Researchers stumbled upon 'an amazing live orange carpet' of coral 'as far as the eye could see.'
Inside the small submersible craft, the two scientists had front-row seats to a previously unmapped part of the seafloor. As the HOV crested the ridge of an underwater volcano, the reef unfolded in front of them. It was “an amazing live orange carpet for as far as the eye could see,” Taylor told Gizmodo in an email.
“It is very unusual to find a thriving deep-sea coral reef with so little evidence of human influence,” she further said. “In other surveyed deep-sea reef areas, there are often examples of lost fishing gear, rubbish such as cans, bottles, and plastic bags, or even areas that have obviously been trawled and thus cleared of all their reef structure. However, this reef was pristine; just a dense mass of layers of ancient coral with a frosting of live coral across the top.
There are a few reasons the scientists believe the exceptional reef has stayed so intact and vibrant. For one, the Galápagos Marine Reserve was declared in 1998, protecting the area from a boom in industrial fishing and bottom trawling—which can trash thousands of years of coral reef growth in the course of a single day, saidin an email to Gizmodo. He is an oceanographer at the Charles Darwin Foundation and was the second scientist present in the HOV during the discovery.
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