Oceans on Nautilus: Into the blue

D uring a career spanning 25 years, Cristina Mittermeier has photographed bowhead whales in the Arctic, sea turtles in the Galápagos and an awe-inspiring array of marine wildlife in the oceans in between. She spoke to Five Media about the urgency of protecting the beautiful undersea world—much of which remains to be explored.

From an early age, maybe because of what Jacques Cousteau was doing for National Geographic, it was so obvious to me that our planet is an ocean planet—that this is the ecosystem that allows life to exist, so how could I not be fascinated by that? I think we all should be!

I grew up in the mountains of central Mexico, but my father was from Tampico, a small city in the Gulf of Mexico, which is part of the oil infrastructure along the Mexican coastline. We’d go visit my grandma and the beach and my earliest memories are of being taken by this massive wave, tumbling and coming out exhilarated. But my next memory is of my mother cleaning the tar off our feet because the beach was so polluted from the fossil fuel industry.

I have so many! Usually it’s the most recent one. We just spent five days swimming with eagle rays. There must have been 100 of them following a large female in big circles—all in just nine meters of water. They’re simply mesmerizing. They have a dotted pattern on their dorsal area and it feels like an artist took a lot of care designing something so fragile and exquisite. They come close to you and you just have to put the camera down and marvel. There’s over a million years of evolutionary perfection there and we know nothing about them. There are secret pockets of the ocean where these things are still happening.

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