NEPTUNE Canada’s first junction box was put through the paces at the OceanWorks facility in Vancouver BC, on 26-27 June. Junction Boxes, which convert and transmit power and data between seafloor instruments and network nodes, are critical components of the NEPTUNE Canada network.MORE »
Ships Log
Crawler testing has gone well, with successful deployment and retrieval by ROPOS ROV. Locomotion in soft deep sea sediment was difficult and modifications are already being proposed to address this challenge. MORE »
Crawler Debut
NEPTUNE Canada's newest supertool arrived from Germany this month. The world's first "Internet-operated deep sea crawler," created by a team of ocean scientists at Bremen's Jacobs University, will help researchers measure conditions such as temperature, salinity, methane content and sediment characteristics at the seafloor. MORE »
Cable Lay Complete
NEPTUNE Canada has completed the lay of 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. MORE »
THE NORTH-EAST PACIFIC TIME-SERIES UNDERSEA NETWORKED EXPERIMENTS
NEPTUNE Canada will be the world’s largest
cable-linked seafloor observatory. It will expand the boundaries
of ocean exploration and give us a new way of studying
and understanding our planet. NEPTUNE Canada brings power and the Internet to the ocean environment through novel technologies.
Science
Through NEPTUNE, scientists will observe and interact with the complex Earth and ocean processes that occur on, above and below the seafloor. The five major research themes of NEPTUNE Canada are:
NEPTUNE Canada’s unprecedented access to the deep sea world will increase our understanding of the oceans in the same way that the Hubble Telescope is revolutionizing our knowledge of outer space. This new knowledge will be applied to many global problems and opportunities, such as mitigating the effects of earthquakes and tsunamis, evaluating the sustainability of commercial fish stocks, improving models of regional climate prediction, and searching for potential new energy sources.
