Despite the fact that millions of people live along the U.S. East Coast, the deepwater areas offshore Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina are some of the least-explored areas along the coast. The southeast U.S. continental margin has some of the largest gaps in high-resolution ocean mapping data on the East Coast and limited previous observations via remotely operated vehicles.

Nearly every dive during the Windows to the Deep 2018 expedition took us to a place that no one had ever been before, allowing us to learn more about the different species that live in the region and how they are impacted by various environmental parameters. All of this information is crucial to managing resources in the deep ocean, as our management is only as good as our information. As humans, our reliance on resources from the deep ocean is only going to continue to grow, and with sound information such as that collected during Windows to the Deep 2018, we can develop plans to manage, extract, and use these resources in a sensible way.