In February of 2002, MBARI researchers Robert Vrijenhoek and Shana Goffredi discovered a recent whale fall while exploring the outer portion of the Monterey Canyon with a remotely operated vehicle.

Robert Vrijenhoek, an evolutionary geneticist at MBARI, has spent his career studying how an organism’s genes can shape its interactions with its surroundings, the evolution of its species as a whole, and—if the animal is endangered—its conservation. Thirteen years ago, he turned his attention to the exotic organisms that populate hydrothermal vents and cold seeps.

After four years of work and numerous test runs in the Monterey Bay, a team of MBARI engineers took the institute's first autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV, for a trial cruise in the Arctic Ocean last fall. The group spent a month aboard the Coast Guard icebreaker USCGC Healy, testing the AUV and its components under and along the Arctic ice sheet.

The Gulf of California sits at the northernmost end of an immense underwater mountain range called the East Pacific Rise, which extends across the Southeastern Pacific Ocean almost to Antarctica.