Slashdot Mirror
How the NEPTUNE Project Wired the Ocean
An anonymous reader writes with a story about a unique 500-mile-long high-speed optical cable project that runs along the Pacific seafloor. "The Juan de Fuca tectonic plate is by far one of the Earth's smallest. It spans just a few hundred kilometers of the Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia coast. But what the Juan de Fuca lacks in size it makes up for in connectivity. It's home to a unique, high-speed optical cabling that has snaked its way across the depths of the Pacific seafloor plate since late 2009. This link is called NEPTUNE—the North-East Pacific Time-Series Underwater Networked Experiment—and, at more than 800 kilometers (about 500 miles), it's about the same length as 40,000 subway cars connected in a single, long train. A team of scientists, researchers, and engineers from the not-for-profit group Oceans Network Canada maintains the network, which cost CAD $111 million to install and $17 million each year to maintain. But know that this isn't your typical undersea cable. For one, NEPTUNE doesn't traverse the ocean's expanse, but instead loops back to its starting point at shore. And though NEPTUNE is designed to facilitate the flow of information through the ocean, it also collects information about the ocean, ocean life, and the ocean floor."
I think. I can't load the vids. Let me see the stream! Very cool initiative indeed! Great job on the innovation.
Google has fiber, Kellogs has fiber, now the ocean has fiber, when do I get fiber?
about the same length as 40,000 subway cars connected in a single, long train
Crazy Unit of the Year award!
subway cars? come on!
And how many libraries of congress?
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
North-East Pacific Time-Series Underwater Networked Experiment
So, is that supposed to be NPTUNE, or NEPTSUNE? Surely we don't want to be inconsistent.
Ezekiel 23:20
it's about the same length as 40,000 subway cars
Or 470,000 Librarians of Congress, stretched out head-to-toe...
I have absolutely no idea what length a subway car is? Which subway? Which model of subway car?
Can't we having something standard like an olympic swimming pool?
But really, how many idiots are there out there who don't understand how long a kilometer (or mile) really is?
BTW what if said subway cars were connected with a 1m coupling? That would make it an extra 40km long. And what if the subway cars were non-standard? Why can't we have some sort of universal measurement that is easy for people to understand?
Google put one of these on the floor of the East coast, rather they are currently engaged in placing one along the east coast for (as I remember) off-shore wind power bus connections. This was announced a couple of years ago. They were putting one in the mid-west as well to make available connections for wind farms in an area where none had previously been, encouraging their expansion. On the east coast they displayed plans for placement off the Carolinas while the gov was busy politicking around for placement of a similar bus off the New England coast. Each one cost a billion plus, but hey, they're Google, the company that will one day rule the world (no sarcasm here).
Stentoran - He who is heard
so way is it used as an analogy? It doesn't clear anything up, so it violates the "omit needless words" maxim.
Your homework for this week deals with unit conversions - subway cars, Volkswagens, Libraries of Congress, African swallows, European swallows, a coon's age, a pinch, a New York minute, and many other units you will have to deal with in your daily lives.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
How many double decker buses is that?
In Soviet Russia, Lev Landau remembers you!
" it's about the same length as 40,000 subway cars connected in a single, long train. "
What. The. Fuck...
The article didn't mention the final deploy of the USA side of Neptune is going in this summer. Don't think the Canadians get to have all the fun with Ocean science, but the NSF has funded a cabled observatory spanning the Juan de Fuca plate as part of an effort with Canada to get sensors covering nearly all the fault lines.
The project in the USA is no longer called Neptune, but more can be found about it here.
Ah, the Juan De Fuca plate. You deploy a network cable, you analyze the surroundings, you discover you can extract geothermal energy and by 2050 you end up with the Rifters universe. P. Watts rejoice! :-)
NYC subway platforms span two 'grid plan' street blocks, and the usualy train is 10 cars long, and grid plan streets are 20 streets/mile. So, approx 528 feet/train which makes the car length obviously about 0.08 furlong.
110 million for a loopback device..