Given the proximity of so many millions of people that live along the southeast coast,
it seems that, of course this area would be very well known, and we would know exactly where everything is.
And that's so not true.
Every dive that we've done has been in places where people have not been before
and so all of this information is really important to managing our deep-sea resources.
This large area was deemed a coral Habitat Area of Particular Concern by the South Atlantic Fisheries Management Council in 2010.
Yes! That's Lophelia. Great. That's quite impressive.
It's a field of dreams for someone who is looking for Lophelia.
Deep-sea corals and sponges settle on hard substrate
and they benefit from strong currents which bring lots of food through the water column to these suspension feeders.
We will be very curious to see what it is that is making these mounds,
whether it is biogenic, made by corals, or whether there are some rock formations down there.
Each one of these dives allows us to learn more about each species and how all of these environmental parameters effect it.
We use information on currents, we use whatever information we can about the substrate type,
whether it's soft or hard, and we also look at things like vertical relief.
And these things are important to us because we know that they're conducive to the development of deep-sea corals and sponge communities.
Diving to these depths is equivalent to trying to fly into outer space. It's just inner space.
Maximizing the time and effort we have on the seafloor is critical to ensuring that the scientific data that we produce is resuable
and Okeanos Explorer and the partners at GFOE are of course providing us with extraordinary data that we wouldn't have otherwise.
That is a beautiful specimen, isn't it?
The nice thing about these dives is that every one is a test of existing models.
So we do need more dives to test them, but we continually improve the predictive of how the models with more exploration.
By partnering, everybody gets better, even more accurate information more quickly than any one agency could do independently.
So that's been a big success of all of these programs is the partnering to make this kind of research happen.
Our management is only as good as the information we have from expeditions like this one.
As humans, we will need resources from the deep sea more and more as time goes on,
yet we can extract them and use them in a sensible way if we just know where things are.