AustraliaQuest is an interactive expedition developed by Classroom Connect. For five weeks a team of scientists and explorers will examine the ancient culture of the Aborigines and attempt to determine how it affects their modern existence.

Welcome to the Great Barrier Reef

The TUSA IV, the team's dive boat

I'm feeling very small at the moment. It's 1:30 p.m. and the white-hot blister of the sun burns directly overhead. The sky is neither cloudy nor clear, nor does it lie flat against the heavens. Instead, a vast, milky dome touches the sea in a silver, shimmering line on the horizon. Our boat, a tiny speck on a pewter ocean, floats alone 130 miles off of Australia's northeastern coast. Beneath us stretches the largest structure of living organisms on the planet.

No quest of Australia is complete without an exploration of the Great Barrier Reef. The statistics speak for themselves: Bigger than England and half the size of Texas, the reef stretches 1,200 miles encompassing some 900 islands. It contains 3,000 individual reefs, a single one of which may have more species of fish than the entire Atlantic Ocean. Scientists have recorded 4,000 types of clams, 400 kinds of corals, 1,500 species of fish and countless thousands of worms, sponges, crustaceans, and jellyfish.

VIDEO View the team's daily movie feature on the AustraliaQuest site Play video     More on AustraliaQuest from Classroom Connect: Quest Critters Set the Course Mystery Photo Quest Map        MORE REPORTS COMING SOON Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7 Day 8 Day 9 Day 10 Day 11 Day 12 Day 13 Day 14 Day 15 Day 16 Day 17 Day 18 Day 19 Day 20 Day 21 Day 22 Day 23 Day 24 Day 25

Dangers abound here. The great white shark's reputation is well known (two people were eaten off of southern Australia last month), but did you know some of the most venomous creatures on Earth live in the Great Barrier Reef? The four-inch-long blue-ringed octopus' bite is foremost among them. They say that you never feel the bullet that kills you. No one has ever felt a blue-ringed octopus bite, but in minutes it paralyzes respiratory muscles and you suffocate to death. Its bite, which contains the most potent, biological toxins known to man, packs enough venom to kill 10-25 people.

Then there's the box jellyfish, probably the biggest killer of all. It's nearly invisible, and, as the name suggests, looks like goop in your hand. But during summer months here, some offshore areas are practically jellyfish soup. Their stinging tentacles contain three types of poisons -- a skin destroyer, a blood destroyer and the fatal nerve toxin -- and have killed hundreds of people.

Add to this giant moray eels, highly venomous undersea snakes, stingrays, and poison-spiked stonefish, and you have plenty to worry about when you jump overboard. My two personal nightmares: The striated cone that shoots a poisonous harpoon into its prey (it has fatally harpooned victims who've picked up this pretty shell and put it in their pocket), and the electric ray that delivers a 200-volt shock.

We're here because last spring during AmericaQuest our online collaborators voted for us to focus on the Great Barrier Reef as part of AustraliaQuest. But our mission, to find and articulate Aboriginal wisdom, hasn't exactly lent itself to underwater exploration. Only now is the connection coming into view.

Sherri dives off the boat, with Lizzard Island in the background

The Great Barrier Reef has been called the "canary in the coal mine" of the global environment. It's an amazingly fragile structure strictly requiring clear, salty water between the temperatures of 17.5 degrees and 28.2 degrees Celsius. If it doesn't get what it needs, it reacts quickly. It dies. When coral dies on the Great Barrier Reef, it's a bad omen for the rest of the world.

So where's the connection? Four weeks of interacting with Aborigines have taught us a few key rules for interacting with our environment. They all boil down to treading lightly on the land and treating it as something you care for, not something you own. So, our job for the next week as we explore the world's most famous undersea structure is to assess its health and see if any Aboriginal land management rules can extend to the sea. As always, we need your help in choosing where we focus our energies help with the mysteries posed by scientists.

We've brought aboard a few top-notch experts to help us this week. Ernie Kovacs, a veteran of two previous Quests, will serve as the team's underwater videographer and underwater biologist. Master Divers Jeff Smith and Fred Colburn from Pacific Wilderness will lead our diving outings (we're more at home on bike seats than in wet suits). The witty and urbane writer, Remar Sutton, is still on-board too.

As we venture into the deep, we'll be pondering the same questions we have on land -- questions that impact our collective future. By the end of this week, we hope to come up with some answers.

Flippers Up!
Dan Buettner

AustraliaQuest
Classroom Connect