Deep-sea coral reef stretches 600 miles from Miami to SC, scientists find

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The world’s largest deep-sea coral reef has been discovered off the East Coast: a massive 6.4 million acre seascape that stretches from Miami to Charleston, South Carolina, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Ocean Exploration.

That makes it larger than Vermont, NOAA says.

The discovery, published Jan. 12 in the journal Geomatics, disproves a long held belief that the Blake Plateau in the Atlantic might be a dead zone.

Instead, scientists found a “stunning” ecosystem populated by “dense thickets of the reef-building coral.”

“For years we thought much of the Blake Plateau was sparsely inhabited, soft sediment,” NOAA Ocean Exploration Operations Chief Kasey Cantwell said in a news release.

“Past studies have highlighted some coral in the region, particularly closer to the coast and in shallower waters, but until we had a complete map of the region, we didn’t know how extensive this habitat was, nor how many of these coral mounds were connected.”

The reef’s borders are between 35 and 75 miles off the coastline, beginning southeast of Miami and moving north to Charleston, South Carolina, NOAA says.

One spot, nicknamed “Million Mounds” by scientists, accounts for the largest part of the reef. It is made up primarily of “a stony coral” commonly found at depths of 656 to 3,280 feet, where temperatures average about 39 degrees, the study reports.

“Cold-water corals such as these grow in the deep ocean where there is no sunlight and survive by filter-feeding biological particles,” the scientists reported.

“While they are known to be important ecosystem engineers, creating structures that provide shelter, these corals remain poorly understood.”