(USA) NYTimes - High Tech Ocean Study

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/science/04ocea.html?th= & emc=th & pagewanted=prin\

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September 4, 2007

 

‘Bringing the Ocean to the World,’ in High-Def

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

SEATTLE — Thousands of miles of fiber-optic cables are strung across the world’s

oceans, connecting continents like so many tin cans in this age of critical

global communication. So the fact that about 800 more miles of fiber-optic cable

will soon thread the sea floor off the coast of the Pacific Northwest might not

seem particularly revolutionary. Until you meet John R. Delaney, part

oceanographer, part oracle.

 

“This is a mission to Planet Ocean,” said Mr. Delaney, a professor at the

University of Washington. “This is a NASA-scale mission to basically enter the

Inner Space, and to be there perpetually. What we’re doing is bringing the ocean

to the world.”

 

Under a $331 million program long dreamed of by oceanographers and being

financed by the National Science Foundation, Professor Delaney and a team of

scientists from several other institutions are leading the new Ocean

Observatories Initiative, a multifaceted effort to study the ocean — in the

ocean — through a combination of Internet-linked cables, buoys atop submerged

data collection devices, robots and high-definition cameras. The first equipment

is expected to be in place by 2009.

 

A central goal, say those involved, is to better understand how oceans affect

life on land, including their role in storing carbon and in climate change; the

causes of tsunamis; the future of fish populations; and the effect of ocean

temperature on growing seasons. Oceanographers also hope to engage other

scientists and the public more deeply with ocean issues by making them more

immediate. Instead of spending weeks or months on a boat gathering data, then

returning to labs to make sense of it, oceanographers say they expect to be able

to order up specific requests from their desktops and download the results.

 

Researchers will be able, for example, to assemble a year’s worth of daily data

on deep ocean temperatures in the Atlantic or track changes in currents as a

hurricane nears the Gulf of Mexico. And schoolchildren accustomed to dated

graphics and grainy shark videos will only have to boot up to dive deep in high

definition. “It’ll all go on the Internet and in as real time as possible,” said

Alexandra Isern, the program director for ocean technology at the National

Science Foundation. “This is really going to transform not only the way

scientists do science but also the way the public can be involved.”

 

The program has three main parts, two of which involve placing a range of

sensors in the oceans and one that connects through the Internet all the

information gathered, so that the public and scientists can have access to it.

 

A “coastal/global” program will include stand-alone deep-water data-gathering

stations far offshore, mostly in the higher latitudes of the Atlantic and

Pacific, where cold, rough conditions have made ship-based oceanography

difficult.

 

In American waters, observation systems are planned on both coasts. In the

Pacific, off the Oregon coast, the system will study the upwelling of cold water

that has led to repeated “dead zones” of marine life in recent summers. In the

East, off Martha’s Vineyard, a coastal observation system is planned along the

continental shelf, gathering information at the surface, subsurface and on the

sea floor, where warm Gulf Stream currents confront colder water from off the

coast of Canada.

 

“That mixing affects surface productivity, weather, carbon cycling,” said Robert

S. Detrick, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

 

In August, the Joint Oceanographic Institutions, which is administering the

Ocean Observatories Initiative for the National Science Foundation, chose Woods

Hole to lead the offshore buoy and coastal program. Woods Hole, which will

receive about $98 million of the total cost, will partner with the Scripps

Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and

Oregon State University’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences.

 

In the Northwest, about $130 million of the initiative’s cost is being dedicated

to build a regional observatory, a series of underwater cables that will

crisscross the tectonic plate named for the explorer Juan de Fuca. Rather than

provide an information superhighway that bypasses the ocean, this new network is

being put in place to take its pulse. Professor Delaney, whose specialty is

underwater volcanoes that form at the seams between tectonic plates and the

surprising life those seams support, is among those who have been pursuing the

cable network for more than a decade, overcoming hurdles of money, technology

and skepticism.

 

Some scientists have suggested that the Juan de Fuca is an imperfect laboratory,

that it is small and lacks some features, like the most intense El Niño

fluctuations, that might reveal more about how that phenomenon affects

conditions at sea and on land. But Professor Delaney says the Juan de Fuca plate

is well-suited for the program precisely because it is self-contained, just

offshore and rich with seafloor activity, complicated current patterns and

abundant fish and marine mammals. The new network shares many similarities with

a plan called Neptune that Professor Delaney and others began pushing for in the

1990s. As part of an earlier effort related to that project, Canada is moving

forward with its own cabled network off the coast of British Columbia.

 

“For the first three or four years, people just laughed when I said we’re going

to turn Juan de Fuca Plate into a national laboratory,” Professor Delaney said.

“Now they’re not laughing.”

 

Many oceanographers say the program will transform their field. Oscar Schofield,

a biological oceanographer at Rutgers University, has spent nearly a decade

helping piece together a small-scale coastal observatory in the Atlantic using a

combination of radar, remote-controlled underwater gliders and a 15-kilometer

underwater cable. The program, called the Coastal Ocean Observation Lab, which

he runs with Scott Glenn, also a professor at Rutgers, has a Web site where

outsiders can track currents, water temperatures and salinity levels in parts of

the Atlantic. They can also follow measuring instruments guided remotely from

the New Jersey coast to south of the Chesapeake Bay.

 

Professor Schofield said that the data gathered already had upended some of what

he was taught in graduate school, from the way rivers flow into the ocean to the

complexity of surface currents.

 

“When there’s a hurricane, when all the ships are running for cover, I’m flying

my gliders into the hurricane,” using his office computer, Professor Schofield

said. “Then I’m sitting at home drinking a beer watching the ocean respond to a

hurricane.”

 

He added: “What’s great about oceanography is we’re still in the phase of just

basic exploration. We’ve discovered things off one of the most populated coasts

in the United States that we didn’t know yet. O.O.I. will take us one level

beyond that, to where any scientist in the world will be able to explore any

ocean.”

 

Several scientists involved in the project cited improved technology — from

increased bandwidth to the ability to provide constant power to instruments at

sea by underwater cables or solar or wind power — as critical to making the new

program possible. They also say that increased concern about global warming,

storms and fisheries has brought new attention to their field.

 

Some experts say they wish the project included more money for, say, placing

buoys in the Indian Ocean, where monsoons and other events make for rich ocean

activity. But John A. Orcutt, a professor at Scripps who is directing the effort

to link the new research to the Internet, said being able to provide constant

new data to scientists around the world, or even to teenagers surfing YouTube,

will help build support for expanding the project in the future.

 

“We want to get the oceans and the sea floor in front of the public now,”

Professor Orcutt said, “so they can understand the need for more.”