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Coated Corals

In 2010, Alvin traveled to the Gulf of Mexico to assess the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on vulnerable deep-sea corals ecosystems and the organisms that inhabit them. WHOI scientists began studying deep-sea coral communities in 2008 in an attempt to understand what the poorly understood systems look like and how they function in an unperturbed environment. When oil began gushing from the Macondo well in 2010, WHOI scientists used Alvin to confirm damage to these fragile ecosystems and to establish a site where they can monitor future changes caused by the spill.(Image courtesy of Chuck Fisher, Pennsylvania State University, and Tim Shank, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Deep-sea time-lapse camera system provided by WHOI-MISO)