The Blake Plateau, off the coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, is one of the most remarkable ecosystems in the United States. It is home to the world’s largest cold water coral reef, a coral complex larger than the state of Vermont, which may be the single largest contiguous ecosystem in the continental US. It is also the site of the world’s first deep-sea nodule mining experiment.
As a testament to just how vast and unexplored the deep ocean truly is, the Deepsea Ventures Inc. mining test occurred nearly 50 year before the discovery of the Blake Plateau Coral Reef.
The mining test came perilously close to strip mining this unique ecosystem half-a-century before its discovery. Something that I’ve wondered about over the last few years is just how close that near miss was.
Using the few maps provided by NOAA and BOEM, I pinpointed the location of that first test mine.
From there, I pulled the data on Atlantic Coral and Hardbottom estimates from the Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy Atlas and separated out just the layers for predicted cold-water coral mounds.
Overlaying the bathymetric maps from USGS and aligning it with features on the seafloor shows us exactly where the test occurred and how close it was to these coral mounds.
Previously, I’ve played it safe, arguing from broader scale charts that the first experimental deep-sea mining test occurred “within 100 kilometers of the densest portion of the cold-water coral reef and falling just south of the upper span of the designated Habitat Area of Particular Concern”. The reality is far more stark.
Those first mining tests came within less than two kilometers of coral reefs on the Blake Plateau.
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Featured Image: A cusk eel swims along the seafloor in the area of the Deep Sea Ventures site during Dive 07 of the 2019 Southeastern U.S. Deep-sea Exploration. Image courtesy of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, 2019 Southeastern U.S. Deep-sea Exploration.
