Meet Dr. Robinson, Deep Sea Explorer

There are several spots on this planet that have never been seen, but Dr. Laura Robinson and her team of explorers are going there.

This team traveled to Trinidad on a scientific expedition made possible by a grant from the European Research Council.

Robinson said, “Every time you go to the sea floor you pretty much find new species and new organisms, and collections of organisms that haven’t been seen together.”

Aboard the James Cook research vessel, the team planned to take samples of deep water corals and test the waters, hoping to get a glimpse into our ocean’s history.

“The corals can live just about anywhere,” she said. “We want to understand where they live and why they live there, because that can help us understand what controls the distribution of ecosystems in the ocean.”

Photo credit: tropics.blogs.ilrt.org

They reached these unchartered depths in a special robot submarine.

“We use a big array of echo sounding waves and you make maps of the sea mounts with about 100 meter resolution. And they can have spectacular shapes, for example you may find out that the mountains have flat tops,” she said.