Since its inception in 2001 in response to the report of the President’s Panel on Ocean Exploration (McNutt et al., 2000), the Ocean Exploration Program of NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research (OER) has made exciting discoveries across all fields of oceanography. Some of the most spectacular discoveries have been related to seamounts, specifically the “North Atlantic Stepping Stones” expedition off the coast of New England (http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/05stepstones) and the “Ring of Fire” expedition in the Pacific Ocean (http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/06fire).

Hammond, S., J. McDonough, and C. Russell. 2010. Box 5: The NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer—New ways for exploring the ocean. Oceanography 23(1):88–89, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2010.89.

Gardner, J., M. Malik, and S. Walker. 2009. Plume 1400 meters high discovered at the seafloor off the northern California margin. Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union 90(32):275.

McNutt, M., V. Alexander, J. Ausubel, R. Ballard, T. Chance, P. Douglas, S. Earle, J. Estes, D. Fornari, A. Gordon, and others. 2000. Discovering the Earth’s Final Frontier: A US Strategy For Ocean Exploration. US Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 77 pp. Available online at: http://explore.noaa.gov/media/http/pubs/pres_panel_rpt.pdf (accessed December 10, 2009).

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.