THE WORLD'S OCEANS ARE DYING

RIGHT BEFORE OUR EYES

- AC SHILTON

SeaLegacy uses advanced tech to broadcast the destruction of humanity's most vital resource from its 62-foot sailboat-and it's impossible to look away.

IT'S AN HOUR BEFORE DAWN, SOMEWHERE OFF THE COAST OF BAJA, MEXICO.

One of the eight residents of the SeaLegacy 1, a 62-foot sailboat, is beginning to stir from their bunk. It's hard to sleep in late-for one thing, the quarters are cramped. Once someone is up, everyone is up. But also, occupants of this vessel are in a race against time, and the sense of urgency in their work pulses louder than any alarm clock. Today, they're hoping to film fevers of mobula rays, or possibly pods of giant blue whales, or maybe orcas.

The SeaLegacy 1 is the office, home, and workshop of Paul Nicklen, 54, and Cristina Mittermeier, 58, life partners and two of the co-founders of SeaLegacy, a small organization of photographers and videographers documenting ocean destruction in real time. In theory, Nicklen and Mittermeier's job is simple: They publish images from their perch in the Pacific. In practice, Nicklen and Mittermeier also have to make people care. And they have to do it all from the sailboat's closet-turned-media room outfitted with one small desk for their MacBooks and a shelf of hard drives.

It's a setup that has only recently been made possible by digital leaps forward.

"It was just a few years ago that when you would dive with an IMAX camera, it weighed 500 pounds. It took two divers to operate it," Nicklen says. When the team hauled that camera back up to the boat, "You had to take that film and put it in cold storage, and then you had to fly it out immediately before humidity got to it." And then it couldn't be dealt with until the SeaLegacy team returned to their desktop computers at their home office in Canada.