We're out here on the NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer, America's ship for ocean exploration.
And we're doing some really exciting work.
I think for me, one of the big things, going to out sea, it really gave me a sense of scale, how big our oceans are.
I knew the oceans were big, but when you're out there and you're not seeing another ship in any direction,
and it's in the evening and you can see a million stars, that's been a really special experience.
And then, on top of that, seeing the science, seeing what's under the ocean and it's amazing that we're only scratching the surface.
Every time we go out, we're finding something new, that no one's seen before.
I think that's just really incredible and really rewarding.
On this expedition alone, we've been part of some amazing discoveries.
A couple of our main objectives of this expedition was to target some of the most vulnerable communities,
so ecosystems that we know consist of species that are slow-growing and long-lived.
Geographically, we recorded a number of species that had only been known from the Pacific Ocean right here in the backyard of the Gulf of Mexico.
They're not small things, these are enormous organisms.
Wow.
Really tremendous view of these coral gardens.
Yeah, this is really beautiful.
In fact, by area, if we look at reefs in deeper waters, they're a lot bigger and they cover more places on Earth than the shallow-water reefs.
And they are just as important.
They create habitat for a myriad of species, including many invertebrates and fishes, some of which are commercially important.
We documented in areas where several agencies have put in preliminary proposals to try to put new management strategies.
And so documenting these places provides a lot of information that has direct links to decision making.
They are the rain forests of the deep sea and just absolutely spectacular.
Look at this block of rock just hanging off the wall here,
you get a real sense of the instability in the local geology here,
but nonetheless, these fans are likely hundreds, if not over a thousand years old,
so that gives you a sense that although this looks unstable,
these blocks have been sitting in their current position for quite some time.
Yeah, and this entire escarpment is an interesting and fascinating feature.
It goes for several hundred miles and really, really deep.
You can dive anywhere from 3,000 meters to about 600 meters.
During this expedition, we've seen a lot of very cool geological features.
In the far western Gulf, we got to dive for the very first time on a very deep canyon.
For me, the really exciting parts of this expedition so far have been making it to Perdido Canyon.
That was one of the objectives met by the scientific community.
It was far west and the fact that we were able to get out there and dive on these sites,
not only dive there but also get some high-resolution mapping in the U.S.EEZ that hasn't existed before, I thought that was really important.
It's been a lot of fun working in the Gulf of Mexico.
It's such a unique environment where we'll be mapping these deep areas that people have never seen before,
but of course, you'll step out on deck at night and to me it almost feels like you're walking down Fifth Avenue, New York City, right?
You have these oil rigs that are lit up out here and it's just a really crazy environment.
But what we've been able to do as a program is say, okay here are the technical capabilities of the ship,
here's what we can go out and do, let's find an area that's non-explored, map it, dive on it the next day.
Some of the highlights of this cruise, mapping wise, it's always really exciting to find methane seeps,
where bubbles are coming out of the seafloor naturally.
We can see those really clearly on the sonars.
And those of course are really exciting for both us and the scientists because it's not just getting maps of the seafloor,
we can also get what's in the water column.
One of the reasons we really like to focus on natural seeps and brine pools is because
the gas in the brine coming up from the seafloor build these natural environments like the mud volcano, but also they create fantastic habitat.
They can create hard grounds on which we find a lot of chemosynthetic organisms,
and these are very exciting deep-sea communities that we don't find in other, shallower waters.
I think one of the really interesting things about this cruise is of course that Dan is a biologist and I'm a geologist,
and sometimes people think of these as just two separate things,
but what I've found really compelling during this expedition is how closely they're interlinked.
At deep-sea seeps, we have organisms that are creating geology, they're building rocks
that create these hard grounds that other organisms like corals can grow on.
But then we even look at geological processes happening hundreds of millions of years ago,
set the stage for many of the specific habitats we see in the Gulf.
And then we've also been able to possibly identify some new species.
Probably the most bizarre squid I've ever seen. I wish I could tell you for sure what it was.
You know, thinking as a professional scientist, the phrase "new species," or "previously unknown to science,"
is just such an amazing, profound thing to hear those words.
And there may be folks who work terrestrially who never in the course of their work see new species to science,
and yet it seems like consistently, throughout these dives, we keep bringing this up and seeing things we haven't seen before.
And so there's something very special and exciting about this deep-sea exploration here.
I think the really important thing is how common these observations of new things are in the deep sea,
just highlighting just how much more there is to be discovered,
how little we've been able to get to know about these ecosystems that cover the biggest part of our world's surface.