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From the deck of the Revelle, you can feel the sea air in your face and hear waves crash against the ship. (sound: crash of waves against ship) But you have to make an effort. Because most of the work on this expedition actually requires researchers to stay inside – watching, not the horizon, but the television. (sound: background discussion: "But look at the little feathery things in the back, those must be hydroids though…") This isn't just any TV, of course. It's the live feed from thousands of feet below us on the ocean floor, courtesy of the remotely operated vehicle Jason II, tethered to, and controlled from, aboard the ship.

Sending Jason II to the ocean's depths is allowing geologists and biologists working together to get a look at previously unseen regions of the Aleutian seafloor, says Alaska Department of Fish & Game marine fisheries scientist Doug Woodby. WOODBY: "To create the model, we need to gather a lot of data on the physical features of the habitat, and it's very valuable to be seeing that firsthand, to know what kind of substrate there is and how that compares to what we see on the charts that we made last year… that show us the details of fine features on the bottom. What we see in the real-live video is often quite a bit different than expected."

Most dive days aboard the Revelle, it's standing-room only in Jason II's "control van," a small, windowless room filled with TV monitors, the hum of machinery and the chatter of scientists. On this day, the scientists expected to see exposed rock, but instead they're finding a lot of mud, and just a few kinds of corals. As Jason's technical team directs the vessel along the ocean floor more than a mile below, Auke Bay Laboratory fishery biologist Jon Heifetz holds a control box with a joystick that allows him to zoom in on interesting sights below. "Ooh...Basketstar!..." The scientists can also ask the Jason pilot to use the vessel's manipulator arm to gather samples, says biologist Gordon Hendler. HENDLER: "We've just been collecting sea pens, some of them have brittle stars on them, some of them don't. What we're interested in finding out is whether there's any evidence that the brittle stars are harming the sea pens, feeding on them."

When the dive ends, it's nearly midnight. But the science team is just gearing up for another full shift of work. After Jason II's return, the scientists must carefully document and process the biological and geological samples they collected. (sounds: bucket sounds/bucket brigade) As Jason II comes aboard, the scientists rush the most vulnerable samples, including corals, sponges and crabs, into buckets of cold water, which are then hustled down the hall into a walk-in refrigerator.

In an onboard laboratory, researchers work all night, taking pictures andpreparing tissue samples for future DNA studies. By the end of the second dive, researchers had still not found the lush coral "garden" habitats like those they'd previously seen in much shallower dives in the Aleutian Islands. But they are seeing something new on every dive, says researcher Doug Woodby. WOODBY: "I'd say the biggest surprise has been the fact that so many of the corals that we've seen in the deeper waters are very different from anything we've seen in the shallower waters. There are some similarities, but there have been a lot of new species – for us - not necessarily new to science, maybe some are, but definitely they're new to us, because we have not looked this deep before."

Reporting from the North Pacific Ocean aboard the R/V Revelle, I'm Sonya Senkowsky. (sounds: waves)