Deep-sea corals

Deep-sea corals live in all the ocean basins and are found thousands of meters below the sea surface, far deeper than the photic zone. Due the challenges of imaging and sampling them there is still a lot that we don’t know about their habitats, biology, ecology and chemistry.

Here are some resources for learning more about deep-sea corals

A website from our last research cruise to the Drake Passage, in the Southern Ocean: Antarcticcorals

A website dedicated to deep-sea corals: Lophelia.org

On our Equatorial cruise we will be looking at both modern and fossil corals, trying to understand what controls where they thrive and why, and how that has changed in the past.