So, I am Kelley Elliott. I work with NOAA's Office of Ocean Exploration and Research as an expedition manager.
So right now, I am on board the NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer.
Okeanos is actually the nation's first and only federal ship with the mission to explore the ocean for the purpose of discovery and the advancement of knowledge.
It's a very exciting mission and we're conducting our ocean exploration activities here in the Johnston Atoll Unit,
which is one of several units of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument.
Work by NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer here in the Johnston Atoll Unit actually first began in 2015.
We had two cruises that focused on collecting seafloor mapping data and doing remotely operated vehicle dives on some of the seamounts.
And in 2017, this year, we've come back to continue and to build on that effort,
to map new seamounts and to collect additional data about the habitats that reside on these seamounts.
I'm Chris Kelley and I'm with the University of Hawaii School of Ocean and Earth Science Technology, and I'm a deepwater biologist.
We are surveying this seamount which has never before explored.
There's never before been any work on this location and we are seeing it for the first time, live.
Some of the really unique things that we found on this expedition, at least to me, are new species.
Whoa! What is it doing?!
Look at this! Huh.
I'm a sponge-o-phile. I'm a guy who likes deep-sea sponges,
and about midway through this cruise, we came across a sponge that I have never seen before, and that was really exciting for me.
We saw a fish and it's in the family Liparidae and Bruce Mundy was on the teleconference line when we came across that fish,
and Bruce is a pretty conservative kind of guy and you could tell he was really excited,
as we all were, because this was such a weird fish.
I think nobody on Earth has seen this fish before and
I think those who are watching right now are getting a first glimpse of a species that nobody has ever seen, certainly not alive before and probably never, ever.
So, new species are always a big thrill, but the other things that excited me about this cruise is
we hadn't really found very many high-density communities in the first expedition to this monument unit in 2015.
And, I was concerned about this, but we decided to give it another shot on this particular cruise.
We found at least four, and I think possibly five, of what I would describe as high-density communities here, all different.
We had one that was filled with precious corals that we saw on the slopes of Johnston Atoll.
Then we find an amazing forest of bamboo corals.
A few days ago, we saw what we call the Land of the Weird Sponges.
Just this amazing community of very, very strange animals that look like an alien planet.
High-density coral and sponge communities are really important because they provide shelter and places to live for all types of different animals.
So deep-sea coral and sponge communities are particularly important because they provide habitat and protection for many other animals.
Some of these corals are also particularly long-lived.
They can be as old as several hundreds of years or even several thousands of years old.
I firmly believe that there are a lot of things that exist in the deep sea that are worth protecting.
But, I have experience in the deep sea. A lot of other people don't have experience in the deep sea.
And you can't care about anything that you don't know about.
You can't care about anything if you don't even know it exists.
So one of the things we're trying to do here is essentially illuminate what's down in the deep sea, and to get the public to care about it.
So one of our goals is to engage and educate the public in telepresence-based exploration.
And this is all just part of an effort to get the public interested and excited and
be more knowledgeable about some of the deep-sea environments that reside on this planet.
People need to see something before they believe it exists.
I can't go up to you and just tell you that there's some great creatures in the deep sea,
and you'll go, "Oh, that's fine. That's great. Hmm."
But if I show you pictures and I show you video of what's down there,
then I think you're gonna start to care about these animals and actually be interested in protecting them.