The ocean covers more than 70% of the surface of our planet
and ocean habitats are as diverse as they are vast. You
may be familiar with shallow coral reefs that grow in warm
tropical waters. But did you know that there are coral reefs
in the deep sea as well? Down at the bottom of the ocean
floor where it's very cold and very dark, deep-sea corals
thrive.
Deep sea corals need certain conditions to flourish. They
need the right temperatures, the right oxygen levels, and
steady current flows that transport their food supply.
One area of deep sea corals is found about 100 miles off the
coast of Georgia and Florida. Scientists call it the Million
Mounds coral region. Over the years, NOAA Ocean Exploration
has sent several expeditions to map the Million Mounds coral
region with sonars and to explore it with remotely operated
vehicles. The Million Mounds Region or what we're calling
that is kind of a nickname is basically what we think is the
largest continuous deep sea coral ecosystem discovered thus
far on earth. We're talking about an about 7 million acres
in size of these these mounds and if you could drain the
oceans and kind of picture what they look like we're talking
about these very large mound features they can be anywhere
from about 30 feet tall to on the order of 300 feet tall and
they they tend to be in either long lines with each other or
just a series of mounds kind of as far as you could see.
So how did these deep-sea coral mounds form? They're formed over thousands of
years and they have these corals that kind of grow in
colonies and they have hard skeletons and then when the
organism dies, the skeleton stays and the next generation
grows on top of that and so over time they get higher and
taller. One particular type of hard coral that is very good at
making these mounds is Lophelia pertusa. Lophelia coral is
often white in color when it's alive and healthy and brown in
color when it's dead. Here you can see the old coral
underneath and the living coral on top. The corals here sift
food from the fast moving Gulf Stream, an ocean current that
flows through the Million Mounds coral region.
The Gulf Stream is a globally renowned ocean current. It's actually a
very warm water very strong currents and a major
transporter of both heat and food through the North Atlantic
Ocean. So what we see when we look at the Gulf Stream, there's
a very tight correlation where you see the most dense coral
mounds and the healthiest mounds and where the Gulf
Stream is strongest The Million Mounds coral region is
important because it provides habitat protection and food for
a variety of marine life. If you look closely, there are all
sorts of other organisms that call this mounds their home.
The rubble although it kind of looks dead is actually full of
really high diversity fauna. Yeah, it's huge habitat for many
species of animals. The coral mounds influence the
biodiversity of the sea floor by basically providing habitat
structure so a lot of things in the deep sea that we observe,
they they don't always have a place to settle in soft
sediment that's moving around. They like to attach to
something hard. 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. The
Million Miles Coral Region still has much to teach us
about life in the deep sea.