Welcome to dive nineteen of the NOAA Ocean Exploration
Expedition North Atlantic Stepping Stones. The stepping
stone we're looking at today is Retriever Seamount within the
Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine and National
Monument. There really is a unique location and a unique
space right in our Atlantic backyard. And just to give it a
sense of scale, you know, the Marine National Monument I'm
told is about the size of Connecticut and so this is a,
you know, a relatively large area in the Atlantic Coastline
here that that's been protected.
It really is just an incredible place, a mixture of currents,
geology, and then just a variety of species that rely on
this place for their migration and as the name of the
exploration says, stepping stones from one place to
another. It's really an oasis in the middle of the ocean.
One of the reasons that we're interested in diving on this
particular little volcanic cone today was both the depth. This
is a great depth for lots of species of deep sea coral to
live but it's also a cone feature and these cone features
can increase the water flow and kind of circle the water around
them. When we see that circling of water, we often see that
larvae transported and food is brought in and retained in
these areas and so we wondered if this was an area where we'd
see a lot of biodiversity and I would say that those hypothesis
have been true. So this is pretty amazing. This uh bamboo
coral here. If we take uh growth rates from other bamboo
corals uh in the deep ocean. This colony here could be 1,600
years old.
Once you look closely at the bottom, um it's just remarkable
how much is alive and living down here.