Digital Extra: Mountains in the Sea

Photo courtesy of Image courtesy of D. Payne and NOAA

Dr. Scott France, Mercer Brugler, Dr. Jon Moore, Dr. Lauren Mullineaux, Lance Arnold and Susan Mills, ready and waiting members of the bucket brigade. .

Video

Watch live images of the expedition, scheduled to streamed from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily. NOAA will also be broadcasting live programs for an hour a day from the control van, with teachers and scientists interacting live with students on shore

More NOAA video clips of deep-sea corals

We are used to thinking that our human communities form the hub of the universe. We imagine that the world revolves around us, our cities, our farmlands, our freeways and shopping malls. Most maps of the world enhance this illusion. They focus on the mid-latitude land masses and leave out large chunks of the planet's surface. Our maps show the U.S. and Europe at the center of all things, and marginalize the Pacific Ocean, the Southern Hemisphere and the poles.

But the truth is that most of Earth is uninhabited. The Pacific alone covers nearly half the planet. The polar regions are empty. The Gobi and Sahara deserts, the rugged mountains of Asia and the Americas, the wide Amazon forests, are only sparsely and intermittently occupied. The truth is that if all six billion of us humans stood shoulder to shoulder for a head count, we wouldn't even fill the state of Rhode Island.

So here along the New England Seamount chain, less than a day's journey from the crowded East Coast, we are seeing places on Earth that have never been seen before. It's wilderness out here on the seafloor, a place where fishes, crabs and corals live unseen and undisturbed for hundreds of years.

"This is really a cruise of exploration," says Peter Auster, of the University of Connecticut, one of the principle scientists on board, who studies the ecology of fishes. "We don't know enough yet about these seamounts to formulate specific research questions. So on this cruise we are making systematic observations of nature and looking for patterns, in order to generate hypotheses that we can test and either prove or disprove."

One thing he found on this cruise is that most of the fish were not among the corals, but in the open sandy plains. "If you don't need protection from predators, and you're looking for things to eat, then it makes more sense to be where the current isn't slowed down by the coral structures," says Auster. He spent every dive leading the twelve-to-four watch, around the clock, to keep an eye on the fishes caught in Hercules' camera. "No fish here," was his usual comment, as the ROV flew through the coral forests. "No fish, no fish, no fish." This is actually good news for those who hope to preserve the seamounts. The promise of a rich fishery could have attracted trawlers, which would destroy the fragile, ancient corals.

These deep-sea corals, although they don't build reefs like their tropical relatives, do provide structure that attracts other species. Many seabed creatures depend on the current to deliver the food they need. Flat against the surface is not a good place to intercept that current, so vertical space is at a premium. Every coral we look at has among its branches an assortment of squatters. The brittle star, a type of sea star with long snakelike arms, is often intertwined with the coral branches. Sponges, barnacles, and feather stars -- their arms fringed with delicate tassels -- climb aloft into the current. Other types of sea stars feed on the soft coral polyps, and yellow anemones colonize their stiff branches. Even dead coral skeletons, like dead trees, provide a vertical spot where other creatures can find an advantage.

By the final weekend of this cruise, after 15 days at sea, it's clear that scientists who investigate the natural world have an infinite store of patience, dedication, and curiosity. The process of exploring has its moments of discovery and excitement, but these are embedded in long hours of tedium, repitition, and weariness. The ROVs go overboard, the winch winds out its thousands of feet of steel cable, the dive goes on for hours and hours, the machines are winched back home. The scientists stand their four-hour watches in the dark, cold control van, sleep intermittently in their small, noisy cabins, swarm out to the deck with their heavy plastic buckets, haul their samples into the smelly crowded lab, and do it all over and over and over, with unending Zen patience.

Late Sunday morning, under an overcast sky, Hercules is retreived for the last time after yet another all-night dive. The ship turns toward shore and steams through the fog for Boston Harbor, as everyone on board packs their gear and dreams of home. It's been a spectacular cruise. The weather gods were kind to us, we explored miles and miles of seafloor that had never been seen before, we watched hours of real-time high-definition video direct from the seamounts, we saw seabirds and whales and and sunfish and stars.

The scientists are heading home with dozens of specimens, thousands of digital images, and hours of videotape. "We got terabytes of data," chief scientist Les Watling said at the wrap-up science meeting Sunday night. "We exceeded all our expectations. I was skeptical of what these ROVs could really do, but they were just fantastic. The crew was so responsive and ready to solve every problem. We've seen what's possible with this technology now, and it's very impressive."

At the dock in Boston, the science team will head for home, in Maine, Connecticut, Florida. The ROV crew will have a few days off, then head back out across the Atlantic on the Ron Brown to visit the Titanic with Bob Ballard and National Geographic. Lance Arnold and I, NOAA's two teachers-at-sea, will take back to our students a deeper understanding of natural science and ocean exploration. And each of us, in myriad ways, will tell the tale of the unseen life that fills the cold dark slopes of these mountains in the sea.