These 1960s photos reveal Jamaica's lost paradise |
'It's the rainforest of the sea': These 1960s photos reveal Jamaica's lost underwater paradise
A trove of snapshots from a 1960s diving expedition reveals stunning glimpses of Jamaica's vibrant ecosystems of the past. This is transforming our vision of what coral reefs can be.
In 1966, marine scientist Eileen Graham dived into the waters along the northern coast of Jamaica to study the lush, vibrant coral reefs. Over the course of two years and long before digital cameras, she gathered a collection of over 1,000 images from Discovery Bay, Runaway Bay and Rio Bueno that capture reefs dense with coral, bright with sea fans and sponges, and alive with shoals of snappers and grouper fish.
Today, that archive of stunning photos has taken on a new significance, scientists say: after decades of declining Jamaican coral reefs, it is reminding the world what a healthy habitat looks like. Graham's images, once a snapshot of an underwater world bursting with life, have become evidence of change and loss. But the photos can also help us know what to aim for, when trying to protect and restore the reefs.
"There's a huge diversity of coral in Eileen's photos. You really see how lush these ecosystems were back then. It really feels like the rainforest of the sea," says Jelani Williams, a Jamaican marine scientist at the University of Southern California.
Once considered one of the most biodiverse regions in Jamaica, the island's reefs have suffered a series of disasters. They were devastated by Hurricane Allen in 1980, and also battered by invasive species, pollution, tourism and warmer waters due to climate change. Ever more powerful storms continue to wreak havoc on corals. And there has been a decline in mangrove forests in the Caribbean, which protect and nurture reefs.
Through old photos like Graham's, "we can learn what a thriving reef looked like before it began to be destroyed," William says.
In 2019, Ken Johnson, a principal researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, came across Graham's photos, which were donated by scientists from the Discovery Bay Marine Lab in Jamaica. Johnson was astounded by their beauty, but noticed how drastically the marine life had changed, even since his own diving days in the Caribbean back in the 1980s.
"The sea floor at Discovery Bay used to be covered in live corals at around 80-90%. Nowadays the coral cover is much lower at around 10-20%," he says.
To show the noticeable decline and support conservation efforts, Johnson began amassing a trove of photos from other diving scientists in other locations who took pictures in the pre-digital age. These old photos may help modern generations avoid what's known as the "shifting baseline" syndrome, according to Johnson: as a habitat becomes depleted, we may shift our idea of what this habitat is supposed to look like, and then no longer even realise what has been lost. Once we see the devastated habitat as a new normal, we may then feel less urgency to try and restore it.
Photos like Graham's can however fight that normalisation, Johnson says, by........