The world's largest known deep sea coral system lies off Georgia's coast

The largest-known deep sea coral system on Earth is just off the coast of Georgia and other southern states.

Mounds of white coral rise up from the Blake Plateau half a mile below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. The habitat hosts fish, crabs, shrimp, sea anemones, jellyfish and squid.

People have known about the coral here for decades, but scientists only recently realized the scale of it. In a paper published in the journal Geomatics, a team of researchers describe what they call a deep sea coral province spanning an area about the size of the state of Vermont.