It's important to explore the deep sea because it's one of our final frontiers.
So little of the deep ocean has been explored.
We are aboard the Okeanos Explorer, America's vessel for ocean exploration.
Pilot has control, ready for release.
Our vessel is a little different, that we're on board right now, in which it's driven strictly by curiosity
The name of our expedition is Deep Connections
and that means not only the connection between the US and Canada and the
strengthening of our bonds between our countries with this interboundary exploration.
But also the connection between our deep oceans and our coastal waters.
With the canyon areas
Some of these features that we're exploring on this very expedition are extremely large
Some of these canyons that we're focusing, Oceanographer Canyon, for example
is as tall as the Grand Canyon and similarly some of these seamounts that we're focusing on are very tall
several thousand feet in elevation
comparable to the Appalachian Mountains.
The animals in the ocean know no boundaries.
They don't understand that, you know certain lines in the ocean have been drawn, belonging to different countries.
So exploring transboundary is really important to our research.
This first site is in The Gully Marine Protected Area or MPA and
was a very high-priority site targeted by our Canadian partners.
These bamboo coral forests are amazing!
We've never seen them this dense.
The North Atlantic Ocean is pivotal importance to humankind and provides many fishery resources.
It is important to transportation
Yet many of these places have never been explored.
Submarine canyons are our connection between land and the ocean and so the fact that we're in the axis of one of these canyons right now
I'd expect that to concentrate and focus
materials from the continental shelf down to this relatively deep-sea environment.
Canyons and seamounts are really important areas to the ocean because they are hotspots of biodiversity
Bunches of corals in particular are very important to these ecosystems.
Yeah, just another example of how one thing planting a flight in this desert of sediment can create a little of oasis of multiple organisms
So on this expedition we're using a habitat suitability modeling because they help us
try to predict what might be on the larger seafloor that has not yet been explored.
A pioneer in habitat suitability modeling was Dr. Brian Kinlan, after who the submarine canyon is named
For many years Bryan worked for NOAA's National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, and was very revolutionary
in his approach of predicting where we might find some of most special and vulnerable marine ecosystems.
We've gotten spectacular guidance to the regional biology and geology from our partners at the Canadian Geological Survey and
Fisheries and Oceans Canada has just been absolutely fantastic.
This is really the way science should be conducted
So every time we do a dive I'm always impressed with just how breathtaking
some of these landscapes to be, or seascapes, if you were.
We're always finding something new or unexpected
on every dive and that's what makes
this a really great tool and what's so great about the Okeanos and our program here is
we're here to explore.