Good morning, everybody. This is the Okeanos Explorer.
Today we go to a suspected shipwreck.
About 200 feet long, perhaps 20 feet wide.
This is something that’s completely unknown that was found on the sidescan sonar from an acoustic survey done for a pipeline in 2009.
We’ve come in on our first sonar target of a suspected shipwreck site.
We are now getting our first detailed look at it.
It’s pretty clear that what we’re looking at is manmade.
We should remember that this part of the Gulf of Mexico is essentially a giant geologic mix master.
The fact that we have a platy, layered appearance here suggests that it isn’t necessarily true that this is manmade.
All kinds of interesting things come to the surface in the Gulf of Mexico that are geologic, not manmade, that have interesting-looking shapes.
This actually was reported to us as a potential shipwreck, largely based on the fact that there was nothing similar in the vicinity that showed upon their survey.
This is looking increasingly like a natural object, not manmade.
Yeah. I was actually able to look at some of that. That is a spectacular extrusion.
It’s very large and then there’s these fracture planes that suggest some activity after extrusion.
So this is a very substantial asphalt volcanic structure.
But the fact that you have tubeworms around the edges indicates that there remains some volatile hydrocarbons present,
which means that it’s not totally ancient, that this is a somewhat recent feature.
Jack, our lead archaeologist today, has said that archaeologists find cool things even if they aren’t all shipwrecks.
I’m not going to dispute that. This is pretty cool.
Now that’s some good footage on those barnacles. Thanks for that. We can identify those pretty well.
There is another seafloor-positive feature a couple of hundred feet away that we’re going to look at next.
This one, this in quote “flower” looks a lot different than the first one.
Likely been at the seafloor for hundreds if not thousands of years, but we’re still seeing evidence for activity associated with the initial extrusion of the asphalt.
It looks like they’re frozen over.
Yep. So I think we are seeing our first visual evidence for escape of hydrocarbons, other than the obvious evidence for the asphalt we see.
There’s actually two there.
Very good call. Very good call.
A short one and a tall one.
So we’re seeing multiple lines of evidence that we are getting chemosynthetic biology associated with what must
continue to be streams of hydrocarbons to the seafloor.
Must be tremendous forces involved to push this much asphalt through and
but that’s not well understood, so any mapping or volume estimates that you’re able to make, I think that will be a real contribution.
We’ve been talking about photomosaicing these
flowers, for want of a better term.
We think we can do it in several passes over the tops of these features.
I concur on the photomosaic. Absolutely critical to do that because that’ll the aerial extent and probably some notion of volume.
The great thing about today is that we came down here thinking that these structures might be parts of a shipwreck,
it's pretty clear that they are not now, but they are naturally occurring.