• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Love of water runs deep for Hub marine biologist

Posted on: Wednesday, 2 July 2003, 06:00 CDT

He's swum with sharks in the South Pacific, explored beneath Antarctic icebergs and collaborated on underwater documentaries with "Jaws" author Peter Benchley.

So where did New England Aquarium marine biologist Gregory S. Stone learn to go off the deep end? Florida? Hawaii?

Try the Framingham YMCA pool.

"I was just completely fixated on (the sea) from the time I was about 6 years old," said the 46-year-old explorer, whose dry-land job is vice president of global marine programs at the aquarium.

Blame it on childhood outings to Nantasket Beach, Jacques Cousteau documentaries and "Sea Hunt," the Eisenhower-era TV show starring Lloyd Bridges as an adventure-seeking frogman.

Stone grew up wanting to pursue life on the high seas: fishing, science, even cruise ships. He worked through college diving for scallops in the frigid waters off Maine - perfect training for the numbing depths (29.5 degrees) off Antarctica.

His association with the aquarium goes back 30 years; as a teenage volunteer, he once fed the fish and mopped the floors. These days, he oversees the institution's marine conservation efforts, spending four to six months a year in the field and the remainder in Boston.

"I like it here," said Stone, watching afternoon traffic creep along the Central Artery from his fourth-floor office in the historic Grain and Wheat Exchange Building, where the aquarium houses its administration. "It's a nice contrast to where I am when I'm in the field."

The field is a thousand miles from any gridlock, let alone a hospital or Starbucks, in places such as Antarctica's Ross Sea or the Phoenix Islands in the remote South Pacific nation of Kirabati.

In addition to articles for scientific journals, Stone recounts these trips in magazines (including several features for National Geographic), books and films ("Ice Island" is his companion book to an IMAX film about Antarctica's largest iceberg).

"The days of ivory-tower science are falling behind us," Stone said. ". . . You've got to get (the research) back in the public arena."

He hopes the animated Pixar creatures of "Finding Nemo" get people thinking about the ocean.

"That's the kind of thing we need," said Stone, who keeps a plastic-toy angler fish on his bookshelf. "We need to bring the ocean into the public's mind like George Lucas brought space into the public's mind."

But public and political interest in galaxies far, far away provides space exploration with support that dwarfs the amount of funding and attention in undersea exploration. Stone likes to cite the case of Aquarius, a sea-floor habitat off Key Largo, Fla., that is the ocean-going equivalent of the space station.

"One space shuttle launch could fund this program for 500 years," Stone said.

"There is not anywhere near an equal focus. We know more about the backside of the moon than we do the sea floor."

What scientists do know about the state of the planet's oceans is troubling. Commercial fishing has wiped out 90 percent of large predatory fish species while global warming, dynamite and poison have damaged much of the world's coral reefs.

"The oceans are in bad shape," Stone said.

"They are the primary life-support system for planet Earth," he continued. "We've got plenty of other dusty, cold planets in our solar system that would show people what life would be like without an ocean."

To gather base-line data, Stone sailed last year to the Phoenix Islands, a scattering of still-pristine coral atolls 1,000 miles north of Fiji. These deserted isles, where Herman Melville set the final showdown in "Moby-Dick," will likely be swallowed by rising ocean levels in the next 100 years.

After embarking on dozens of dives, discovering new species of coral and exploring shipwrecks, Stone headed back to Boston for meetings, fund-raisers, data crunching - and r & r.

"I don't want to be in the field all the time," Stone said. "It's hard . . . I can tell you that on every expedition there are a half- dozen moments where I sit around going, I'd like to be home now.

"Because I travel so much for work, the idea of getting on an airplane (for vacation) and going off somewhere exotic is not at all attractive to me . . . I enjoy a long weekend in Maine more than anything."

Caption: OCEAN EXPLORER: Gregory S. Stone has spent his career studying the deep sea. STAFF PHOTO BY RENEE DEKONA

Caption: LIFE'S WORK: Since he was a boy, Gregory S. Stone, vice president of global marine programs at the New England Aquarium, has loved the ocean. STAFF PHOTO BY RENEE DEKONA

More News in this Category