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August 17, 2013

South of the Emile Baudot seamount

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© OCEANA / Carlos Minguell

 

We arrived at 4:00 at Guyot Bel, a knoll in the Mallorca channel SW of the Emile Baudot seamount, at the edge of the platform, right where the escarpment starts falling. We travel 22 nautical miles tonight to get here, we’ll work here today and then head back to the south of Cabrera, since the wind is going to come in hard in this area in the coming days and it will be more difficult to study the area at that point.

We did two ROV immersions today, one in Bel Guyot and another on a summit in the volcanic field of Emile Baudot, the latter of which was the most striking because of its higher altitude. The Guyot proved to be a muddy mound where we found deep-sea species that until now never been captured on camera, and others that have rarely been filmed in their habitats, like tripod fish and viper fish. At the summit, the landscape was very different, much rockier and crowned with a dead coral reef, inhabited mainly by sponges and deep-sea gorgonian.