed the
security and safety of our staff and scientists as a number one priority,"
says David Divins, an IODP spokesman. "The problem is that there is some
potentially pioneering science that will have to wait or find another
location."
The lawless waters off Somalia, however,
are unique. They offer tantalizingly rich returns on anthropological and
climatological research. And even Divins admits that the wait could be long.
Research slots on the JOIDES
Resolution—the name is an acronym for Joint Oceanographic Institutions for
Deep Earth Sampling—are ferociously competitive and booked years in advance. It
could be "at least another five years or so" before the vessel
returns to the region, Divins says.
Some beleaguered researchers,
meanwhile, have sent out an SOS to the world's navies.
Armed escorts, however, are another
matter.
The only vessels afforded close
naval protection are UN
World Food Program cargo ships carrying relief supplies to the Horn
of Africa.
Governments balk at guarding
low-priority research vessels, especially when they resemble oil company drill
boats—jackpot targets for pirates. The scientific agencies operating the
research ships also pan the idea, saying it would sink their insurance
policies.
"When I raised the military
question, it caused a firestorm of anger from everybody from the U.S. State
Department to the IODP," Feakins says. "I was intimidated into just
dropping it."
A Treasure Lost
Statistics compiled by the International Maritime Bureau show that brigands
managed to force their way aboard only 14 ships in the region in 2012, down
from 31 in 2011 and 49 in 2010.
In ports such as Djibouti city, just
north of Somalia, it's easy to see why.
The militarization of the area's
waterways, particularly the strategic Bab-el-Mandeb Strait between Africa and
Arabia, is virtually complete.
The U.S. and Europe each lead
heavily armed task forces that shadow endless convoys of oil tankers and
container ships past the wild shores of Somalia. Japanese corvettes sit ready
at dock, their engines rumbling. Spanish, German, Turkish, and French soldiers
assigned to antipiracy campaigns jam the port's hotel lobbies.
Offshore, merchant ships bob at
anchor with razor wire coiled about their rails. Big placards on their hulls
warn that lethal force will be used to repel attackers.
How long this martial pressure can
be sustained is an open question. But for now the Somalis are outgunned.
A suspected Somali pirate is
apprehended near Mumbai, India.
Photograph by Punit Paranjpe,
AFP/Getty Images
Still, even if the oceanographic
research community steams back into the Gulf of Aden tomorrow, the havoc that
pirates have wreaked on science is enduring.
Writing in EOS, the journal of the American Geophysical
Union, the meteorologists Shawn R. Smith, Mark A. Bourassa, and Michael Long
point out that routine wind readings collected by ships for decades are now
interrupted by a colossal blank space that gapes across 960,000 square miles
(2.5 million square kilometers) of open sea.
In this case, ship captains have not
simply avoided Somalia, but have refused to broadcast anything that might tip
off eavesdropping buccaneers—including daily weather reports. That long
radio silence has spawned a historic anomaly, or aberration, in oceanographic
records.
"The data void exists in the
formation region of the Somali low-level jet, a wind pattern that is one of the
main drivers of the Indian summer monsoon," the EOS article's
authors warn.
One consequence: It has become
harder to predict long-term changes in a weather system that disperses rain
across immense agricultural zones in Africa, the Middle East, and especially
South Asia.
"For people trying to
understand the science of climate change and the impact of El Niño on the Asian
monsoon, I believe that this has been permanent damage," laments Peter Clift, an earth scientist at Louisiana
State University in Baton Rouge.
Clift is being generous.
His own research, which explores how
the Earth's geology and atmosphere interact, has been held hostage for more
than a decade by the marauders off the African Horn.
He needs a drilling ship. None will
come. And he says he may never complete his life's work: yet more booty stolen
by the pirates of Somalia.
From 2013 to 2020, writer Paul
Salopek is recreating the epic journey of our ancestors on foot, starting at
humankind’s birthplace in Ethiopia and ending at the southern tip of South
America, where our forebears ran out of horizon. Along the way he is engaging
with the major stories of our time — from climate change to technological
innovation, from mass migration to cultural survival. Moving at the slow beat
of his footsteps, Paul is also seeking the quieter, hidden stories of people
who rarely make the news. To read Paul Salopek's latest dispatch, go to: outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.com
