Wild Tobago

At depths that could kill a diver, Dr Judith Gobin explores the deep ocean off Tobago and Trinidad. She talks with Dr Anjani Ganase (Twitter: @AnjGanase) about her adventures on EV Nautilus; and pleads for further scientific exploration and knowledge of these areas before they are destroyed .  “ I’ve always loved the sea. As a little girl, I enjoyed amazing vacations at Mayaro, fascinated by the sea, its animals and fish. Swimming, snorkelling and scuba diving became passions.” Dr. Judith Gobin is a senior lecturer in Marine Biology at the Department of Life Sciences and Deputy Dean for Undergraduate Affairs in the Faculty of Science and Technology, at the University of the West Indies (UWI). Her passion for discovery in the marine environment led her through university and the experience as a summer intern at the Institute of Marine Affairs solidified her career in marine biology. She spent 15 years in marine research at the IMA. Now she has over 35 years of research exp...

The Caribbean archipelago is a chain of small islands in a vast deep ocean. Here Dr. Diva Amon explores the underwater volcano, Kick’em Jenny, off Grenada. Dr. Amon is a deep-sea biologist with experience in chemosynthetic habitats and human impacts on the deep sea. You can find out more via her Twitter (https://twitter.com/DivaAmon) and her website (https://divaamon.com/). The Kick’em Jenny (KEJ) volcano first rumbled into the public eye on July 23, 1939, when it shot a cloud of steam and debris 275m up into the air, and sent 2-metre tsunamis to the shores of Grenada, the Grenadines and Barbados. While KEJ may be a looming threat to us here in Trinidad and Tobago, we usually fail to look past that, never stopping to ponder what strange environments and animals may lurk beneath the Grenadian seas down on the slopes of the volcano. KEJ is the only active submarine volcano in the Caribbean, created by the subduction of the Atlantic Plate below the Caribbean Plate, and i...