Voyage to the Ridge 2022: Meet the Explorers!
On Wednesday, August 3 at 1:30 p.m. ET/5:30 p.m. GMT, join a live discussion featuring mission personnel leading the Voyage to the Ridge 2022 expedition aboard NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer!
Kasey Cantwell of NOAA Ocean Exploration, Ashton Flinders of the U.S. Geological Survey, Joana Xavier of the University of Porto, and Deb Glickson of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will discuss a range of topics related to the ongoing exploration of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Azores Plateau, and surrounding areas, including their experiences on the expedition thus far and their hopes and anticipations as the exploration continues through September. Learn about everything from hydrothermal vents to life at sea, and then continue to engage with the exploration moving forward by watching livestreamed deep-sea dives of the seafloor, water column, and the life they sustain in real time.
Join the virtual event online through one of the following platforms:
- NOAA Ocean Exploration on Twitter
- NOAA Ocean Exploration on YouTube
- NOAA Ocean Exploration on Facebook
About the Expedition
From May through September 2022, NOAA and partners will conduct Voyage to the Ridge 2022, a series of three telepresence-enabled ocean exploration expeditions on NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer that will include mapping operations and remotely operated vehicle (ROV) dives to collect baseline information about unexplored and poorly understood deepwater areas of the Charlie-Gibbs Fracture Zone, Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and Azores Plateau.
Spanning the north-south length of the Atlantic Ocean and stretching an impressive 16,000 kilometers (10,000 miles), the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (MAR) is the longest mountain range in the world and one of the most prominent geological features on Earth. The majority of it sits underwater and thus much of it remains largely unexplored. With active tectonic spreading, the MAR is the site of frequent earthquakes. Spectacular hydrothermal vents may form where magma provides heat as it rises to the seafloor. These vents are known to support diverse chemosynthetic communities. However, little is known about life at these sites once vents go extinct, or what life lies beyond the vents, further away from the rift zone.
Voyage to the Ridge 2022 will seek to close some of these gaps and increase our understanding of the region’s geological context and past and future geohazards, the diversity and distribution of coral and sponge communities, and how populations of deep-sea species are related across this region and throughout the deepwater Atlantic basin.
Published July 27, 2022