WEBVTT

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Welcome to dive nineteen of the
NOAA Ocean Exploration

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Expedition North Atlantic
Stepping Stones. The stepping

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stone we're looking at today is
Retriever Seamount within the

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Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine and National

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Monument. There really is a
unique location and a unique

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space right in our Atlantic
backyard. And just to give it a

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sense of scale, you know, the
Marine National Monument I'm

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told is about the size of
Connecticut and so this is a,

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you know, a relatively large
area in the Atlantic Coastline

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here that that's been
protected.

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It really is just an incredible
place, a mixture of currents,

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geology, and then just a
variety of species that rely on

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this place for their migration
and as the name of the

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exploration says, stepping
stones from one place to

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another. It's really an oasis
in the middle of the ocean.

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One of the reasons that we're
interested in diving on this

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particular little volcanic cone
today was both the depth. This

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is a great depth for lots of
species of deep sea coral to

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live but it's also a cone
feature and these cone features

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can increase the water flow and
kind of circle the water around

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them. When we see that circling
of water, we often see that

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larvae transported and food is
brought in and retained in

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these areas and so we wondered
if this was an area where we'd

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see a lot of biodiversity and I
would say that those hypothesis

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have been true. So this is
pretty amazing. This uh bamboo

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coral here. If we take uh
growth rates from other bamboo

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corals uh in the deep ocean.
This colony here could be 1,600

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years old.

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Once you look closely at the
bottom, um it's just remarkable

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how much is alive and living down
here.