Chris Barnes on Building NEPTUNE

This June, Dr. Chris Barnes retired as founding director of NEPTUNE Canada, the world’s largest and most advanced cabled ocean observatory network. It and the VENUS coastal network make up the ONC Observatory, which is managed for the University of Victoria by Ocean Networks Canada.

NEPTUNE Canada and VENUS pioneer a new generation of ocean observation systems that, using power and the Internet, provide continuous, long-term monitoring of ocean processes and events, as they happen, leading a new era of wiring the oceans.

The entire NEPTUNE Canada network—which features an 800-km loop of powered fibre-optic cable off the BC coast, power and communication nodes at five key scientific sites on the seafloor, and hundreds of sensors—has taken almost 10 years to plan, build and install. Much of the infrastructure and some of the instrumentation is breakthrough technology being used for the first time, anywhere.

NEPTUNE Canada is now a $150-million facility for studies on ocean change, plate tectonics, geochemistry of the ocean crust, gas hydrates, deep-sea ecosystems, natural hazards and ocean engineering.

The development of NEPTUNE Canada has been funded by the Government of Canada through CFI, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and CANARIE, and the Government of British Columbia through the BC Knowledge Development Fund.

In August, Barnes shared with The Ring his thoughts on being at the helm of this world-leading project.

What three qualities are essential to build something as complex as NEPTUNE Canada?

Vision—as we pushed the scientific community to arrive at a consensus on where it wanted to go with this concept. Determination—because many of us had no idea where the funding would come from. And patience—to keep going when there was no evidence that it would succeed.

What other big science can you equate NEPTUNE Canada to?

NASA putting the rover robots on Mars is analogous. I can see the parallels in having the vision and courage to persevere, getting the funding, capturing the public’s imagination, and then achieving the technologies to pull it off.

Did you at any point wonder what you had got yourself into?

Not really. We knew it was high-risk and that failure was very real—not because we didn’t believe in the vision, but because there were so many impediments to overcome.

What was the biggest challenge?

Three big ones: marshalling the scientific community to determine what is achievab#8804; making sure we had sensible funding proposals and a team of exceptional people behind us; and working with partners to design and install new technologies and develop the database. All within a tight timeline. It’s not a matter of steps where you go from point A to B to C. You have to do all these things concurrently and have people working at many different levels.

What was your biggest thrill?

The big event at the Esquimalt Graving Dock [in July 2009] when we showed off the nodes and some of the equipment just before they went out to sea. Everything had finally come together. And it was an opportunity to thank many of the people who had shared the vision or had been part of it.

Any surprises?

A trivial one that stands out is when we found a rice cooker and a screwdriver side by side on the seafloor at 1,300 metres. When the ROV opened the lid on the rice cooker there was an octopus inside. Her eggs were stuck to the lid. It was a remarkable surprise because it was so totally unexpected.

How much interest is there in the international marine technology community over what has been achieved here?

A lot. I’ve been to conferences in China, Japan, Taiwan, Australia and places in Europe over the last five years or so, often by invitation and often at their expense because they want to know about this. Many other countries are at the dreaming stage or in the planning stage and will use us as a standard. Our job is to maintain that world leadership by continuing to evolve and to attract scientists to use our facility.

Is the level of interest from the scientific community where you would like it to be right now?

We already have more than 9,000 users and 1,500 of these are scientists who are downloading data regularly. That’s not bad considering we’ve only been operating for close to two years. There’s always a capacity to bring on more scientists and add more instruments so that new scientific questions can be asked.

Where do you expect usage to be in five to 10 years?

The potential for significant growth is in the international field. As other observatories come online around the world—as they certainly will in five to 10 years—those countries will engage a lot more scientists and there will be comparisons between our data and their data, and so on.

Will there be a world network of ocean observatories?

Yes, this is why we use the word “transformative.” Not only are we bringing power and the Internet into the ocean environment, we’re enabling multidisciplinary teams of scientists around the world to work together and understand how ocean processes interact. As a patchwork quilt of ocean observatories springs up around the world, there’ll be a level of information, interpretation and discovery in the oceans that we’ve never seen before.

When can we expect to see research results from NEPTUNE Canada?

To better understand earth-ocean processes, we need sustained observations over a period of many years. Some processes are short-term, like the Japanese earthquake and tsunami earlier this year. But many are long-term—things like global warming and ocean acidification. These are going to have enormous impact on humankind in the coming decades. We need a good knowledge base to make decisions. That’s what NEPTUNE Canada can provide—for government decision-makers, educators, the public, everyone.

What do you think NEPTUNE Canada will look like in 10 years?

If we continue to build the user base and attract leading scientists, we can expand. The system is designed for up to 10 nodes. Our original concept was to add extensions to the Pacific and Explorer tectonic plates and to go north to the Nootka Peninsula to help us understand how the three tectonic plates interact. I see us using more mobile instruments, such as gliders that can go really deep and carry bigger payloads. And the next step is an autonomous underwater vehicle that can dock with the nodes so it doesn’t have to come back up to the surface each time. That’s key to NEPTUNE Canada’s success—to continually evolve and lead the way.

What is Chris Barnes going to do next?

He’s going to get up a little later in the morning and maybe go to bed a little earlier. [Laughs].