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Language: en

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..but all three of them were, not a rock to
be seen.

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Right.

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Just coral rubble as far as the eye can see
and live coral up on top.

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A cover of live coral that I've only seen
in a couple of places.

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It's a lot of living, growing reef.

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It was everywhere.

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I mean all the way up the slope, from the
base to the top.

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Well, we've got up so far is what, 86 miles?

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We thought that was going to be, just an escarpment.

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Basically, rock, and so it was really surprising
when we got there and it looked very similar

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to what you all saw.

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Just coral along the edges and live coral
on top.

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So now, that we know this is here, we can
think about...

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Well, wait a minute, the possibilities for
where Lophelia could be forming reefs are

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now bigger than they used to be.

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So that's a real fundamental change in how
we do exploration out here.

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It's brand new.

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This is, it's really different than anything
we've seen before.

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The temperature profile is really weird here,
and it a lot of ways that suggests to us that

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there are a lot more connections to shallow
water than we would expect at 700 meters.

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All those waters are mixed.

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Everything that is happening up at the surface
is very quickly being translated down to 700 meters.

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We see swordfish swimming all around, you
know?

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There's these big fish coming down to interact
with these habitats.

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Connections between water column productivity

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and the sea floor productivity, which cycles carbon and nutrients around.

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So putting the whole picture together gives
us more predictive power

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that management can use to try and use to conserve and protect the systems.

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And that's really the ultimate goal of DEEP
SEARCH is to be able to inform the management

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agencies about the importance of this habitat
and then they can protect them.

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Limit as much as possible the human impacts
in what are still relatively pristine coral reefs.

00:02:04.450 --> 00:02:07.910
You know, there aren't many of those left
of Earth, and we just found a really big one.

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This is huge, this is a really big finding.

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I'm thrilled.