We're going to be offshore of the Southeast United States
roughly east of Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida. This is
a region called the Blake Plateau. The Blake Plateau is a
flat area about six hundred to a thousand meters deep.
Most of the East Coast is sort of a gradual shelf that
transitions slowly into the deep ocean. We have some
fascinating canyons to the north but down here you have
this very broad sort of mid-depth shelf which is fairly
unusual and then you have a very steep drop off into the
very deep sea called the abyss.
It's been known for quite a while. There's a lot of
foundational work in this region by scientists that did
early submersible work here. Pilot, dive super. Go, dive
super. You guys are free to continue your descent.
The recent systematic mapping and exploration efforts on the
Blake Plateau provide a perfect case study of how we can
implement NOMEC. By coordinating among many
partners, we can strategically plan and implement exploration
missions such as each expedition builds upon the
others in mapping coverage and then we can efficiently utilize
submersible vehicles to give us stunning new insights into
these marine habitats.
One of the most important aspects of this area is it's
-known for one of the largest deep sea coral ecosystems in
the world that's been discovered thus far. This is
honestly one of the largest thickets of Lophelia that I've
seen of this size. The coral mounds influence the
biodiversity of the sea floor basically providing habitat
structure. So those coral mounds provide a great habitat
upon which other things can grow and that's where we tend
to see a lot of the the biology that we're interested in. I
would love to see as many Lophelia mounds as we can see.
That would make me very happy. I'd really like to see as far
east as they go just so that we have an idea of where this
habitat actually ends. We have made it to the top of our
exploration today and now we're looking around on the rim.
To be able to understand that ecosystem is really the first
step in being able to properly manage human uses of the ocean
that interact with that ecosystem. That's really why
we're here is to try to get that basic information, that
actionable data that people can make management decisions with.