Almost a decade ago, the container ship MV Rena ran hard aground on Astrolabe Reef off Tauranga on New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty. The ship, carrying 2,100 containers and 1,700 tonnes of heavy fuel, would break up resulting in New Zealand’s worst marine ecological disaster. It resulted in a $700 million salvage operation to remove the wreckage, along with scattered debris on the reef.
Tauranga diver and ecologist Phil Ross has been monitoring the wreckage of the Rena since 2012, making dives at least yearly to monitor how the reef is recovering from the damage done by the grounding,
Sunlive,co.nz reports that his latest dive in December 2020 shows the stark contrast to his first dive in 2012 where the reef looked like a “scrapheap” littered with tyres, broken containers and twisted steel.
“It looked like someone had taken a ship, tipped it upside down, shaken everything out of it and then jumped up and down on it,” Phil says.
“Looking at it then I couldn’t imagine how it would recover but through the process of salvaging that debris field got taken away and allowed the reef to recover.”
Here is a short video survey of how the reef is reclaiming what is left of the wreckage of the MV Rena.
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