Wreck site “a science experiment”

Quest is in worse condition than expected based on side-scan sonar images captured following the Society’s 2024 discovery of the wreck. It’s not the Quest many on the team were hoping to see, admits Antoine Normandin, the expedition’s research director. However, by the time the Falcon ROV had finished its initial reconnaissance in the early hours of July 7, Normandin’s disappointment had turned to excitement about the scientific value of the wreck site.

“Quest in itself is now becoming a science experiment,” he says. The ship underwent many changes and refits over its 45-year lifespan: deck cabins were added and removed, the engine was upgraded from steam to diesel and the bow and stern were completely rebuilt following the Second World War. The different materials present on the ship at the time of her sinking have lent themselves to colonization by different types of marine animals, creating visible layers of biodiversity around the wreck. For instance, soft corals have tended to congregate around the top of the bow, feeding on the plankton carried by the stronger currents above the seabed and dive teams have captured spotted wolffish — a threatened species in Canada — hiding within the structure.

A shipwreck is a brand-new habitat “literally falling out of the sky,” says WHOI biologist Kirstin Meyer-Kaiser, an expert in deep-water ecology. After 60 years on the seabed, Quest has become a thriving ecosystem. “It’s really cool to me that the impact of human history is that we’re creating a habitat. We’re increasing biodiversity on the local scale of the wreck, and maybe also on the regional scale because now it’s a stepping stone for some of those things to spread.”

It’s fitting that Quest, which supported so much geographical research and discovery in her life, “is still a research vessel in a different way,” says Normandin.

The presence of trawling nets is also a stark reminder of the problem of ghost gear, or lost and abandoned fishing gear, which poses an entanglement hazard to wildlife, contributes to plastic pollution in the ocean and interferes with the study and preservation of marine archeological sites. Quest lies within a trawling exclusion zone colloquially known as the Hawke Box, which was designated in 2002 at the request of snow crab fishers in southern Labrador who were concerned about the impacts of intensive shrimp trawling on juvenile crab. “It shows that even if trawling has been stopped [here] for 25 years, the impact on the seabed is still there, and it will be there after 100 years,” says David Mearns, co-chief scientist for the expedition.