And if you're just joining us today, we are exploring a new seep site.
We've seen a bit of authigenic carbonate during the first portion of the dive, so some rock outcrops, and now we have encountered a very nice mussel bed that has also a generous coating of bacterial mat.
As we came into this mussel bed, we started to see some of these active bubble plumes that are kind of turning on and off as we're going through this area.
Yeah, we definitely found the seep. Lots of bubbles.
This is just terrific, with all the seeps kind of going off at different times. Just a really, really cool sight.
And you can see just the amount of life that's also associated with these mussel beds. We have multiple species fish as well as crustaceans.
We've really come full circle here. The Okeanos first identified these sites and now based on seep maps that we've compiled over the years, we chose a cluster of seeps that look good.
It just shows the value of this sort of discovery and exploration mode that we're in here.