WEBVTT
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Language: en

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[Music] Millions of people live&nbsp;
along the North Atlantic and we&nbsp;&nbsp;

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use the North Atlantic Ocean for so many things:

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Seafood resources, climate regulation,&nbsp;
trade, and transit; the North Atlantic&nbsp;&nbsp;

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Ocean plays a pivotal role in our daily&nbsp;
lives. But we've just only begun to look&nbsp;&nbsp;

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at and to understand the ecosystems and the&nbsp;deep-sea resources that exist in those areas.

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Back in 2016, we started looking at the map and&nbsp;trying to figure out where could exploration in&nbsp;&nbsp;

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the Atlantic Ocean be most useful, where were the&nbsp;big gaps. All that became the foundation for the&nbsp;&nbsp;

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Atlantic Seafloor Partnership for Integrative&nbsp;Research and Exploration or "ASPIRE." [Music]

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Led by NOAA Ocean Exploration, ASPIRE is not&nbsp;only a collaboration across NOAA, but it's also&nbsp;&nbsp;

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a collaborative effort with a number of our other&nbsp;Federal partners like the U.S. Geological Survey&nbsp;&nbsp;

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and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, as well&nbsp;as international partners from Canada and Europe.&nbsp;&nbsp;

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"We here in Canada have a number of canyon&nbsp;ecosystems but the majority of them on the&nbsp;&nbsp;

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Atlantic Coast haven't been fully explored.&nbsp;[Music] On the NOAA mission we explored a&nbsp;&nbsp;

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completely different area that we had never been&nbsp;to and the diversity of the benthic fauna in this&nbsp;&nbsp;

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area was completely overwhelming and exciting. It&nbsp;was something that we didn't know would be there."

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"All this information is being used to&nbsp;
inform the regional government of the Azores,&nbsp;&nbsp;

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ending the designation of new Marine Protected&nbsp;Areas. The aim of the regional government is to&nbsp;&nbsp;

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protect 30% of the E.E.Z. by 2023, so all&nbsp;
this information is extremely valuable to&nbsp;&nbsp;

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inform those decisions." [Music] One of&nbsp;
the biggest accomplishments from ASPIRE&nbsp;&nbsp;

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has to be the work that was done in the&nbsp;
Blake Plateau. Not only can I now say&nbsp;&nbsp;

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that we have closed the gaps in bathymetry in&nbsp;that area, but we've also revealed one of the&nbsp;&nbsp;

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largest deep-sea coral and sponge habitats&nbsp;that have been found globally to date.

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"They grow a third of a centimeter&nbsp;
a year to a centimeter a year,&nbsp;&nbsp;

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which is about the length of your pinky nail.&nbsp;That means a one-meter-tall coral is about a&nbsp;&nbsp;

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thousand years old, to give you an idea how old&nbsp;and precious and sensitive these reefs are."

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Efforts like this are greater than&nbsp;
sum of their parts. Together we can&nbsp;&nbsp;

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hopefully change our understanding of&nbsp;
how the Atlantic is connected. [Music]