Office of the Press Secretary
January 5, 2009

Via Telephone

CHAIRMAN CONNAUGHTON: Good afternoon, everybody, this is Jim Connaughton, the Chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. I’m here today to brief you on an action the President is going to take tomorrow with respect to ocean conservation.

So tomorrow afternoon the President is going to use his Antiquities Act authority to designate three new areas in the Pacific as Marine National Monuments. The President’s action tomorrow will cap off an eight-year comprehensive ocean conservation strategy. The areas that the President is going to designate in total will comprise the largest areas of ocean or ocean seabed set aside as marine protected areas in the world, coming in at 195,000 square miles.

By designating these areas as Marine National Monuments this — part of our marine environment will receive the highest level of recognition and the highest levels of conservation. Today’s action will prevent the destruction and extraction of some of the nations and the world’s most pristine natural resources that are also enormously rich in biodiversity. The conservation action is going to benefit the public and future generations through enhanced science, knowledge and awareness, and just good old-fashioned inspiration, because these places are exceptionally dynamic when it comes to the marine environment.

The action is going to conserve these places in the future in a way that also fully respects our nation’s national security needs by ensuring freedom of navigation for all vessels in accordance with international law and by ensuring that our military can stay ready and be globally mobile. So we’ll be focused on — we’ve got a strategy that enables us to do both.

Let me briefly describe for you the three monuments, their names and their features, and then I’ll look forward to opening it up for questions.

So the first of the monuments will be the Marianas Marine National Monument. This will have two main components. One of the main components will be the Marianas Trench and the long arch of submerged active volcanoes and hydrothermal vents that run along the entire Marianas Island chain. The Mariana Trench contains the deepest places on earth. The trench in its deepest point is deeper than Mount Everest is high, and it’s more than 1,500 miles long and 44 miles wide. So to compare that, it’s about five times longer than the Grand Canyon and several times wider.

The active volcanoes and thermal vents, there are about 21 of them that run along the island chain, and we’re talking about active volcanoes and these hot thermal emissions that come out of the surface of the — the bottom of the sea, you know, anywhere from a thousand feet deep to 5,000 feet deep. Just to give you an example, one of the volcanoes is responsible for a sulfur pool, which is a phenomenon. The next place that occurs that we know of is on the moon of Io off of Jupiter. The thermal vents produce heat from the core of the earth, produce heat that boils the water to very, very high temperatures, and also makes the water highly acidic. In one place, the water is a pH of one. And yet in this very, very harsh environment, you have thriving, living resources — something we want to learn a lot more about.

The other major feature of the Marianas Marine National Monument will be the pristine coral reef ecosystems that surround the three northernmost islands of the chain. These ecosystems are home to more than 300 species of stony corals and they have some of the highest fish abundance and fish diversity in the entire Marianas Islands chain — it’s about 14 islands.

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