A deep-sea coral reef forest off the South Carolina coast was discovered last week and experts involved in the project have called the expansive ecosystem that runs for at least 85 miles “unbelievable” and unlike anything they have ever seen before, HuffPost reported.
The discovery was made about 160 miles off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, during a two-week expedition to explore uncharted canyons and coral ecosystems.
Scientists recently made sonar mappings of the ocean floor and found hundreds of deep-sea mounds which they hoped could be made of coral.
Last week the research vessel Atlantis set off from Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to investigate.
Expedition chief scientist Erik Cordes hoped they would be able to collect corals during their explorations but was not sure exactly what their teams would find beneath the ocean’s surface.
Their discovery changes everything.
Taking to Twitter, Cordes said that their discovery had “lots of implications.”
It turns out the live corals are growing atop skeletal remains of coral colonies believed to be hundreds of thousands of years old, HuffPost said.
“This is a huge feature,” Cordes said. “It’s incredible that it stayed hidden off the U.S. East Coast for so long.”
Experts hope that through the ongoing project, which is funded by NOAA, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and U.S. Geological Survey, they will gain a better understanding of deep-sea ecosystems.
Sandra Brooke, a coral ecologist at Florida State University who is a member of the research team, said the discovery threw her “mental image of what the reefs out here look like for a loop,” according to HuffPost.
Cordes added that the findings do not “get more direct than that,” noting that there was a reason they dense coral forests were down there.
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