NEPTUNE Canada opens window to underwater world

The NEPTUNE Canada ocean observatory and the University of Victoria had two big reasons to celebrate on Dec. 8.

That’s the day that NEPTUNE Canada—the world’s largest and most advanced cabled ocean observatory—officially turned on the gush of data from hundreds of scientific instruments and sensors installed on the seafloor of the Pacific Ocean.

The launch event also included a public announcement that NEPTUNE Canada and its sister ocean observatory, VENUS, are receiving $24 million in operating funds over the next two years from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI).

“This is wonderful news that reinforces the world-leading stature of these two observatories,” said NEPTUNE Canada project director Dr. Chris Barnes of the new funding. “We are hopeful that the federal government will soon establish a formal program to provide ongoing support to the operations of all of Canada’s major science initiatives.”

Led by the University of Victoria, NEPTUNE Canada pioneers a new generation of ocean observation systems that use innovative engineering and the Internet to provide continuous, long-term monitoring of ocean processes and events as they happen.

Land-based researchers across Canada and around the world can use NEPTUNE Canada to conduct offshore and deep-sea experiments and receive real-time data without leaving their laboratories and offices.

Every year for the next 25 years, NEPTUNE Canada will amass more than 60 terabytes of scientific data—equivalent to the text in about 60 million books—on biological, physical, chemical and geological processes in the Pacific Ocean.

“We’re seeing history in the making,” said Iain Black, BC Minister of Small Business, Technology and Economic Development, minutes before he officially launched NEPTUNE Canada’s data flow at the Dec. 8 celebration. “One small click of a mouse—one giant leap toward ocean discoveries that will benefit the entire world.”

The backbone of NEPTUNE Canada is an 800-km loop of powered fibre-optic cable installed on the seafloor off the west coast of Vancouver Island. Connected to the cable loop are nodes—each the size of three minivans parked side-by-side—that provide power and two-way communications to hundreds of instruments and sensors.

Observations from NEPTUNE Canada will have policy applications in the areas of climate change, hazard mitigation (earthquakes and tsunamis), ocean pollution, port security and shipping, resource development, sovereignty and security, and ocean management.

“This observatory is coming online at a very critical moment in the history of our planet,” says Dr. Kim Juniper, a UVic marine ecologist and the BC Leadership Chair in Ocean Ecosystems and Global Change. “The deep ocean is just starting to feel the effects of global-scale industrial activity in a big way.”

Juniper is using NEPTUNE Canada instruments to study how deep-sea ecosystems react to disturbance and long-term environmental change. “With this new knowledge we’ll be in a better position to predict and manage the impact of an increasing human presence in the oceans,” he says.

Marine geophysicist Dr. Ele Willoughby at the University of Toronto is using NEPTUNE Canada to study gas hydrate deposits in Barkley Sound. These peculiar, ice-like deposits are a potential cleaner-burning fuel source. They’re also storehouses of powerful greenhouse gases.

“What NEPTUNE Canada allows us to do for the first time,” says Willoughby, “is to monitor a large hydrate deposit for years at a time so that we can see very small changes.” 
She can also associate those changes with other phenomena, such as earthquake tremors, which are being measured by NEPTUNE Canada’s network of seismic sensors.

“This network allows us to do the same kind of studies we’re doing on land, but extends them to the deep ocean,” says Dr. Garry Rogers, a research scientist with Natural Resources Canada. “The area where NEPTUNE Canada is deployed is one of the most active underwater earthquake areas in the world.”

NEPTUNE Canada also features a tsunami array. The instruments in this array can detect sea level changes of 1 mm—the thickness of a sheet of paper—at one-second intervals in thousands of metres of water. The array proved itself for the first time in the hours following the Sept. 29 earthquake off Samoa.

“About 11 hours after the quake the first waves were recorded by the NEPTUNE Canada array,” says Dr. Rick Thomson of the Institute of Ocean Sciences. “The first three waves generated are the most pristine records of a tsunami I have seen in my career.”

The development phase of NEPTUNE Canada was funded by more than $100 million from the Government of Canada through CFI, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and CANARIE, and the Government of British Columbia through the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund.

Visit NEPTUNE Canada at neptunecanada.ca