[Coral-List] The Guardian: Largest known deep-sea coral reef mapped off U.S. Atlantic coast

[Brian Kennedy]

If you actually read the paper Sowers et. al. that triggered all the new
articles you will see that the authors do not claim to have discovered
these types of reefs instead they document the spatial extent that these
reefs likely occur and their density (which is truly amazing in scope and
size). The excellent work of Dr. Sowers and colleagues does not in any way
diminish the work of previous researchers; instead, it uses a new sonar
dataset to build upon that previous body of work at a spatial extent that
has never been possible before. As so often happens the media took the
headline and ran with it but we can't hold the authors of the study
responsible for the media publishing the most grandiose headline possible
and missing the nuance of the actual science.

Brian Kennedy