Some of the most beautiful landscapes on earth are seascapes. Multi-colored coral reefs, seamounts, rocky bottoms, azure lagoons and mangrove swamps, great cliffs rising from the sea on iron-bound coasts, all are part of the variegated seascapes ranging from our coasts to the deep sea. This includes the mid-ocean ridge system, earth’s largest mountain range, the great fracture zones, the thousands of seamounts and abyssal hills, the great trenches that could submerge Mount Everest with room to spare. However, that’s only the big stuff. look at the the sand dunes and ripple patterns of our sandy beaches, rocky edges of our New England and western coasts, the salt topography of the Gulf Coast continental slope, and the basin and range topography off Southern California and we discover that the some of the strangest, most varied, and most beautiful landscapes on earth actually lay under the sea.