Welcome to our Deep Connections 2019 expedition aboard the Okeanos Explorer, America's ship for ocean exploration.
Our expedition, Deep Connections, was named that for twofold reasons.
The first being that seamounts and canyons within our Northeast waters are connected.
Both to each other and from the deep sea to the shallow waters.
We also have connections between our transboundary expedition
starting in Halifax, Nova Scotia surveying Canadian waters
and then moving into U.S. waters and seeing the connection between areas across our borders.
We here, in Canada, have a number of canyon ecosystems
but the majority of them on the Atlantic coast haven't been fully explored.
The continental shelf is generally thought to be in the area of about 120 meters below sea level or shallower.
While the deep-sea depths range from 1,000 meters to 6,000 meters, or even more in the trenches.
Submarine canyons, which are canyons carved within the seabed
as well as seamounts which are these protrusions that are formed from mantle hotspots pushing through the lithosphere
serve as bridge communities between that shallow continental shelf and the deep sea.
They do so in a number of ways: biologically, chemically, physical oceanographic, as well as sediment conduits.
So they're really important to study from various disciplines, they mean different things to different scientists.
Nice.
Seamounts and canyons are often considered biodiversity hotspots in the deep sea.
That means that we see a wide range of animals that very densely packed
in these relatively small areas of the deep ocean.
And that's because these areas have similar features within them.
Canyons have steep walls and these seamounts have steep slopes.
And these types of steep and rugged terrain are really important for corals and sponges
and their associated community of organisms to live.
These bamboo coral forests are amazing! We've never seen them this dense in the Gully or really anywhere else.
One common feature of these seamounts and submarine canyons that are being explored
is that we're seeing species that are similar between them yet the geographic space between them is quite wide.
The oceans know no boundaries.
There is exchange of genetic material, movement of animals across many places within the oceans.
So, it's really important to study transboundary to understand how these areas are connected.
Working together with the U.S. on transboundary regions
has allowed us to get a better understanding
of the marine ecosystems that we share.
And to create better hypotheses on patterns of connectivity
along the Eastern slopes off of North America.
This gives us a lot of information on how these ecosystems may change in the future.
And how we can collectively respond to that change.
Even though science, as we know it thus far, has been confined to countries
doing science within their own territorial waters.
This is an example of what can get accomplished if interagency agreement at the international level is happening.
It's been amazing! We never thought we would see what we've seen
so thank you so much!
I'm sure we'll get lots of great information from it.
There's no good reason, from a scientific perspective, to only limit studies to one country.
As a scientist who has been working in the field for give or take 10 years
it's really notable how collaborative this program is.
It's just a new paradigm for doing science.