UNDERSEA DISCOVERIES OFF CANADA'S EAST COAST

Deep sea expedition goes into uncharted waters

Updated Mon. Jul. 30 2007 11:22 AM ET

CTV.ca News Staff

A deep sea expedition has unearthed new discoveries and insights into ecosystems that are home to rare corals and fish off the eastern coast of Canada.


A team of about 20 Canadian researchers explored the waters off the coast of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland over three weeks to find out what was beneath the water's surface.


The team was literally venturing into uncharted waters. A remotely operated submersible captured images of four areas along the continental slope off Nova Scotia. The submersible allowed the team to look deeper than they ever had before.


"We really didn't know what we would find when we went out there because it was all new to us," Ellen Kenchington, a research scientist at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Halifax, N.S. told CTV's Canada AM. "Previously we had been working at depths to about 700 metres. With the new technology that we had...we could go two and a half kilometres. So it was fantastic."


The submersible was able to instantly beam back pictures of corals and new varieties of starfish.

The team collected more than 3,000 digital images, and countless hours of video footage and samples retrieved from the ocean depths.


The research team also found another species of pink bubblegum coral, which is the largest sea-floor invertebrate in the world.


"One of the objectives of our study was to try to document the distribution of the deep water coral," Kenchington said.

Kenchington said the information gathered from their research will be used to locate where coral is on the sea floor and to devise ways to protect it.

Other discoveries new to the area included:

A single-cell animal which was a type of xenophyophore. The size of a grapefruit, this had previously only been found in the deepest part of mid-Atlantic.
A colony of lophelia, a stony white coral that forms large reef frameworks. It had been previously sighted in other areas off Cape Breton.

The findings of the research team will also be used to record information about the ecosystem in the area and to measure the effects of climate change as well as fishing and oil and gas activity.


The submersible traversed a protected area near Sable Island which is referred to as the Gully. The Gully is the largest submarine canyon in eastern North America.


"This marine protected area is a canyon something like the Grand Canyon," Kenchington said. "It's the largest canyon in eastern North America. So if you can imagine the Grand Canyon flooded, that's what we were looking at, so not only were the organisms interesting but we had these steep walls and really interesting geological features, which were really exciting."