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DISPATCH 3: "Rock On" - 6.02.2006 | Mark Carroll The Johnson-Sea-Link submersible did not surface again until after midnight. Once back on deck, scientist John Reed and fellow researcher, geologist Robert Ginsburg, relayed that they had encountered a surprising amount of activity at the dive site. 
Although deep-water reefs as a whole are biologically diverse, wide swaths of them are often largely dead (just how much of this phenomenon is natural, coincidental or caused by humans is still a subject of debate and one of the questions this expedition hopes to address). But, on this dive along the outer slope of the Miami Terrace, the sub team encountered a substantial amount of life. In the cold, deep waters, among thickets of coral, swam eels and a host of small fishes. Crabs battled one another set against an other-worldly landscape of sponges and sea fans. As far as settings go, it was as good as it gets for exploration. As a geologist, Ginsburg's approach to this mission exists on different timescale. During the dive, Ginsburg had found a particular kind of rock associated most often with the bottom of a lake, not a rocky precipice 1,000 feet beneath the ocean. He wrestled a sample off the bottom on the way back to the ship. "What was it doing there?" he rhetorically asked, looking down his glasses at the fragmented stone. "A mystery makes for good science," Ginsberg continued. "Right now, I just have wild hypotheses to explain this. I need more pieces for a theory." 
Deep-water reefs, like their tropical counterparts, are formed on a solid foundation. But, in the case of deep-water reefs, the structure and composition of this foundation is what defines them. Generally speaking, they come in two distinct flavors - bioherms and lithoherms. As the name implies, bioherms are built on the remnants of previous inhabitants - the jumbled skeletons of corals and other long-dead critters. Likewise, lithoherms have built up over time in a similar fashion, but their foundations, somehow, have turned to solid rock. The Miami Terrace, as it turns out, is neither. Although the terrace itself is still considered a deep-water reef, it is a hard bottom reef of generally unknown composition, making it unclassifiable as either a bioherm or lithoherm. Rocks along the Miami Terrace have been traced to the Miocene - putting their age somewhere in the realm of 10 million years old. But, the working academic theory about this area is that it might have formed from the remnants of an ancient coral reef from some 10 thousand years ago. Otherwise, the geological history is spotty at best. The strange geology of this area is just a puzzle within the grand ecological puzzle these researchers have set out to solve. To that end, back aboard ship, another group of scientist was planning to put the solid substrate below to another use althogether... Blog 3: "Wingman" - 6.02.2006 Mark Twain said something to the effect of, "Being at sea is like being in prison with the possibility of drowning." I think he might have felt a bit better about things in today's age of Personal Floatation Devices, survival suits (affectionately referred to as Gumby suits), EPIRBs (a homing device used to help search-and-rescue teams locate folks that need locating) and hydrostatically released life boats - all of which are in abundance aboard ship. Not that anyone really dwells on such morbid stuff, but it's always nice to know, in the back of your head, that you're covered. This is the ocean. And, although it can be a place of overwhelming peace, it always has the potential to turn nasty. I sleep better at night knowing that Gumby has my back. 
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