NOAA's Robot Found A Golden Orb 3,250 Meters Down. Scientists Finally Figure Out What It Was The "golden orb" that stumped NOAA's deep-sea team in 2023 is the discarded base of a giant deep-sea anemone , according to a preprint posted to bioRxiv on April 21 and a NOAA release the next day.
The orb turned up on Aug. 30, 2023, on Dive 7 of the Seascape Alaska 5 expedition , when the remotely operated vehicle Deep Discoverer, working from NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer, came across a gold, mound-shaped object with a hole in it, attached to a rock in the Gulf of Alaska at about 3,250 meters.
A videographer first called it a "yellow hat," NOAA Ocean Exploration said at the time, and the team's guesses ran from a dead sponge to a coral to an egg casing. There will be no ROV dive today as #Okeanos is in transit, but we plan to be back in the water this weekend.