Amazing Oceanic Wonder: A Beautiful Coral Reef Was Found that Runs from Miami to South Carolina!
Cybersecdn- A report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Ocean Exploration says that the biggest deep-sea coral reef in the world has been found off the East Coast. From Miami to Charleston, South Carolina, it’s a huge 6.4-million-acre ocean.
NOAA says that means it’s bigger than Vermont. The finding disproves a long-held idea that the Blake Plateau in the Atlantic might be a dead zone. It came out in the magazine Geomatics on January 12. They found instead a “stunning” ecosystem with “dense thickets of the reef-building coral” living in it.
In a news release, NOAA Ocean Exploration Operations Chief Kasey Cantwell said, “We thought for years that a lot of the Blake Plateau was soft sediment and not very populated.”
“Studies from the past have shown that there was some coral in the area, mostly near the shore and in shallower water, but we didn’t know how big this habitat was or how many of these coral mounds were linked until we had a full map of the area.” NOAA says that the reef is 35 to 75 miles from the coast and goes from southeast of Miami, Florida, to Charleston, South Carolina, in the north.
Scientists call the biggest part of the reef “Million Mounds.” It is mostly made up of a type of hard coral that can be found at depths of 656 to 3,280 feet. The study said that the water temperature in this area is usually around 39 degrees.
“Cold water corals like these grow in the deep ocean where there is no sunlight and serve by filter-feeding biological particles,” the authors write.
“These corals are known to be important ecosystem engineers because they build structures that give other invertebrates and fish food, shelter, and a place to grow up, but they are still not well understood.” In 2019, there were signs of a huge reef, but scientists didn’t tell anyone about the find until the reef was marked by a group of different agencies.
The results of more than thirty multi-beam sonar mapping studies and twenty-three submersible dives were put together to make a nearly complete plan. The news statement says that the scientists “identified 83,908 individual coral mound peak features” during this method.
The experts say that the study shows how huge the coral province is. The coral province is made up of almost continuous coral mounds that are up to 310 miles long and 110 miles wide…”
The paper says that in a “core area,” high-density mounds that are up to 158 miles long and 26 miles wide can be found. Along with NOAA Ocean research, the Ocean Exploration Trust, the University of New Hampshire, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Temple University, and the U.S. Geological Survey all took part in the multi-year research project.
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Derek Sowers, who led the study and is the Mapping Operations Manager for the Ocean Exploration Trust, said, “This plan to map and describe the beautiful coral ecosystem over a number of years and across multiple agencies is a great example of what we can do when we work together.”
