Good morning, deep sea explorers. I'd like to welcome
you to dive eighteen of the NOAA Ocean Expedition, North
Atlantic Stepping Stones and today, our stepping stone is
"Asterina" Seamount. So, we have just landed on the bottom
of 3,789 meters. Oh, beautiful. This is actually a sea pen. Uh
that was a little bit unexpected. So, these sea pens
are uh cnidarians so they're related to corals and anemones
and uh they tend to have an anchor. You can see that white
base at the bottom is called a peduncle and they have an
anchor into the sediments. There must be at least a bit of
sediment if between these cracks here. This actually
looks like another C pen um and so I wonder if this is uh well
this one almost certainly is a rock pen. You can see very
clearly that this one is uh attached to the rock there and
this is uh pretty unusual. It's very unusual to see these rock
pens. Um most seapens have an anchor that anchors into the
sediment but these rock pens actually have more of a sucker
on the bottom and attached to the side of rocks. And uh we've
been hearing through the chat room that this actually would
be the the deepest uh record of a rock pen in the Atlantic and
you can see that uh inner skeleton, that pen in the middle
kinda comes all the way down to the base and ends uh in this
peduncle this kind of sucker on the bottom so this is a
really unusual find this is uh the deepest record of a rock
pen in the Atlantic. Just beautiful.