Cabled Ocean Observatories: the NEPTUNE Experience

Date/Time:

15 Mar 2012
14:30-14:55

Location:

South Galleries

Seminar Details
NEPTUNE (North-East Pacific Time-Series Underwater Networked Experiments), supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council, and the Government of British Columbia, completed installation of its 800 km long subsea cable, infrastructure, and over 130 instruments in 2009. Located in the northeastern Pacific, freely accessible data began to flow over the Internet in December of that year, launching the first regional cabled ocean observatory. Implementation of the NEPTUNE concept, which was originally conceived by scientists at the University of Washington, will continue to expand with U.S. construction of its Regional Scale Nodes (RSN) south of NEPTUNE Canada as part of the National Science Foundationâ??s Ocean Observatory Initiative (OOI). The strength of the NEPTUNE concept is based on abundant power and high bandwidth 24/7 communications, which transforms the way ocean environments are studied. This approach will enable discrimination between short and long-term events, real-time interactive experiments, high bandwidth data including optical and image data, and the ability for multidisciplinary teams to work together from disparate locations, and continue to interrogate the growing database over the next 25 plus years. The NEPTUNE Canada infrastructure supports a wide range of scientific areas including: plate tectonic processes and earthquake dynamics; dynamic processes of seabed fluid fluxes and gas hydrates; regional ocean/climate dynamics and effects on marine biota; deep-sea ecosystem dynamics; and engineering and computational research. Results will contribute to our understanding of climate change, ocean acidification, the impacts of natural hazards, and the potential for renewable natural resource development. Cabled ocean observatories are just beginning to transform the ways in which we understand our ocean sciences. Coupled with mobile assets, cabled observatories will expand their reach to address both basic and applied research needs.