The most important part of the ocean you've never heard of
The Saya de Malha Bank is one of the world's largest seagrass fields and the planet's most important carbon sinks. It faces incalculable risks that threaten the future of humanity.
The most important place on earth that virtually no one has ever heard of is called the Saya de Malha Bank. Among the world’s largest seagrass fields and the planet’s most important carbon sinks, this high-seas patch of ocean covers an area the size of Switzerland. More than 200 miles from land, the submerged bank is situated in the Indian Ocean between Mauritius and Seychelles. It has been called the world’s largest invisible island as it is formed by a massive plateau, in some spots barely hidden under 30 feet of water, offering safe haven to an unprecedented biodiversity of seagrass habitats for turtles and breeding grounds for sharks, humpback and blue whales.Researchers say that the bank is one of the least scientifically studied areas of the planet partly because of its remoteness. The area’s unpredictable depths have also meant that, over the centuries, merchant ships and explorers tended to avoid these waters. It has long been the type of fantastical realm so uncharted that on the old maps, it would be designated “Here Be Monsters.” More recently, though, the bank is traversed by a diverse cast of characters, including shark finners, bottom trawlers, seabed miners, stranded fishers, starving crews, wealthy yachters and libertarian seasteaders.The tragedy, however, is that since the Saya de Malha Bank is mostly located in international waters, where few rules apply, its biodiversity is being systematically decimated by a huge fleet of industrial fishing ships that remain largely unchecked by government oversight. The bank remains unprotected by any major binding treaties largely due to an anemia of political will by national authorities and a profits-now, costs-later outlook of fishing interests. The question now: Who will safeguard this public treasure? Mowing down an eco-systemMore than 500 years ago, when Portuguese sailors came across a shallow-water bank on the high seas over 700 miles east of the northern tip of Mauritius, they named it Saya de Malha, or “mesh skirt,” to describe the rolling waves of seagrass below the surface. The Saya de Malha bank, which means “mesh skirt” in Portuguese, was named to describe the rolling waves of seagrass just below the surface. It is part of the mascarene plateau in the Indian Ocean and is one of the largest submerged banks in the world. (James Michel Foundation) Seagrasses are frequently overlooked because they are rare, estimated to cover only a tenth of 1% of the ocean floor. “They are the forgotten ecosystem,” said Ronald Jumeau, the Seychelles ambassador for climate change. Nevertheless, seagrasses are far less protected than other offshore areas. Only 26% of recorded seagrass meadows fall within marine protected areas, compared with 40% of coral reefs and 43% of the world’s mangroves.The Saya de Malha Bank is existentially crucial to the planet because it is one of the world’s biggest carbon sinks. Much like trees on land, seagrass absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stores it in its roots and soil. But seagrass does it especially fast — at a rate 35 times that of tropical rainforest. What makes the situation in the Saya de Malha Bank even more urgent is that it’s being systematically decimated by a multinational fleet of fishing ships that virtually no one tracks or polices.Often described as the lungs of the ocean, seagrasses capture about a fifth of all its carbon and they are home to vast biodiversity. Seagrass also cleans polluted water and protects coastlines from erosion. At a time when ocean acidification threatens the survival of the world’s coral reefs and the thousands of fish species that inhabit them, seagrasses reduce acidity by absorbing carbon through photosynthesis, according to a 2021 report by the University of California. Seagrasses provide shelters, nurseries, and feeding grounds for thousands of species, including endangered animals such as dugongs, stalked jellyfish and smalltooth sawfish. Seagrass meadows like the Saya de Malha bank absorb about a fifth of all oceanic carbon. They also clean polluted water. Acting as a dense net, they trap microplastics and lock them away in the sediment. (Greenpeace / The Outlaw Ocean Project) But the Saya de Malha is under threat. More than 200 distant-water vessels — most of them from Sri Lanka and Taiwan — have parked in the deeper waters along the edge of the bank. Ocean conservationists say that efforts to conserve the bank’s seagrass are not moving fast enough to make a difference. “It’s like walking north on a southbound train,” said Heidi Weiskel, director of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.On May 23, 2022, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution to declare March 1 as World Seagrass Day. The resolution was sponsored by Sri Lanka. Speaking at the assembly, the Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the UN, Ambassador Mohan Pieris, said seagrasses were “one of the most valuable marine ecosystems on earth,” highlighting, among other things, their outsize contribution to carbon sequestration. But recognition is one thing; action is another. As the ambassador gave his speech in New York, dozens of ships from his country’s fishing fleet were 9,000 miles away, busily scraping the biggest of those very ecosystems he was calling on the world to protect. VIDEO | 05:54 Saya de Malha: Robbing the bank Share via Plumbing seafloor wealthFor the past decade, the mining industry has argued that the ocean floor is an essential frontier for rare-earth metals needed in the batteries used in cellphones and laptops. As companies eye the best patches of ocean to search for the precious sulphides and nodules, dubbed “truffles of the ocean,” the waters near the Saya de Malha Bank have emerged as an attractive target. Black, potato-sized polymetallic nodules scattered on the seafloor in 2019 drew prospectors for their cobalt, nickel, copper and manganese. (Southeastern U.S. Deep-sea Exploration / Office of Ocean Exploration and Research / NOAA) To vacuum up the treasured nodules requires industrial extraction by massive excavators. Typically 30 times the weight of regular bulldozers, these machines drive along the sea floor, suctioning up the rocks, crushing them and sending a slurry of pulverized nodules and seabed sediment through a series of pipes to a vessel above. After separating out the minerals, the mining ships then pipe back overboard the processed waters, sediment and mining “fines,” which are the small particles of the ground-up nodule ore. This 2020 animation demonstrates how a collector vehicle launched from a ship during deep-sea mining would travel 15,000 feet below sea level to collect polymetallic nodules containing essential minerals. (MIT Mechanical Engineering / The Outlaw Ocean Project) Most of the bank is too shallow to be a likely candidate for such mining, but cobalt deposits were found in the Mascarene Basin, an area that includes the Saya de Malha Bank, in 1987. South Korea holds a contract from the International Seabed Authority, the international agency that regulates seabed mining, to explore hydrothermal vents on the Central Indian Ridge, about 250 miles east of Saya de Malha, until 2029. India and Germany also hold exploration contracts for an area about 800 miles southeast of the Saya de Malha Bank.All of this activity could be disastrous for the bank’s ecosystem, according to ocean researchers. Mining and exploration activity will raise sediments from the ocean floor, reducing the seagrass’ access to the sunlight it depends on. Sediment clouds from mining can travel hundreds or even thousands of miles, potentially disrupting the entire mid-water food web and affecting important species such as tuna. Research published in 2023 found that a year after test seabed mining disturbed the ocean floor in Japanese waters, the density of fish, crustaceans and jellyfish in nearby areas was cut in half.Proponents of deep seabed mining stress a growing need for these resources. In 2020, the World Bank estimated that the global production of minerals such as cobalt and lithium would have to be increased by over 450% by 2050 to meet the growing demand for clean energy technology.However, skeptics of the industry say that because of the long transport distances and corrosive and unpredictable conditions at sea, the cost of mining nodules offshore will far outstrip the price of doing so on land. Other critics contend that technology is changing so quickly that the batteries used in the near future will be different from those that are used now. Better product design, recycling and reuse of metals already in circulation, urban mining and other “circular” economy initiatives can vastly reduce the need for new sources of metals, said Matthew Gianni, co-founder of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition.More recently, though, the Metals Company, the largest seabed mining stakeholder, has shifted away from talking about batteries and instead claimed that the metals are needed for missiles and military purposes.The Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, a group of nongovernmental organizations and policy institutes working to protect the deep sea, reports that over 30 countries have called for a moratorium or a precautionary pause on deep-seabed mining. Still, government officials in Mauritius and Seychelles seem to be eager to take advantage of the financial opportunity that seabed mining appears to represent. In 2021, Mauritius hosted a workshop with the African Union and Norad, the Norwegian agency for developmental cooperation, to look into seabed mining prospects.That year, Greenpeace, a member of the conservation coalition, chose the Saya de Malha Bank as the location for the first ever underwater protest of deep-seabed mining. As part of that protest, Shaama Sandooyea, a 24-year-old marine biologist from Mauritius, dove into the bank’s shallow waters with a sign reading “Youth Strike for Climate.” She had a simple point to make: that the pursuit of minerals from the seafloor, without understanding the consequences, was not the route to a green transition. She said: “Seagrasses have been underestimated for a long time now.” Scientist and climate activist Shaama Sandooyea boarded a ship for the first time to carry out an underwater protest at the world’s largest seagrass meadow at the Saya de Malha Bank in the Indian Ocean in March 2021, as a part of Greta Thunberg’s Friday for Futures movement. (Greenpeace / The Outlaw Ocean Project) Raking the watersIn 2015, an infamously scofflaw fleet of more than 70 bottom trawlers from Thailand fished in the Saya de Malha Bank. Their catch would be turned into protein-rich fishmeal that gets fed to chickens, pigs and aquaculture fish. At least 30 of them had arrived in the bank after fleeing crackdowns on fishing violations in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, according to a report from Greenpeace. The Thai government was not yet a member of the Southern Indian Ocean Fisheries Agreement, so none of the vessels were approved to fish in the bank by the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission. Thus, the Thai ships skirted international oversight bodies meant to protect this area of water. Thailand’s director-general of the Department of Fisheries later confirmed the vessels were “operating in an area free of regulatory control.”The impact of the Thai fishmeal fleet was “catastrophic” to the Saya de Mahla Bank, according to researchers from Monaco Explorations. “It seems remarkable that the Thai government permitted its fishing fleet to commence trawl fishing,” the organization said in its final report. “Even a cursory glance” at the existing literature should have dissuaded any trawling, the researchers added, questioning whether the Thai government’s decision to approve trawling was a “case of complete negligence” or a “deliberate policy to trawl the bank prior to joining Southern Indian Ocean Fisheries Agreement.” The Thai fishmeal trawlers have continued to return annually to the Saya de Malha Bank but typically with fewer vessels than in 2015. In 2023, only two trawlers were still authorized by the Southern Indian Ocean Fisheries Agreement.More recently, the bigger fishing presence in the Saya de Malha Bank consists of Taiwanese tuna longliners and Sri Lankan gillnetters. More than 230 vessels fished in the vicinity of the Saya de Malha Bank between January 2021 and January 2024. Most of these ships (over 100) were from Sri Lanka and were gillnetters, according to data from Global Fishing Watch. The second-largest group were from Taiwan (over 70). At least 13 of these ships from Taiwan and four from Sri Lanka have been reprimanded by their national authorities for illegal or unregulated fishing, with transgressions including the illegal transport of shark fins or shark carcasses with their fins removed, the falsification of catch reports, and illegal fishing in the waters of countries including Mauritius and Seychelles.The presence of these ships poses a dire threat to biodiversity in the bank, according to ocean scientists. Jessica Gephart, a fisheries-science professor at the University of Washington, explained that the Saya de Malha Bank is a breeding ground for humpback and blue whales that can be injured or killed by ship collisions. The worry is that fishing vessels may not just cut down the seagrass, warned James Fourqurean, a biology professor at Florida International University. These ships also risk causing turbidity, making the water opaque by stirring up the seafloor, and thereby harming the balance of species and food pyramid.There aren’t really any laws or treaties that protect the Saya de Malha Bank. International institutions known as regional fisheries-management organizations are supposed to regulate fishing activities in high seas areas such as the bank. They are responsible for establishing binding measures for the conservation and sustainable management of highly migratory fish species. Their roles and jurisdictions vary, but most can impose management measures such as catch limits. These organizations are often criticized by ocean conservationists, however, because their rules only apply to signatory countries and are crafted by consensus, which opens the process to industry influence and political pressure, according to a 2024 Greenpeace report.The Saya de Malha, as an archetypal example of these limitations, is governed by the Southern Indian Oceans Fisheries Agreement. Sri Lanka, the home of the bank’s largest fleet, is not a signatory. Far away from human rightsWith near-shore stocks overfished in Thailand and Sri Lanka, vessel owners send their crews farther and farther from shore in search of a worthwhile catch. That is what makes the Saya de Malha — far from land, poorly monitored and with a bountiful ecosystem — so attractive. But the fishers forced to work there live a precarious existence, and for some, the long journey to the Saya de Malha is the last they ever take.Sri Lankan gillnetters make some of the longest trips in the least equipped boats. In October 2022, a British American couple encountered a Sri Lankan gillnet boat in the bank. The crew had been at sea for two weeks and had only caught four fish, so they begged the couple for supplies. After the encounter, the Sri Lankans remained at sea for another six months.Some vessels also engage in transshipment, offloading their catch without returning to shore, which can lead to prolonged periods at sea and increased risks. In 2016, six Cambodian crew members died from beriberi, a preventable disease, onboard a Thai fishmeal trawler. The Thai government linked the deaths to hard labor, long hours and poor diet, while Greenpeace found evidence of forced labor.Today, fewer vessels from the Thai fleet are traveling to the Saya de Malha Bank, but questions about working conditions on Thai vessels persist. In 2023, a crew member named Ae Khunsena died under suspicious circumstances, with his family suspecting foul play, while officials ruled it a suicide. VIDEO | 06:36 Saya de Malha: Far from shore Share via Creating a new nationVast and sometimes brutal, the high seas are also a place of aspiration, reinvention and an escape from rules. This is why the oceans have long been a magnet for libertarians hoping to flee governments, taxes and other people by creating their own sovereign micronations in international waters.The Saya de Malha Bank has been a prime target for such ambitions. Covered with seagrass and interspersed with small coral reefs, the bank is among the largest submerged ocean plateaus in the world — less than 33 feet deep in some areas. Near the equator, the water is a balmy 73.4 degrees to 82.4 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on the season. Waves are broken in the shallower areas. But the biggest allure is that the bank is hundreds of miles beyond the jurisdictional reach of any nation’s laws.On March 9, 1997, an architect named Wolf Hilbertz and a marine biologist named Thomas Goreau sailed to the bank. Launching from Victoria, the capital of the Seychelles, the voyage took three days. With solar panels, metal scaffolding and cornerstones, they began constructing their vision for a sovereign micronation that they planned to call Autopia — the place that builds itself.In 2002, the two men returned to the bank in three sailboats with a team of architects, cartographers and marine biologists from several countries to continue building. They intended to erect their dwellings on top of existing coral, reinforcing steel scaffolding using a patented process that Hilbertz had developed called Biorock, a substance formed by the electro-accumulation of materials dissolved in seawater. This involved sinking steel frames into the shallow waters, then putting these steel poles under a weak direct electrical current. Little by little, limestone is deposited on the steel poles and at their base, creating an ideal habitat for corals and other shellfish and marine animals.Rushing because a cyclone was headed their way in a matter of days, the team built in six days a steel structure five by five by two meters high, anchored in the seabed and charged by a small onboard battery. In later interviews, Hilbertz, who was a professor at the University of Houston, said he hoped to use building materials with a lower carbon footprint and create a self-sufficient settlement in the sea “that belongs to the residents who live and work there, a living laboratory in which new environmental technologies are developed.” His plans ultimately stalled for lack of funds.Two decades later, a 58-year-old Italian businessman named Samuele Landi began promoting a new vision for a micronation in the Saya de Malha Bank. He planned to park a massive barge near the seagrass patch far from the reach of extradition and police. A gifted computer programmer, avid skydiver and motorcycle racer, Landi had been a man on the lam for roughly a decade. Accused of fraud after his company, Eutelia, declared bankruptcy in 2010, Landi and some of its executives were tried and convicted in Italy. Landi was sentenced in absentia to 14 years, which led him to relocate to Dubai where he dabbled in crypto, hid money in Switzerland and skated around extradition treaties.While living comfortably in Dubai, he registered companies in bespoke tax-free zones, and eventually procured diplomatic credentials from Liberia, according to a New York Times profile.As he prepared this plan for moving to the Saya de Malha Bank, Landi purchased an initial 800-ton deck barge that he named Aisland. Anchoring it roughly 30 miles off the coast of Dubai, he lived on the vessel with three sailors, a cook and five cats. In 2022, Samuele Landi bought an initial 800-ton deck barge that he named Aisland and anchored roughly 30 miles off the coast of Dubai, where he lived with three sailors, a cook and five cats. (The Legend of Landi by Oswald Horowitz / The Outlaw Ocean Project) Aisland’s deck was fitted with six blue shipping containers bolted in place—living quarters, equipped with solar-powered air conditioners and a desalination system. Landi stayed there for over a year as he raised money to buy another barge twice as large as the Aisland. He even hired an architect named Peter de Vries to help design plans for the refit of the new barge so that it could sail to the Saya de Malha Bank and survive there. Landi hoped to eventually create a floating city consisting of about 20 barges, which would, by 2028, house thousands of permanent residents in luxury villas and apartments. Since the Saya de Malha Bank has been known to entice pirates and other sea marauders, Landi also planned to mount a Gatling gun on the Aisland. “That’s one of these guns that fires 1,000 rounds a minute — very heavy-duty stuff,” De Vries said in an interview with the Times.The movement to create sovereign states on the high seas has a colorful history. Typically such projects have been imbued with the view that government was a kind of kryptonite that weakened entrepreneurialism. Many held a highly optimistic outlook on technology and its potential to solve human problems. The founders of these micronations — in the 2000s quite a few dot-com tycoons — were usually men of means, steeped in Ayn Rand and Thomas Hobbes. Conceptualized as self-sufficient, self-governing, sea-bound communities, the vision for these waterborne cities was part libertarian utopia, part billionaire’s playground. Fittingly, they have been called, in more recent years, seasteads, after the homesteads of the American West.In 2008, these visionaries united around a nonprofit organization called the Seasteading Institute. Based in San Francisco, the organization was founded by Patri Friedman, a Google software engineer and grandson of Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist best known for his ideas about the limitations of government. The institute’s primary benefactor was Peter Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist and the co-founder of PayPal who donated more than $1.25 million to the organization and related projects. Thiel also invested in a startup venture called Blueseed. Its purpose was to solve a thorny problem affecting many Silicon Valley companies: how to attract engineers and entrepreneurs who lacked American work permits or visas. Blueseed planned to anchor a floating residential barge in international waters off the coast of Northern California. Never getting beyond the drawing-board phase, Blueseed failed to raise the money necessary to sustain itself.The reality is that the ocean is a far less inviting place than architectural renderings tend to suggest. At sea, there is plenty of wind, wave and solar energy, but building renewable-energy systems that can survive the weather and corrosive seawater is difficult and costly.On Feb. 2, 2024, Landi and his crew tragically learned this hard lesson. The Aisland was slammed by a rogue wave, which breached the hull, breaking the barge in two. Two members of Landi’s crew survived by clinging onto pieces of wood until a passing vessel rescued them the next day. Landi and the two remaining seafarers died. According to Italian news reports, Landi put out a call for help, but it didn’t come in time. His body was found several days later, when it washed up on the beach about 40 miles up the coastline from Dubai. Vanishing protectors and predatorsIn November 2022, a research expedition by the environmental nonprofit Monaco Explorations took one of the largest and most advanced research vessels in the world to Saya de Malha. The goal was to document a seafloor famously lush in seagrass, corals, turtles, dugongs, rays and sharks. However, during the three weeks that the research team combed the waters of the Saya de Malha Bank, they spotted not a single shark. 1/3 Researchers investigating the Saya de Malha Bank in 2022. (Monaco Explorations) 2/3 Researchers investigating the Saya de Malha Bank in 2022. (Monaco Explorations) 3/3 Researchers investigating the Saya de Malha Bank in 2022. (Monaco Explorations) The likely culprit, according to the scientists, was a fleet of more than 200 fishing ships that have in recent years targeted these remote waters.Sharks play a critical role in the ecosystem as guardians of the seagrass, policing populations of turtles and other animals that would mow down all the seagrass if left unchecked. Catching sharks is not easy, nor is it usually inadvertent. In tuna longlining, the ship uses a line made of thick microfilament, sometimes stretching as long as 40 miles, with baited hooks attached at intervals. Many tuna longliners use special steel leads designed not to break when the sharks, bigger and stronger than the tuna, try to yank themselves free.To offset poverty wages, ship captains typically allow their crew to supplement their income by keeping the fins to sell at port, off books. To avoid wasting space in the ship hold, deckhands usually throw the rest of the shark back into the water after they cut off the fins, which can sell for a hundred times the cost of the rest of the meat (except in countries such as Sri Lanka and Ecuador where there is a market for the meat). It’s a wasteful process and a slow death, as the sharks, still alive but unable to swim, sink to the seafloor. When the Imula 763 returned to Beruwala port in Sri Lanka in August 2024 after fishing in the Saya de Malha Bank, another vessel, the Imula 624, was in the same port where fishermen were cutting up sharks. (Amazing Fish Cutting / The Outlaw Ocean Project) In 2015, more than 50 Thai fishing vessels, primarily bottom trawlers, descended on the Saya de Malha Bank to drag their nets over the ocean floor and scoop up brushtooth lizardfish and round scad, much of which was transported back to shore to be ground into fishmeal. Two survivors of trafficking who worked in the Saya de Malha Bank on two of the vessels — the Kor Navamongkolchai 1 and Kor Navamongkolchai 8 — told Greenpeace that up to 50% of their catch had been sharks. Since then, the Thai presence in the Saya de Malha Bank has diminished, and in 2024 only two Thai vessels targeted the area.The Sri Lankans have continued to fish the bank intensely. Of the more than 100 Sri Lankan vessels that have fished in the Saya de Malha since January 2022, when the country’s fleet first began broadcasting vessel locations publicly, about half use gillnets, according to vessel data from the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission. Gillnetters hang wide panels of netting in the water, keeping them attached to the surface via floating lines. These particular gillnetters operate across the Indian Ocean, and a number of the vessels were observed at the bank by the 2022 Monaco Explorations expedition. Sharks are especially vulnerable to gillnets, which account for 64% of shark catches recorded by the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission. Sri Lankan vessels have historically targeted sharks in the country’s national waters, but as domestic stocks of sharks have been decimated, the Sri Lankan fleet moved into the high seas, areas including the Saya de Malha Bank. (The Fishcutter) Historically, Sri Lankan vessels have targeted sharks in domestic waters. Between 2014 and 2016, for example, 84% of reported shark catches came from domestic vessels, according to research into the Sri Lankan shark and ray trade published in 2021. But as domestic populations declined, vessels, among them the fleet of gillnetters, moved to the high seas, leading to a new boom in the fin trade. Sri Lanka’s annual exports of fins quadrupled in the last decade, according to UN Comtrade data, with 110 tons exported in 2023, primarily to Hong Kong, compared with just 28 tons in 2013. VIDEO | 04:32 Saya de Malha: The vanishing predators Share via Tracking data also show that more than 40 of the Sri Lankan vessels do not publicly broadcast their location while in the bank, making it impossible for conservationists to fully understand what’s going on.In August 2024, a Sri Lanka vessel that fished in the Saya de Malha between March and June 2024 was detained by Sri Lankan authorities with over half a ton of oceanic white-tip shark carcasses aboard, all with their fins removed. Catching oceanic white-tip sharks is prohibited under Sri Lankan law, as is the removal of shark fins at sea. This was not an isolated incident: Sri Lankan authorities have seized illegally harvested shark fins on at least 25 separate occasions since January 2021, according to press releases from the Sri Lankan Coast Guard.Why should anyone care about the disappearance of sharks in the Saya de Malha Bank?Ernest Hemingway once described going bankrupt as something that happens gradually ... and then suddenly. The extinction of species is like bankruptcy, and when it finally occurs, there’s no going back. If we keep draining the bank of one of its previous riches, a “sudden” reckoning may be soon. Additional reporting and writing by Outlaw Ocean Project staff, including Maya Martin, Joe Galvin, Susan Ryan and Austin Brush.
