This is dive 9 of the Okeanos Explorer expedition 3 to the Gulf of Mexico.
We’re on a ridge on the eastern side of Bryant Canyon, which is the easternmost of three major drainage systems in the Gulf of Mexico.
It is hard to imagine at these depths that this kind of thing forms and stays intact for any period of time.
It’s part of the Gulf of Mexico’s character. There’s so much sediment that comes out of those rivers into the north.
The Mississippi drains something like well over half of the U.S. and so all those sediments every year just build up, build up, build up for millennia.
There’s a great view in Seirios now of how complex these features are relative to each other.
They’re sub-parallel, but they’re also what we call anastomosing. There’s cross-cutting relationships as well.
Well, it’s moving fast, whatever it is. We’ve seen, we used to see this in the Med.
It was either fish or sometimes rays.
Let’s see what our folks think here.
Wow.
It’s a moving dust storm.
Pretty spectacular little run there.
Looks less like a fish as we get close to it.
It’s almost like a sinkhole or something.
Well, that’s exactly what it looks like to me.
Looks like something where some material has been removed underneath and that piece of sediment’s just dropped in.
I think the sediment here is very fine grained.
And I think when you see it being excavated like that, you get a feeling for how fine grained it is.
Look how complicated that slope is on Seirios.
Wow.
It’s great.
It just says that this is a bottom that’s swept periodically and periodically often enough so that most biology can’t get going here.