Pilot has control. Pull the pin. The Aleutian Chain is one of these areas in the world
which has seen really high biodiversity for different species of sponges and corals. So far ,
this entire dive has been totally dominated by ecosystem engineering species. [Music]
I believe this is one of my favorite corals, the red tree coral, Primnoa pacifica.
Red tree coral is actually one of the most important species in Alaska.
It provides a lot of habitat for rockfish and juvenile crabs and lots of other species.
This is truly a coral garden area. [Music] This is blowing my mind quite honestly,
this morning. This is a wonderful thing to see first thing in the morning. [Music]
I personally find it really interesting to think
about the interplay between the biology and the geology.
Corals grow at very, very slow paces. It was a very restricted in food compared to in the upper ocean. [Music]
And that's really useful information for geologists to have when thinking
about the relative timing of different events here on the seafloor and this area
seems to have experienced quite a lot of activity over a long period of time.
And it's interesting to note that those first boulder fields we examined had big, fresh-looking
blocks with hardly any corals on them right. Yeah, there was hardly anything on those rocks earlier.
And these are very well covered,
and the blocks are more rounded and so, yeah, I think these have been sitting here for a while.
[Music] Being a geologist and making observations means that you go a little
slower and you really can look around and take in a place. It's been a really cool adventure.
The water column is the largest living space on the planet and it's also the least explored.
And the reason that we do so many different transects are these different depths is different
organisms like to live in different parts of the water. I think traditionally people think
of the water column as kind of this big mixed mass that it's all the same. But there's lots of different
currents in the ocean. Some currents that run deep, some currents that run in the midwater,
and some currents that run in the shallow water as well. This is what's called a glass squid. Yeah
This is a Taonius borealis. Oh did you just see the muscular portion that's covering the
eye, the cornea, just opened a little bit. That was incredible. It's really amazing.
This is the first time I've ever dove on a cold seep area so I'm super excited.
This really is a needle in a haystack situation very often. The pilot has
pointed out a really good view from Seirios that shows an overview of this giant bush of
tubeworms. The fact that the tubeworms are here means that the seeps are here.
The seeps are definitely here. So these tubeworms do not occur outside of chemosynthetic areas.
Those are some healthy-looking tubeworms. Look at those. Beautiful.
Any nothing that comes out has the ability to combine with water before it gets dissolved and
forms this white ice-like material on the seafloor. Oh oh oh oh! That's a wonderful shot. Thank you so much.
These tiny bubbles gave a glimpse of the community that might be below. With our sonar from the ship
and then sending down D2 2,000 meters below, seeing these small bubbles just always makes
me reminded of like how impressive the feat of human engineering is. Oh wow look at that. I think
it's really important to be able to translate the science that we're doing into something that will
inspire children, will inspire undergraduates, will inspire other students to become deep-sea
biologists. With exploration, you're not even at the point where you can generate a hypothesis.
You are trying to figure out what to ask and there are all these new things that you discover
that either go along with your hypothesis or don't and I just love how these expeditions
get us to the point where we can ask questions in some cases and in other cases collect enough
data that we can answer some questions so that's the really cool part about these trips. [Music]