Warrenton will play key role in state-of-the-art research
June 20, 2008
By Cassandra Profita
Leaders
of a revolutionary project in oceanography have spent the past year
drafting designs for an ocean observatory off the Pacific Northwest
coast.
Now, the team of experts at the University of Washington
has preliminary approval to build their elaborate underwater research
lab, part of which will use power and bandwidth from Warrenton to study
the Cascadia Subduction Zone.
Program Director John Delaney, an
oceanography professor at UW, toured the Oregon Coast this week with
assistant director Michael Kelly and project manager Pete Barletto to
discuss their vision with community members.
The project would
install powerful fiberoptic cables on the seafloor, allowing scientists
to deploy robots, cameras and sensors to study underwater biology,
chemistry and geology in greater detail than before.
Better yet,
with 10,000 times the bandwidth of a home Internet connection, the
cables would deliver volumes of data - including video of seafloor
happenings - to anyone on the Internet worldwide.
"You can do
oceanography in Kansas," said Delaney. "It doesn't matter anymore where
you live. You can interact with the ocean from 3,000 miles away."
Cable to land in Warrenton
If
all goes according to plan, Warrenton will be the landing site for a
fiberoptic cable serving the part of the lab that examines earthquake
and tsunami hazards in the Cascadia Subduction Zone.
Four other
branches of the lab - with hubs stationed near natural gas reservoirs,
earthquake fault lines, an undersea volcano and the middle of the Juan
de Fuca tectonic plate - would stem from a cable landing site in
Pacific City.
With remote-controlled robots roaming the seafloor
and water column, the lab would cover the central and southern portion
of the Juan de Fuca plate. A complementary project in Canada will
examine the northern portion.
Later, as part of a larger vision, the Pacific Northwest observatory will link up with similar labs in oceans around the world.
The
assistant program director, Kelly, and the project manager, Barletto,
have labored to pinpoint the right locations for the observatory's
SUV-sized "nodes," which will serve as the power stations for
monitoring devices.
It's a balancing act between the logistics of laying fiberoptic cable and the interests of science, said Kelly.
"The
best science is at the most geologically unstable parts of the
seafloor, which is also the part of the ocean where you don't want to
put your cable," he said.
The site selections are designed to
cover a broad range of seafloor landscapes to help scientists worldwide
better understand the Earth's oceans.
Research instruments
connected to the nodes would deliver a constant stream of measurements
of underwater phenomena such as ocean currents, tectonic plate
dynamics, volcanic seafloor creation and releases of 700-degree water
from spouting spires and chimneys.
Scientists of all walks can compete to add their instruments to the lab and conduct underwater research of their choice.
Delaney
said he hopes to have the $170 million needed to start construction in
2010 so the observatory can be fully operational by 2015.
The
project was delayed this year by a change in federal budget policy.
Delaney had expected to receive final approval on the project designs
earlier this year, but the rules changed to require yet another round
of reviews.
Delaney is part of a larger consortium of
oceanographers in the Joint Oceanographic Institutions who are working
together to secure $331 million in National Science Foundation funds
for a broader network of observatories that would reach across the
globe. Final approval for that funding is now scheduled for spring 2009.
While
the delay could increase costs and give similar projects in other
countries a competitive advantage, Delaney said the additional scrutiny
is understandable.
"We're asking the federal government to give
us a quarter of a billion dollars to do something no one's ever done
before," he said.
Delaney has been plotting the observatory for 15 years.
With
its round-the-clock monitoring, he said, the innovative lab will give
scientists new eyes to study the world that lies nearly two miles under
water. They can correlate seismic and biological events in ways that
weren't possible before, creating entirely new fields of study.
The
results could be earlier warnings of earthquakes, tsunamis and storms,
new medicines derived from marine microbes, better understanding of the
ocean's role in global climate change and better fish stock management.
Even some of the possibilities are unknown because so much about the ocean remains a mystery.
"We've
had more robotic manipulations on the surface of Mars than in our own
ocean," he said. "The ocean is the most powerful engine on the planet
for determining conditions on the continents. ... It's so fascinating
but so poorly studied."
