The ship is unique in numerous ways from other ships that I’ve been on.
An ROV is a remotely operated vehicle.
It’s tethered to the ship.
Coming up on the ROV.
It can move underwater.
It has video camera capabilities, so it’s essentially a robot underwater
that pilots control on the ship side.
Yeah, Andrea, I’d love to get a zoom on the solitary hydroid there at some point.
Okay.
My name is Andrea Quattrini.
I’m a PhD student at Temple University.
I study deep-sea coral ecosystems.
And out slow to full wide.
I’m a ship-based science team lead.
My role is to communicate and coordinate with scientists on shore as well as the ROV
team to make sure that ROV operations go smoothly and science objectives are met.
I’d also like to know, where is this rock coming from?
Um, I know we’re down to 1,800 meters or so…tell me it rolled downhill.
But I’m really wondering what this rock is made of.
Are we looking at continental-type crust here?
Are we looking at something else?
The telepresence component here is definitely a unique experience.
Scientists back on shore are listening in and communicating with us
in real time as the ROV is exploring the bottom of the seafloor.
Also, it allows the public and the viewers to see in real time what
we’re observing and to explore the dive with us.
We are currently at a depth of 1,875 meters.
Here in the control van, this is where all the action happens.
For any new listeners joining us, we are off of the
northeast U.S. coast in the canyons system.
We are on the lower continental slope.
We’re off the coast, in waters off of New Jersey and Rhode Island.
The ROV pilots are manipulating and maneuvering the ROV and the scientists sit
in the back and help plan and lead ROV dives from the science perspective.
So we have about an hour left in the dive, so we’ll start moving back
up slope and then heading toward the top of the feature.
We really hope to characterize and discover new habitats, including deep-sea coral
communities, potential cold-seep habitats or chemosynthetic communities.
And we also are exploring geological features pertaining to
landslide areas along the continental slope.
Even though this may have been in place quite a while ago,
there’s still active processes going on even at the smaller boulder scale.
We’re going to hopefully see several deepwater coral communities.
Deepwater corals are, many of them are long lived and slow growing
and thus they’re susceptible or vulnerable to anthropogenic disturbances.
We also could see chemosynthetic communities,
and these communities are found in cold seep areas.
They house unique and different communities from other areas of the deep seafloor.
Both of these are types of biological hot spots, so you get high biodiversity of animals
in these areas compared to other fauna that you see on the surrounding seafloor.
ROV in sight.
No thrust on.
Copy that.
Yeah, we can go ahead and bring Seirios aboard.
Pilot, dive super.
Go ahead dive super.
Yeah, we can secure power.
Copy that.
High voltage is off.