A Fiber-Optic Cable To Inner Space

tetraconz writes "The University of Washington has been working on a vast 3000km undersea network to research the ocean floor off the West Coast. From the executive summary: (PDF) "The goal of NEPTUNE is to establish a coherent system of high-speed, submarine communication-control links using fiber-optic cables to connect remote, interactive experimental sites with land-based research laboratories and classrooms." This is an important project to explore the last unknown region of the Earth: the ocean. Check out the project homepage."

Comments

Re:It's about time

[LarsWestergren]

This project is absolutely fantastic. We're finally beginning to systematically explore the ocean and the ocean floor. The implications here for technology, environmental studies, education, and research in all sorts of different arenas is staggering.

Agreed. It used to be said we knew more about outer space than the oceans, but finally this is starting to change. If you want to learn more, a good place to start is the amazing BBC documentary
Blue Planet. It contains some of the most beautiful images I have ever seen.

Re:Sensible?

[pphrdza]

I'm reminded of a technique developed in the 60's/70's for gathering cells from lungs, without surgery, to determine if there was cancer (live cells were "scraped" using a tiny brush). The patients didn't have to go through the expense and inherent dangers of surgery to get an accurate diagnosis. But the pathology labs had never actually seen live lung cancer cells before, and initially didn't recognize them as cancerous.

How much will be found in "real time" that will change how we think about and approach the subjects of oceans, and remote research? Maybe it is expensive, but maybe it's less expensive and less dangerous than the alternatives (like the analogy above).

Re:Sensible?

[Obfuscant]

However, it may also be that the cost of setting up this network might be better deployed focusing on the actual experiments themselves.

They have been focusing on the experiments for years. The new part of this project is NOT the measurements, it is the connectivity and being able to get large volumes of data back.

It costs a great deal of money to send out ships to tow side-scan sonars and temperature/salinity sensors. It costs a great deal of money to put out current sensors. This means that sampling is done very sparsely, if ever. And the instruments have to be designed to fit their data in limited space.

A wide-bandwidth real-time data stream allows not only more data to be collected, but for data sampling methods to be changed to observe transient phenomena. While we have some understanding of the long-term activities under the water, most of the fun (and change) comes from the transient stuff.

And I'll point out that while the web page comes from U-dub, there are an awful lot of academic and corporate institutions involved in Neptune, so saying that "University of Washington" is doing this is a little insulting.