WEBVTT

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Good morning, deep sea
explorers. I'd like to welcome

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you to dive eighteen of the NOAA
Ocean Expedition, North

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Atlantic Stepping Stones and
today, our stepping stone is

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"Asterina" Seamount. So, we
have just landed on the bottom

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of 3,789 meters. Oh, beautiful.
This is actually a sea pen. Uh

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that was a little bit
unexpected. So, these sea pens

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are uh cnidarians so they're
related to corals and anemones

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and uh they tend to have an
anchor. You can see that white

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base at the bottom is called a
peduncle and they have an

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anchor into the sediments.
There must be at least a bit of

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sediment if between these
cracks here. This actually

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looks like another C pen um and
so I wonder if this is uh well

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this one almost certainly is a
rock pen. You can see very

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clearly that this one is uh
attached to the rock there and

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this is uh pretty unusual. It's
very unusual to see these rock

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pens. Um most seapens have an
anchor that anchors into the

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sediment but these rock pens
actually have more of a sucker

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on the bottom and attached to
the side of rocks. And uh we've

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been hearing through the chat
room that this actually would

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be the the deepest uh record of
a rock pen in the Atlantic and

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you can see that uh inner
skeleton, that pen in the middle

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kinda comes all the way down to
the base and ends uh in this

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peduncle this kind of sucker
on the bottom so this is a

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really unusual find this is uh
the deepest record of a rock

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pen in the Atlantic. Just
beautiful.