WEBVTT

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During the Windows to the Deep 2018 expedition, we're exploring the U.S. southeast continent margin.

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The deepwater areas offshore Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina are some of the least explored on the U.S. eastern seaboard.

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This area is home to millions of Americans, yet we know so little about what's in our deepwater backyard.

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The reason it's so unexplored in part is because lots of these features are very far from shore, makes it difficult to get to them.

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And also, as you get closer to shore, you have to combat the Gulf Stream's currents and those are very difficult, as we've discovered.

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I guess that's been a theme of this whole cruise is going to places that have not been explored before, and having eyes on the seafloor for the first time.

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It's been an impressively overwhelming amount of input that we've received from the community.

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One of the best things that's come out of this expedition is that we've really addressed a lot of their needs.

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We've identified new coral habitats, we've located commercially important fishes.

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All of this information is really important to managing our deep-sea resources in a sustainable way.

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We've had a chance to look at a whole bunch of different types of habitats that really haven't been explored before at all.

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These mounds occur throughout a huge region, and we were hoping to find just this.

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Perhaps this entire mound may be a very slow accumulation of these organisms.

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And that's exactly what we were hoping to confirm. Exactly, yeah. 

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Because this is one of hundreds and hundreds of these mounds.

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If even a fraction of them are covered in coral such as this is, 

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it really gives us an amazing perspective on how much coral might be down here and the extent of this coral habitat.

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For me, having worked on the mapping survey in 2014 for this whole area, I've also been curious ever since then about what really was there.

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So just having the opportunity to actually see what's living and growing down there 

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and to see that it's such a remarkable habitat is really exciting.

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And you realize that that's covering probably a huge area that we're working in right now.

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It was very surprising what we found and how that kind of data and information about the seafloor 

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in these areas can help us alter our expectations of these sort of lower-relief and smaller features throughout the world's oceans.

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It's kind of exciting.

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It's just been sort of all encompassing for me. 

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The discovery, exploration, education for me, and educating others and reaching out to the public, it's just been great.

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The beauty of these seascapes gives you an appreciation that you can't read about it and feel attached to it,

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or understand its beauty and fragility like you can when you actually see it.