Amon is a deep-sea ecologist and co-founder of the ocean-conservation group SpeSeas. Her path ran through Southampton, then Hawai'i, where she studied abyssal fauna in the Pacific zone now targeted for nodule mining, then the Natural History Museum in London, then Santa Barbara. The Caribbean seafloor she came from remained, in the scientific record, mostly blank.
For a month in the summer, the ship's remotely operated vehicle SuBastian descended again and again. The team identified 25 active cold seeps — places where methane and other gases seep from the seabed and feed communities that live on chemistry rather than sunlight. One sprawled across more than 2,000 square metres. They counted 219 bubble streams rising from the sediment. The gas comes from the same hydrocarbon system that has made Trinidad the Caribbean's largest oil and gas producer since drilling began there in 1857; on land, the same methane pushes up the mud volcanoes near Princes Town.
SuBastian's cameras recorded a Mobula ray carcass on the seabed being taken apart by crabs and worms, deep-sea sharks passing through the lights, carnivorous sponges, squat lobsters, lizardfish.
Among the suspected new species is an octopus, possibly in the genus Graneledone. But the decision that may matter longest was made about where the specimens go. All of them — more than 700 — will be housed at the University of the West Indies' Zoology Museum in Trinidad, multiplying its deep-sea collection twelve-fold.
Amon has a name for the practice she was working against: parachute science. Foreign researchers arrive, gather what they need, and leave. The data goes abroad. The specimens go abroad. The expertise never settles. She said this was the first deep-ocean work in the Caribbean carried out by a team predominantly of Caribbean scientists.
The specimens stayed on the island they came from.
Rather less than a third of the world's ocean floor has been mapped to modern resolution. The blank areas are not evenly distributed; they cluster around coastlines belonging to countries that cannot easily fund ships. What Amon's crew left behind is not only a chart of 11,335 square kilometres. It is a shelf of jars in a museum in St. Augustine, and a group of scientists who now know how to go back down.