This is the third cruise in a four-year project sponsored by the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research (OER) and the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS), a division of the Department of the Interior. The overall goal of this project is to explore new areas of the Gulf of Mexico in search of coral communities; in doing so, we can develop the tools to better predict the occurrence of corals and to understand why they occur where they do. This effort begins long before we go to sea, with a group of scientists poring over industry three-dimensional seismic data and bathymetry (depth measurements) providing information on the structure and composition of the sea-floor. When a number of likely sites are chosen, we survey these "high-probability " sites with various tools to gather higher-resolution bathymetry data and to get our first real look at the seafloor. As we embark on this cruise, we have already discovered a handful of new coral sites, and we hope to discover even more. |