Last Wednesday afternoon, a group of scientists and a handful of lucky onlookers crowded around a heap of computer monitors onboard a NOAA research vessel in between Santa Cruz and Anacapa islands. In the middle of this scrum were two men controlling a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) 500 feet beneath the boat’s hull.
Later in the day, an oceanographer named Peter Etnoyer would ruminate on the fact that when he was in college, researchers still believed that the deep sea consisted of dead zones devoid of life; however, the ROV’s electrical eyes revealed an ecosystem teeming with fish, crustaceans, and the organism that nobody knew actually existed in the Santa Barbara Channel until recently: coral.
Everyone held their breath as they watched the ROV clamp onto a pink gorgonian coral bush, more commonly known as a sea fan, and deposit it onto the submersible’s “front porch.” Exhales. Applause. Soon after, scientists and their assistants were slicing and dicing the specimen so it could be preserved for examination. The abiding question is how deep-sea corals are impacted by ocean acidification.