Reef J - M-60 Battle Tanks

Reef J — M-60 Battle Tanks at the J complex adds another chapter to Georgia's remarkable artificial reef story, where Cold War-era armored vehicles rest at advanced depth on the outer continental shelf alongside Liberty Ships, tugs, and ferry boats in one of the southeastern Atlantic's most diverse reef complexes. The M-60 tanks at Reef J occupy a deeper position than similar deployments at shallower reef sites, creating conditions where the tanks' marine communities reflect the ecology of Georgia's outer shelf rather than the more coastal conditions of lesser-depth reefs. The M-60's deployment at Reef J represents the coordinated planning that characterizes Georgia's artificial reef program at its most sophisticated. By deploying tank clusters at different depth ranges across multiple reef complexes, the program creates reef habitat across a depth gradient that supports different species assemblages, effectively expanding the ecological range of the state's artificial reef system beyond what single-depth deployments could achieve. The Reef J tanks occupy the deeper end of this gradient, where the species they support differ meaningfully from those at shallower deployments. Advanced depth conditions around the Reef J M-60 tanks bring a different character to the marine community than the well-lit conditions at shallower sites. The reduced light at depth favors the sponge and gorgonian communities that dominate over the photosynthetic organisms that characterize shallow-water reef surfaces. These slow-growing, mature communities accumulate over extended periods, and their presence on the Reef J tanks indicates the years of development that have occurred since the deployment. The tanks have become genuinely complex reef structures, their surfaces layered with multiple generations of biological growth. Fish encounters at the Reef J tanks reflect the outer shelf ecology of Georgia's offshore waters. Larger grouper and snapper species that favor deeper structure are regularly encountered, and the pelagic visitors that use the reef complex as a waypoint tend toward the larger species more typical of open ocean environments than coastal reefs. These encounters justify the advanced preparation required to dive at this depth. Reef J's M-60 tanks complete the complex's remarkable inventory of reef structures, contributing their distinctive military character to a site that encompasses the full range of vessel types and construction forms that Georgia's reef program has deployed.