We're setting out to explore the Gulf of Alaska, unknown or
poorly known parts throughout the entire gulf. My name is
Merlin Best. I'm a biologist with Fisheries and Ocean
Canada. I work out of the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, BC,
on Vancouver Island and I'm the biology lead on this
expedition. Exploration is important because without it,
we wouldn't really know much of anything. My name is Jamie
Conrad. I'm a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in
Santa Cruz, at their Pacific Coastal and Marine Science
Center. I am the geology lead. So starting out near Kodiak
Island and then exploring seamounts heading east out towards
basically the other side of the gulf and then coming along
northwest and back to close to where we started. I think the
major challenge is going to be weather. We have a number of
storms that are kind of converging across the Gulf of
Alaska. So we're going to try to remain flexible, try to stay
a step ahead and try to give ourselves the best
opportunities to dive. Seamounts kind of provide this
really important relief point along the flat abyssal plain
and so every time you get something that's a little bit
different and different kind of water currents and rocky
substrate you can have really cool ecosystems, really high in
biodiversity. So lots of coral, sponges; we were seeing mats of
brittle stars, sea stars eating the brittle stars, and so on up
the food chain. We're seeing the geology of the sea floor.
We're seeing faults. We're seeing the context for the
habitats that all these creatures are living on. I came
back from a break and the ROV had settled down and was
looking at this kind of golden colored thing that was
encrusting a rock. I think it's important more so that it just
captured the minds of of people around the world. Things like
that, getting people engaged, getting people involved and
hopefully they follow along as we continue to find new
discoveries. The odds of finding something completely
new to science are are pretty high and it happens pretty
often. We got kind of pushed out of the Gulf of Alaska due
to poor weather. We're able to make the most of it by going
inside and doing some dives within the fjords. We were able
to climb this basically vertical wall feature 500
meters below us and saw some really amazing stuff. We saw
four or five giant Pacific octopus. Once we got to the
Eastern Gulf off of the Alexander Archipelago, we saw
these really dense forests of Pacific Red Tree Coral, Primnoa,
at a density that I've never seen before supporting all
different kinds of life.
I believe this is the deep-sea octopus, Graneledone boreopacifica. This really rarely
seen process happening. We're diving on a seat off of Chatham
Strait, about 32 miles-ish off of the mainland of Alaska.
We saw an incredible amount of bubbles and this very diverse
chemosynthetic community. Geologists mostly have been
able to explore the seafloor using remote means. Rarely do
they get the chance to put their eyes on the seafloor and
actually see what's there and see the context of the geology,
see the faults, the rocks, the seeps, the landslides as they
are. We've been bouncing kind of between different areas trying
to stay one step ahead of the storms and hopefully in doing
so we're able to get a couple more good dives in
Yeah, we're looking at what they call the glacial flour,
which is really just finely ground rock.
I think exploration like this is crucial to helping us better
manage our marine habitats and fisheries. If we don't know
what's down there, if we can only if we've only been kind of
estimating or guessing, then we don't know what we could be
losing. The more that we know the more that we can
effectively manage, you know, human activities in the ocean.
Just having the the baseline knowledge for what's out there
gives geologist that worry about geological hazards an
idea of what areas are prone to submarine landslides, how often
faults might break and create big earthquakes, things like
that. Pretty shocked with the amount of work that we've been
able to do. The team aboard has been wonderful. Everybody's
kind of rallying behind the mission to get in the water as
much as possible and do as much exploration as we can.