A few months ago, the QUEST television program included a segment on various gelatinous marine animals, including jellies, found offshore of central and northern California and featured at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The beginning of the video segment briefly showed one of the most important habitats for these animals — Monterey submarine canyon. Not unlike on land, features of the undersea landscape have a significant influence on the quantities and diversity of animals. Science involved in understanding the relationship of this “seascape” with submarine ecosystems requires quality maps and the technology to create those maps is improving all the time.

For this post, I simply wanted to show a few images of the canyon and beyond. As readers on my regular blog know, I just love showing images of our planet’s seafloor. We are currently in an age of exploration and discovery when it comes to mapping the seafloor — in many ways it’s like sending probes to another planet. Many of the images I show in this post are from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), which has not only done a lot of the mapping and science, but has also designed and built the technology to do it. See their page on marine geology, including Monterey canyon, here.

The first image (below) shows the deepest part of Monterey canyon, near the shoreline, cutting across the flat and relatively shallow continental shelf. The yellow arrow represent river sources of sediment that contribute to the longshore currents (red arrows) that funnel the sediment into the canyon and, ultimately, into the deep sea.

In fact, it is the movement of sediment through the canyon that is responsible for creating and sculpting the canyon. Not unlike the Colorado River incising into the Colorado Plateau to create the Grand Canyon, these underwater “rivers” of mud, silt, sand, and water rush down the canyon eroding the canyon little by little. Since I’m bringing up the Grand Canyon, I always like to point out the scale of Monterey submarine canyon with the map below, which compares the two canyon systems at the same scale (also from MBARI).

Grand Canyon (top) and Monterey submarine canyon (bottom); credit: MBARI

Finally, I’d like to point out that there is even more to discover and learn beyond the canyon itself. As the continental slope transitions to the much flatter open ocean floor (greater than 10,000 feet deep) the deep canyon transitions to a subtler feature. The Monterey submarine fan, shown in the map below, is a depositional feature — it’s where all the sediment that cut the canyon (and much more that simply traveled through it) ended up. This is the submarine equivalent of a delta in some ways.

Next time you are standing along the coast in Santa Cruz or Monterey and looking out into the ocean remember that there is an entire landscape on the seafloor as beautiful and complex as what we see on land.

-

- Image comparing Grand Canyon and Monterey Canyon courtesy of this MBARI publication (link opens a PDF)

- First and last images created in GeoMapApp, a free web-based software for creating topographic/bathymetric maps

36.75428977478731 -122.04959113150835

The longest animals in the world aren’t what you’d imagine.

What are the longest animals in the world? Hint: you’ve most likely never heard of them. They glow in the dark and have many stomachs, mouths and tentacles – sometimes hundreds. They’re about the width of a broomstick, but they can grow to be more than 100 feet long. So although blue whales are bulkier, some species of this marine animal are longer.

They’re called siphonophores (that’s pronounced sigh-FAWN-oh-for) and they’re cousins to the jellyfish you can see at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Aliens, giant caterpillars, tropical flowers: siphonophores resemble all three. And in today’s QUEST television story you’ll have a unique opportunity to see footage of the siphonophores that live in the Monterey Bay, courtesy of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

This week’s story also features a behind-the-scenes visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s jellyfish exhibit. And I can promise you that you’ve never seen the orange sea nettles in the giant blue tank quite like you’ll see them in this story.

Watch the Amazing Jellies & Siphonophores television story online.

36.806375 -121.861196

New instruments hook to the underwater lab.
Credit: David Fierstein © 2005 MBARI

We heard about the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute's new underwater laboratory in a radio story last fall. When that story aired, the lab (known as the Monterey Accelerated Research System, or MARS) was just getting going, with lots of neat experiments planned. Now, few of those have become a reality.

In case you missed the first story, the MARS is essentially an underwater data hub, perched on the ocean floor almost 3,000 feet below the surface of Monterey Bay. A 32-mile cable connects the system to land, acting as a power cord and data link. Several "underwater extension cords" allow a variety of instruments to plug into the hub, getting power from land and sending back data via the cable. That constant connection is a big step forward in undersea science; without it, researchers have had to use boats to stay physically close to their instruments (something hard to do for very long), or have sent the instruments off on their own, relying on batteries to keep them running and collecting data.

Until late February, earthquake scientists at the UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory had been using that second method with their seafloor seismic station, the Monterey Ocean Bottom Broadband (MOBB). "We had to wait three months to even know if the instruments were alive," said Barbara Romanowicz, the lab's director. But the MOBB is now plugged in to the MARS system, and is transmitting its information about earthquakes in real-time.

That new stream of information could be especially valuable in California, because the MOBB provides a unique view of the main fault system, the San Andreas, which runs along the Northern California coast. Most seismometers are land-based, and therefore positioned on the east side of the fault. The MOBB is on the west side of the fault, offering a helpful perspective on the fault's shifts and shakes.

The researchers hope that the MOBB's new stream of real-time data will improve their earthquake models, and perhaps eventually help provide early warnings about impending quakes (for more on that topic, see the TV story, Earthquakes: Breaking New Ground).

The MOBB is just one instrument using the MARS hub. A tool that uses sound waves to track fish is currently attached, and within the next six months you can expect to see a robotic DNA lab and a robot that crawls along the seafloor, collecting data on animals that live in the mud.

36.8015 -121.788

The Eye in the Sea. Credit: MBARI.

The Eye in the Sea is one of the coolest, gee-whiz scientific projects you'll see. It's part of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute's so-called MARS project (that stands for Monterey Accelerated Research System). MARS is an undersea laboratory, set up deep on the sea floor about 30 miles offshore from Monterey.

The Eye in the Sea is one of the first research projects to be hooked up to MARS. It uses a small amount of red light to view what’s happening on the ocean floor, about 3,000 feet below the surface. The images travel through 32 miles of cable and go back to the control center on land, where researchers view real-time video of life at the "benthic" level – that is, a voyage to the bottom of the sea.

And you're going to be able to take that voyage, too.

Schoolchildren, teachers and eventually the general public will be able to see the spindly-legged crabs calle spiny kings, or the eel-like hagfish, or the giant, dark, blob-like Pacific sleeper shark.

The Eye in the Sea becomes operational in January, and researchers expect to have their school program up and running by late January or early February, depending on the success they have hooking up Eye in the Sea to the metal hub out in the middle of Monterey Bay.

All of that means that the public will be able to go to www.mbari.org beginning sometime in February and view video-cam images from half a mile deep on the sea floor.

How cool is that?

Watch video from the Eye of the Sea in the Underwater Laboratory audio slide show online.

36.8015 -121.788

The new FOCE experimental chamber being developed by MBARI scientists.

The scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) are already well-known for uncovering some of the most extreme marine animals in the deep sea, like the incredible vampire squid. But recently, they're using their unique blend of biology and engineering to study one of the least-discussed impacts of climate change: ocean acidification.

When we hear about climate change, we tend of think of the atmosphere – and for good reason. But as MBARI scientists describe, the oceans are a key part of the process. The ocean acts like a giant sponge, absorbing carbon dioxide emissions from the air. And as we add more and more CO2 to air by burning fossil fuels, the ocean is absorbing it. On one level, it's done us a big favor. Scientists say that we would be experiencing much more extreme climate change were it not for the ocean's ability to remove the heat-trapping gas.

However, the carbon dioxide that the ocean absorbs is making the water more acidic. This isn't the first time that the oceans have become more acidic. But as is the case with many impacts of climate change, it's the rate at which acidification is happening that worries scientists the most.

As you can probably guess, the ocean is an incredibly complex system. So ocean acidification poses an interesting question to scientists: what will the impacts be on marine species and ecosystems? What they know already is that there will be winners and losers in more acidic waters. Some creatures may do fine, while others won't be able to adapt in time. Either way, food webs may feel the effects – including webs involving species that humans depend on , like salmon.

Another major concern has to do with marine animals with certain kinds of shells – known as "calcifiers." Corals, clams and others all use carbonate in the water to build their shells out of calcium carbonate. But ocean acidification reduces the amount of carbonate in the water, making it more difficult for them to make shells. That could be devastating for coral reefs, who are already facing a number of stresses.

Even if you're an animal without a shell, ocean acidification could make things difficult. Scientists are studying how much stress this could put on animals that can't regulate their internal pH, or how it could affect the larvae or reproduction of certain species. MBARI scientists are hoping that the flume they are developing to conduct FOCE experiments will help researchers answer some of these questions.

Check out the whole story – watch the "Acidic Seas" audio slide show online.

36.8015 -121.788