WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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The overall goal of the project is to see what's out there,

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find sensitive habitats and protect them.

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So, the kinds of sensitive habitats the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management wants to protect

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are in this context, of the whole cruise, are in three different categories:

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the canyons, the seeps,  and corals.

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But all sensitive for different reasons.

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The physics is different, the gas fluxes are different. And when you move from the canyons to the seeps,

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here you've got, these are depositional environments that had really high organic inputs

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a long time ago, tens of thousands of years ago.

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And as that organic carbon has been cooked and ruminated in the sediment, it produced methane.

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And that methane is now seeping out of the seabed

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and fueling all of these organisms that can feast upon methane.

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I think of a little bit as Earth's kidneys.

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It's pulling in material and recyling material and putting the good stuff back in and taking the bad stuff out.

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We all have hitchhikers right? We have our microbiome in our skin and our ears and our nose, whatever.

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So the Beggiatoa, these sulfur oxidizers, that live at the Pea Island Escape, they are very long filaments.

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So they're long, they're mobile. They move around, they can cruise up and down.

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They set themselves up in the perfect chemical gradient where they have all the substrates that they need.

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So if you were a free living microorganism who wanted to set yourself up in the perfect chemical gradient,

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but you weren't modal, what would you do?

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You would hitchhike.

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You would jump on a Beggiatoa.

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So, these Beggiatoa are essentially colonized. They're kind of like the bus system at a seep.

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In two days, Mandy will be the first person ever to visit this newly discovered seep that we're calling Pea Island.

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Someplace that people on Earth has never been before.
Yeah.

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And that's the coolest thing ever.

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It's like a kid in a candy store.
(laughs)

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There's nothing that makes my eyes twinkle like really thick Beggiatoa mass. (laughs) There just isn't.

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There just isn't.