NeptuneCanada.ca
Title
NEPTUNE Canada
Description
Bringing the Pacific Ocean online
Stage I of the NEPTUNE project will lay an 800 km ring of powered fibre optic cable on the seabed over the northern part of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, a 200,000 sq km region in the northeast Pacific off the coasts of British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. This tectonic plate is the smallest of the dozen major plates that make up the planet’s surface and offers a full range of Earth and ocean processes for us to observe.
The NEPTUNE cable network will initially feature two seafloor “laboratories”, or nodes, one on the northern edge of Barkley Canyon, the other close to the active venting along the Endeavour Ridge. Additional funding is being sought for four additional nodes. From these nodes, land-based scientists will control and monitor sampling instruments, video cameras and remotely operated vehicles as they collect data from the ocean surface to under the seafloor. Instruments will be interactive—scientists will instruct them to respond to events such as storms, plankton blooms, fish migrations, earthquakes, tsunamis, and underwater volcanic eruptions, as they happen.
Information and images gathered by NEPTUNE instruments will flow instantly via the Internet to the shore station in Port Alberni, British Columbia, and from there to Victoria, British Columbia. In this way, NEPTUNE will bring this part of the Pacific Ocean online to laboratories, classrooms and living rooms around the world.
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