Peter Auster won't forget Erin. Born at the close of August 2001 in warm seas south of the Cape Verdes, Erin needed three days to achieve official tropical storm status.

By Sunday, Sept. 9 the storm had finally become a hurricane, brandishing 120 mph winds and heading toward a ship Auster was on southeast of Georges Bank. Erin was all but forgotten two days later, on Sept. 11.

As terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that morning, Auster, the science director at UConn's National Undersea Research Center (NURC) and an assistant professor of marine sciences, was aboard the 274-foot research vessel Atlantis. He was with a team of scientists, educators, artists, and journalists who had put to sea two days earlier on the inaugural cruise of a National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) exploration program with an optimist's list of things he hoped to encounter. Not on that list: an unpredictable hurricane flailing them with fierce winds as they pounded through 25-foot seas.

Experienced sailors know the one thing you can always expect from the ocean is the unexpected. And experience is something Auster has in abundance.

A scientist by training and an explorer by nature, he says his first career choice was to be a Viking. "Marine biologist," he concedes, "is the next best thing." He was inspired by the first U.S. astronauts and compares ocean exploration to space exploration, with significant advantages: "The oceans are nearby. Life is everywhere down there. And you can explore much more often."

And the difference between exploration and research? Research begins with questions that are tested through hypotheses, observations, and experiments. Exploration is what you do to provoke the questions.

Auster has been on exploration and research cruises everywhere - Bering Sea, Coral Sea, Florida Keys, South China Sea, Gulf of Alaska, Caribbean Sea, tropical Pacific, and deep lakes in Russia, Kenya and Malawi. However, most of his work is right out his back door in the cold and turbid North Atlantic, where, despite being one of the most well- studied places on the planet, much remains to be discovered. He has been scientist or chief scientist on nearly 40 major research cruises and conducted more than 1,700 dives.

In 1999, the Pew Charitable Trust honored him with a Marine Conservation Fellowship and a $150,000 research award. And in 2000, NOAA named him an Environmental Hero of the Year for his research in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, offshore from Boston. He proudly displays his letter of congratulations from then Vice President Al Gore in his office.

Auster's research is focused on understanding how differences in underwater landscapes affect populations and communities of fishes. He goes about this work as wildlife biologists do on land, by looking at individual animals interacting with their surrounding environments. Unlike wildlife biologists, who can venture out with just binoculars and notebook in hand, Auster needs to surround himself with technology, as simple as scuba gear or as complex as research submarines, just to get to work.

Before Hurricane Erin cut short the voyage, Auster and his colleagues intended to explore the precipitous undersea canyons along the edge of the continental shelf and the immense undersea mountains "known as seamounts" that rise nearby from the 16,000-foot-deep Sohm Abyssal Plain. Auster planned to determine just who all of the players are in undersea life and how they divide up resources in the underwater landscape, just as birds and mammals do on land. One major goal was to see how fishes use deep-sea corals as habitat.The corals themselves are slow growing and can live hundreds to more than 1,000 years of age. They are the redwoods of the ocean.

Last summer, Auster finally got to go mountain climbing, except from the top down. Together with a team of scientists, he set sail again on Atlantis to explore three of them - Bear, Manning, and Kelvin - ocean monuments that rise to relatively shallow depths and feature virtually untouched coral habitats. Once on site, the scientists relied upon one of ocean exploration's most sophisticated tools, the 23-foot manned submersible Alvin, famous for its role in the discovery of the Titanic in 1985.

The seamounts are part of a 682-mile chain that curves in a southeastern direction from the Georges Bank. Getting to them requires a day and a half of travel from Woods Hole, Mass. A few of these seamounts had been visited before, back in the 1970s. The team then was made up of geologists, and they were not really interested in life in the deep sea. While some sampling from surface ships has also been done at a few places, there has been no real biological exploration of the whole mountain chain until recently. Kelvin Seamount had never been explored before using any technology.

Most maps of the seamounts were made using old technologies and lack much detail; a major expedition objective was the creation of new maps using state-of-the-art multiple-beam sonar mapping pioneered in the last decade. Under the leadership of Ivar Babb, director of the NURC, who accompanied Auster on the expedition, new maps were produced each night before a dive. Late night meetings with the team were held after the new maps were printed to select a dive site and plan a route for the dive the next morning, and each dive was better planned as the team learned more about where fishes and corals were located.

Alvin, an innerspace shuttle, can accommodate just two passengers besides the pilot. Preparation for each day's dive commences before dawn. All of the sub's systems, both for science and to keep the human cargo alive, must be thoroughly checked. It is 8 a.m. by the time Alvin finally rolls out of its bay on Atlantis and the submariners wriggle into the cramped compartment; another 20 minutes pass before they're in the water and diving.

Alvin's mechanical manipulator about to collect a small piece of coral. [All photos courtesy NURC/NOAA/WHOI]

They descend quickly, from aquamarine light through dusk into midnight. A spectral light flickers in the gloom. Then another. Suddenly Alvin is surrounded by a surreal population of eerie, glowing sea creatures. Auster compares the phenomenon with the famed Northern Lights "astonishingly beautiful and outside the experience of terrestrial mammals."

When Alvin finally reaches the underwater mountain, Bear, more than 4,265 feet deep, Auster discovers a world that has thrived for eons despite constant darkness, bitter cold and crushing pressure. Since the mountain has endured practically no human disturbance, the landscape and the community of fishes that live there are more natural and wild than he has encountered virtually anywhere else. "Seeing them in such an unimpacted environment helps us understand the landscape attributes that are important for their survival," he says.

An Alvin day is brief and non-negotiable; when the power in the batteries is depleted to a certain level it is time to go home. As the pilot deftly jockeys the sub around the seamount, Auster works efficiently. He catalogues more than 25 species, filming them and recording important observations about their dispersal throughout the habitat. Samples of corals and other invertebrates are also collected for the other scientists aboard.

All too soon the dive is over and Alvin surfaces. The weary submariners first stretch out the cramps that inevitably set in when you cannot move more than a few inches for six hours. Then they entertain the realization that incredible fortune has graced them with this experience. Then it is time to go to work reviewing video and still images and processing and cataloging samples.

Integrating the maps and the data that are ultimately produced from the Alvin dives, using modern geographic information systems, will allow the team to plot where corals, fishes, and other species occurred on the seamounts.

Understanding what it means? That comes later.

So, what is the meaning of such an adventure? Well, you can look at it a lot of ways.

You can say that UConn scientists helped lead a group of intrepid adventurers who put to sea and explored some of the last places on our planet where no one has gone before. You can call that a gift to the human spirit.

You can say that the maps, video and samples add to our collective knowledge of the geography and biological diversity of our world. In fact, at least one new species of coral was discovered on this expedition.

You can say that reports of the expedition written by journalists from Newsday and the influential research magazine Science, who accompanied the expedition, have boosted public awareness of places in the deep sea that are fragile and in need of national and international management to conserve their incredible diversity.

You can also say that the two teachers from New England high schools, who also sailed with the expedition, will return to their classrooms and convey the excitement of scientific exploration to their students, who one day could become researchers and explorers, inspired by their teachers' tales of undersea adventures with Auster and his team.

Peter Auster is reticent to assign a single value to the expedition. Auster, the scientist and his students will be poring over the tapes and still images to begin to paint a picture of how fishes use the diversity of habitats found on seamounts. This is the science side of the story. Scholarly papers will be published and talks given at scientific meetings.

An expedition to the seamounts already planned for next year will yield even more discoveries.

Still, those of us who will never gaze upon the peaks of drowned mountains, need to know: What does such an experience mean?

"We live in a remarkable time," says Auster the Researcher. "Our species can travel to the greatest depths of the oceans, but all of the knowledge we gain means nothing if we can't use it to conserve the diversity of life on our planet. The experience of seeing these remarkable places gives me the need to step beyond the pure science to educate the public and decision-makers of the value of protecting some of these submarine canyons and seamounts from humans, as we do in national parks and wildlife refuges. The science is the foundation, but getting people to develop an ethical approach to ocean conservation requires more than data. We need to translate the other- worldliness of these landscapes and the animals that live there and then make people understand how exploitation of such places can be devastating."

Auster the Explorer hesitates and looks out the window of his office on UConn's Avery Point campus smiling wistfully as he gazes at white caps dancing on Long Island Sound.

"And there are so many places left to be explored," he says.