WEBVTT 00:00:01.040 --> 00:00:04.800 Good morning everybody on shore and on the internet joining us today. 00:00:04.800 --> 00:00:10.480 This is the NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer coming to you live from the western North Atlantic. 00:00:14.720 --> 00:00:18.320 We are diving on Retriever Seamount, one of the New England Seamounts. 00:00:19.120 --> 00:00:22.800 And it is about 400 miles southeast of New York City. 00:00:26.480 --> 00:00:31.120 This seamount is approximately 2,000 meters in total height. 00:00:31.680 --> 00:00:34.800 This seamount has not been dated, that is, we do not know 00:00:34.800 --> 00:00:40.080 the precise age of this seamount specifically, but Bear Seamount, which is just off to the west, 00:00:40.720 --> 00:00:47.360 has been dated at about 99 to 103 million years. Again I think it's just really striking the 00:00:47.360 --> 00:00:53.760 difference between this soft sediment environment and suddenly these oases of hard rock where we're 00:00:53.760 --> 00:00:59.680 seeing a lot of organisms attaching. These would be lava flows, 00:01:00.240 --> 00:01:04.000 but the blastics that we're seeing is not necessarily the rock underneath, 00:01:04.000 --> 00:01:07.760 so we would expect the type of rock that forms lava flows to be dark, 00:01:07.760 --> 00:01:10.720 but we're what we're seeing here again is this manganese crust, 00:01:10.720 --> 00:01:16.800 so it's sort of manganese oxide that crystalizes out of seawater and covers 00:01:16.800 --> 00:01:21.120 pretty much any hard surface. It's kind of interesting, 00:01:21.120 --> 00:01:25.280 you know one of the questions we don't really know the answer to but is something we would 00:01:25.280 --> 00:01:28.960 like to understand better is why are there only two corals here 00:01:28.960 --> 00:01:34.080 when where we were earlier there was a very high density and extremely high diversity of corals. 00:01:34.080 --> 00:01:37.200 It has something to do with the ability of the larvae to settle, 00:01:38.160 --> 00:01:40.800 the rate of sedimentation, how quickly they're buried, 00:01:40.800 --> 00:01:46.640 the rate of delivery of food, all these different factors go into whether you're going to see 00:01:46.640 --> 00:01:51.680 a lot of corals or very few corals. Or other organisms for that matter, 00:01:51.680 --> 00:02:03.040 the sponges and the hydrozoans and all these things that are growing attached to the rock.