Look out below: Get a peek at life mile deep off Outer Banks

The continental shelf off North Carolina is narrow, and water about a mile deep is only about 20 miles off the beach at Cape Hatteras. NOAA officials said the Hatteras slope has never been explored before, and Megan McCuller, a marine biologist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, hasn't been able to take her eyes off the video from the expedition.

"There's so many new species to be discovered. We saw this, like, pitch black sponge on one of the dives, and all the shore scientists had no idea," McCuller said Friday.

Scientists, students and the public were able to watch video from some of dives online in real time and ask the researchers questions via email about what they were seeing. The Museum of Natural Sciences set up a live video feed for one dive.

"This is our first time seeing things," McCuller said, "so it’s like we’re all experiencing it together and exploring the ocean together."

The Okeanos Explorer and the Deep Discoverer are showing off an alien world where shoals of squid move like lightning under the weight of a mile of water, brittle starfish swim by like creatures in a dream and corals bloom like flowers in total darkness.

Most of the creatures that thrive in the deep ocean wouldn't survive at surface pressure, like a hagfish.

"They look gross and they're super slimy, but they do a very important service of eating things that fall to the bottom, like whale carcasses," McCuller said.

Others are deep-water relatives of more familiar species, such as cancer and spider crabs, lophelia coral and anemones. They live in total darkness, so many make their own light.

The deep-sea world might seem remote, but it's critically important, McCuller said, because it anchors the food chain that surface fish and coral rely on. It's also very delicate – some deep-water corals take hundreds of years to grow.

McCuller said expeditions like those conducted by the Okeanos Explorer and Deep Discoverer are the best way to help people understand that.

"Getting more education about what's out there is most of the battle to caring about what's, like, right in your backyard," she said.