TO GO BOLDLY

Explorers supported by Rolex's Perpetual Planet Initiative ask the question: What if the final frontier is not up in space but down below in our marine animal forests? In search of an answer, Augustman headed out to the Caribbean waters around Basse-Terre, embedded with eco-Avengers Luiz Rocha and Under The Pole's Ghislain Bardout and Emmanuelle Périé-Bardout

-  JONATHAN HO

THOUGH WE THINK WE HAVE NOT experienced a catastrophic cataclysm in our lifetime, on 26 April 1986, the world actually witnessed a near apocalypse: a series of human mistakes and failures leading to the world’s worst-ever civil nuclear incident.

Deadly radioactivity set off alarms at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden over 1,000 km away, instantly depopulating entire towns, a city, and affecting ecological systems disastrously for decades. For those flora, fauna or human life that survived, they coped with cancers, mutations and physiological barrenness.

A similar disaster is taking place not over the course of a few days, but instead across a steady progression of years with the consequences of a global catastrophe instead of a regional one. Rolex launched the Perpetual Planet Initiative in 2019 supporting individuals and organisations using science to understand the world’s environmental challenges and devise solutions that will restore balance to our ecosystems, and explorers like Rolex Laureate Luiz Rocha and Under The Pole’s Ghislain Bardout and Emmanuelle Périé-Bardout are fast discovering that our oceans are not quite as vast (and untouched) as we imagined.

SEEKING NEW LIFE, NEW FRONTIERS