WEBVTT

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This is dive 9 of the Okeanos Explorer expedition 3 to the Gulf of Mexico.

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We’re on a ridge on the eastern side of Bryant Canyon, which is the easternmost of three major drainage systems in the Gulf of Mexico.

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It is hard to imagine at these depths that this kind of thing forms and stays intact for any period of time.

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It’s part of the Gulf of Mexico’s character. There’s so much sediment that comes out of those rivers into the north.

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The Mississippi drains something like well over half of the U.S. and so all those sediments every year just build up,  build up, build up for millennia.

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There’s a great view in Seirios now of how complex these features are relative to each other.

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They’re sub-parallel, but they’re also what we call anastomosing. There’s cross-cutting relationships as well.

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Well, it’s moving fast, whatever it is. We’ve seen, we used to see this in the Med.

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It was either fish or sometimes rays.

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Let’s see what our folks think here.

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Wow.

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It’s a moving dust storm.

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Pretty spectacular little run there.

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Looks less like a fish as we get close to it.

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It’s almost like a sinkhole or something.

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Well, that’s exactly what it looks like to me.

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Looks like something where some material has been removed underneath and that piece of sediment’s just dropped in.

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I think the sediment here is very fine grained.

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And I think when you see it being excavated like that, you get a feeling for how fine grained it is.

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Look how complicated that slope is on Seirios.

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Wow.

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It’s great.

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It just says that this is a bottom that’s swept periodically and periodically often enough so that most biology can’t get going here.