A glimpse into an unseen seascape just 20 miles offshore!
Bringing a never before seen world to light, NOAA has gone one mile deep off the Outer Banks coast to capture a fascinating world of extraordinary beauty. Laura Leslie covers the story for WRAL, Raleigh.
“A deep-sea research expedition is letting scientists see the ocean bottom off the North Carolina coast for the first time.
The Okeanos, a remote-controlled underwater research vessel, explores different parts of the ocean each year for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This year’s expedition, which wrapped up last week, was off the Southeast coast.”
The continental shelf off North Carolina is narrow, and water about a mile deep is only about 20 miles off the beach at Cape Hatteras. NOAA officials said the Hatteras slope has never been explored before, and Megan McCuller, a marine biologist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, hasn’t been able to take her eyes off the video from the expedition.
“There’s so many new species to be discovered. We saw this, like, pitch black sponge on one of the dives, and all the shore scientists had no idea,” McCuller said Friday.
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