ROV SuBastian Dive 379 - Ribbon Reef Canyons, Australia - FK200802

thank you and good morning or good afternoon wherever you may be in the world welcome to day two of leg two of the canyon seamounts and reach reefs voyage of the coral sea and great barrier marine park forecasting live from rv falco it's a sunday morning here where we are beautiful day skies are clear seas are calm and we've just deployed rv sebastian to a water depth of 1342 metres we're really quite excited right now because we've dropped the sebastian right onto some rock outcrop which we're really crossing our fingers to see and we've got it um we can barely contain ourselves let me paint a bit of a picture of where we are and why we're here so those who were on online yesterday would have seen us do a dive in the submarine canyon uh we got down to 1800 metres water depth that was at the mouth of the canyon more or less today we're in that same same canyon but a bit of a different arm it will come up slope closer to the great barrier reef by a distance of about five kilometers and as we've come up slope of course it's shallower so like i said we're in 1340 metres water depth uh this part of the canyon it's narrower the sides of the canyon wall a bit steeper it's it's it's assumed what we call a very much a v-shaped valley form and as you can see we're seeing outcrop direct outcrop exposure of the rocks that form this canyon wall system yesterday we saw a little bit of rock yesterday we saw mostly soft sediment planes and sediment drapes which was fascinating particularly from the biological point of view with a lot of burrowing and info but we've changed character today in a big way so far at least is where we've dropped to right now so these rocks clearly in color they're you're looking at something which is sort of a charcoal gray to black but as we've just been zooming around as in the last few minutes we've seen bits of the rock which are um different color they're orangey brown you might say slight light gray so we're currently thinking that the the the black gray is most likely a sort of a manganese crust which is very characteristic of deep ocean environments that grows on hard surfaces over geological time but where we've got the other color rock that's most likely a fresh face of the rock and we're very much interested in seeing that fresh face because it gives us insights into the the true properties of the rug okay here's a little bit coming into view on the left right now there we go orangey brown greenish kind of color that's as fresh as rocks faces you'll you kind of hope to get in this environment it's beautiful let's move along here a little bit there's a little bit of sand muddy sand draping it but it's great exposure still small crustacea sitting on the rock face as we move along okay that's cool so it's very steep so this is the other point about where we're sitting now we're on the route we're near the canyon floor but not quite oh it's on the edge of it on its southern um flank if you like and the track will take us across the southern flank across the canyon floor very narrow stretch and then we'll climb afterwards the northern canyon wall that's that's great okay let's just zoom in thanks mate thanks j rod okay and we'll just do something over there just drift up to the uh slightly shallower view we've got a lovely outcrop where we can help describe those rocks a bit more for those that are keen on the geology so i know there's a few online but uh that is stunning from a geological perspective because we're seeing evidence of these being sedimentary rocks there's okay great so we'll just now the zoom again is this just a nice slow move thanks j-rod it would be beautiful just hover here or take the view now we need to be careful that we're looking we're separating the the benthic organisms which are growing on this rock face from what the rock itself might be so these gray sort of halo oval shape features any comments from the team here may well be biological yes yeah sponges sponges thank you glass sponges sponges yeah that's great they're growing on the rock face looking briars owens there on the right and if we just pan down a little so down to the bottom there we've got that's a fraction yeah thanks j-rod that's that's lovely there get some good i want to zoom in a bit more this looks like a carnivorous spot yeah so we're getting yeah that lower section there that deep orange color passing down into the green so the the orange will be from some degree of oxidation on the fresh faces uh but there's definitely some hints of fine-grained lemonade in that pretty disturbed pretty contorted wavy broken up i've got to say but this is giving us outstanding insights into the underlying geology which these canyons are formed within been lovely to try a sample on that so we have uh we have the rov team of they've been brilliant in their support in uh developing on the fly a experimental tool to take a sample of the rock perhaps to drill in we'll try uh so yeah j-rod if we give out if you want it down where those sponges were gonna get a rock sample and then after we could pluck off those carnivorous sponges great yeah so we're going to settle the sebastian for a while here and get the arms out and i think we'll target that orangey brown layer just at the base of that face let's see how we go this is extremely experimental everybody will uh we're ready well it's worth a shot these are sort of outcrops you dream forever so while we're waiting for that we can describe some of the vita as they appear jeremy's standing next to me introduce him for the morning how are you this morning jeremy oh i'm good we i mean it's obvious you know a geologist we settled down and we both are in awe but for very different reasons he's looking at the rocks and talking about the color of the rocks and and i'm just looking at you know six different groups of life in one section here we see uh hydroids octa corals caniver sponges i think um and then regular sponges so in this one rock face there's there's so much here we could basically come up after this and have enough for the rest of the day to work on but yeah we've got we're good hours we've got a full day so just painting the picture for the day we'll be um doing two dives today is the game plan this dive in the uh mid reaches of the of the canyon there was a question that i'll just answer so why we aren't collecting fish on on this expedition uh it's so when these expeditions are designed so the people involved have specific questions to answer and for this trip it was the geology and specific biology so in our case it was sponges and corals and no one uh was working on the fish that was directly involved in this project and therefore that's why we're not collecting fish for this expedition okay let's try try the ahri stuff look at this yes we are also collecting plankton sorry dougal uh dougal thanks for being here you can help us identify some of this uh benthic for uh fauna that we're seeing here so even if this just have a go at this i'm sure did you see all the stuff right next to the right so there's carnivorous sponges regular sponges rhizoines and hydroids [Music] that's even if we break off some some chips that would be right here cool but no we're actually i guess this stuff is a little bit harder than that yeah it's pretty tough these are potentially quite old rocks what are these these little keys we're just using an adapted um trying that on the edge stretching the scratching it's good scratching is good yes we need our g-pick down there i think too how's did i used to have two tips okay all right what do you want us to just stay this year interesting lesson that's good okay yeah we have another drill that's currently being uh made by our rov team so we thought we would try to use this one while we were waiting you want to try scratching some more like mainly by the orange yeah yeah so this way so we're just not quite giving up yet we're just gonna see let's let this uh cloud clear for a bit i can see what we're doing yeah it'd be great just to knock off a chip at least yeah a comment from online there someone oak tree saying i mean this is a real science trial and error you're dead right we have great capability out here we can adapt as best we can you know the the overall objectives of the voyager to characterize the seabed as much as we can from a geological and biological point of view you know we're really well equipped with sampling and observation gear but sometimes you just gotta do things on the fly a little bit not get your hopes up too high here we go it's getting a bit of a clearer view exactly i know and explore you don't know till you try hmm having another another another attack it's really bouncing off that surface you can see it's just scratching this one area yeah thanks j-rod just trying to concentrate on one spot and maybe give it a bit of a working over as it were so one screen there for everybody you can see a view of the canyon in 3d from our mapping last night and the night before we met the canyon in its entirety uh in great resolution so we can really can have a clear understanding of where we are in the system so that on screen for everyone we've got a 3d perspective view looking into the canyon wall and the spot that we're sitting at the moment 1 340 meters okay coming in again he thinks he broke something off the floor that broke off thanks general one of the rv pilots think it might have chipped something off so we'll just try to see if we can spot it and even the smallest centimeter chip would be something to give us a little hand specimen to look at it on the microscope even that's something that size reveals a lot to us okay i come off here if i fly around somewhere else and let the this saddle here that's a good idea let's yeah it's gonna yeah thanks dave let's do that it's clearly pretty cloudy and dirty right now so we're just going to zoom out and move away for a few minutes and get a better feel for the local area yeah thanks j rod we'll do that to see what else we've got okay that's retracting the arm for the moment you never know you may see a bit of overhang that we can it's quite green okay cross station hasn't moved from half an hour ago a lot of flakes in the water column lead being kicked up okay wow this crop is pretty significant when we lift our heads a bit here and uh there's that fish sitting on that little ledge kind of nice little little home there real estate there looking at the top down yeah not bothered by the avalanche no no no interesting yeah it hasn't been disturbed oh we look over here yeah happy happy to do that zoom in on the uh right there see what's growing on that rock face so we saw some sponges earlier these might also be sponges a lot of sediment on them yeah maybe on the other side of the rock face is we'll look for some jointing where there's a bedding plane um getting a sense with these rocks that given their hardness for one thing that they could be well yeah we just realized j-rod there's a bit of an overhang right here uh whether we can snap it off with the drill just have a nipple at the edge and see what might happen yeah thank you clearly hard rocks but we are getting a hint of some degree of structure to the rock so whether that could be a metamorphosed sedimentary rock that extremely very old a little bit of our crop we've seen there's been hints of fine grain bedding very consorted highly fractured too by the look of it there's our drill bit again let's see what we go like with the jaws do you think the jaws will crank that possible but i mean cody can go and get it and see if maybe he can knock him out so we'll give this a go how big do you think that glass sponges next to what we're doing that's breaking chips off that's fighting in this time it seems hey that's pretty neat you can see what the outcome is it's pretty good at least you're not bouncing off as much i think he's definitely in a group yeah oh really good wow okay cross our fingers here everyone good thing about [Laughter] you know you can drill here plenty of cooling fluid around water temperature 3.4 degrees at 342 [Music] meters that's not smoke that's just a fine grain rock flower you might say coming off the the drill smoke sounds cold that smoke sounds cool i'm excited to read i'm excited to read your methods in the publication that comes from this so twisting yeah that pipe looks is that pipe bending the pipe's bending i don't see that's deep enough yeah that's great let's just take what if anything comes to this [Applause] [Music] champion and we're done we might have dropped it but um all right i'm just going to the bottom where that avalanche went just in case yes down to there i don't think it did i think it actually stopped before that okay now we're searching for them yes it was a question online was the drill developed specifically for this mission i guess it has been um absolutely he says jay rod we built it on the in the workshop here on the ship just in the last couple of days after thinking a bit what was about what we're seeing what we had on board to adapt with or back in three and four pretty wrong just going to stow our slightly bent are used but used and productive quick concept that looks like copper piping is that copper no i think it was uh okay good yeah yeah there we go coming closer scott there we go just going to search around to see what we might have dropped i think we can go back to the spot we first drilled that yeah i think it's like right over here yes see that's you're still searching yeah so we're still having a bit of a go at trying to find that bit of a rock we drilled out we do know have a good understanding where we are with onboard navigation from the sebastian so we can position precisely the expert rov pilots it's made a little bit harder with this cloudy water so question online about how we test the rock samples that we might collect so we can make a you can do a range of things but with these things like this you'd make a thin section that you would polish and look at under a light microscope to look at the mineralogy based on typically color form of the the minerals that make up in the rock face the rock sample i should say and that allows you to separate out minerals such as such as quartz from feldspar from maybe my cases materials there they're all the sorts of minerals you find in what we call clastic rocks plastic being broken fragments of rock which end up in rock again as sediments remembering we have the rock cycle whereby nature is constantly recycling mineral elements on the earth's surface into sedimentary rocks over geological time periods so if we're able to identify some of the mineral components we can then start potentially to trace where they've come from in their in their history so we're just cruising up the muddier slope right now this is really very steep folks as you can tell [Applause] particularly those avalanches rushing down here's what all right okay just scanning the floor below where we cut before what a shame yeah this is a successful drill that was right at the start let's go down to the bottom bottom and start heading just repositioning the uh sebastian at the moment again so the screen's gone a bit we've just come off the seabed a little bit so it's going all that blue water but here we go coming into view again [Music] just gonna be around the corner of it is that the chip on the floor i don't know getting my hopes up oh that's where he's brilliant there's something down right there yeah that's one thing we got we drilled over there i'm just going to look there's the rush yep jayrod's tucking it carefully in here someone deserves a beer location precisely and that rock has just fallen down the steep sand slope tell you what the tension in here is pretty pretty high we're all just thinking can we get this thing everyone's calm is that it's made all the more harder by stirring up the mud like this keeping in mind folks we're steering a sebastian which is the size of area small car you know we're flying along this canyon wall rock outcrop and then extending the arms into these precise locations it's really phenomenal the control we have for me this is the first trying to do this in my career and i think we might have hit payload let the guys focus in yeah yeah good yeah that's that's a clast i think it's not washing off we'll see what it is when we get it on yeah that's a useful little sample of the of the sediment anyway but then the modern sediment i think i should say go into eight yeah so we're taking this so there was a question why not just drill another hole [Laughter] yeah i know it's always a toss up isn't it um we have bent out bent out drill stem as well so i don't think it's going to turn turn to effectively unfortunately that's the illegal one off oh you're calling a one-off exercise but that's fine we can we can rebuild the um the cutting edge to the drill bit looked fine it was just the extender pipe it needs to be you need to shorten that up yeah yeah thanks go to yeah yeah good call yeah we're gonna adapt it and make it a shorter stem on that drill so we've got more direct force more control more power and let's just hope that this is what we think it is not just another bit of outcrops and it is outstanding oh yeah there's a rock that's a rock i mean it's a rock and this is the first ever outcrop sample from the great barrier reef margin rob looking at rob beamer in the background here just uh it is it is the formation platform yeah for the great barrier reef so what this rock is made of is what the great barrier reef has grown upon exactly without this this larger shelf development which has taken place probably since the cretaceous when australia broke up with pogba then yeah the great barrier reef wouldn't exist yeah we've got the saw mark on the face there that looks like quartz this is cool okay well that's a beautiful payload there it's very fine grain yeah it doesn't have time very fine grained okay maybe a kind of a mud one it's got a crack let's get it in the box before it falls i can go in a as well that's a decent size that's fantastic you know that's yeah yeah you've really got the internal parts yeah we've got a fresh front round of applause thanks guys oh we shall proceed ancient australian continent yeah exactly yep that's what that is the underlying geology of a great barrier reef is what we've just sampled as an outcrop exposed on the seabed 1 345 meters so that was a good start to the morning everyone uh we're happy i'm too shabby anywhere else we'll like to move towards the canyon floor so back on our transit okay uh just our phone following the transaction no no we'll kick on thank you unless jeremy sees something right here can you have a closer look at that yeah i know we don't have much time on this dive right sure we might yeah sponge it's fully delicious it has these kind of almost bell-shaped looking parts of the yeah the body like so we haven't collected that one yet we've only had the beers it's pretty cool though we've seen it yeah well yeah so um tom has been saying that here there's this ancient solitary it looks like a coral but it's made of a different uh structure i have the information so look at this this is a very small little very small guy a video and it looks like a sclerotinian um solitary so it's one polyp a hard coral and um so this is you know one of the few sclerotiening corals that live in the deep they're fairly common and so we want to collect a few of these um on our last trip in this area when we dredged we collected a bunch of cup corals and about half of them ended up being new species and new ranges for the region so at this depth in this area there's not much known about the about these these scleritine cup corals so we're doing it blind now but we'll see if we can grab the colony not bad uh you could throw it in um 1a with the rock wow that's the whole thing that's perfect so you can see um so the polyp it's wide and then it comes to a narrow point so the length of that base is indicative is will identify what species it is in addition to um the pulp feature yeah um that was a great quick grab well it was pretty good you went blind halfway through did you have a field did you feel it in your cloth you knew it was there yeah it's amazing it became if you can balance it on your claw okay it won't be worth waiting for the dust to settle i think okay that's all right okay that's sometimes that happens cody it was going to be named after you i know all right so you're back on track right here all right if i close that jaw anymore yeah that's right just kind of makes it too much there's a question about how did you know where these rock features would be yeah great how did we know where these rock features would be well we hoped they'd be here i've got to be honest but we've selected this dive site today chasing the steepest parts of the canyon wall so where where it's formed in the steepest gradients you know 20 to 30 degree gradient slope it kind of tells us that because it's steep it must be stable and formed in something relatively solid so our intuition and our experience i guess also suggests that you know steep in these environments typically is a hard substrate rock face ideally so that was our our working hypothesis based on the bathymetry the high resolution bathymetry that the the falcore collected in the last couple of days uh so our little hypothesis has proven correct i think and that we've seen seen that rock out crop in in real life so it's this one one little step in building our knowledge and understanding and i guess our own confidence in the way we're interpreting the data from the from the mapping someone named the coral that we dropped [Music] someone's given a name to that little specimen we just lost cause lost specimus kodi eye hey cody has left the room [Laughter] ah g'day emily good to see you online how are you on the left so we just had a change of rov pilot crew while they settle in and we'll just really commence our transact property that was the start of it and clearly had a really cool site to start on and took some samples adam and chris have joined us as rov pilots so as the cloud clears hopefully we'll get a bit more of a vista what's the green reservation [Music] there's another one of those eels that we saw yesterday hey eric that's an updated way one of the things we it always opens your eyes when you when you start looking at the sea bed in in real life as opposed from the maps we collect which are remotely sense data sets is the detail and overnight we've in the last two nights in fact we've mapped the seabed in great details using the falco's multi-beam sonar systems and produce maps which give us a horizontal or a seabed resolution of 10 meters so that's the level of detail you see and clearly once we get down here you we're seeing stuff at the centimeter scale so a 10 meter footprint on our map can be characterized by a lot more detail so you've got to sort of adjust your mind to the to that that scale mix yeah thanks yeah quick going down trying to find the what we expect to be this the floor of the the true floor of the canyon axis effectively uh just to have a closer look at that thinking that it should be a soft sediment area but we've been proven wrong before quite challenging for the pilots i think floating past on screen is probably a holotherian sea cucumber it seems such an unlikely environment to be in a really really steep area there's certainly a lot of sediment around pretty much any flat surface has got a drape of of cinnamon which is calcareous likely you know raining down from the shallow corals nearby but now to have it kind of just sitting here mid water looking like it's fast asleep uh because we have seen them swimming but they're swimming actively whereas this is just sitting there it should be a personality maybe it's possible it's it's really deceased had to say that's good here we go yeah see how soft it is our ripples with the with the currents uh we saw beauty yesterday uh and it was three seven eight died we you know was swimming we can zoom right in you could see all the different little um papillae you know on the thing has given us that id has he maybe it's snapping yeah i agree there we go a bit of movement yeah it is sunday morning after all zooming on oh that's beautiful yeah do you have that higher up yeah that is pretty amazing you know that background of the canyons yeah that's a starter that's uh what an alien you know yeah it is very alien isn't it and it has the you know little the little purple uh papillion scattered all over it do you remember we looked the one we saw yesterday had these little white dots on it we weren't sure whether it was part of its skin or whether it was just um such an unusual environment to see just floating past i mean look at the the wall is vertical vehicle yeah and yet the bathymetry maps just don't quite do it justice that's right yeah that's to give you a sense of how steep jeremy's just spotted her so you think this could be a kinder sponge you oh yeah whichever one's easier um yeah sure i'm sure yeah yeah probably you know so we still haven't collected a kinder sponge and maybe this is not that nah this is this is a soft coral scale yeah i think it's a sponge um yeah it's hard to get a zoom in while we're hovering um but we could with this yeah the start of it yeah okay so it's folded yeah they're really quite unusual all right are you gonna rock them and suck them yep good view of this rock face as well as we prepare to take a sample of these creatures growing on the rocks in that you can make out those very fine lineations which are bedding lines within the rock it's all very gently folded and contorted at quite different angles as well so i say there's certainly mentally in origin but probably metamorphosed as well no worse there's some stuff below that we might want to get so use more access but you just so and when we when we attach to this wall it'll be a good opportunity to look at the really high you know look really close at the wrong face yeah yeah get some images yeah a lot of life on this section you imagine the the currents are in the right it's in the right orientation to obtain the nutrients that are passing by that's good is it okay yeah it's going to hold it do we have manual focus no i won't reach can we get manual focus on it okay try that there it is nice oh look it's got a canal running through it and out the end that's interesting okay yeah let's we got our image let's grab it nice place up here the rock as well that's a very flat right fine strata are we going to connect to the rock um i'm not with one left right now okay yeah go for it and uh yeah he can collect it right now i can fly okay free flight if i need to but it's holding all right okay okay you're happy for me to put it right from the base here yeah please and um you can put it in buy a box two i guess all right it might be better than how long is it here it's it's hard to it's pretty long it's pretty long okay three four yeah you'll probably want to grab it nearest to the base it may uh and it's okay if it does shatter if it does yeah oh there's a thing on there there you go okay good beautiful look at that it's like a plunger you know just it's just not dropping i'm over here do you want to get a close look at the rock oh that was good okay yeah that was good is there anything else we've seen a lot of this i just want to get one of them at least all right we'll box that and move on tom bridge said good to subscribe i think you wrote that message before we dropped it sorry tom next one all right [Music] i'm gonna buy you a christmas present they were pretty good they were wonderful so i'll just explain i'll take this opportunity to explain um why we're collecting biology um on this on this expedition so in addition to understanding you know what the great barrier reef and the coral sea are made of what's the substrate how it forms we also want to know what's living within these habitats and the only way to understand what species are living within them is to collect them a lot of these specimens are really hard to identify from images and we're now using advanced molecular techniques to identify the species and understand the evolutionary histories of these various amphizoan groups that we're working on so we're collecting what we call morphotypes of each what we think are species morphotype as different suites of morphological features for given species and what this allows us to do is identify whether we're looking at one species or multiple species that have one species that has variation or multiple species that are distinctly different and what morphological features can be used to separate the different species so that's why we're collecting these colonies and sometimes we're going to collect full colonies but we only collect what we need um so we're very careful about what we end up collecting okay so we're looking at the canyon wall i guess okay right so we can if there's anywhere where you can find a if there's a flat bit of soft area to take a core um just behind down here see what happened yeah take what we can get it's after a copyright infringement so we're just landing the sebastian onto the what appears to be the very narrow axis of the canyon our objective right now is to try and find a spot that would be appropriate to collect a short push call into these sediments um not necessarily flat but not that's just not that'll do this uh there was a question about how many samples we can collect per dive and so in the great barrier reef we're collecting no more than five specimens per morphotype uh all five specimens per species and we i think probably only hit one species at most per dive um among our targets so we're well under our limit so for those looking at this operation for the first time perhaps uh what the rov pilots are currently doing they've just taken out a short cylinder perspex cylinder which we call a push core push core number two is the numbering system that we use that's really quite a straightforward operation where we just simply use the the hydraulic arm strength of the sebastian to just push this core as far as we can ideally the full way ways about 20 centimeters into the seabed which we've done very well just there give it a little wiggle to break it away at the bottom of the core and extract it nice and gently so that excellent we have full core recovery which is always a great thing sometimes they do fall out but not today and then we just slide it back into that little holder you can tell looking at the top of the course perfectly undisturbed from that sample so it gives us a pristine sample of the seabed and we'll take a duplicate because we have a number of people interested in these materials these sediments for potential analysis back in the labs okay all right that's good it's a okay interesting as we zoom right in you can see all the fine grain detritus of bits of shell fragments on the seabed these all rain down from the water column or sometimes i'll be transported by stronger currents coming off the great barrier reef perhaps during flood events certainly during the tide every day uh so over time you have a an accumulation or a vertical build up of the sediment record and that we use as sedimentary geologists to understand the history of sedimentation where it's come from its age it's a relatively short core by way of core standards but it's still a great insight into understanding and characterizing the the recent environments of these canyon systems very fine grain as you can tell from the cloud of mud left behind so fine grain sediments take a long time to accumulate so there could be a decent record of time in that perhaps perhaps one to two thousand years if it's an undisturbed site okay excellent that was a nice quick hit right there thank you chris wow yeah because we have them in the shallow waters here they're called painted crates and they're actually a commercially harvested animal but this is the first really large lobster-like we've seen in the depths here we've seen plenty of shrimp and uh but this is a beauty and good size too there's a dinner plate size so those two green dots are 10 centimeters apart so that's a good 30 odd centimeters across the body uh yeah really unusual yeah for this size of this depth it's going to be where i just came up since we're buried and again just kind of strange i'm just sitting on the on the floor it must be a lot of food you know it's probably again yeah well certainly look at you know organic matter the cinnamon we're washing up here it's quite soft but oh isn't that beautiful doesn't body size tend to increase with depth with certain things you know well yeah for sure you can get this gigantism happens in different parts of the world so in antarctica um you know you can have these giant salicious sponges you know really strange gigantism occur but you know out here in the coral sea we have we have some fairly large spider crabs you know a good 30 40 you know 30 odd centimeters across the body but i mean this is a completely different uh animal it's really it's you know lobster it's a decopot obviously it's got 10 weeks but you can see it's uh so the antenna they're drawn back and then you've got uh the chile do you see how the chilean actually spread so this you notice right that's its claws right so that's one long solid piece and then this is 90 degrees back lightweight wide open ready to catch whatever is coming past here wow or is it defensive for the rov yeah it could be about to attack yeah that's amazing it's yeah yeah yeah so you see this one here is actually pointing towards the top the top claw so you're not getting quite that perspective but you know if you're i don't know what they're eating they're like might be other small shrimp and the like but once those claws close you'll see the you know the the teeth the teeth along those pores you're not going anywhere all right you are hungry you are dead me i mean but we'll leave them alone yeah this kind of reminds me like a venus flytrap you know there's the claws you get on that but this is really spectacular yeah and really large you know we saw some fairly large shrimp and things yesterday maybe 10 centimetres more and we've got to look like a polykey little follicle worm just having a bit of a swim probably kicked up from this yeah we're probably awesome so these kind of poly kicks and they kind of the latin is this interior which is the sedentary or in the sediment or eren which is erratic swimming right that's the latter okay let's move on all right thank you yeah okay chris we'll leave them but you know um i mean crayfish are common in the shallow coral reefs of the great barrier reef but during day time they are typically hiding right because they are food for lots of animals octopus is a is a classic predator of crayfish and you know everyone likes eating those crayfish so during the day if you're scuba diving in the great barrier review you'll find them but they're always tucked in holes and things at night time you see them come out and that's when they're more common i mentioned that there's a there's a commercial fishery for painted crayfish and they uh they have a clothes it's a helmet crab is that a little one with that hermit crab in a hurry so there's a commercial fishery for painted crayfish and they're worth a lot in the in the restaurant trade because they have this beautiful colored shell painted painted crayfish they command a higher price than your standard western block lobster and so in this part of the great barrier reef they have a crayfish fishery and also up in the torres strait not far from where we are yeah i wonder how deep they've been recorded i mean in this part of the world this might be about a metric extent you know well that's definitely not a painted crayfish but um you know just to see one of that size of this you know a crayfish that size of this depth is pretty amazing yeah and there's the uh we've been here before oh you recognize that i recognize it and these are corrallomorphs okay so these are annette these are uh hexa coral jeremy do you want to talk about him yeah so we were uh the center of the screen and hanging down yeah so karla morph is so you you would assume it's closer related to the sea anemone um and the zoanthid because they you know they have a similar structure uh but they're actually sister to the heart corals um and the black corals you know which is it's pretty odd if you look at the phylogenetic tree um but as rob was saying so they have this polyp that faces downwards quite a good size too i mean it'd be what 10 15 centimeters long yeah we saw them on the previous expedition at the coral sea on the sides of these large roofs in places that are hanging down they've got these little little dots along the the main body but you can see the tentacles hanging down they've got this almost umbrella like what would you call upper mouth but it's it's definitely hanging down none of them were pointing upwards so i think that's quite interesting right i guess that's an easy way to differentiate them from the anemones yeah yeah but you know maybe it's also something to do with how they feed so you know if you're facing upright you're going to get a mouthful of sediment clearly that's a lot certainly uh coming down from the shallow coral reefs and so maybe wait a second all right can you look closely at it does it look like enough tent has tentacles inside um i can land out because right now there's a big overhang above me so i can come down a little bit let me pull up this little document i have here which is a little life in these overheads yeah really a lot of life if we need to go it's okay yeah it'll be cup coral solar yeah okay it's okay let's push on all right sorry yeah that's yeah okay so i've got some time well oh yeah sure yeah let's check it out we'll try our best to keep it in the claw i got faith in this crew the last guys i mean all right so we're doing a second attempt on a cup coral i'll let us settle down and then take a look sorry shrimp okay are we settle down it's actually interesting it looks like a different coral up there different type do you think we could reach both from the same position they actually worked really well last time we uh collected the hard coral the cup curls so we're going to use the uh yep so what we're seeing here is what seemed to be at least two different types of um cup corals so sclerotinian um solitary so one polyp corals and as i explained earlier um a lot of the species in this region are being described or not yet discovered so this is a good opportunity to to grab a few and send them to stephen cairns in the smithsonian institute and um you can let us know what they are um so today is going to be an interesting day um because our our goal is to do two separate dives and that presents the challenge of you know deciding when to end the first dive and come up actually can we take a closer view before you suck it um i'll just zoom in look at that guys all right so as i was saying um we're trying to just figure out the logistics of you know when we end this dive start the next dive we want to maximize our time underwater uh but there's two different locations that we want to explore today no i'm not coming back and i don't want to meet the alternative is the camera huh but actually the other one might be a little bit this one might be a little easier to suck we'll try our best to grab from the you know get the whole base as well all right we got it on the floor i guess you just sucked it up with the sand yet um we can assume we got in there no because it was already broken um there'll be plenty of cup curls to spend time collecting uh if you didn't get it well you can see all the mud that's built up down below so just above us well probably about four kilometers away from where we are now is the is rivenary five so think of it like a big wall of coral and you can scuba dive on it uh it has it's lovely diving there and that is the uh basically where the head of this particular canyon starts so this is what we technically call a reef blocked canyon so the reef is right at the very head of the canyon and so you'd expect that most of the sediment here is likely calcium carbonate coral pieces and the like just rain down from the uh the very steep shallow coral reef that's just four kilometers west of where we are now onwards and upwards and join the start of our 500 meter transit so we're now working up the north side wall of this very steep sided valley this is v-shaped here if you recall yesterday we're down on rov dive 303 78 and that was u-shaped so as you go further down the canyon axis the valley floor becomes wider and flatter but as we're in the kind of middle zone of this this canyon uh becomes more v-shaped so this is a reflecting of the the erosion that's cutting through this hard rock so marty mcneill kind of reflected on you know the time it has taken to to incite to cut down into this hard rock and you can imagine it's probably millions of years of development not only millions of years to build up the uh the hard rock that now forms the well essentially the edge of the australian continent but now is uh has is being cut into through erosion so we're heading up the uh the north the north side wall um and we're sitting on top there's lots of this white sediment this is calcareous sediment coming from the shallow reef higher up on the great barrier reef itself so it's interesting anywhere where it's it's overly steep uh that sediment doesn't build up and you end up with this great layer of white sediment which has got marine life on it because it's uh it's mainly what we call lebensborn this is german for life traces and it leaves this this characteristic mounds and burrows and trails left behind by lots of animals but you know you can see an eel over there on the just sitting down on the slope like it's like a big ski slope isn't it so it looks like trails and there's another eel that's kind of just hanging there on the side hella sore thank you yeah so we value our fish army and experts are sure who can help us id some of these animals but for us as a marine geologist we're really interested in the rocks too and you know what we're seeing is really the very eastern easternmost reaches the outermost limits of the australian continent right this is the hard rock of on which the great barrier reef has grown and uh and of course there's lots of questions around the age of the great barrier reef and we still don't know we have a bit of an idea and that's from a very long coral core that was taken through ribbon re-5 and this is this is the reef that's closest to us now so it's not an accident that we're here we purposefully chose this particular reef to come and visit because of some drilling work that was done in 1995 by some marine geologists they were interested in trying to understand the origins of the great barrier reef and they actually set up a jack up drill on top of riven re-5 and cored down they got a a core sample that's about 200 meters long and my close colleague jody webster at university of sydney has been very much involved with all of this this this study to try and understand the ancient great barrier reef but this is the longest coral core that's ever been taken on the barrier reef and it tells us a lot about the different cycles here we have a nice big squat lobster yep another decent sized one uh beautiful red color it's hanging underneath uh chris we got the have you got the lasers on okay so we're probably looking about a good 10 centimeters across there but because the rock itself becomes an excellent habitat for uh all kinds of uh marine life and we're seeing some mobile creatures like um crustaceans shrimp the squat lobsters um but if you have a look to the left this sort of top left of that lobster there's this sort of strange net like almost like a plastic bag sitting there it's not plastic bag we think that these are probably the the the discarded remnants of basket eel homes so there's a there's a type of eel here we've seen them before great cutthroat eels basket deals they they're kind of long thin eel and they create these these strange mucus-like nests in which they they kind of almost stitch them to the sides of rocks and then they hang inside them and there's another one in the crevasse yeah just yeah almost in the center of the screen no sorry i'm imagining things yeah so you see these discarded kind of mucus bags all over the place jeremy what are we looking at here is this supply valve very important yeah yeah i mean yeah yes please we can just sort of i'll see if i can zoom in of course we've got this beautiful long-legged shrimp uh above and i'll just come come left a little you know it just it looks bi-vowel fish but it's got this quite strange looking mouth it could be just the mantle that we're seeing on the inside anyone from the shore any it is now just one i'll just throw something else out there could it be a brachiopod okay so we have seen relict brachiopods these are living relic animals um in in the deep coral sea uh because brachypods had their heyday 400 000 years uh 400 million years ago i need to get my zeros right uh when you know i guess bivalves were in existence then but back then this is sort of permian period pre the pre permian extinction the brachypods ruled the shallow seas and you can walk on fossil remains of just you know millions and millions of brachiopods thick shelled uh animals look very much like bivalves now but after the permian extinction they they they mostly disappeared except for a few remnant species that are still in existence today uh i think of linga lingula this is a small thumb thumbnail shaped brachiopod that you can still find living in the deeper oceans and uh quite amazing but you know unchanged as a species over 400 odd million years but so anyway i just say that out there there are brachypods in these worlds a bit hard we need to get a bit of a move on yeah so just talking about today's plan we're trying to fit in two rov dives today this one in uh the middle part of the canyon so we're now at uh 1350 meters what we need to do is is move along to the start of our 500 meter transect which is part of our standardized sampling regime at the end of that chainsaw we'll recover it'll be probably around about one and one pm this afternoon our time uh the ship will then mobilize a little bit further westward closer to ribbon roof five and then we'll do a a more shallow water dive probably around three four hundred meters and work our way as high up into the shallow mesophotic zone as we can so we do have to get a bit of a move on it's of course there's plenty to look at but there's still a lot to lot to discover but in that time we need to recover the rov move the ship drop it back in the water again so there's still a lot to happen today [Music] yeah that's good all right they're gonna give great distances okay so we're just having a discussion here about uh the start of our 500 meter transect and when we get going we we won't stop we just have to go to a steady rate at a set height and we're doing this for every one of our rv transects on this uh on this expedition it's one thing is you've changed okay okay and off we go and we have stephanie in the event logger and alex is sitting on the squiddle desk and and so part of the exercise is to log everything that we see during this 500 meter transects this allows us to do a comparison between all of the the various transects that we're going on now um you know it's no accident which which canyon we're going up we're trying to test the idea of how these canyons vary across this uh really complex uh deep barrier reef area so we're just the seaweed of what's called the ribbon reefs they are about we're about 80 kilometers or so north of cairns in northern queensland we're about 60 kilometers east of um of the continental shelf and we're hitting we're coming across a really steep wall here which means we have to climb up it in order to move along it but yeah it's really we're actually really amazed at just how steep the environment is we've got lots of interesting animals on this this wall um so we've got a corello morph this is sort of an enemy looking uh light looking animal but uh definitely corelli morph we've got uh farrier two different kinds of farrier here this is a genus of hexagonal sponges looks like we've got some camacular feather stars hanging off the side yeah quite a few hexanac hex-actin-ellen sponges they've got this classic translucent white look about them and of course if we were to zoom in closer to the rock you would actually see a lot more marine life uh dougal i'm not sure if you're watching you can see some plankton going past we've got sea stars on the left here but if you look beyond the marine life really spectacular rock formation you can see strata in them so where the rock is actually broken away you can see the layering now the whole thing is dipping okay so it's not horizontal by any means so we're looking at sheared faces and and exposed strata and in places you know you can't actually see that strata but overall what we believe here is this is a sedimentary rock that's uh it's very old it's certainly hard and it's probably met being metamorphosed so it's had a long geological history of warping and pressure that have given it these uh you know sort of fold this folded look about the strata so it's really quite an ancient rock base and of course this is what the great barrier reef is is growing upon yeah like chris one of the pilots is just talking about how steep this is you know so we're actually on a 500 meter transect and so far that other transits have been quite easy because you're it's generally off a sort of gently sloping sidewall but like when we put our plan in last night we i don't think we really expected it was going to be so steep but here we are going up literally vertical rock faces and uh and if this is part of our 500 meter transect we just have to have to work with it but yeah clearly just beautiful environment for uh for lots of attached marine life we've got a feather star hanging off the edge i'm keen to see a a sea lily or a stalked version of those feather stars we have seen them on other dives and uh they're they're a really relic animal so this this could be an environment that we find them in so keep an eye out for them yeah i agree with you dougal this is some cliff and i just repeat we did not really expect it to be this kind of exposed uh so i mean this has been mapped very well both previously by myself and jodie webster our other colleague who's unfortunately stuck in sydney um be great to have jody here with us but uh last last couple of nights the the falco has been mapping doing a fantastic mapping job through the night because this is very well covered now we had a good sense three dimensional sense of the sea floor but again just repeating what what scott was saying earlier you kind of got to get your head around when you put a camera down as a hala saw coming in oh look at that oops gave him a bit of a fright remember without these lights would be pitch black down here so uh it would be quite a imagine it from an animal's perspective in the pitch blackness and then this big you know suv sized beast comes out of the darkness with great lights would be a surprise [Music] i can i can clearly see folded strata here at the bottom of the screen you can see that layering but it's got that kind of warped look about it so this is classic so if you if you metamorphose a sedimentary rock you start creating all these folds and things so i guess the original rock material would have been sedimentary now this could be multiple layers of sand muds and mud because we now have a rock sample we can actually look at that and and see what the internal material is made of but then you also need lots of pressure and time geological time to start folding and creating all these these different shapes but ultimately it's just this magnificent habitat for um for marine life and we've got cup corals here lots of salicious sponges sorry uh yeah hexagonal sponges made of silica it's still very cold it's 3.6 degrees celsius [Music] we've got emily emily twiggs online it's great to have you joining us again emily uh she's been watching us regularly through uh through this expedition yeah and so i guess the beauty of this voyage is that we can combine both that geological insight and bring in the the biology as well i always say geology drives biology i'm not sure if jeremy it's a bit of a competition here but you know i do love looking at the rocks but yeah it's fascinating to see what's down here and and because this was the real unknown this is for us was the real frontier over time we've actually met really well this margin uh you know in a three-dimensional sense using multi-beam sonar we have been doing this for uh 20 years or you know in my academic career i've been doing it for well over a decade but we still had not put a deep camera down here to actually see what that seafloor looked like that three-dimensional seafloor looked like so this is really really unique and again i'm just so surprised just how steep it is and we had an understanding it was a fairly steep gradient just from the three-dimensional uh the 3d pictures that we we generated from the sonar but you know actually see it physically in front of a camera as something else it just seems way more steep than we thought in a lovely big brittle star just in the center of the screen there now i guess you would understand and we're still in our 500 meter transect but uh instead of going very far horizontally we just seem to be going up and up so i'm wondering where is this ever going to top out a lovely shrimp just sitting under that that ledge with a maybe halo saw um i admit my my fish species names are not that great so i really have to reach out to people ashore who can id these people do these fish now interesting looking at the rock you see this sort of lighter colored brown on the left i think this is probably a face that's actually given way um you know so it's this rock dane with um ferro manganese oxide thing over there now could be cup corals a little hard to tell because we're just having to sit off the um the rock a little bit as we're doing this transect we can't follow really really closely to the rock here in order to do this transect okay looks like we topped out over that that reef that cliff rather but it's still very steep but if you have a look over on the right hand side of the the view you can see that's the crest of um well basically there's a series of gullies that are draining into the main trunk channel okay if you think of almost like a river system uh so the mat there's the main river that's the the channel of the canyon itself the main trunk channel and then there's a whole series of gullies now these gullies have all different scales but they're all essentially draining into that main trunk channel and we've deliberately chosen our 500 meter transect to cross over through several of these now we're crossing over them diagonally so we've come up the left hand side would be the western side of this gully we're cresting the ridge between two gullies and we're now dropping onto the the the western side wall of the next gully so this is really interesting to see so we have mapped this we have a good three-dimensional sense of what these look like but what's really interesting is how sharp the the base of these gullies are okay now the gullies are can be hundreds of meters long but they're the main source of all of the sediment that's coming down into the main trunk think of it like the big river this would be a creek that's one of a new several or numerous creeks that are draining smaller catchment areas into the main trunk channel of the canyon which is now behind us so we've just crossed through one of those gullies and we're coming up to the crest of the next one so again quite it seems to be very sharp delineation between a gully on one side to the gully on the other and now we're coming over the top the crest and we're now into a different catchment and you can see off into the distance now that's probably a few tens of meters away is the next gully right and and these gullies fill the side walls of the larger canyon right so if you can imagine just one after another going down channeling and in fact you can actually see them branching off so it's not just one branch they're multi-fed you can see there was one going off to the left and there's another one that's just disappearing off the left of the screen now and now we rise up it's really good isn't it yeah yeah yeah oh here we go who's living in this hole i do love these big burrows i'm my fingers crossed for a giant isopod but something's definitely had a bit of a dig in there uh i am putting my money on an isopod but we can't we can't kind of hang around unfortunately because we're on this transit wow look at that we'll [Applause] yeah something's had a good dig in that but you see it's quite soft you know there's a scene steep okay so we're coming up over the crest of where the two gullies are joined together and now and we're looking down into the next gully okay and clearly this gully has lots of different smaller catchment areas uh draining into the creek imagine the creek then drains into the river the river being the very bottom of the canyon but boy have a look at these these um these eels uh they're all they all seem to be pointing up slope maybe that's if the food's coming down from there that's where you want to keep your mouth pointed too but yeah this is really something else right so we we were expecting to see um this this you know numerous gullies all linked together this network of gullies but it's also something just something else to see that in real a real picture of it and yeah it really is steep so we're now climbing up the eastern wall oh this is so it looks like it's given away there and we're seeing a whole lot of these burrows again we've seen this this clustering of burrows before they were giant isopods they have this classic flat-floored dome shape they're about 15 10-15 centimeters wide the isopod itself is pretty wide about five six centimeters across and where we have these sort of vertical faces we we had found lots of burrows in them so um the great to see a living one but now we we're coming up over so we're tracking diagonally across the uh the northern side wall of the main canyon which is made up of a whole series of gullies and this is the coming up to the crest of the next gully and as we look off into the distance we're now falling down into the next gully there is really what's interesting is really distinct little um what would you call that you know like the floor of these gullies they're really narrowly defined clearly the sediment is coming down into it and there's probably some erosion going on it just captures all the sediment and it's just like a little shoot little sediment chute and everything is pointing down towards that main uh canyon floor which is quite a few hundreds meters below us now so now we're dropping down into that the the chute of that gully and we've got we've got um palasaurs and shrimp seems to be the dominant demersal life oh boy hey look at the there's a very there's a course this sediment here looks quite coarse we've got marty marley you checking yeah thank you that would be good we're still on our transit can't we yeah yeah so we can't actually stop but this is really interesting so it definitely has a coarseness about it and now my if i would put money on it i would say this is probably coarse uh coral like shallow water coral pieces of literally the shallow coral reef which is lying higher up above us and it's been directed into this chute at the bottom of a creek creek you know just a land analogy here and then we're climbing out of that chute up the side of this next gully and yeah like a really interesting environment yeah and dougal's uh just pointed out that the lack of holothurians and it's a good point i mean this is a muddy sandy environment uh in other like yesterday's dive we were deeper it was more muddy and it was more flat the gradient was much much flatter and there were lots of sea cucumbers haven't seen so many on these side walls but plenty of eels and shrimp [Music] yeah so these are like valleys think of them as smaller ones we're just calling them gullies here so the gully drains into the larger valley the valley being the the main trunk channel of the canyon the canyon is a much bigger beast it's like 10 kilometers long it's about one to two kilometers wide at its widest as you get closer to the great barrier reef it gets narrower and steeper and we're in the middle section of that 10 kilometer wide sorry 10 kilometer long canyon and it's clearly v-shaped and we're going up the sidewalls oh it's really nice sea star here quite a good size so you can see the oh and we've got a it looks like a tulip sponge off just crossing through the on the left of the screen so big c star in fact there's uh the imprint of one and just make out the five star imprint of the sea stars uh so i'm just pointing out the laser beams in the center they're 10 centimeters apart so it gives you a sense of scale so that one we passed was probably good 20 centimeters across another shrimp oh what we got here on the there's something just to the left of us oh is this a squid it's a squid you can't stop though you can't stop unfortunately i might just quite yeah oh this beautiful squid we're in the middle of a transect here so we really can't hang around but we have this beautiful squid just sitting here you can see his arms pointing towards us and he's got a lovely extended fins at the back of him we have to keep moving unfortunately are rules yes we are on a this transect we have to do this this is part of the um the systematic comparison that we're doing between each of the each of the rov dives but uh not to worry we will see more of these um we'll see uh on when we go out in the coral sea where we've been quite fortunate we've seen lots of nautilus squid dumbo octopus uh pygmy pygmy dumbo uh octopus or squid you know there's quite a lot of cephalopods out there in the coral sea so but for my money i think that was our first is that our first cephalopod on the gbr margin is it our first one yep that was our first cephalopod in the deep gbr here so that was great to see our stuff oh yeah okay chris is saying we stopped at dumbo octopus yeah i have to agree with that yeah yeah yeah yeah so i was on the last expedition doing it virtually from my home in cairns and uh it was quite funny to be tracking along and suddenly you hear the the pilots going dumbo dumbo you know like it's like so cool you know and uh definitely anyone was watching it was just spectacular it came drifting out of the left and it went right in front of us with its really strange flapping flapping ears just looking like dumbo the elephant and uh yeah just fantastic so we we stopped for dumbos we also stopped for nautilus i might add there are nautilus off the edge of the great barrier reef and our colleague andy dunstan who did his phd on nautilus was uh teamed up with colleagues from america um greg barrowd from the usa and they brought a team of people out to the great barrier reef very close to where we are now and they put a whole series of grubs baited remote underwater video systems put the basically cages with videos video cameras inside and lowered them down off the edge of the the ribbon reefs and right very close to where we are now in about two three hundred meters of water and um there's no surprise they actually found lots and lots of nautilus so uh this is too this is i think this is too deep for them at the moment out in the out in the coral sea we typically find them between 500 and 700 meters depth so we're in 1200 meters of water now so it's a little too deep phenomenal so it looks like a xenophobe did you see that just just passing by i'm monothelic i can never say the xeno5 it's a form of it's a benthic forum they form these very large tests they're about baseball size uh we have seen them out in the coral sea there you find them in organically rich environments and and this is exactly what we've got here lots of food there's another one just passing under these little lumps on the seafloor and here we got a sea cucumber coming up is this a squid off on the just i think we got another squid just passing us on the right hand side yeah it looked like a squid anyway there we got some pink see um hold therians coming in so plenty of uh eels halosaurs lots of them cyanobrancas thanks dougal sorry naffo branca sorry get that right and we're on this 500 meter transect so we're continuing to move along a fairly clip pace here but now we're climbing up over the edge of one of these gullies there's a shrimp just drifting past us and this is the crest where two the tops of two uh gullies join and then we'll drop back down into the next next one but the idea is that we we're actually crossing them diagonally and climbing up the slope so we're now at 1200 meters and we're seeing some more of these burrows running the crests there and one of these deep water jellies drifting past we actually collected one yesterday slipped him up and we got that pickled for dougal but look how steep these gullies are you know they think of them almost like avalanche faces but everything's going down you know so we're on the continental yeah more broadly on the continental slope of the great barrier reef and everything's draining into this basin it's called the queensland trough and that's about another 800 meters or so deeper down where it starts to flatten out everything's being directed down there food particles mud rocks dead animals right all organic matter is just this huge shelf to basin transport and uh because it's no surprise these canyons are the main conduits of all that sediment and and organic matter clearly the the marine life uh you know they have evolved and adapted to take advantage of all this you know whatever is drifting down from above through the water column and also being washed down or falling down the sides of these gullies and into the main canyon below but boy i mean look off into the distance you know it's almost like looking at the edge of a mountainside the you know successive ridges almost like anyone who's been skiing would know what i'm talking about you know you're looking at different uh ski faces you know and this might be an avalanche face here but you know these are ridges they're all joined up but they're all pointed pointing downwards towards that main valley which is the uh the channel floor below but you know just it's just great to get this kind of perspective uh why are we i mean we're looking at one two you can almost you can count them there's about three maybe even four gullies uh in parallel each one joined to another each one have their own discrete catchment area but little shoots very well defined shoots at the at the bottom of each one of these gullies yeah and have a look at some of these steeper faces of those those gullies you can see where it's full on the way and there's some burrowing going on you wanna pause transcend real quick while we uh [Music] so steve's asking you know how much these gullies sequester calcium carbonate from corals um so if you think of coral reefs they're constantly growing accreting and eroding right this is natural um so the left alone the corals will continue to grow but through wave action and storm environment and bleaching events and light they erode down and so that sediment ends up somewhere so some of the coarser sediment ends up closer into the lagoon itself like a coral reef lagoon the back roof lagoon sort of classic uh coral morphol morphological environment and some of it ends up down here so we have ribbon refive which is about four kilometers due west of where we are now and and some of that coral rubble material rains down into this environment because the head of this canyon is in fact right at the very base of that ribbon reef 5. so part of the part of the exercise here is to actually take some samples and we've done two so far we're we've basically taken those sediment samples and they they can tell us a lot about the material that's drifting down into these and so we we would expect this is a very high calcium carbonate content most of the sediment here is limestone uh of course it's not just coming from coral but also from the pelagic sediment that's raining down from the water column above and that could simply just be pelagic plankton uh there's lots of foraminifera and uh all kinds of uh shelled finer shell plankton when they die they just drift down and you know they go to make up this sediment and we call it hemi pelagic so it's pelagic it's come from above but i'd say a lot of the sediment here is also made up of shallow water corals now we know this for a fact because we've got some deep water coral some deep water cores from the base of these canyons and when you split those cores open you can see shallow water coral material in there now that doesn't grow there it can only have been transported from the great barrier reef so think of these canyons like huge conduits like the big rubbish collect collectors you know and they're capturing all of this sediment material both from the shallow water corals and also from the water column above yeah uh just taking over that um i'm rob beeman from james cook university and we've got jeremy horowitz our black coral expert i'm going to grab some lunch and jeremy will take over yeah everyone in the control room we are getting really good at spotting that one hello store fish so i can now name one fish pretty proud of that so for lunch we have smoked ham and garlic roasted potatoes and um some fresh greens a kale and watermelon salad and uh what was the pineapple it was cinnamon a cinnamon crusted pineapple uh yeah really good we eat pretty well on this ship yeah and then there's also a um a a compartment where you could find m ms that never end so yeah i keep trying to get to the bottom and it keeps every time you put them in the closet and close the door once you open it again it's magically refilled so it's this amazing process that we don't yet understand the underlying mechanisms but we're getting there their names are elder jeff account calm down so we're seeing some halosaurus and some sand yeah um on these expeditions there's always a magnificent chef um this is the third uh research vessel that i've been on for you know an extended period of time for like a month or more and every time they i guess they must really make sure to have a really good chef who is just always cooking and often people do shifts that mean someone's always working so 24 hours there needs to be food so that means you know there's always fresh food being made you know food being put aside so you can have breakfast lunch or dinner most times of the day and and dessert all times smoked meat smoked meats yeah so we're still doing our transect is that right yes hello therian completely completely different scenery right right so it's been a nice change as we're going up so we're at uh 1 155 meters it's 4 degrees celsius oh there's a vase glass sponge or tulip sponge i think it's a tulip sponge it's beautiful we've already collected one of those and we're gonna try to minimize collecting the same species twice or you know no more than five times for sure um if you remember yesterday when we were down at 1800 meters the temperature was like 2 degrees and so now it's 4.2 degrees so um you know what from about 2000 to about 1000 the increase in temperature is about one and a half degrees ah yes it was a gorgeous blue sea cucumber we just passed it so one of the reasons so you may wonder why there's sediment you know on this vertical slope and um so it could be an indication of a lack of downward current of down slope current yes so another healtharian this one seems to be floating just off the sea floor or is it something else yeah can't stop we're in the middle of our transect it was cool decisions oh so yeah it's really surprising to be seeing this mud and substrate and debris settled on this slope uh it'll be really interesting to understand the process you know why why is it not falling down why is it where it is how many of those have you done in your life so many been on three expeditions i was on rv elise which is from new caledonia but it's a french ship and then i was on the investigator last year um in the same general location as we are now 55 dredges 150 corals zero black corals and that was the only reason why i was on the ship was to get some black corals and it was the big joke of the trip uh luckily there are obviously lots of black worlds around it's just you know just the luck of the dredge um yeah really deep like 4 000. yeah thanks for helping identify the that critter earlier um whether it was a hall of farian or not um yeah i think it might have been a cold jelly duval a big one but there are lots of holotherians here's another this one seems to be rolling in the sand having a grand old time go 380. how many guys have you guys done 379 really wow thousands and they still let you drive huh no turn right and that was a straight away it was right right right when you got the dried out straight away you got that 7-11 what yeah they're glass sponges um okay so if ben ever offers to drive you somewhere just say no but for driving i agree actually i don't like dropping in that either after this i have to drive from brisbane back up to townsville that'll be a three-day drive with some breaks but i'll only drive the daylight you know early morning until about four or five and three-day drive i mean it's uh what is it a 15-hour drive maybe 16-hour drive is it a scenic route like is it pretty or is it sure some some of it you're near the water you know it's along the coast you haven't been to brisbane yeah yeah we're in charisma but two weeks or more right wait a second can we pause and look at it all right we're gonna pause so this is a dumbo octopus uh this is the first time i'm ever seeing one in person virtual person um so yeah let's take some nice still oh beautiful look at this so we got a marker where we stopped the transect yep we'll stay with him for about a few seconds just get some nice shots yeah let's try to get a nice focused view so it's about 15 18 centimeters across look at this guy i'll just try to get a sharp shot of him look at his eyes they're very disney like aren't they yeah i guess that's why they call it the dumbo all right some suddenly kicking up yeah we're pausing our transects which this is the first time we're pausing our transects for anything so you know it's important you can see the eyes got a little white outline big black eye beautiful [Applause] i didn't see the eye closed as the uh sediment went towards it my sunglasses first okay we're good yeah all right back to our pre-programmed transect so there's a question how does someone become it yeah they could hear you right all right and begin transacting begin transact is is that as far as no yes right i've never seen one before uh like you know i've seen them we had one with a couple on the last coral sea voyage and um yeah it was it was something you know just contrast in the view that those beautiful strange flapping is i was saying um we're on a 500 meter train set right we have to stop and continue and then the pilots go yeah but we stopped the dumbbells of course we stopped the numbers that's funny yeah yeah that's funny yeah because we also stopped for nautilus but there it's a bit deep here for almost it's about a thousand meters now or a kilometer deep and uh we we do find them in in depths around that's a 500 to 700 meter mark in daytime at night time is different they vertically migrate uh go up into the higher in the water column to around to three hundred meters so we will we will probably stop for nautilus as well we may get an opportunity on our next dive that's this afternoon so uh the conclusion of this dive 379 we will uh we will recover the rov and we will move about three kilometers further west of where we are now closer to ribbon re-five and then we will put the rov back in the water we're expecting depths anywhere between maybe um three four hundred meters and then we'll climb up the side over the head of this canyon we're at the very very it'll be the very western limit of it it's just exactly where it sits close to the ribbon roof five so just to repeat that geography we've got rivenry five it's an outer barrier uh reef on the great barrier reef and you can scuba dive on it and snorkel and i've been there and it's quite a you know lovely coral reef and on the seaward side of it it drops quite steeply to a shelf break around about 90 meters depth and then we have basically a big vertical wall and that is the head of this canyon that we are in at the moment and so the idea is we'll recover the rov mobilize western probably around about sort of 2 3 p.m in the afternoon we will put the rov back in the water and climb up the head of this this canyon so these are sort of softball sized bumps balls on the seafloor um xenophores there are there are four foreign and quite fragile they're if you were to pick them up they can crumble quite easily but they have this really complex skeleton that basically uh well it's called the test uh foreign test and like you mentioned they they're a a single cell of animal and they they have cytoplasmin uh just trying to recall my undergrad biology here i'm actually a marine geologist but they they create these very complex fairly large tests you know you could you could easily pick it up in your hand but they typically form in deep ocean environments with high organic matter and i i think you can all agree it's pretty you know there is a lot of organic matter here we're seeing lots of burrows we're seeing lots of sea cucumber fecal pellets sea cucumber poop uh on the seafloor there's plenty of food uh and organic matter down here and we're literally only about four kilometers away from the edge of the great barrier reef here so it's pretty close that's right duel xeno fire for we've collected quite a few of them yeah with the iron yeah okay yeah pilots are just saying they've collected uh quite a few in the past they're pretty fragile though yeah they easily you can easily crush them um so there's one just passing by on the right hand side of the screen now collected them right greg um yeah so just talking about organic matter uh you can see these little almost toothpaste like tubes on the seafloor these are this is very likely from holothurians all right we have seen quite a number today we certainly saw lots yesterday in dive 378 lots of sea cucumbers it's a bit deep about 1800 meters and you know they they're the we call them vacuum cleaners of the sea they're basically slurping up all this mud i do a lot of scuba diving on the great barrier reef myself there you do see lots of sea cucumbers in the shallow parts of the great barrier reef lots of different colors down here though we're seeing about three or four different yeah yeah types of sea cucumbers including really spectacular purple ones at the very early start of the dive there we go one of these purple ones but if you recall it was it was just floating in the middle of one of the canyon in the in the mid water like it was asleep was quite a amazing yeah looking uh sick you come here we go i'm just probably glad i'm not driving the rov i'm just trying to manipulate the view here with my little joystick there we go there's a good view we're just um we're just finishing the 500 meter transect here so that's important because we're doing a systematic comparison between all the different canyons that we're studying and something else that's really interesting if you look below the the uh sea cucumber there's a as a parallel oh sorry there's a linear line of burrows now what is causing that i don't know but we're certainly open to suggestions here and we've got one what's up we've got a halo saw just off to the left it doesn't seem to be too bothered by us at rat tail thanks dougal told you my my fish id is not so good we have we have uh we really appreciate people's input from ashore helping us id these animals yeah rat tail you can see it's a pectoral fin sitting up quite a deep body compared to some of the eels that we've seen earlier and this is also part of the the systematic survey we take a push core at the end of the transect so we're doing that now we collected one at the beginning we also collected one at the very bottom of the uh the canyon floor uh this is important because the sediments can tell us look the analyzing the service can tell us a lot the the origin the provenance of these sediments uh what originally made them was it coral was it you know pelagic plankton uh how much quartz is in it how much carbonate calcium carbonate is in it you know just all of this analysis you can do just from taking a plug of sediment nuni on youtube just helping us explain allosaurus i'll just read it out rat tails have stouter bodies distinctive dorsal fin yeah and along with very big eyes and a non-forked tail yep that would describe that one really well okay you just get a sense of how soft this mud is you know you could plunge your arm into it quite easily i was out here in 2017 on the the new zona that's the big german research ship one of the largest research ships in the world we were out here with maya matadi from marim the german research institute he's a paleo oceanographer and we were plunging eight meter cores into this area um we worked out here for a month and uh quite a great experience being on huge german research ship but we were collecting these great long piston cores and uh you know so much much longer than these push cores and you know it's almost like a big factory on the back deck it would you would plunge these great long cores into the sea floor and you pull up this great huge long plug of sediment and then be laid on a big table and then everyone would get to work taking samples from from it and the idea was to look at the oceanographic signals that were locked up in the sediments so think of these sediments like you know layers of history and of course the further the deeper you go down in the core the older it it gets until you get to the modern sea surface which is you know present day environment so the longer that core can be the further back in time you go and this can all be age dated through radiocarbon age dating and other techniques but with each layer when you split these cores open you can see them they just very much like looking at tree rings so you know so from this is a really valuable way to to understand our oceans and there's a very large world's largest marine geological program is the integrated ocean drilling program and uh these scientists who devote their entire lives traveling around the globe taking very very long calls out of the sediment to try and understand the oceanography marine life the geology of the sea floor and it's been running for many many decades australia is a part of the iodp through the anzic community which is australian new zealand enzik an australian and new zealand ide international consortium so it's all to do with the integrated consortium all to do with being part of the iodp global program oh soft yep good all collection yep thanks very much yeah so we're after some replicas oh just assert that sea cucumber is thinking something's going on uh we're just taking a few a few holes away around from where it's uh living and because what their escape mechanism is to kind of throw themselves up into the water column there we go and off we go that's just brilliant yes and we've seen plenty of these swimming uh sea cucumbers fantastic funny it waited until right at the end before it uh before it took off so we're just climbing up these uh the northern side wall of the the main canyon this is uh canyon directly in front of riven river five rivenry five is about four kilometers west of where we are now so we're just climbing up the the steeper sidewalls the beginning part of this dive was really steep um vertical walls of rock closer to the the channel axis itself we've climbed over that and we're now into these fairly steep gradient but softer sediments and we're seeing lots of uh leave and spoon life traces burrows mounds tracks and the sorts of animals we're finding here is dominated by well now sea cucumbers we've seen uh quite a few crustaceans shrimp uh we did see a really spectacular lobster or crayfish i mean really quite a large size i've never seen one like that before but um yeah we're definitely in sea cucumber country now and of course uh lots of eels you know eels halosaurus tails there's certainly a lot of fish life down here there he is one having a good look at us yeah look at that face yeah thanks gents that's good good driving so we're right about a kilometer deep 1030 meters temperature's still pretty chilly it's 4.4 degrees c down here we're still within the antarctic intermediate water and this is this uh lower colder water mass that's that's uh following the topography and it's formed south in the southern ocean and it drifts it basically moves towards the equator this is really amazing look downward downward facing uh is this a rat tail yeah right towel let's get a really good look at that one see if we can zoom in whoop sorry just as well i'm not driving the rov i'm just playing with the zoom controls here zoom out a bit because anytime we stop we're really throwing up all this sediment and that's unavoidable unfortunately it's pretty pretty muddy here anyway so anyone the fish army they get a good look at that okay we've got people saying possible cascell that's good yeah we appreciate the help from ashore we're recovering at one 20 minutes all right 1 000 meters so you want to jump in for me i'm alright you're looking for a rock huh wow yeah yeah funny won't get one down yeah i think there might be ones yeah yeah what are you looking you're looking at the four little so we've got about about 20 minutes or so before we're going to have to terminate this dive and recover the rov uh but the the the fun's not over yet we're going to uh once it's recovered we're going to bring the we're going to uh reposition the the falcore um about three kilometers west of where we are now and that'll be a little bit closer to rivenry five higher up the canyon and closer to the head of this canyon so we'll expect to see the environment change again it's certainly going to be shallower we'll probably get into the mesophotic zone it's it's an area of great interest to us both geologically and biologically we have some ideas about what might be there but uh you know as as we're finding there's also lots of surprises so what we'd like to see geologically is is exposed strata so literally the the deeper roots of the great barrier reef where they're exposed on these steep rock walls we'd like to see that you know going from perhaps not these really old looking rocks that we've seen earlier in this dive but something more like layers of of coral reef right and this gets back to the story about the origin of the great barrier reef and you know we have this deep long uh core that has been taken through the middle of rio and re-5 back in 1995 and jodie webster who is our colleague on this this voyage unfortunately he's at home in sydney but i i know he's watching um he's particularly interested in this because he's been involved with this this core as part of his his phd when he was an undergraduate uh when he was a postgraduate at university of sydney and you know people have been studying there's a very long court about 200 metres long for many years to try and get a sense of when the great barrier reef started and at this stage our best understanding is that we might be talking about a great barrier reef origin that transitioned into this sort of tropical carbonate coral environment anywhere between say about 600 million years sorry 600 000 years ago so great bar reef is relatively young in geological terms so it was only until that that time you know say 600 000 years ago that the that the shelf was perfectly formed with the right width in the right climate zone the right temperature the water quality that coral reef started to develop so this very long ribbon reef 5 course about 200 meters long actually pushes through a whole lot of cycles you know every time the sea level dropped coral reefs were exposed and then as the sea level rose again coral reef would grow and so we have these cycles six to eight different cycles since the beginning of the great great barrier reef's origin so dougal what have we got here is this just is this a medusa like it seems very solid to me or is this a jelly of some kind um looks like one of those upside down jellyfish you find on the on the great barrier reef but you wouldn't think one down here what do we got here dougal for those who aren't aware dougal lindsey's our resident plankton specialist but he's in japan so he's been joining us we've been doing these dougal dives sisquit yeah tunica perhaps yeah yes mysterious blob yeah we know we don't know it all and i think that's pretty cool actually there's plenty of animals here we just go what the heck you know you do mental search for your phylum list and you come up blank thank you tunica big mouth wow okay that's first time see anything like that yeah it looked like um it looked like a medusa was upside down and pushing into the seafloor but no sampling at the moment unfortunately we are getting very close to the end of our dive probably about another 15 minutes and then we're going to have to call it quits we have to recover we've got to recover through you know a kilometer so it takes time but yeah the aim is to do sampling uh this this expedition we have for permits both in the great barrier marine park and in the coral sea marine park which adjoins it and um you know we have a lot of interest from biologists from all around the world we're particularly interested in in corals so soft corals high corals sponges other invertebrates and plankton so across all the sediments and rocks as well so this is a very very much a focus of this expedition is to collect samples but right now uh unless something really amazing just jumps out as we will continue along for another 15 minutes or so and then we will we'll complete the dive and recover but then what the aim is to move westward and in about an hour or so we will put it back down uh we'll have a second dive this afternoon on the bottom 3 30 yeah aiming for back on the bottom around 3 30 so in about two and two to three hours to about two hours away we'll be back down on the bottom yep photobombing shrimp yep yes the eel thing i mean we've seen a number of fish down here the fish tend to be these long eel like animals but it's a couple of animal eels we've seen these could be great cutthroat heels um there's also probably basket eels little cup cup [Music] there just there what has he been on that do we have time or yeah yeah yeah yeah just having a bit of a look here this is a cop crawl and just to the left just to the left of it in the center of the screen this really whoops sorry just just turning this is me driving there the camera it takes a little friends yeah [Music] it's quite strange we we saw some on a uh on a boulder well a a soft sediment boulder a bit of debris from yesterday and uh we do not know what it is and you can see it's stalk-like it's quite small it's only maybe two centimeters tall and uh it's on this stalk and it has this flat or like it's about the size of a fingernail um flat area and then it has these little these almost tentacle-like pods on the outside and we have no idea what what this is it has a real intricate uh root system so we we scooped it up out of the mud and when we cleaned it off it's really extensive root system and this you have this little circular head with um whatever tentacles around you around the circle but it's a fringe right so they it's complete laterally flat it's not like a ball of ten of tentacles or uh or but you know it's it's quite a strange looking structure it's interesting to see it just here in the middle uh yeah so sure yeah that's all right good joy we have a good picture of it uh google i'll send you a picture later um we can head out all right all now we'll just keep trucking along and see what we can see and because we have these uh this is these are some xeno what sorry i'll just zoom out sorry everybody it's just me driving up if my son was here he'd be able to drive this no problems at all you know he's you know i'm i'm just an old guy and the technology is a little little risk response overly responsive yeah it's very sensitive yeah i agree great forums yeah i like looking at them too we haven't collected any oh there's a nice tina ford drifting past there's one for you there dougal um yeah they're really amazing looking these uh xeno fire fours and i mentioned before they're found in organ organic rich environments in the deep sea when we go out to osprey reef which is one of our destinations we should see them there as well on a previous rov dive and they're envisioning the coral sea expedition we saw lots and lots of these uh xenophores together really clustered deeply in the on the uh on the sea floor but uh here they are again and off we got oh yeah yeah i totally agree with the yeah they get they get all the kids driving these things they're just so much better at it and but i gotta say the rov team is just fantastic you know just what they can do because it takes a lot of concentration we have a full team here and they take turnabouts every every a couple hours or so because it just you know it takes a lot of concentration we are talking about an rov that's the size of a of a a large car it's a kilometer underneath us and you know we have to do this delicate dance between the rov and the ship above all what's this is this a safana four oh this is really beautiful okay here's another one for you there dougal or hydrazone yep two you'll pick this up pretty surely he's got these this colonial maybe colonial hydrozone you can see how they so dougal is uh in japan and unfortunately couldn't make it couldn't actually join us physically on the ship here because all the difficulties with international transport getting into australia so you know we had to come up with other ways and because him coming in remotely and talking about the the midwater dives has been really good and possibly another hermit crab let's continue along so i tell you i like we're getting near the end of the dive for me the highlight has been seeing the rock right seeing that strider rock we're talking ancient hard rock basement that this is what the great barrier reef is growing upon that for me geologically that was the highlight i think some might say the dumbo octopus is the highlight yeah i don't know what do you think uh ancient rock strata versus dumbo octopus with cute eyes i don't know the key dies will always win yeah rocks yeah go evenly cool actually i thought the gullies were really interesting because we actually had mapped them we knew that they would be there but actually see them live you know that kind of you know parallel um bridges one after another that was really fascinating now those gullies the what's draining most of the sediment into the main valley there we go the cliff was awesome i agree and also what's growing on the cliff um because we have jeremy our coral a black coral expert here and you know and most of the cecil fauna the corals and the things like they're attached to those these exposed rocks and the rocks are exposed because it's just simply so steep the sediment doesn't build up and so you get these nice clean faces and lots and lots of things growing on them but you know i still love going across these sandy environments these muddy environments because there's plenty of life there you can see it because they've left a trail behind and you don't get that on rocks so you know you can see the burrows and the tracks and all the uh the whole ethereum poop you can see these little twisty tube toothpaste tubes on the seafloor so clearly lots and lots of life down here but you know it's quite easy then to to make these broad statements the different kinds of habitats so we have these steep rock exposed uh walls and they have lots of soft coral lots of corals different kinds of anthozoans corelli we saw corelli moths early they're really quite strange looking um yeah and feather stars attached and then we're in this soft sediment environment and we're seeing lots of eels sea cucumbers and uh lots of shrimp shrimp seem to be everywhere uh they they're in both environments um but yeah we're lots of um lots of eels and uh rat tails there seem to be more fish on this on the soft sediment than on the hard and hard rocket fire would you agree jeremy they must be feeding with other living things in the sand and the mud yeah that's right and there's a xeno fire four on the right so in at james cook university where i work there is a very large you're going to be recovering in a couple minutes right yeah okay there's a very large fish fish study group led by marcus sheaves he's a professor of marine biology there and i was just explaining to marcus just how many eels we we find down here and you know it's great to bring these other experts in because they think different ways that i might uh they straight away they're asking questions like what's their energy source what is what are they eating now we haven't seen them eat anything yet but there must be a lot of food down here to support this much biomass right so what are they eating is it the is it the shrimp that we're seeing there's plenty of shrimp there and that's a that's a fairly big oh it's a little squid oh yeah [Applause] this is his belly that is so cool look at aren't we lucky eh this is right at the end of the dive yeah oh my god that is just oh look at that completely translucent so squid has got a pen uh it's a semi-rigid skeleton it's quite reducing you just make it out and the middle of it is giving that rigid structure yeah totally and it's kind of it's got its ten it's got his arms uh upright oh boy and look at that you got just the most translucent little fins at the back it's pretty tricky it's not very big it's probably only a few centimeters across all right i think that's the way good way to finish it there we go squid take a bow thank you and there we go all right well thank you very much everybody um that was just to repeat and uh so the aim is we will recover uh sebastian we'll bring it back on board we will uh mobilize transit about 33 sorry three kilometers west of where we are a little bit closer to the great barrier reef in a few hours we will put sebastian back in the water so if you can hang around for a few more hours we'll get another look at this canyon will be 30 40 minutes yeah so we'll recover about 30 40 minutes thank you yeah and about an hour or two we will be back in the water so the aim is to get shallower we're going to look at the mesophotic zone or as far as we can go while we have daylight and we will be climbing under to the head of this canyon the head of the canyon is directly adjacent to ribbon reef number five so if you stick around a few more hours we'll we'll see you again that's a wrap

Channel: Schmidt Ocean

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Id: klqBGLc1nT8

Length: 201min 24sec (12084 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020