Mark J.Spalding.jpgMark J. Spalding, President of The Ocean Foundation, has been appointed to the Sargasso Sea Commission by the Government of Bermuda.  The Sargasso Sea Commission was established pursuant to the Hamilton Declaration on Collaboration for the Conservation of the Sargasso Sea, signed on 11 March 2014, by the governments of the Azores, Bermuda, Monaco, the United Kingdom, and the United States.  

The Commission will exercise a stewardship role for the Sargasso Sea and keep its health, productivity and resilience this unique open-ocean ecosystem under continual review. The Commission is the result of three years of work by the Sargasso Sea Alliance, and operates as a stand-alone legal entity established by Bermudian and US law. Since 2010, the Sargasso Sea Alliance (SSA), led by the Government of Bermuda, has pushed to establish safeguard measures for the Sargasso Sea, a unique two-million-square nautical mile ecosystem in the North Atlantic that is without effective legal protection, placing it at risk of long-lasting harm due to overfishing, pollution and more.

SSA_Geographical_Area.jpg

The Sargasso Sea Geographical Area of Collaboration (map from Annex I of the Hamilton Declaration).  This map shows the known and predicted seamounts beneath the Sargasso Sea.