Oh, what's...ooh.
What is this? This looks very seepy. It does look very seepy.
So this is likely authegenic carbonate. So carbonate that has been formed by bacteria that is processing methane.
And there's a number of these fish that seem to be enjoying this spot very much.
So these white areas could be indication of bacteria that's feeding off of methane.
So for people at home that are watching, we are a little surprised to find this.
So we, there are seeps known to be in the very general region, but we did not have a target in sight for this dive.
It's not that someone could not have located this earlier, but we weren't aware of it.
So we're kind of scrambling to wrap our minds around what we're seeing as well.
We didn't really know too much about seeps on this margin even existing before about 2012, when NOAA started discovering a lot of methane plumes in the water column.
So the quandary we're in here is that these have only been studied, really, for about 5-7 years, and we're kind of always discovering more.