- [Justin] Aloha everyone.
Welcome to NOAA's National Marine Sanctuaries distance learning program, our webinar series.
Today we are going to be exploring the strange off-ridge seamounts in the expansion area of
Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. For those of you who are new to our series,
you are in listen-only mode. If you have any questions, you'll notice a control panel
located on the right-hand side of your screen
and there is a question box. You can type anything in there, technical issues or questions
and we will do our best to respond. There will be a Q&A, a question-and-answer session,
at the end of this presentation and we will share your questions with Dr. Kelley then.
Just so you know, this webinar is being recorded and it will be available on our website
as soon as we are able to edit and caption it, and we will send that link out to you
also at the, after this webinar is over. I wanted to let you know and also welcome folks from all across the world,
we have 400 people registered for this webinar and I can see a lot of new attendees joining as I speak
about a hundred and forty three at this point.
I just wanted to welcome folks. We have people from Hawaiʻi of course, but also
Florida and Texas, Alabama, California, Washington State, Washington DC, North Carolina,
the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa and a lot of other states,
and then also welcome to our international visitors. Again I don't have enough time to list everyone,
but we have folks from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Canada, the Bahamas, India, Japan, Indonesia, Nigeria
the Russian Federation and more, so welcome everyone and thank you for coming.
All of these webinars are made possible by the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries.
And I am going to try to share a video with you briefly,
see if it starts for us.
Great. And I highly encourage you to visit Sanctuaries.NOAA.gov
The web team just spent a lot of time updating the website and there's some incredible footage.
You can learn about all of the different National Marine Sanctuary sites
and see 360 videos, photos, and learn a lot more about each individual place.
The map you're seeing here rep...shows you all of the different National Marine Sanctuaries
in the blue circles, as you can see, they're scattered all across the country,
including the Great Lakes here. And also we have our Marine National Monuments,
and so those are the triangles that you see here in American Samoa, Rose Atoll,
and the one that's going to be focused on today, Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument,
which protects the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands right here.
The National Marine Sanctuaries are protected by Congress through the National Marine Sanctuary Act
and the Marine National Monuments are protected by different presidents through the Antiquities Act.
All of this together is protecting more than 600,000 square miles
Today's hosts, myself Justin Umholtz, I work with the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation
as an education coordinator with Mokupāpapa Discovery Center located in Hilo, Hawaiʻi.
And our job at Mokupāpapa Discovery Center is to share about that remote part of Hawai,
Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.
And joining us today as well is Malia Evans.
Malia is the education and Native Hawaiian outreach lead at Mokupāpapa Discovery Center.
So before we introduce our speaker I want to show you a couple photos about
why these national marine sanctuaries and monuments are protected.
They're very important sites of biodiversity,
they protect a lot of different maritime heritage resources, including shipwrecks,
and they also... as soon as my slide catches up...
protect important cultural heritage resources as well.
The photo you're looking at here is actually part of Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.
This is a very important island, Mokumanamana.
These areas provide very important habitat for many different species, here again is a Hawaiʻi species,
in Papahānaumokuākea. This is a green sea turtle and the highly endangered Hawaiian monk seal,
paling it up at the moment.
And our mandate is to provide education programs to our communities, like this webinar series,
and also outreach which we hope to be able to do more of as as things become safer in the future.
And at each of our sanctuaries and monuments there is incredible research going on,
which is shared on each of the web sites for individual sites.
There is ongoing monitoring to ensure that these sites thrive and stay healthy
and ultimately each site is managed to protect the resources that it was created to protect.
I'm getting ahead of my slides, sorry for the slight delay...
All right so I hope that many of you have had a chance to visit a National Marine Sanctuary
or Marine National Monument near you. I highly encourage you to do that.
These are areas that offer incredible beauty and great experiences...there's kayaking,
diving,
surfing,
I'm going slow because my internet appears to be a little slow,
wildlife viewing and boating
and fishing of course and many other activities but the one I want to also promote
is volunteering because these are our National Marine Sanctuaries,
different communities take care of these places and it's the volunteers
that keep them healthy and keep them thriving and healthy for future generations.
So with that, I am going to hand it over to Malia to introduce our speaker for today.
-[Malia] All right, and it is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Christopher Kelly,
recently retired from the University of Hawaiʻi after 24 years
where he served as Graduate Research Faculty for the Department of Oceanography,
Affiliate Faculty for the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology
and Program Biologist for the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory.
He has been on numerous manned submersible dives, a large number of
which were conducted in the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument
between 2001 and 2009. In 2018 Dr. Kelly was asked to lead an ROV cruise
off Dr. Robert Ballardʻs ship Nautilus, to explore the geology and biology
of enigmatic sea mounts located north of Hawaiʻi.
The objectives of, and findings from this cruise will be the topic of the talk today,
so without much ado, well actually so without further ado,
Mokupāpapa Discovery Center's Third Thursday by the Bay Lecture Series welcomes Dr. Christopher Kelley.
-[Chris] Thank you so much Malia and Justin, I'm very excited to have an opportunity to talk about the cruise,
and talk about the Nautilus program in general. So let's dive right in.
So before we actually talk about the cruise, I just want to familiarize everybody with some of
the seafloor features in the North Central Pacific, and one of the main ones that many of you might have
heard of already is the Hawaiian Emperor Ridge, which is a trail of sea mounts and islands and banks
and so forth that runs all the way from main Hawaiian Islands up to the Aleutian trench.
And here you can see the ages right now the hot spot - these trails are created by mantle plumes,
or hot spots if you will. The plume is right now off of the Big Island,
and then around 43 million years or so ago there was a turn, and it went straight up here,
and then we don't know what happened further back in 70 or 80 million years
because that's when the trail gets, its being subducted into the Aleutian trench
But what I want to point out is there some other features right around the
Hawaiian Ridge and the upper Ridge, and this includes Hess Rise, which is a big
volcanic platform or province. We have the Liliuokalani Seamount trail that's right here,
and the Musician Seamounts over here, and there's also another one called the Wentworth Seamounts.
So I want to do a poll right now, Malia, and that is maybe you can find out how many people have actually heard of
some of these lesser known seamounts like the Liliuokalani's or the Musicians?
- [Malia] So we'll start our first poll question. Have you ever heard of Hess Rise or the Liliuokalani Seamounts?
Select one of the following: yes or no. And if you're in full screen mode you want to pop out,
using your control panel to answer this poll. So go ahead and register your vote.
- [Chris] and I'm just... you want me just to continue on and then you'll get the results or...?
- [Malia] Here, I'll close the poll. We have a lot of people who responded so far,
almost 90%, so I'm gonna close the poll up and we'll look and see what the results are.
So let's see, no, 77% did, never heard of the Hess Rise or the Liliuokalani Seamounts.
- [Chris] Well that's good, then you are going to learn something new today.
and I find these features to be really exciting. So let's see here, okay so this
is kind of a close-up of the Hawaiian Ridge here and here's the Hawaiian Seamounts trail if you will,
and I just drew an arrow to show you the direction
of the trail and I've also drawn some arrows showing you the direction of
these other trails, the Wentworth, Liliuokalani, and the Musicians trail as well.
And the point I want to make with this particular slide is that they're not all
going in the same direction, and the reason they're not going in the same direction,
one of the possible reasons is the fact that these trails are created
by the motion of the Pacific plate and the Pacific plate may have changed directions,
and that's why they're lining up a little bit differently.
And to show you how that could have happened I'm going to show a little cartoon video here.
and let's see...
What you're gonna see on this video, you're gonna see the Hess rise depicted as a sort of white blob,
and then the Liliuokalani Seamounts are this sort of line of seamounts
that are coming off of the Hess Rise. Here are the Wentworths, and these are all in white,
and these are believed to be older, have been dated to be older,
and then you have the Hawaiian Seamounts and the band and going up into the Emperors.
So that's what you're going to see, and I'm going to go ahead and play
the video for you right now so you can see how people think this might have occurred.
So this is actually depicting what they believe is the motion of the plate
and now you can see the Hawaiian Seamounts starting out, after the Hess Rise and the others...
and so that's how it works, these seamounts were created sequentially.
Okay and the reason they cross or intersect is because the plate changed
direction between when the Hess Rise and the older seamounts were created and
when the Hawaiian Seamounts were created.
So that's all well and good and that's sort of where people think things are...
people think this is what happens in this area the Pacific,
but now we've got a little problem here because alongside
these particular trails that I just mentioned there's also a smaller trail
right along here which I'm referring to as the enigmatic seamount trail and it's
enigmatic or it's strange because it's parallel to the Hawaiian Ridge trail.
And I for one had no clue how that could occur
because this is approximately a hundred, hundred and twenty miles from the center of these volcanoes,
and that's too far out to actually be sort of Hawaiian hotspot created.
So what I did, is I contacted Dr. Jasper Konter
at the University of Hawai'i Geology and Geophysics Department and asked him specifically
how could this trail even form? How can you get a parallel trail to the Hawaiian Seamounts?
and his response was, well you notice that that trail is on the Hawaiian Arch.
And no I didn't. And so I'm going to show you what he was talking about here.
And in order to kind of illustrate it, I really intensified some of the colors on this ramp
to show you sort of subtle differences in the depth of the seamounts.
So what he was talking about it
is best well-known right here off of the main Hawaiian Islands what's called the
North Hawaiian Arch, and this is a very large broad area of shallower sea floor
compared to the rest of the abyssal seafloor here, and it's adjacent again
about a hundred miles or so from the main Hawaiian Islands, and then there's
also a deeper area right next to these islands called the Hawaiian Trough.
And I knew about this already, but I didn't think that it
applied further up the chain, and what Jasper was saying is that he had noticed
that the arch is up here as well. Right here and you can actually see a trough as well in this area too.
So what? So what does that mean? how does that explain how the seamounts formed?
Okay so this is what they believe, how arch volcanism is believed to to work.
So whenever you have a really really large volcano right here such as the the Big Island
or some of the main Hawaiian Islands that's forming, there's so much weight to this volcano that it actually
deflects and pushes down on the Earth's crust, and the Earth's crust bends and
what it does immediately after in the actual volcano is it forms a trough
and then it comes forms an arch which then rebounds and then gets back to the
normal seamount level. Okay and this is the North Arch Lava Field because this
is the one place in the world where arch volcanism has been really studied the best,
and maybe in one place in the world where it's even known to have occurred
and basically they knew that this rise was here but it wasn't until the 1980's
and the 1990's when they did the GLORIA side-scan surveys throughout the Pacific,
that they found this big huge area of sort of a lava flow, it's very flat,
it didn't show on bathymetry very well at all, but this is an extremely large area of lava
that some event had occurred here. So they got down there and they dredged and they got some rocks
and you have to keep in mind that all the seafloor around this area is about a hundred million years old
and they went and dated these rocks, and lo and behold that they found out that the
rock from this area is somewhere on the order of 3 to 4 million years old
and basically it's the same age as these islands here in the main Hawaiian Islands.
And so the theory then arose that the amount of pressure on the crust
by these islands here, actually created such a trough and such an arch here that
had actually split open the seafloor and lava oozed out and formed
this very large sort of pond of lava if you will.
Okay and what Jasper was alluding to is that what if the same thing occurred here but then in Gardner,
in this particular case, this is Gardner Pinnacles, and this is the Saint Rogatien area.
Gardener, this past year in 2020, it was described as being the largest volcano discovered in the world,
it was written up by Garcia and his co-authors in a very recent paper.
This is the big load, right here, that caused this trough
and caused this arch to form, and what Jasper is saying is that it's possible
that the deflection, or the - not the deflection - the distortion of the seafloor here
was so great that you didn't just get lava oozing out,
you got actual volcanoes forming that erupted and formed seamounts.
Okay, so how do you how do you know that? I mean, how can you even prove that?
Well the fact of the matter is nobody had ever been to be these seamounts. These black dots show where
all of us had been before, myself and others as well, but nobody had been as visited these seamounts.
And furthermore, nobody had even mapped these seamounts. So this shows you the
sort of a close-up of satellite altimetry data and I sort of did it at this grade
so it shows up a little worse than it actually is,
but the bottom line is that you can't get really good resolution or get a really good look
at seamounts from satellite data, what you really need to do is map them
using multi-beam sonar or some other type of sonar system,
and they hadn't been mapped yet, so we really didn't know what they look like. Furthermore,
since they've never been mapped and never been visited, only one of these seamounts
ever had a name and this is from a ship transiting that discovered it and they
named it after a Captain Naifeh, and so we just decided to give our own
numbers here so we called him seamount one starting on the right here, all the way up to
seamount 10 already to the left, and Naifeh is essentially seamount eight.
And doing this we also decided to call this group of five the Naifeh Cluster.
And this group down here the Unnamed Cluster One.
Okay, so we had our hypothesis. We were hypothesizing that the seamounts were the result of arch volcanism.
So then what did we need to do? Well we had a map.
Okay so this is sort of a depiction of multi-beam mapping, sonar mapping, and I don't have
time to go into that, so I'm just calling that priority one - we have to map because
we can't dive or go down and collect rocks unless you've got good maps to choose our sites.
Secondly what we needed to do was collect rocks. And that's our primary objective number two.
So we had to get a vehicle down there to grab some rocks. Now why do we need rocks? What will that do?
Well, it'll do the same thing as the rocks down here in the North Arch Lava Field did,
that if we grab some rocks from these seamounts, and as it turns out these rocks get dated to the same
approximate age as Gardner, then that's very strong evidence that they were created by arch volcanism.
And Gardner is known to be somewhere between 12 to 14 million years old.
So that's what we are hoping that we would get, we would get an age on these
that that would approximate the same age as the adjacent large volcanoes.
Okay, third primary objective is that the monument isn't protecting rocks,
the monument is there to protect animal communities
and unique - both marine as well as terrestrial communities. And the monument, and myself
as well since I'm a biologist, want to know what animals are on the seamount.
So our third objective was to survey their biological resources. Of course we didn't know anything.
We did not, we didn't know what animals lived here, but we did know what animals lived over here
on the Musician Seamounts, and we also knew some of the animals that lived over here on the Hawaiian Ridge,
on some of these because there had been previous expeditions by NOAA's Okeanos Explorer
and the University of Hawaii ship Kai'imikai-O-Kanaloa or KOK, that had found spectacular communities of corals
and sponges and all types of animals on either side of the sea mounts. So we were obviously hoping to find =
some of these communities on these sea mounts as well, so that was a major priority.
So this time we didn't have those two ships, we had their sister ship, the R/V Nautilus
to do the exploring, and this is operated by the Ocean Exploration Trust or OET,
and this Cruise was designated NA101 and it took place between September 15th to October 2nd of 2018.
The ship has got the mapping system, it's got the wonderful ROV the Hercules, the Hercules ROV,
and pilots, and it also is a telepresence-enabled ship where anyone in the world can watch the expedition
live over the internet.
So here is the Cliff Notes version of a cruise summary in one particular image.
This shows sort of a compilation that was put together by OET's Nicole Raineault,
and basically it shows that we were able to get up to all ten of these seamounts
and map around all of them and then these right here are the dive numbers.
So we were able to dive on these seamounts as well.
And I'm going to start getting a little more into the weeds here
and talk about the Primary Objective Number One, which was the mapping.
So we did complete all ten seamounts and completely mapped all ten of them as well.
And I just put this picture up, I'm supposed to put a credit but I have no idea where I got this,
probably decades ago, probably from are they from Kongsberg Simrad
who operates the multi-beam systems.
In any case, what we found out is that three of these seamounts in the Naifeh Cluster
the further northwest cluster, are guyots, are flat top seamounts,
which means that they actually reached the surface.
And none of the ones in the unnamed cluster where guyots so they had not reached the surface.
And this shows you how valuable multi beam mapping is. So that picture
I showed you earlier was of Naifeh. That's what we knew about it before we got up there,
and this was what we knew about it after the Nautilus had mapped it.
And then this shows you another example of one of the unnamed clustered seamounts, Number Three,
and that's what we knew it looked like before, that's what we know what it looks like now.
So it's an extraordinarily important tool. Total mapping was over 16,000 square kilometers on this cruise,
which was only a little over two weeks long. And we now know, as I mentioned, three of the five seamounts
were revealed to be guyots, so they had reached the ocean surface.
Okay, so we have our mapping and we also did 11 ROV dives. So he did one dive on each of the ten seamounts,
and then we did two dives on sea mount number six.
All of the dives were conducted between 1200 to 2800 meters, and part of the reason for this is that
this is a depth where we expected to get good rocks, but also we were hoping to get good biology as well.
Okay, so let's take a look at Primary Objective 2 and how we did here. So we got a total of 56 rocks collected from
all 10 sea mounts and Andrea Balbas was on the cruise with us just taking a look at them.
She basically eyeballed and sort of said that she thought that 8 of the 10 seamounts,
the rocks in 8 of the 10 seamounts appears dateable.
So a rock is not a rock is not a rock. Not every rock can be dated,
but she thought a very large number the ones that we got could be dated.
Also, all of the rocks were split for distribution to four different labs. So one of them was going to
Oregon State University for the argon-argon dating, and another one is
going to the Geological Repository at Rhode Island, University of Rhode Island.
Another one was going with Dr. Dorsey Wanless at Boise State University,
and the fourth one was going to Jasper Konter at the University of Hawaii.
And each of these were going to do different things. The dating was going to be at Oregon State,
and then these are going to be chemical analyses by Jasper and Dorsey.
Okay. Primary Objective Three. Survey of biological resources. So yes indeed we found
beautiful wonderful communities on these seamounts.
We found five high density coral and sponge communities
on seamounts four, five, six, Naifeh and nine.
A what we're calling high density
is anything that's over three thousand animals for linear kilometer along the
track we consider at high density. So we were seeing seamounts between 3,000 to
8,000 per kilometer and I'll explain later how we got those counts on those animals.
But anyway, you can see they're different, they're unique and they're wonderful.
Okay, in part of our biological resource survey we also wanted to find out
how many of these animals could be new species. We got in our permit the
ability to collect the specific samples, and so we were sampling some corals,
sponges and some other animals, associates as well and we were able to
get 46 biological samples, and currently we believe that several of these are
potential new species of corals, at least one made as glass sponge species,
possibly two species of arthropods that are new, six potential new species of sea cucumbers,
a new tunicate, possibly two new species of mollusks, and three new species of sea stars.
So again this was really great . We were very very selective in our sampling by the way
since it is a monument, and we were not just collecting helter-skelter. We're specifically targeting very unusual animals
that we think could be new, as well as other reasons for the various studies.
Aside from the collections, we got 117 hours of high definition video from the Hercules ROV,
which then, we were able to get thousands of image captures from that video. And this is just the sampling
showing you the documentation of all types of different animals: fishes, crabs sponges, sea cucumbers, urchins
anemones, you name it.
And I want to show you some of the video was really really fascinating so that the Nautilus group
actually posted it on the internet and I want to show you one in particular that
supposedly got millions of hits
and it's the first time anyone has seen a gulper eel in situ. And take a look at this.
- [Video unidentified voices from the Nautilus]. Look at that, what is that? Oh wow. Looks like a Muppet [laughter].
What are you?
It's in the water column. Is it a fish? [unintellible]. Is it engorged? or is it... is it mad?
Whoa! Wow! Oh my goodness! [multiple people's reactions].
[laughter] He's got like poofy eyes. Wow!
We really ticked him off. Uh oh! What the? Is that like the gill arch or the gill?
Some kind of... whoa! It just got so big. [laughter and exclamations of surprise]. That's its defense.
Show them how big I am. He's doing the shake [more exclamations of surprise].
Is that a gulper eel? Yeah, I think so, yeah. That is crazy! that was awesome! Way to end the dive. Bye!
- [Chris] So that is why a lot of us are in the deep-sea area
because you never know what you're gonna see down there and that just caught
everybody by surprise. That was absolutely a wonderful find.
Okay, in addition to the primary objectives I mentioned, we also had a number of
secondary objectives that were piggy- backed onto the cruise, and one of these was to
test a new gripper during the dives that was developed by Spencer Backus at the
Jet Propulsion Laboratories here, and this gripper is a prototype that was
invented by Spencer to try to figure out a way at which you could do horizontal
drilling in the deep sea which has never been done before. And so we were testing
just the gripping mechanism. Secondly we were collecting environmental DNA water
samples or eDNA samples for Dr. Meredith Everett as well with NOAA, and that's a
brand-new emerging field of research and I'll talk a little bit briefly about it
a little bit later on, and then the third thing we were doing was testing a new 3D camera
developed by Dr. Allan Adams at MIT, and you can recognize Justin is
helping Allan get this thing ready to go on a dive. So these are all secondary add-ons
that we were accommodating during our main mission here.
So now I want to talk about post-cruise, so what have we done since? And I apologized
for this picture it was a blatant attempt to promote the NOAA Office of Exploration and Research,
which because I'm wearing their shirt and they
support the OET program as well as deep water research all over the world.
But anyway, just showing you some of the things that have come out.
The first thing that came out was just a very brief description of the cruise
letting people know that this had happened in the Journal of Oceanography,
and then let's talk about the mapping Primary Objective One, the mapping. So that all of
the data and the mapping data has already been processed, it has been
submitted to the National Center of Environmental Information that is
operated by NOAA, you can see here, all these are cruise tracks.
This is submitted by Renato Kane of OET as well as Nicole Raineault who are the big mapping experts
on this cruise among other things that they can do. And Renny actually presented this
talk at the Ocean Observations 2009 conference as well for the mapping.
So this is wonderful. The data is now available to for any of you to get
just by going onto this website.
Now let's talk about the geology, this main thing here.
So our rock samples have not been dated yet, the argon-argon testing
takes quite a while, but they are in queue, and they are going to get dated but it just
takes a while, the whole process takes a while. In the meantime Dr. Jasper Konter
and also some of the co-authors, Dorsey and Andrea and Jasper's student Molly Cunningham,
presented their findings about lead isotope analysis at the AGU 2019 conference.
And I'm not going to go into this because you can't see it very well anyway I don't think.
But their findings make these seamounts even more enigmatic
and more mysterious than we thought originally because the lead
findings are not a great match for arch volcanism, nor are they a good match for
any of the other known mechanisms. So basically we're going to wait for the dating.
We don't know what's going on but this could be still arch volcanism but
then it's going to have differences to the one known known area of arch volcanism,
the main Hawaiian Islands as well. So to me this is very exciting that
it's not so quickly answered, you know, there's still some work to be done to
figure out what's going on.
So this is the biology objective so Dr. Tom Hourigan, who's the Program Director of
NOAA's Deep-sea Coral Research and Technology Program.
He presented this poster at ocean sciences 2020,
and sorry Tom, I'm showing your backside but apparently that's the only photo of you
that I have from the cruise, and I wanted to let everybody know that even Program Directors
occasionally get to sneak out and get out on the water sometimes.
So Tom was on this cruise with us and he presented just an overview of the biology findings here,
but also Tom's group supports the
annotation of all the video and imagery that's collected on these cruises,
and that annotation was done at the University of Hawai'i by the Deep-Sea Animal Research Center
or DARC, and that's these three young women here
that are doing fantastic work in providing the deep-sea coral program with a lot of records.
For this particular cruise all of the video has been annotated by them
and they have already submitted the 15,905 records to Tom's program
that are documenting over 45,000 corals and sponges along with over 4,000 associated animals,
and the data is now all available here. This is the Deep-Sea Coral Database Map Portal,
and you can see all these dots right on here, this is the enigmatic seamounts, so the data is all available.
This also shows you how dedicated this group is. This is Meagan Putts and she came into work even
though she was having a very clear isotope problem, excuse me isopod problem.
God I blew the joke. Sorry. Okay so talking a little bit more about biology
there were, as I mentioned, there were thousands of images and the DARC lab actually formatted over 5000
of these images for incorporation into the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research's
online animal guide. And this is the formatting where they put the site, depth indicators, headers, logos...
everything else the source. And these photographs, they're going to be
incorporated in the next version of that guide. We need to go through and pick the
best of the best of all of these images, we're not going to get them 5,000 more
because it's already 5,000 pictures in this online guide. We're going to pick
the best of the best and then submit them so they're all gonna wind up available for you to look at as well.
Okay let's look at secondary objectives. So this gripper, the tests were
successful. Spencer learned an awful lot from doing
these tests and he wrote a very very long detailed article describing this testing,
which he submitted to the Journal of Field Robotics.
So if you're interested in seeing what he did out here you can access this particular article.
Regarding the eDNA samples, so Meredith Everett at NOAA she presented
some of her preliminary findings at the 7th International Symposium on Deep-Sea Corals
down in Bogotá, Colombia and we don't have time to actually go into this,
and I don't have the knowledge to go into it, but I will sort of point out
that she was able, she was focusing primarily on corals and she was able to
actually identify a number of species or groups of corals from the water samples
that were collected over these particular seamounts, so the process was
that we would collect the water sample in an area where in particular we had a
high density of corals and then we would try to also sample a few of these corals
as well so that she would have a match to see how all they they went up
against what she was seeing in the water. And there are some things that she's got
to find out, there's a couple groups of corals that we know were present in
fairly large numbers in the family Primnoidae which did not show up in the
water samples but again that's interesting and she's working on that as
well and trying to improve on this. And this is a brand new field and it's going
to be really cool when they continue to develop this.
And then we've got this 3D camera by Dr. Adams as well from MIT and we got this down on two dives,
and it all worked and it was beautiful. He did a preliminary little 3D view you gotta
have those glasses on so I can't show you, where you get immersed in a whole deep-sea environment
but he's got that he's working on it and
hopefully at some point then that's going to be made available to... for people
to actually see and actually walk around on the seamounts via his video.
So that's all I've got for this particular cruise but that's not all there is I want to tell you about
because the Nautilus, we just found out a few months ago, the Nautilus has got the support
to head back up into the monument in 2021 to map and dive on on even more unexplored seamounts.
And in this particular, this next cruise that we're already planning out, we're going
to try to hit some of these lower Liliuokalani Seamount features right here
that are inside the monument, as well as some of these that we think are
the southern end of the Wentworth Seamount trail but we're not sure,
we'd like to confirm that and also we want to try to figure out what's
going on with this trail and this bifurcation where you have two forks
going down here so we're going to go and grab rocks again and we're also going to
go and do some biology because nobody's been on any of these seamounts again.
So stay tuned in the end you will be able to see this live if you're interested by
going on to NautilusLive and watching the expedition when we do it.
And then finally there are thousands of sea mounts in the Pacific and we hope that
these cruises will help clarify their complex origins and the remarkable
communities they have living on them. And I also wanna just thank, there's so
many people to thank here. I just want to thank everybody in the monument, in OET,
University of Hawai'i, Office of Ocean Exploration, Deep-sea Coral Program,
as well as all of the crew of the Nautilus and all of the co-scientists and communication experts.
This shows maybe about a third of the people that were on the cruise,
so it took a lot of people to make this happen.
So with that I think we're done and hopefully we have some time for some questions, Justin and Malia?
- [Justin] Chris, you did great! You actually have plenty of time for questions,
so I'm gonna leave it to Malia to start us off if you're ready?
- [Chris] I'm ready
- [Justin] Malia are you on?
Oh, she might have lost connection, oh there we go.
- [Malia] Ok, first question: Are the grooves in the the seafloor, for lack of a better word,
that extends from the Naifeh Cluster eastward, related to volcanic activity?
- [Chris] That's what's called a fracture zone, and I'm not a geologist so I'm not going to
go into it, but basically if my understanding is correct, that's when
you've got a couple plates colliding further to the east and the way they're
moving against each other creates these stress areas that are manifested in
these huge elongate fractures that extend for hundreds if not thousands of miles.
And there's a set of these, and there's just one of them that came right to where the
Naifeh Seamounts are. So we don't know if there was a connection between
those fracture zones and the origin of those seamount, but some people have
actually thought that maybe those fracture zones actually weakened the seafloor
and allowed for a greater volcanic activity at that site.
- [Justin] All right, so here is another geology question so...
- [Chris] Oh dear.
- [Justin] We'll see what you can do here.
Is there an analogous arch volcanism to the southeast of the main Hawaiian Islands?
- [Chris] There is. It's a little less obvious because there are some other seamounts there
there that date back to the Cretaceous as well, and I don't know,
Are you still showing my screen or not?
- [Justin] Yes.
- [Chris] Okay I don't know if I can try to roar through here here and see if I can get back to a slide to show this.
Okay. Right here you've got what appears to be the South Arch, the southern part of the...
and then this North Arch, this is South Arch... and here it is not very much going on here South here,
it's more dramatic on the north side.
- [Justin] Great. Thank You. Go for it Malia.
- [Malia] Alright, our next question says, Hi Chris! Did you observe ferro manganese crusts on the seamounts?
- [Chris] We sure did. In fact once you get down about a thousand meters below the sea surface,
you pretty much find crust about everywhere except in the very youngest seamounts.
So what they're talking about is they're talking about a precipitate that comes out of the seawater
very very slowly over time. It's a mineral precipitate and it tends to adhere to clear rocky surfaces and it
is called crust as a result. And it usually forms at about two to three millimeters per million years
and so the older the seamount the thicker the crust.
And so we did see substantial crusting, particularly on this group ridge right here,
which looked actually a bit older than the Naifeh, but we still saw some crusting
going on the Naifeh Seamounts as well. So given its 12 to 14 million years if this is true,
it's arch volcanism. That's long enough to actually have some crust form on all the rock surfaces.
- [Justin] And what is the significance of that crust?
- [Chris] Well, that crust is, along with sort of nodules that occur on sort of sedimented
surfaces or substrates, they're of intense interest to the deep-sea mining community
because they are extreme, they have some extremely valuable minerals in there.
They've got copper, cobalt, rare earth elements, they've got...
I can't even think of them. There are so many types of minerals there, and so there is a very
active movement going on right now to develop a deep-sea mining industry
throughout the Pacific. And in international waters that's handled by
the International Seabed Authority as well, and they are already leasing out
research blocks of seafloor, particularly in the East, excuse me, the West Pacific, Northwest Pacific,
for crust mining and in the southeast Pacific for nodule mining activity.
So they're very very significant and we biologists
are doing our best to catalogue what animals live on manganese crust
environments because those animals are going to be at risk from mining activities
if and when it takes off commercially.
- [Justin] Should I go Malia or...?
- [Malia] Okay we have another question regarding,
How much natural light was there at the depths that you visited?
- [Chris] At those depths there's no natural downwelling or ambient light coming from the surface.
It's completely black. Its extinguished at those depths.
However in the deep sea there's a lot of bioluminescent animals, and so if you were to turn off all of your lights
you can see a fair number of plankton's that are doing flashes and so forth, but all of the colors and
everything you see on the video and the images, those are a result of our artificial lights that the ROV has.
- [Justin] Alright, well while we're talking about depth there's two questions I'm going to combine:
What was the least depth of the guyots?
So I imagine, what was the highest guyot or the shallowest from the surface?
And then what is the ocean depth of the highest Naifeh guyot?
- [Chris] Okay, well the highest point on the Naifeh guyot which was the shallowest seamount of all 10,
was 723 meters. And then the seafloor around there was, let's see, I should have looked at that...
it's going to be somewhere around 4,000 meters plus or minus...
the arch area here is usually about a hundred to two meters higher than the normal sea floor right here,
but I think as a ballpark, I should have looked at this, I apologize,
but a ballpark could be around 4000 meters, possibly a little deeper.
- [Malia] Okay, we have some more questions about depth.
How deep can the Nautilus go and what is the average depth of its dives?
- [Chris] Well the Nautilus does anything from 200 meters to look at fisheries and deep coral reefs
all the way down to about 3000 meters. And I think that's their range right now.
The vehicle could go deeper, but it's more of a cable issue and how much cable that you've got,
and I think they may be attempting to get a longer cable for 2021
that would allow them to go down to potentially 5,000 meters but right I believe it's around 3000.
- [Justin] There is an eDNA question. I'm not sure, you said that's not necessarily your specialty,
but they're wondering if corals need to be spawning in order to gather a DNA or how...
maybe you could give up another brief explanation of how that works.
- [Chris] No, the answer is no, they do not need to be spawning to collect their DNA
because corals as well as other animals just shed DNA naturally.
I'll give you a perfect example that Meredith told me about.
There're bamboo corals down there in the family Isididae, and they call them bamboos because they tend
to have these white and black sort of intervals along their stock,
and anyway, we call these corals pretty snotty because they release a lot of mucus,
and that mucus gets into the water column and that's got a ton of DNA and the problem for Meredith
is that sometimes these bamboo corals, which can be quite numerous down at these depths, they can
kind of drown out all the other corals present because they released so much mucus.
So nope, don't need to have eggs, you can just grab a sample of water and you'll find DNA in it.
- [Malia] Aright, since we're talking about organisms,
Has a research team specialist
identified the sponge and coral specimens in the videos and photographs from the dives?
- [Chris] Yeah so we have tentative identifications of the animals from the photographs,
but of course that's an imperfect science
because it can be very challenging to identify animals strictly from photographs
and you can't sample every single animal that you see obviously,
nobody wants to do that. So we have based on our experience and based on the great
experience of the DARC lab at the University of Hawai'i.
We have some pretty solid IDs. Also the DARC lab sends the photographs out to taxonomic specialists
so all of the coral photographs will go to coral experts, the sponges will go to
sponge experts, the arthropods, crabs, will go to arthropod experts as well. And they have
been extremely helpful in giving us their opinions as to what the animal identifications are.
Now with regard to the specimens, I didn't really follow up on that, but the specimens are all in the Museum
of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and a number at pieces have been accessed already
And the polychaete worms have been accessed, some of the corals have been accessed,
one of the urchins that I thought was going to be a brand new genus, believe it or not,
turns out it was a known species collected in 1902 by an expedition here in Hawai'i.
So some of them are known, some of these squat lobsters or crabs have
been examined but then a bunch of the other ones had not yet examined.
Dr. Scott France, from the University of Louisiana Lafayette,
I believe he's got four of the coral specimens that he's examining right now.
- [Justin] While we're on the topic of the ocean exploration and research guide, there's a question
that says, are there plans to include snippets of video data in addition to the photo imagery?
I'm thinking AI computer vision library and potential automated video USB surveys on this question.
- [Chris] The DARC lab doesn't really do the video highlights, we sort of leave that up to the the OET,
the Ocean Exploration Trust to post or do whatever they want to do with their highlight video
and it's been sort of the same thing with the Okeanos Explorer video as well, but they will post on their website
the video clips of what they think are really wonderful clips of animals and interactions with animals,
but no, we don't to my knowledge we don't have any plans to include video clips on the animal guide
but somebody could suggest this to OER
and see if they want to have a actually a separate video clip library from these cruises.
- [Justin And OER is linked in that handout that I posted in your control panel there,
you'll notice there's a little grey tab called handouts so you can download that
and I will be sure to send that same handout out to everyone after the
webinar as well so if you have ideas, their link is there.
I think we have time for one more question. Malia, do you want to take this one?
- [Malia} Okay so our last question for the day,
Are the ecosystems and these great depths linked in any way to ecosystems in the photic zone?
- [Chris] That's a very good question, and yes we do think they're linked primarily via food resources
that are making their way down from the surface all the way into the deep ocean.
So this can be in the form of particulate organic matter and then that particular matter is fed on
by other smaller animals that are fed on by larger animals, etc., etc.,
so that's definitely one of the ways in which we think they're linked.
- [Justin] Great. I'm just pulling up my view. Can everyone see my screen? It may take a second.
Yes, you should be seeing a National Marine Sanctuary webinar series slide.
So on this slide you are gonna see a link to our webinar archive,
so all of the different webinars that have been hosted here are available there and that also is in your handout.
And any questions can go to our lead Claire Fackler here at sanctuary.education@NOAA.gov.
Chris referenced a lot of different organizations, so those are available in the handout,
and the Nautilus is a major partner as, but there is also the NOAA Okeanos Research Vessel
and the Schmidt Ocean Institute the Falkor is another one.
So there are quite a number of organizations doing great work out all across the Pacific and Atlantic
but especially for us here in Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.
- [Chris] Justin, donʻt forget the University of Hawaiʻi has got the Kilo Moana with the Luʻukai ROV as well.
In fact theyʻre actually going out on a cruise shortly
and Meagan Putts with the DARC Lab going to be the data editor on that cruise.
So they are also available. They have yet to do a telepresence but I think they're moving in that direction.
- [Justin] Great that is wonderful to hear. I'm always learning about how big this family is.
So we apologize if we didn't get to your question but we will be downloading all of these questions and sending
anything unanswered to Dr. Kelley, and I'll be sending that out along with the handouts.
Let me forward our slide here...
All of you will be receiving a certificate of attendance. I know this is handy for those of you who are educators,
and it counts for one hour of contact...professional development.
And at the end of this webinar when you close out a small survey will pop up.
So it's a huge help if you could take the time to do that,
it really only takes you a couple minutes, but it's what keeps the justification to
our bosses to let them know that this is a useful tool for our community and for our all of you.
For those of you who are educators either formal or informal,
we also have a slightly longer survey that we really appreciate your feedback on
as we develop new online and multimedia and distance learning resources.
So please, we very much appreciate you taking the time to do that.
And that link is also going to show up in your survey.
And finally, normally we would advertise upcoming webinars, but it's very soon going to be
Get into your Sanctuary Day! And this year it is going to be virtual.
So from July 31st to August 2nd if you go to the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries Facebook page
we will be running a series of both pre-recorded and live
Facebook experiences that cover all of the National Marine Sanctuaries and Marine National Monuments.
That is the last thing I had to share. Dr. Kelley, thank you so much for taking the time to
come share the work with us. It's exciting after two years to hear kind of where things are at.
And Malia, thank you for co-hosting. Did either of you have anything you want to add?
- [Chris] One last thing for me. The Nautilus is going to be working on the West Coast
hopefully starting in August of this year, and itʻs all Covid independent unfortunately,
but those of you who really want to tag along and see things in real time when
the scientists are are seeing them as well, you just got to go on on to NautilusLive
and see what's going on. And if they've got a cruise going they'll be broadcasting it
and you can watch right along with the the people on the ship.
- [Justin] Yep, and actually that reminds me,
for those of you who are doing home learning or also classroom learning,
you can arrange a ship-to-shore communication, at least with the Nautilus
and I believe the Okeanos has that capability, to actually have your
class talk with people while they're out on the ship, finding out what they're
learning and what their experience is like. So that also would be available on the
web pages that we're sharing. And they have a lot of archived highlight footage
which I would highly recommend you checking out.
Any last comments Malia or Chris?
Great! Well thank you everyone so much for visiting us and staying with us for this webinar,
and there are plenty more to come so please be sure to check out our sanctuaries.NOAA.gov/education page
and you can find out more about what is coming up. Take care, aloha.
- [Malia] Aloha!