Deep Coral Shakedown (Schmidt Ocean Institute)
26 August – 6 September 2012
RV Falkor and ROV Global Explorer
The Cordes lab was invited to participate in this cruise by the Chief Scientist Peter Etnoyer from NOAA. The goals of the cruise were to survey a series of sites from the Florida Platform over to Viosca Knoll and the recently discovered site in Atwater Valley 357. We set out to investigate coral habitats in a variety of settings, document the diversity of octocorals and examine the aragonite saturation state in Lophelia pertusa habitats. The cruise started out in rough seas with the arrival of Hurricane Issac in the Gulf of Mexico. We ran from the hurricane, in some of the roughest seas that any of us had ever encountered. Despite this delay, we were able to accomplish many of the tasks of the cruise and returned home with plenty of new samples to analyze in our diversity work and our ongoing monitoring of ocean acidification in the deep Gulf of Mexico.
Cruise web site: http://www.schmidtocean.org/story/show/956