By gCaptain contributing writer, Captain Patrick Donovan, R/V Thomas G. Thompson, University of Washington
As mariners we encounter them all the time… a yellow buoy, a white ship, the daily routine of transmitting weather observations. They are references to scientific research taking place in our world, a world habitually focused on trade, commerce, profit, and loss. Sometimes unnoticed, the commercialized aspect of life on the sea comes in contact with the academic pursuit of knowledge.
Often these references arrive in the form of a Notice to Mariners. An update to a chart, a submerged mooring, plotted somewhere along our track line. A concern? Maybe. But then you see the depth, 2600 meters. Your deeply laden vessel only draws 12m. No problem.
But what is this mooring, and why would someone put it there? What is so interesting at that depth that someone would travel out into the middle of nowhere, a place that in normal seagoing life is often part of a route but never a destination, and install a subsea mooring in 2600 meters of water?
The answer is almost infinite. Ocean waves, swell, temperature, sea life, chemical makeup of the water column, salinity, gravity, motion, oxygen, nitrates, sediment, etc. You name it, and there is an instrument for it, or at least one in development. The ocean environment is still so vastly unknown, there are new and unexplainable things happening on a daily basis. We know more about the moon than we know about our own ocean, and in turn have a shared responsibility to find out more.
Though it can be one of the most tranquil, docile, and beautiful environments, the ocean can in a matter of minutes turn into one of the harshest, most unforgiving places on earth. Our ability to understand and predict weather patterns on the surface has led to increased safety for mariners by 100 fold, but understanding the weather is only part of the problem. We don’t have, and never will have the ability to control it. And thus lies the greatest challenge in attempting to study a particular region. Access.
The only available access to the ocean is by ship, and the types of vessels needed are few and far between. Oceanographic research vessels must be seagoing vessels capable of handling large parties of scientific personnel, and hosting a variety of equipment, including remotely operated vehicles (ROV’s) and manned submersibles. They are expensive to operate, and offer little profit for commercial operators.
Scientists spend years writing grants, fighting for ship time, mobilizing a small army’s worth of equipment to remote outcroppings of ports to meet an available ship, transit out to the site of interest, only to be thwarted by impersonal and unbiased nasty weather.
A group of researchers from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, have found a solution to this issue by building a remote underwater ocean observatory.
Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) consists of two-subsea cable networks- called Venus (inshore) and Neptune (offshore). Located off the coast of Vancouver Island, these networks entail groups of instruments linked together by fiber optic cables. The network uses the power of the Internet to bring real time observations from underwater instruments right into the offices and classrooms of researchers around the world, regardless of the weather.
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