Backgrounder: Neptune Canada Wires Subsea Volcanic Region
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 66 instruments—hosting about 280 sensors—were successfully installed on the ocean floor. Delays in final node development prevented installation of instruments at the Endeavour Ridge site at that time.
Instrument depths range from 23 metres (Folger Pinnacle) to 2.7 kilometres (ODP 1027). When the first suite of instruments is fully installed, the entire observatory will support more than 600 sensors. Instruments range from simple temperature probes, seismometers and hydrophones, to complex multi-instrument systems and remotely operated vehicles equipped with cameras, probes and chemical analysis units.
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.
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.
In December 2009 NEPTUNE Canada went live, providing the world with real-time data, including video, streaming from the Pacific ocean via the Internet.
For more information on NEPTUNE Canada, visit www.neptunecanada.ca.