[light music] - [Narrator] Beneath the waters of North Carolina's coast a massive graveyard stretches from Currituck to Bogue banks.

More than 5,000 ships have met their end here and those are just the ones we know about.

The reason this region is so perilous has to do with the ever-changing shoals rising from the sea floor.

It's basically a system of underwater dunes that ships can easily run into.

[light music] Add piracy and three maritime wars and it's understandable that we call this region the graveyard of the Atlantic.

- We have very rapid currents fed by the Gulf Stream.

We have shallowing waters, dangerous waters around the capes made up of sand shoals and we have dynamic storms that pop up at a moment's notice and wreak havoc on the seagoing vessels.

- [Narrator] But there's new life thriving on these shipwrecks.

- So when we first get eyes underwater, we're descending down the water column.

It's blue.

Sometimes there's not much light, if we're really deep.

We reach the bottom, that sandy bottom, and start to head towards the ship.

And on our way there we often see signs that mean we're approaching the shipwreck.

We see big silvery schooling Jacks dart through the field of view of the camera and once we've reached the shipwreck itself it's just incredible.

The amount of fish, sometimes, on these racks is so great that it obscures us from seeing the rec structure itself.

I was just struck by how alive these wrecks were with marine life.

It was absolutely stunning.

[light music] - [Narrator] A team from NOAA set out to explore some of these historic shipwrecks.

They came equipped with sonar and remotely operated vehicles loaded with 4K cameras to see just how much life these wrecks support.

And it wasn't easy getting down here.

- The shipwrecks sunk for a reason.

They either sunk during wartime or they sunk because of challenges of ocean storms and the seabed and shallow waters.

And then we encountered those same challenges except for the wartime effects.

[light music] - [Narrator] But the effort paid off.

Researchers glimpsed unprecedented views of these unique habitats and collected valuable data on how the ships are being used by marine life.

[light music] - The imaging sonar is a really cool tool.

It transmits sound through the water at very high frequencies.

It allows us to image and detect things almost like an acoustic camera.

So we're transmitting high frequency sound over 10 times a second, up to 50 meters away from the ROV or 150 feet and outward about 140 degrees or almost a half circle.

This enhances our ability to detect animals that are using the shipwreck far beyond what the camera is able to see.

And it produces what it is, in essence, a video, an image of fish moving.

We can sense and detect fish moving around the shipwreck forming tight schools or individual sharks swimming through the water column.

[light music] Even though we can image very large schools and give us an idea of the quantity of fish or the numbers of fish, we need to deploy something like an ROV in order to capture the images in the video in high definition to help us identify them to species.

[light music] - These sites really are forming oasis for marine life.

And one of the things that we think may be happening is that these shipwrecks are forming islands, almost stepping stones, if you will, that some of these animals can use as they move from place to place almost like a rest stop.

[light music] - [Narrator] As climate change continues to warm ocean waters more species may be using these rest stops.

- One of the things that the observations we are able to make on this mission will help us understand is what the current snapshot is of what types of fish are living on these shipwrecks.

And we can continue to monitor these shipwrecks into the future to understand how that may change over time.

Being able to get eyes underwater on these shipwrecks is pretty rare.

A lot of circumstances have to align for us to get a large research vessel with this technological equipment out into the ocean and then 200 to 800 feet underwater to observe the history and the ecology in that fusion.

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