Backgrounder: NEPTUNE Canada Ocean Observatory Goes Live

• NEPTUNE Canada (North-East Pacific Time-series Undersea Experiments) is the world’s first regional-scale cabled ocean observatory. It has taken almost 10 years to plan, develop and install.
• Much of the infrastructure and some of the instrumentation developed for NEPTUNE Canada is breakthrough technology being used in the field for the first time.
• The backbone of NEPTUNE Canada is an 800-km loop of powered fibre-optic cable installed on the seabed from the coast and across the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate off British Columbia. This plate provides a natural laboratory for studies on ocean change, plate tectonics, geochemistry of the ocean crust, gas hydrates, deep-sea ecosystems and ocean engineering.
• In summer 2009, five power and communications nodes and 60 instruments—hosting about 280 sensors—were successfully installed on the ocean floor. Rough seas and delays in final node development prevented installation of instruments at volcanic Endeavour Ridge. They will be deployed in summer 2010.
• When fully instrumented, the observatory will support more than 600 sensors.
• Instrument depths range from 17 metres (Folger Passage) to 2.7 kilometres (ODP 1027). The most remote node site is at Endeavour Ridge, about 300 km from the BC coast.
• NEPTUNE Canada instruments range from simple temperature probes, to seismometers and hydrophones, to complex multi-instrument systems and remotely operated vehicles equipped with cameras, probes and chemical analysis units.
• The initial rate of NEPTUNE Canada real-time data flow is about 120 gigabytes a day. Once all instruments are operational, data flow will reach 175 gigabytes a day.
• The NEPTUNE Canada cable loop connects to land at its shore station in Port Alberni, BC. The station provides power to the cable network and manages two-way communications, observatory controls and data flow between the subsea cable network and NEPTUNE Canada’s headquarters at UVic, 200 km away.
• The network line between Port Alberni and UVic can transmit data at the rate of 10 gigabytes per second—the equivalent of a simultaneous broadcast of 500 HDTV channels. This provides NEPTUNE Canada with enough capacity to host many more instruments in the coming years.
• An advanced data management and archive system (DMAS) at UVic collects and archives all data gathered by NEPTUNE Canada’s instruments and sensors and makes the data and images available to scientists and the public via the Internet. DMAS allows scientists to remotely control their instruments and conduct interactive experiments.
• For more information on NEPTUNE Canada, including a list of funders and partners, visit www.neptunecanada.ca.