These seamounts that we are diving on were once active volcanoes,
but they are quite old. So
Kelvin Seamount has not been directly dated before,
but based on the ages of nearby seamounts, I would estimate it to about 92 million years old.
I don't think we've seen such well-developed ripples on any of the sediment surfaces.
Certainly not over such a broad area, we've seen a few in small patches.
So this is really interesting.
We have just tremendous diversity, but there's not a lot of numbers of each of the species,
but there's a lot of different species here. So that's one measure of biodiversity is
just how many different species we see. It's something called species richness.
Really nice view in Seirios camera if you want to see what the Deep Discoverer looks like when it's
working on the bottom of the ocean here. You can see really well the slope
as well of this feature. Yeah, I have to say what gets
me really excited is when I see a lava flow that has these really distinct features on it
that can let me imagine what it looked like when it was actually erupting.
To get a sense of how the rheology of the law, how it flows.
At one point, this was not solid rock, this was actually moving and changing its shape.
I just find that really exciting about volcanology in general.
Well, it's been an outstanding dive. And perhaps all the more remarkable given that
at about 6:30 or 7 this morning, we didn't know that we would have
a dive because the Gulf Stream is moving through the area so rapidly,
that we weren't able to work here because the ship wouldn't have been able to be
stable enough for the ROVs to work on the bottom.