Cold Water Reefs Revealed with New High-Tech Gear

Scientists have gone high-tech in order to study fragile cold-water reefs. With very little known about these subarctic water reefs, researchers have now employed underwater technology to better understand this ecosystem.

Although their existence was already documented in the 18^th century, it's only now that it's possible to investigate these otherwise hidden reefs. The results of those studies have highlighted the vast damage that years of deep-sea trawling have caused and still cause to the reefs.

"Traditionally, the metabolism of cold-water reefs are typically investigated by collecting animals and analyzing them in a laboratory," said Lorenzo Rovelli, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Preferably, however, researchers would like to do the opposite, and bring the laboratory to the seabed, where the reef can be studied in its own environment. Since cold water reefs grow incredibly slowly-about 5 mm per year-and are fragile habitats, we were looking at novel techniques that could be used on a reef to assess metabolism with little impact on the reef structures."

In this case, the researchers used equipment on these deep water reefs that employed a method called "Aquatic Eddy Covariance" to simultaneously measure the content of oxygen in the water and the water flow at high frequencies. The data can be used to calculate how much oxygen is being absorbed by the reef inhabitants, and the approach allows investigators to assess the O2 consumption rates as a function of environmental drivers like food availability and hydrodynamics.

The findings reveal a bit more about the total oxygen uptake by the reef community which, in turn, expresses how much carbon is turned over within a defined area of the reef. Not only are these reefs hotspots for biodiversity, but turn over a considerable amount of carbon.

The findings are published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.

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