Wet and weary scientists dunked their scuba gear in bins of fresh water after climbing back aboard the Oscar Elton Sette, a 224-foot research vessel idling off the coast of Niʻihau.

They’d just finished a series of shakedown dives in preparation for their next three weeks on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s cruise assessing the health of reefs inside Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.

The nearly 600,000-square-mile protected area in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands includes dozens of tiny islands and atolls but is mostly a vast expanse of unexplored ocean. Its incredibly rich biodiversity and cross section of culture and history have kept the trip’s chief scientist, Randy Kosaki, spellbound for decades.

But on this second day of the cruise, instead of joining the divers, he’s hunkered down in his stateroom, glued to the computer screen on his desk.

Streaming live on his laptop is the first presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. More than 67 million people had tuned in, looking for policy differences on immigration, the economy and defense spending.

For Kosaki, what’s at stake is this remote stretch of the Hawaiian archipelago, a place revered for its environment, culture and history.

The marine national monument was created under the Antiquities Act, which lets presidents unilaterally declare them and unilaterally undo them. Trump shrunk another monument — Bears Ears National Monument in Utah — by 85%, although President Joe Biden restored it.

Historically, this had rarely if ever happened. Monuments were made, and then left alone. That changed with Trump.

And so even while out at sea on a science expedition, Kosaki leaned on the ship’s fragile Wi-Fi connection to give him a window into which candidate might have the edge heading into the Nov. 5. election.

Papahānaumokuākea is integral to Kosaki’s job as deputy superintendent of research and field operations for NOAA. And he doesn’t see its protection as a partisan issue; over the past two decades he has worked under Republican and Democratic administrations.

He recalls shaking former First Lady Laura Bush’s hand after she came to Hawaiʻi to announce the name of the monument as Papahānaumokuākea — honoring the Hawaiian gods said to have given rise to the archipelago and its native inhabitants — after President George W. Bush created it in 2006. And he remembers President Barack Obama nearly quadrupling its size in 2016, making it the world’s largest protected place at the time.

The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands have received layers of bipartisan protection for over a century. Worried about seabird poachers, President Theodore Roosevelt established the Hawaiian Islands Bird Reservation in 1909, the first federal move to protect the area.

But those protections have never felt less certain than they did under Trump, whose administration put Papahānaumokuākea on a short list of national monuments that should be repealed or significantly downsized.

It never ended up happening during his time in office, but anxiety rose with the prospect of Trump returning to office in January.

Kosaki inches closer to his monitor as the presidential debate moderator asks the candidates what they would do about climate change — an ongoing threat to the monument, already battered by coral bleaching, rising seas and stronger storms.

He leans back in his chair after neither candidate directly answers the question. Harris underscored that the threat is real; Trump said little but has expressed conflicting views ranging from calling it an “expensive hoax” to describing it as an issue important to him.

As an insurance policy, Democratic U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaiʻi and other backers of Papahānaumokuākea, including fellow Hawaiʻi Rep. Ed Case, have been pushing forward a plan to designate the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and the waters around them a national marine sanctuary, instead of just a monument.

“I’m very much in favor of it because it is sort of a way to ensure that it is not subject to the whims of any individual president,” Schatz said.

Papahānaumokuākea protects 7,000 species, including fish, seaweed and birds found nowhere else. New species are discovered regularly as divers descend to new depths in new places.

But the protections it provides go beyond the environment.

The monument includes hundreds of downed planes from the Battle of Midway during World War II, sunken whaling ships that ran aground in the 1800s and cultural artifacts from Polynesian voyagers who discovered the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands around 1000 A.D.

A sanctuary designation would likely strengthen protections for the region beyond doubling down on the monument’s ban on commercial fishing and mining, and its highly restricted access. It would add an enforcement authority, giving NOAA the ability to create emergency regulations in any natural or human-caused disaster as well as assessing civil penalties and holding those responsible accountable by recouping damages. That could bring in additional revenue to manage the monument.

The Office of National Marine Sanctuaries has provided funding for the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef Ecosystem Reserve since it was created in 2000, which would continue under a sanctuary designation, according to Eric Roberts, NOAA’s Honolulu-based superintendent of Papahānaumokuākea.

Most importantly to supporters, a sanctuary would be much harder to reverse.

It’s now a race against the clock to beat the inauguration of a new president, or at least move the designation process along as far as possible before that happens.

NOAA is expected to release its final environmental impact statement — the next step in the timeline — later this fall or early winter. It’s currently going through the clearance process with the Department of Commerce and White House, Roberts said.

After the EIS is done, NOAA must wait 30 days before releasing its final rule. That triggers the final step, a holding period of 45 days in a continuous congressional session, which could happen in January. That’s when Congress can let the designation go forward as proposed or make changes.

Congress directed NOAA in late 2020 to start the process of designating Papahānaumokuākea a national marine sanctuary, maintaining the same boundaries while expanding on the monument’s rules. It developed draft plans and held public listening sessions in April throughout Hawaiʻi.

From Hanalei to Hilo, the agency got an earful. Kosaki said the comments from Hawaiians on Kauai were especially interesting. The Office of National Marine Sanctuaries also sifted through nearly 14,000 written comments and drafted responses that will be included in the final EIS.

“We were expecting angry fishermen,” Kosaki said of the Hanalei listening session, noting that the state Division of Conservation and Resources Enforcement had armed officers present just in case. “We got a few of those, but mostly we got people, I think, that wanted to be heard and wanted to feel heard, especially those that are kind of like lineal descendants of people that have some kind of tie to the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.”

The Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, which advises NOAA on fishing policies that govern 1.5 million square miles of federal waters, opposed the monument’s creation from the outset. The council underscored concerns that restricting access to certain waters would dig into the profits of the Honolulu-based commercial longline tuna fleet.

In her May letter to NOAA, Wespac Executive Director Kitty Simonds said the sanctuary designation is “unwarranted.” She renewed calls to allow Native Hawaiians to fish in the monument for subsistence, which is already permitted, but then also be able to pay for their trip by selling their catch. NOAA rejected Wespac’s proposal, saying it amounts to a commercial activity.

The Papahānaumokuākea Native Hawaiian Cultural Working Group, co-chaired by Kekuewa Kikiloi and Pelika Andrade, has cited industrial fishing as a specific threat to the monument.

“Because there is some risk that the existing protections afforded the Papahānaumokuākea National Marine Monument could be curtailed by a future president, the protections afforded via a sanctuary designation, even where duplicative of those applicable to the monument, are necessary,” the group said in its testimony to NOAA.

Roberts said that even though he feels confident about what’s happened so far in the designation process over the past three years, the election is “the wild card.”

After the Harris-Trump debate wraps up, Kosaki shuts off his laptop. Political pundits would tout Harris’ firm control, and Trump would refuse her invitation to debate again — both encouraging signs to conservationists who want to keep the monument intact and add the sanctuary designation.

As he heads down a deck for dinner, the chief scientist notes that he and his colleagues at NOAA have long had to remain politically neutral as their careers straddle the whims of any particular party or president.

On this voyage, the debate would soon be in the rear-view mirror. The entire next day aboard the Sette would be spent in transit to the first stop within the monument’s boundaries: Lalo, also known as French Frigate Shoals, roughly 550 miles northwest of Honolulu.

The scientific team would wake up the following morning at dawn to see La Perouse, the 122-foot basalt pinnacle that more than two centuries ago lured sailors to their near demise when they mistook the white guano-covered rock for the sails of another ship and ran aground in the atoll’s shallow waters.

By the end of the three-week trip, they will have logged nearly 400 dives and counted almost 36,000 fish across 117 different sites.

The bounty of data will inform scientific studies into what makes this part of the archipelago, extending 1,300 miles northwest of Kauai, so special, the lessons that can be applied well beyond Hawaiʻi and what more there is to learn.

These findings, like all of their work, will feed back into the campaign to shore up the region’s long-term protection.

Civil Beat’s coverage of climate change is supported by The Healy Foundation, Marisla Fund of the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.