The overall goal of the project is to see what's out there,
find sensitive habitats and protect them.
So, the kinds of sensitive habitats the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management wants to protect
are in this context, of the whole cruise, are in three different categories:
the canyons, the seeps, and corals.
But all sensitive for different reasons.
The physics is different, the gas fluxes are different. And when you move from the canyons to the seeps,
here you've got, these are depositional environments that had really high organic inputs
a long time ago, tens of thousands of years ago.
And as that organic carbon has been cooked and ruminated in the sediment, it produced methane.
And that methane is now seeping out of the seabed
and fueling all of these organisms that can feast upon methane.
I think of a little bit as Earth's kidneys.
It's pulling in material and recyling material and putting the good stuff back in and taking the bad stuff out.
We all have hitchhikers right? We have our microbiome in our skin and our ears and our nose, whatever.
So the Beggiatoa, these sulfur oxidizers, that live at the Pea Island Escape, they are very long filaments.
So they're long, they're mobile. They move around, they can cruise up and down.
They set themselves up in the perfect chemical gradient where they have all the substrates that they need.
So if you were a free living microorganism who wanted to set yourself up in the perfect chemical gradient,
but you weren't modal, what would you do?
You would hitchhike.
You would jump on a Beggiatoa.
So, these Beggiatoa are essentially colonized. They're kind of like the bus system at a seep.
In two days, Mandy will be the first person ever to visit this newly discovered seep that we're calling Pea Island.
Someplace that people on Earth has never been before. Yeah.
And that's the coolest thing ever.
It's like a kid in a candy store. (laughs)
There's nothing that makes my eyes twinkle like really thick Beggiatoa mass. (laughs) There just isn't.
There just isn't.