Wednesday February 4, 2026
ABC7 News —
Some researchers will go to almost any length to advance science. But for Luiz Rocha, it’s more like any depth. Rocha and a team from the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco recently returned from an expedition to deep coral reefs, located off Guam. At more than 330 feet, it’s a layer known as the Twilight Zone.
“So those depths are very hard to get to. We can do it by technical diving, which is the way we do it. But you can also do it with ROVs and with submarines. They’re much more expensive than the way we do it. But because it requires a lot of logistics, a lot of time, a lot of funding. The end result is that those that are really hard to study, very few people do it, and we don’t know much about it,” Rocha explains.