My name is Santiago Herrera and I'm a visiting professor at Lehigh University. And I'm a biologist.
The focus of my research is understanding the biodiversity patterns in the deep oceans
and the ecological processes that happen on the seafloor.
I study these topics primarily through the use of field observations,
like the ones we're making here in the expedition on the Okeanos Explorer.
Right now we are in waters of American Samoa.
So we are looking at places that are unknown, that we have very little knowledge of .
So this area of the world,American Samoa, is a place where there hasn't been a lot of work done below 250 meters.
In this particular Samoan region, there are several seamounts that we have been diving.
Every single day we have visited a different seamount.
So a seamount is essentially an underwater mountain.
So you can think of seamounts as islands in a sea of mud, essentially.
So the deep areas of the abyssal plains, which are the largest habitats in the seafloor,
these vast expanses of flat topography, get an accumulation of sediments and particles that rain down from the surface.
That restricts the habitat for animals that need to find a firm attachment, such as a rock.
So seamounts behave like islands in this sea of mud because, as they rise up from the sea bottom,
they interact with the water that is moving, and those currents wash off the sediment to get
all those nice rocks exposed that are ideal habitat for animals that require hard substrate to attach.
So in this way, you can think of seamounts as islands of habitat, providing a space for a lot of these animals to live on.
One of the interesting aspects about seamounts is that they also modify the currents,
and they can cause the deep water to rise up and cause some certain
degree of mixing with the top layers of the ocean, therefore promoting the fertilization with nutrients to the surface.
We do have some evidence that seamounts act as places where, in general,
you see a higher number of species compared to the surrounding seafloor.
So you can think of them also as hotspots of biodiversity.
So I think the information we are generating on this expedition will be of great value
for the management of the protected areas in the American Samoa region,
but also, the information we collect will be of great interest to the broader scientific community
because it provides us with a picture of what the role of this region may be in the greater biogeographical puzzle of life in the seafloor.