..but all three of them were, not a rock to be seen.
Right.
Just coral rubble as far as the eye can see and live coral up on top.
A cover of live coral that I've only seen in a couple of places.
It's a lot of living, growing reef.
It was everywhere.
I mean all the way up the slope, from the base to the top.
Well, we've got up so far is what, 86 miles?
We thought that was going to be, just an escarpment.
Basically, rock, and so it was really surprising when we got there and it looked very similar
to what you all saw.
Just coral along the edges and live coral on top.
So now, that we know this is here, we can think about...
Well, wait a minute, the possibilities for where Lophelia could be forming reefs are
now bigger than they used to be.
So that's a real fundamental change in how we do exploration out here.
It's brand new.
This is, it's really different than anything we've seen before.
The temperature profile is really weird here, and it a lot of ways that suggests to us that
there are a lot more connections to shallow water than we would expect at 700 meters.
All those waters are mixed.
Everything that is happening up at the surface is very quickly being translated down to 700 meters.
We see swordfish swimming all around, you know?
There's these big fish coming down to interact with these habitats.
Connections between water column productivity
and the sea floor productivity, which cycles carbon and nutrients around.
So putting the whole picture together gives us more predictive power
that management can use to try and use to conserve and protect the systems.
And that's really the ultimate goal of DEEP SEARCH is to be able to inform the management
agencies about the importance of this habitat and then they can protect them.
Limit as much as possible the human impacts in what are still relatively pristine coral reefs.
You know, there aren't many of those left of Earth, and we just found a really big one.
This is huge, this is a really big finding.
I'm thrilled.