A massive 6.4 million acre deep sea coral reef has just been discovered off the US East Coast and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Ocean Exploration are naming it the largest of it’s kind in the World.
The discovery, just published in the journal Geomatics, disproves a long-held belief that the Blake Plateau in the Atlantic might be a dead zone as instead, scientists found a “stunning” ecosystem populated by “dense thickets of the reef-building coral.”
“For years we thought much of the Blake Plateau was sparsely inhabited, soft sediment,” NOAA Ocean Exploration Operations Chief Kasey Cantwell said in a news release. “Past studies have highlighted some coral in the region, particularly closer to the coast and in shallower waters, but until we had a complete map of the region, we didn’t know how extensive this habitat was, nor how many of these coral mounds were connected.”
The reef’s borders are between 35 and 75 miles off the coastline, beginning southeast of Miami and moving north to Charleston, South Carolina, NOAA says. One spot, nicknamed “Million Mounds” by scientists, accounts for the largest part of the reef and is made up primarily of “a stony coral” commonly found at depths of 656 to 3,280 feet, where temperatures average about 39 degrees, the study reports.
“Cold-water corals such as these grow in the deep ocean where there is no sunlight and survive by filter-feeding biological particles,” the scientists reported.
“While they are known to be important ecosystem engineers, creating structures that provide shelter, food, and nursery habitat to other invertebrates and fish, these corals remain poorly understood.”
Data from more than 30 multi-beam sonar mapping surveys (and 23 submersible dives) was combined to create a nearly complete map. In the process, the team “identified 83,908 individual coral mound peak features,” according to the news release.
The study documents the massive scale of the coral province, an area composed of nearly continuous coral mound features that span up to 310 miles long and 68 miles)wide. A “core area” has high-density mounds up to 158 miles long and 26 miles wide.
[image: Mixed coral habitat on the Blake Plateau. Image courtesy of Ross et al, NOAA-OE, HBOI.]
More information: Derek C. Sowers et al, Mapping and Geomorphic Characterization of the Vast Cold-Water Coral Mounds of the Blake Plateau, Geomatics (2024). DOI: 10.3390/geomatics4010002