The Alvin on deployment — one of the submersibles used
on the Sea Mounts along with the Hercules and Argus
tandem ROV system.
Image from mpi-bremen.de
From Deep Sea News comes a post that is right on time for me. Deep Sea News is a science blog run by a Post-Doc from MBARI, a research assistant from TAMU-Corpus Christi and a Graduate Student at Penn State. They cover all things Deep Sea (below 1000m).
One might think that’s a lot to cover…in a way it is, considering that almost 80% of the earth’s ecosystems, by volume, is deep sea (1000m or deeper), but…the truth is we have only explored less than 1% of that area. Even 48 years after the Triest reached the deepest spot in the sea.
I am fortunate to work with a professor at Avery Point who has explored part of the deep sea ecosystem. He focused his attention on the sea mounts that form a chain from the continental shelf of eastern North America to the mid-Atlantic Ridge then on to the Azore Islands. These sea mounts may act as “islands” in the deep sea that intermediate depth deep sea, bottom dwelling fish (those that live between 200m and 4000m depths) use as stepping stones across the much deeper abyssal plains. During a recent cruise his team documented 7 new deep sea octocoral species in 10 days of diving. I have seen some of the video from that cruise, along with pictures of what a trawled zone looks like before and after the trawl. I hope that a ban on dep sea trawls comes to pass since the trawlers now have the capability to reach over 2km down and leave scars across the bottom that stretch for kilometers.
Before he heads to Rome for an FAO meeting on limiting deep sea trawling, I have to meet with him for a new HD video editing project I will be doing with him about cephalopods. Hopefully I will also be able to work with him on some future deep sea video surveying work as well. The ultimate would be deep sea cephalopod behavior and ecology studies!! (or mangroves… but there are few cephalopods in the mangroves.)
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