Analysis-ready optical underwater images of Manganese-nodule covered seafloor of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone

Abstract

We provide a sequence of analysis-ready optical underwater images from the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) of the Pacific Ocean. The images were originally recorded using a towed camera sledge that photographed a seabed covered with polymetallic manganese-nodules, at an average water depth of 4,250 meters. The original degradation in visual quality and inconsistent scale among individual raw images due to different altitude implies that they are not scientifically comparable in their original form. Here, we present analysis-ready images that have already been pre-processed to account for this degradation. We also provide accompanying metadata for each image, which includes their geographic coordinates, depth of the seafloor, absolute scale (cm/pixel), and seafloor habitat class obtained from a previous study. The provided images are thus directly usable by the marine scientific community e.g., to train machine learning models for seafloor substrate classification and megafauna detection.

Revealing Heavy Metal-Resistant Mechanisms and Bioremediation Potential in a Novel Croceicoccus Species Using Microbial-Induced Carbonate Precipitation

“…The strain Ery5 T was isolated from sediment collected from the Clarion-Clipperton Zone of the polymetallic nodule region of the East Pacific Ocean (154 • 48 W, 09 • 12 N) at a depth of 5377 m. The sample was collected via a television multicore operated from the vessel HAI YANG LIU HAO in September 2013. The television image revealed that over 50% of the seafloor surface was covered with abundant polymetallic nodules [19]. The isolation process involved using an LB medium supplemented with 20 mM Mn 2+ and 30 g/L NaCl.…”