The difficulty in sampling habitats in the Drake Passage has led to a paucity of information on benthic fauna, yet on this expedition seamount composition was found to be rich and diverse, particularly with regards to cold-water coral and sponge ecosystems.
Several U.S. projects that were planned and funded outside of GoMA became contributing partners to help advance the cause of coordinated and collaborative programs looking at biodiversity (e.g., two deepwater expeditions, a seamount study, a benthic observatory program, and an acoustic sampling development project).
Virtually every oceanographic expedition discovers new seamounts, and it is estimated that approximately 20,000 exist in the oceans of the world.
Studied only sparsely for decades, NOAA expeditions to the seamount in 2002 and 2006 cast light upon its unique deep-sea coral ecosystem.
The 2001 expedition drilled six seamounts and tested the samples to determine their original latitude, and thus the characteristics and speed of the hotspot's drift pattern in total.
Possibly the best ecologically studied seamount in the world is Davidson Seamount, with six major expeditions recording over 60,000 species observations.
Here, we construct a megafaunal inventory for Davidson Seamount off the central California coast based on six expeditions and over 60000 faunal observations.
D.A.B. and M.D.L. were co-principal investigators on the expedition that discovered the 2011 eruption at Axial Seamount.
The Monowai seamount, an underwater volcano located north of New Zealand, erupted during the expedition and added about 300 million cubic feet (9 million cubic meters) of rock to its summit — a volume equal to 3,500 Olympic-size swimming pools — in just five days.
Following the information learned from the 2002 and 2006 expeditions, there was public support for the making of Davidson Seamount into a marine sanctuary.
