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