Pescadero Basin is my idea of paradise - for a wide variety of reasons, but the mud and the sediment transport are a big big part of that. It would definitely not be possible to understand the ecosystem that we're exploring here without understanding the mud. My name is John Magyar, I'm a research scientist in geobiology at CalTech, and I absolutely love mud. Mud - mud's just amazing at the sea floor. You have two kinds of mud, you have mud that has come down through the entire water column - organic material, marine snow - and then you also have the rock grains ground up over time; and so the interactions between the organic material from throughout the ocean and the inorganic material from the earth mediated by microbiology. It's just absolutely fantastic - plus the smells and the feels the textures - mud's just great. On these dives in the Pescadero Basin, we have to find a place where we can collect the mud. So we look around, we find an area that looks both horrible and also scientifically interesting. There are absolutely frustrating moments in in mud collection. Oh look at it - try harder Jared get out wow what are you doing? So when we get a good mud sample it's it's a good day. I think what surprises me the most is the varieties of mud that you can have in such a small spatial area - physically and chemically so so different. A lot of that you can't really distinguish until you get the samples up to the ship, and so I continue to be amazed by what we're able to bring up. It's really a really a spectacular environment for studying what goes on in the mud. There's plenty of glory and mud mud is just glorious!