Why Are Scientists Exploring Davidson Seamount?
A key purpose of NOAA’s Ocean Exploration Initiative is to investigate the more than 95 percent of Earth’s underwater world that until now has remained virtually unknown and unseen. Such exploration may reveal clues to the origin of life on earth, cures for human diseases, answers on how to achieve sustainable use of resources, links to our maritime history, and information to protect endangered species. There is increasing evidence that seamounts and deep-sea corals are important fish habitat, hold data on ocean climate and productivity, and are hotspots of bio- diversity, including new species. Previous Ocean Exploration expeditions have documented deep- sea coral and seamount ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coasts of New England, California, and the Pacific Northwest, but these missions have only begun to quantify these systems. These expeditions have yielded many new records of biota, new ecological data, new data on habitat distributions/structures, and data on water
