The U.S. National Science Foundation Sept. 21 that it is awarding a coalition of academic and oceanographic research organizations a new five-year cooperative agreement to operate and maintain the . The 91探花, Oregon State University and project lead Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will continue operating the OOI, a science-driven ocean observing network that delivers real-time data from more than 900 instruments to address critical science questions regarding the world’s oceans. The coalition was previously funded in 2018.

Under this new $220 million total investment, each of the three institutions will continue to operate and maintain the portion of the observatory for which it is currently responsible. The award amount for the 91探花is $52.4 million.

鈥淚 am extremely excited about this next five years of operations and the continued opportunities that the Regional Cabled Array will provide for unparalleled environmental data throughout entire ocean depths in some of the most dynamic environments on Earth,鈥� said , a 91探花professor of oceanography and director of the Regional Cabled Array. 鈥淒ecade-long measurements from more than 150 instruments sampling every second make this a perfect system to captivate users with 鈥榥ew eyes鈥� and AI applications, which will undoubtedly lead to important new discoveries and predictive capabilities.鈥�

91探花operates what鈥檚 now known as the , an underwater observatory 听on the seafloor of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate 鈥� a small tectonic plate off Newport, Oregon, that鈥檚 home to an active underwater volcano and deep-ocean life 鈥� at 1 to almost 2 miles depth. The array also has instruments that move up and down to monitor properties in the ocean above. More than 500 miles (900 kilometers) of submarine fiber-optic cable provide power, real-time data transmission and live, two-way communication between the observatory and computers back on shore.

The Regional Cabled Array is the largest component of the full OOI network that collects and shares measurements from more than 900 instruments on the seafloor and on moored and free-swimming robotic platforms. The instruments are maintained with regular, ship-based expeditions to the equipment sites. All data are freely available to users worldwide, including members of the scientific community, policy experts, decision-makers, educators and the public.

“We’re so pleased to have the opportunity to continue providing streaming, real-time ocean data for all to use as part of the OOI,” said , the Maggie Walker Dean of the 91探花College of the Environment. “This support will allow the global research community to conduct multi-faceted, cutting-edge science for years to come, which is vital to understanding and protecting our oceans.鈥�

Oregon State University will continue to operate the Endurance Array in the coastal waters near Oregon. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which is based in Massachusetts, will operate projects outside the Pacific Northwest region, inluding the Pioneer Array off the North Carolina coast, subject to environmental permitting, and two global arrays, off the southern tip of Greenland and at a long-term ocean observing station in the Gulf of Alaska.

鈥淥OI has proven to be an exceedingly valuable source of information about the ocean. Its freely available data are contributing to better understanding of ocean processes and how the ocean is changing,鈥� said NSF Program Officer for OOI George Voulgaris.听 鈥淪cientists are using OOI data as the source of cutting-edge scientific discoveries 鈥� everything from getting close to predicting underwater volcanic eruptions to changing ocean circulation patterns that have real life implications for weather and fishing patterns.

鈥淥OI data also are serving as inspiration for students in the classroom, who are excited about learning about the ocean with access to real-time ocean data. We at NSF are proud of our continued investment in making these data available.鈥�

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will continue to lead operations and management of OOI through 2028, and OSU will continue to house and operate the data center that ingests and delivers all OOI data.

For more information about the Regional Cabled Array, contact Kelley at dskelley@uw.edu.

Adapted from a from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

The 91探花鈥檚 large research vessel, the , will embark Aug. 13 from Newport, Oregon. A team of dozens of 91探花students, researchers and engineers will visit sites hosting a unique, National Science Foundation-funded, underwater observatory.

For almost six weeks the team will send a remotely operated vehicle, , to recover and deploy more than 100 instruments as far as 2 miles below the ocean鈥檚 surface, all connected to a cable that supplies power and internet connectivity. Team members will work around the clock to make the most of precious ship time and complete their tasks in the calmer summer conditions.

, a 91探花professor of oceanography, is the principal investigator and chief scientist for two of the expedition鈥檚 four legs. Kelley has been involved with the cabled observatory since its inception more than a decade ago. 91探花News asked her about as part of a new series, 鈥淚n the Field,鈥� highlighting 91探花field research.

Where are you going, and when?

Deborah Kelley: We鈥檙e visiting all the main sites on the , a submarine fiber-optic cabled observatory off the coast of Oregon spanning depths of 260 feet (80 meters) to 1.8 miles (2.9 kilometers). We鈥檒l visit the Cascadia margin, hosting some of the most biologically productive waters in the ocean, and a highly dynamic methane seep site where methane is crystallized like ice, and issues as gas from the seafloor.

We鈥檙e also going to work at the base of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, one of the few places with seismometers on both the subducting oceanic plate and the North American continental plate. Then we go to Axial Seamount, the most active underwater volcano off our coast. We鈥檒l work at the base of the seamount, at 1.6 miles (2.6 kilometers) depth, and also install instruments in the summit caldera.

The entire cruise will be 41 days, loading Aug. 11, leaving shore Aug. 13 and finishing Sept. 20, divided into four legs with crew changes in Newport.

Have you visited this field site before?

DK: We surveyed the seafloor to plan out cable routes and instrument locations before the installation cruise in 2014, so it鈥檚 over a decade of visiting these sites every year. Still, we see new things on each expedition.

Our work was disrupted a bit by the pandemic. In 2020, we only had a couple of students with us. Everyone was under really strict quarantine, so logistically it was a nightmare. Last year we were back to having about 25 undergraduates onboard 鈥� all team members had to wear masks all the time and get tested twice a day. This year things will be more normal.

I haven鈥檛 gone the past two summers because I had to minimize my COVID exposure. This year, I鈥檓 going on Legs 1 and 4. I鈥檓 so excited 鈥� seeing some of the most extreme environments on Earth with the ROV, getting to work again with an amazing team and old friends on the ship, and interacting with 91探花undergraduate students will renew my spirit for sure.

What do you hope to learn?

DK: This cruise is mostly focused on maintaining this national facility 鈥� the biggest and most advanced underwater observatory in the U.S. Our job is to make sure that all the infrastructure is functioning, and keep the instruments running so that anyone in the world can explore our data.

We鈥檙e going to swap out over 100 instruments from the seafloor and water column, including an HD camera and a coupled microbial DNA and fluid sampler at Axial Seamount hot springs, and three instrumented vertical profiler robots that move up and down in the water.

The scientific scope of the observatory is incredibly interdisciplinary: It covers all types of oceanography, from geology to marine biology. The instruments provide unparalleled information on ocean heat waves, ocean acidification, earthquake activity, and tsunami waves.

The infrastructure at Axial Seamount forms the most advanced volcanic observatory in the world鈥檚 oceans. The seismic activity鈥檚 been picking up there, and the seafloor is still inflating, so there will be an eruption upcoming, it鈥檚 already the level where it was when it previously erupted.

Satellite instruments can detect ocean temperature at the surface, but a satellite doesn鈥檛 see down into the water column. 听And sea-going oceanographers are lucky if they get to go out to sea once a year. But this observatory has three moorings with profilers hosting nine instruments each that go up and down nine times a day, from 600 feet depth to just below the surface, and have made more than 40,000 vertical profiles so far.

Who will be participating in this field campaign?

DK: Over the four legs we have 144 science berths, and they鈥檙e all full, including students, the science team, engineers and the team that operates the remotely operated vehicle.

This year鈥檚 include 25 undergraduates from the UW, Bellevue College and Queens College in New York. The students are from all disciplines: neuroscience, computer science, oceanography, biology, engineering and Earth sciences. Three students from past years will also join the technical team and act as ambassadors.

We have several add-on science programs. One is led by a former 91探花Oceanography graduate student, , who is now a faculty member at Carleton College. She received a five-year award to look at changes in microbial DNA and viruses in and near the hydrothermal vents, and will bring a postdoc and student with her.

This year a children鈥檚 National Book Award finalist, , will join us on the first leg to collect material for a new book.

We鈥檒l also have a 19-year-old filmmaker from the U.K., Leo Richards, who produces short films for his YouTube and other channels. He鈥檒l be joining us on legs 1, 2 and 3 to document the Regional Cabled Array and the amazing environments and life there.

What鈥檚 one thing you really enjoy about doing field work 鈥� especially something that might not occur to most people?

DK: I鈥檓 still amazed every time I see the seafloor. Even places where you don鈥檛 think there鈥檚 much life, animals thrive. The incredible life around hydrothermal vents can flourish in high-temperature fluids devoid of oxygen, but enriched in toxic metals, carbon dioxide and hydrogen. One of my favorite animals that lives its entire life in near-freezing waters and in complete darkness is the 鈥渄umbo鈥� octopus.

Over 70% of the world鈥檚 volcanism is in the oceans. I just never get tired of looking at these systems, and the lava flows that occur around them. We see fossilized rivers of glass-covered lava, and amazing underwater hot springs.

I love the science, and I love the engineering, but I really am passionate about taking students out to sea with us. A lot of them say it changes their life. That鈥檚 a gift, to be part of.

Is there any way for people to follow your efforts (blog, Twitter, Instagram, etc.?)

DK: We鈥檒l be posting updates on the VISIONS鈥�23 . We鈥檒l have a , , and a new 鈥渇eatured image鈥� every day or so. We鈥檒l also be streaming whenever the remotely operated vehicle is in the water, and during deck operations and transits between sites.

This year we won鈥檛 be creating our own social media channels, but you can find updates on the , and feeds of the larger NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative, which includes observatories in other locations.

Anything you鈥檇 like to add?听

DK: We just updated the Regional Cabled Array , and I鈥檓 really proud of it. It鈥檚 got phenomenal images, and we refreshed the biological catalog. Here鈥檚 an example of the “鈥澨齱e always see, that looks really prehistoric, and it鈥檚 very rarely photographed. So. if people want to explore, our technology, the seafloor and deep-ocean environments off our coast, and the life found there, they should check out the gallery of images from past cruises (and from this one, as the cruise continues).

For more information, contact Kelley at dskelley@uw.edu.

[Updated 4/18/2023 for clarification:

• Scientists are not alarmed at discovering this geologic feature, which does not trigger earthquakes but may regulate friction in the fault zone
• This discovery does not change the current risk of a large earthquake on the Cascadia Subduction Zone]

The field of plate tectonics is not that old, and scientists continue to learn the details of earthquake-producing geologic faults. The Cascadia Subduction Zone 鈥� the eerily quiet offshore fault that threatens to unleash a magnitude-9 earthquake in the Pacific Northwest 鈥� still holds many mysteries.

A study led by the 91探花 discovered seeps of warm, chemically distinct liquid shooting up from the seafloor about 50 miles off Newport, Oregon. The , published Jan. 25 in Science Advances, describes the unique underwater spring the researchers named . Observations suggest the spring is sourced from water 2.5 miles beneath the seafloor at the plate boundary, regulating stress on the offshore fault.

The team made the discovery during a weather-related delay for a cruise aboard the RV Thomas G. Thompson. The ship鈥檚 sonar showed unexpected plumes of bubbles about three-quarters of a mile beneath the ocean鈥檚 surface. Further exploration using an underwater robot revealed the bubbles were just a minor component of warm, chemically distinct fluid gushing from the seafloor sediment.

鈥淭hey explored in that direction and what they saw was not just methane bubbles, but water coming out of the seafloor like a firehose. That鈥檚 something that I鈥檝e never seen, and to my knowledge has not been observed before,鈥� said co-author , a 91探花associate professor of oceanography who studies seafloor geology.

The feature was discovered by first author , who made the discovery as a 91探花undergraduate student and now works as a White House policy advisor.

Observations from later cruises show the fluid leaving the seafloor is 9 degrees Celsius (16 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the surrounding seawater. Calculations suggest the fluid is coming straight from the Cascadia megathrust, where temperatures are an estimated 150 to 250 degrees Celsius (300 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit).

The new seeps aren鈥檛 related to geologic activity at the that the cruise was heading toward, Solomon said. Instead, they occur near vertical faults that crosshatch the massive Cascadia Subduction Zone. These strike-slip faults, where sections of ocean crust and sediment slide past each other, exist because the ocean plate hits the continental plate at an angle, placing stress on the overlying continental plate.

Loss of fluid from the offshore megathrust interface through these strike-slip faults is important because it lowers the fluid pressure between the sediment particles and hence increases the friction between the oceanic and continental plates.

鈥淭he megathrust fault zone is like an air hockey table,鈥� Solomon said. 鈥淚f the fluid pressure is high, it鈥檚 like the air is turned on, meaning there鈥檚 less friction and the two plates can slip. If the fluid pressure is lower, the two plates will lock 鈥� that鈥檚 when stress can build up.鈥�

Fluid released from the fault zone is like leaking lubricant, Solomon said. That鈥檚 bad news for earthquake hazards: Less lubricant means stress can build to create a damaging quake.

This is the first known site of its kind, Solomon said. Similar fluid seep sites may exist nearby, he added, though they are hard to detect from the ocean鈥檚 surface. A significant fluid leak off central Oregon could explain why the northern portion of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, off the coast of Washington, is believed to be more strongly locked, or coupled, than the southern section off the coast of Oregon.

鈥淧ythias Oasis provides a rare window into processes acting deep in the seafloor, and its chemistry suggests this fluid comes from near the plate boundary,鈥� said co-author , a 91探花professor of oceanography. 鈥淭his suggests that the nearby faults regulate fluid pressure and megathrust slip behavior along the central Cascadia Subduction Zone.鈥�

Solomon just returned from an expedition to off the northeast coast of New Zealand. The Hikurangi Subduction Zone is similar to the Cascadia Subduction Zone but generates more frequent, smaller earthquakes that make it easier to study. But it has a different sub-seafloor structure meaning it鈥檚 unlikely to have fluid seeps like those discovered in the new study, Solomon said.

The research off Oregon was funded by the National Science Foundation. Other co-authors are , who did the work as a 91探花doctoral student and now works as an environmental consultant in Seattle; Emily Roland, a former 91探花faculty member now at Western Washington University; Masako Tominaga at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and Anne Tr茅hu and Robert Collier at Oregon State University.

For more information, contact Solomon at esolomn@uw.edu or Kelley at dskelley@uw.edu.

The National Science Foundation announced that it has awarded a coalition of academic and oceanographic research organizations a five-year, $220 million contract to operate and maintain the . The coalition, led by the , with direction from the NSF and guidance from the OOI Facilities Board, will include the 91探花, Oregon State University and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

The OOI is an advanced system of integrated, scientific platforms and sensors that measure physical, chemical, geological and biological properties and processes from the seafloor to the sea surface in key coastal and open-ocean sites of the Atlantic and Pacific. as designed to address critical questions about the Earth鈥搊cean system, including climate change, ecosystem variability, ocean acidification, plate-scale seismicity, submarine volcanoes and carbon cycling with the goal of better understanding the ocean and our planet. All OOI are freely available online.

Each institution will continue to operate and maintain the portion of OOI assets for which it is currently responsible: the 91探花will operate the that extends across the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate and overlying ocean; OSU will operate the off the coast of Washington and Oregon; WHOI will operate the Pioneer Array off the Northeast U.S. coast and the Global Arrays in the Irminger Sea off the southern tip of Greenland and at Station Papa in the Gulf of Alaska; and Rutgers will operate the cyberinfrastructure system that ingests and delivers data for the initiative. In addition, WHOI will serve as the home of a new OOI Project Management Office.

鈥淲e at NSF are proud of our continuing investment in 24/7 streaming data from the ocean and coupled Earth systems,鈥� said William Easterling, NSF assistant director for geosciences. 鈥淔rom underwater volcanoes to ocean currents, OOI enables cutting-edge scientific discoveries and makes big data accessible to classrooms at all levels. These data are key to addressing everyday challenges, such as better storm predictions and management of our coastal resources.鈥�

The OOI officially launched in 2009, when the NSF and the Consortium for Ocean Leadership signed a cooperative agreement to support the construction and initial operation of OOI鈥檚 cabled, coastal and global arrays. The launch represented the culmination of work begun decades earlier, when ocean scientists in the 1980s envisioned a collection of outposts in the ocean that would gather data around the clock, in real- and near-real time for years on end, and enhance the scientific community鈥檚 ability to observe complex oceanographic processes that occur and evolve over time scales ranging from seconds to decades, and spatial scales ranging from inches to miles.

The OOI currently supports more than 500 autonomous instruments on the seafloor and on moored and free-swimming platforms that are serviced during regular, ship-based expeditions to the array sites. Data from each instrument is transmitted to shore, where it is freely available to users worldwide, including members of the scientific community, policy experts, decision-makers, educators and the general public.

The 91探花operates the largest single piece of the OOI, the : cables from Newport, Oregon, that bring high power and high-bandwidth internet to an observatory that spans the seafloor and water above. The equipment was built and installed by the 91探花starting in 2011 and became fully operational in 2016. It includes more than 140 instruments and six tethered robots laden with instruments that collect data from about 9,500 feet beneath the ocean鈥檚 surface to the near-surface environments.

The new grant will fund refresh and maintenance of the Regional Cabled Array infrastructure, data evaluation, and five . The main hardware will continue to be maintained and upgraded by the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory, and will continue to incorporate sensors from local companies Sea-Bird Scientific of Bellevue and Paroscientific of Redmond.

Just before its official commissioning, the Regional Cabled Array in April 2015 captured first-of-its-kind data of an that included more than 8,000 earthquakes over a 24-hour period, a roughly 7-foot collapse of the seafloor and more than 30,000 explosive events. The data evolution of the eruption was the focus of . One of those authors is now using real-time observations to that the underwater volcano’s next eruption, which also will be monitored, will occur in early 2022.

“At one of the meetings, an NSF officer said: ‘If you build it, they will come.’ That’s what we’re seeing,” said 91探花principal investigator and oceanography professor . “The real-time capability and power supply are key because they let us have a permanent, 24/7 presence on the seafloor and throughout the water column and we are now able to respond to events in near-real time. We have significant expansion capabilities and are excited to continue gathering fundamental measurements in the ocean.”

The number of instruments attached to the observatory is growing. William Wilcock, a 91探花professor of oceanography, has received two NSF grants that include funding for a new instrument now monitoring seismic activity and deformation of the seafloor, and another geophysical instrument to be installed next year on the underwater volcano, . An award from Germany’s national research agency resulted in the installation this past summer of two high-resolution sonars to image methane gas plumes that are bubbling up from the seafloor at a highly active area called Southern Hydrate Ridge.

“We are looking at some of the most biologically productive and geologically active regions in the world, and we’ve never had so many co-registered sensors in these dynamic environments. With these data, collected on time scales from seconds to years, we hope to discover important links about how the ocean works and evolves,” Kelley said.

“We now have the capability to examine in real time the impacts of large storms and low-oxygen events on ocean biology and chemistry, offshore earthquakes and underwater eruptions, and to share these data and discoveries with a global community of users.”

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For more information, contact Kelley at dskelley@uw.edu. More photos are available .

Note: This article is adapted from a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution .

The , funded by the National Science Foundation, left July 25 from Newport, Oregon, and will be back Aug. 29. The group is on the California-based research vessel Roger Revelle, since the UW’s large research vessel, the Thomas G. Thompson, is completing its major .

, 91探花professor of oceanography, is chief scientist on the cruise that recently began its second leg.

While at sea a will brave the crushing pressures and cold temperatures, while the team works day and night to direct the dives and prepare equipment above water. The researchers will be cleaning some instruments from marine life, and swapping out sensors that collect hot spring fluids and DNA samples over their year-long missions.

The team is posting regular from the ship. On Aug. 1, members reported seeing , the bioluminescent tube-shaped tropical that have been seen this year off the Pacific Northwest. They are also posting highlights of the robot-captured dive videos, including one showing how on the UW-built technology.

In addition to the maintenance work, two new instruments from William Chadwick at Oregon State University will be added. The first will monitor tilting and the rise and fall of the seafloor to detect inflation and deflation at Axial Seamount, an underwater volcano that is part of the cabled observatory. A second instrument, to be placed in a nearby hydrothermal vent field, will measure the temperature and salinity of fluids that waft around the vents and in the Axial caldera. More than 120 instruments 鈥� including seismometers, high-definition video and digital still camera, and underwater chemical mass spectrometers 鈥� will be recovered and reinstalled during the cruise. Data from all instruments is accessible in real time from shore through the Ocean Observatories Initiative .

This year’s cruise includes 24 undergraduate and graduate students from the UW, Peninsula College in Port Angeles, Western Washington University in Bellingham and Queens College in New York. They are posting For many undergraduates this will be their first experience at sea.

Other cruise participants include a teacher from Kingston Middle School in Kitsap County, faculty members from Grays Harbor College in Aberdeen and 91探花Tacoma, and a postdoctoral researcher from the 91探花Applied Physics Laboratory.

Follow along on Twitter at , or tune in during one of the robot’s dives for from the deep sea.

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For more information, contact Kelley at dskelley@uw.edu.

, a 91探花professor of oceanography, was recognized for his work using new technology to study the upper ocean. He earned his undergraduate degree in engineering and applied physics at Harvard University and his doctorate jointly from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Following a postdoctoral year at WHOI, he was on the MIT faculty until he joined the 91探花in 1986.

In his research, Eriksen has collected observations to understand oceanic internal waves, equatorial and upper-ocean dynamics, eddies and general circulation using both conventional and custom instruments. He led development of the听, an听autonomous underwater glider that can be deployed for several months and travel thousands of miles in the upper ocean. More recently, Eriksen has led the development of the Deepglider, the only autonomous underwater vehicle capable of gliding to the seafloor and back in the deep ocean. Deepgliders are designed to last up to a year and a half and travel as far as a quarter of the way around the Earth.

, also a 91探花professor of oceanography, was recognized for her studies of deep-sea environments. A Pacific Northwest native, Kelley earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geology at the 91探花and her doctorate at Canada’s Dalhousie University. She joined the 91探花faculty in 1995. She also holds an adjunct position at the University of Bergen in Norway.

Kelley’s research focuses on the extreme environments of seafloor volcanoes and associated underwater hot springs, as well as the unique biological communities that live there. Her field work includes more than 30 research expeditions. She led a 2003 cruise to the “” hydrothermal vent field in the Atlantic Ocean. In 2015 she co-authored an of seafloor volcanoes and deep-ocean life, which won the Association of American Publishers 2016 Prose Award for Earth science books. Kelley is a lead investigator for the Pacific Northwest , a real-time seafloor observatory that connects the ocean to the internet. She has also traveled to the deep ocean firsthand more than 50 times, reaching more than 2 miles below the surface.

, a 91探花professor emeritus of atmospheric sciences and of Earth and space sciences, was recognized for his research on the interaction of solar radiation with clouds, snow, sea ice and glaciers. Warren did his undergraduate degree at Cornell University and his doctorate at Harvard University before joining the 91探花faculty in 1982. He was previously elected as a fellow of the American Meteorological Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Warren has analyzed some 500 million visual observations of , taken from land-based weather stations and ships in the ocean, to create a global atlas showing the distribution of nine different cloud types. More recently, he has looked at how soot from forest fires and fossil-fuel burning gets and changes the reflectivity of snow and glaciers, speeding up global warming. He also has published on the “” hypothesis for how the oceans may have completely frozen over earlier in Earth’s history. Warren’s extensive fieldwork has brought him to Siberia, China and to Antarctica, where a mountain ridge is named after him.

The three 91探花faculty members will be among new fellows who will be honored in December at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in San Francisco.

Today, with the National Science Foundation-funded U.S. , the ocean is accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week to anyone with an internet connection. The 91探花 led building and installation of the OOI’s , an underwater ocean observatory off the Pacific Northwest coast that is connected by fiber optic, high-power communication cables to the internet.

“About four out of five instruments on the Cabled Array are still streaming data live to shore, which is phenomenal for something that’s as technologically advanced and deployed in harsh ocean environments,” said , a 91探花professor of oceanography who now leads the 91探花portion of the project. “It’s an astounding piece of infrastructure.”

This tech-heavy project creates a permanent, 24/7 scientific presence in Pacific coastal waters and the deep ocean, including on an underwater volcano 5,000 feet beneath the oceans’ surface. 91探花scientists and engineers built most of the hardware and installed it to transmit data live to shore for the next quarter of a century.

The Cabled Array is one of 83 platforms that make up the OOI and the only one directly connected to the internet. The full OOI includes more than 830 instruments providing more than 100,000 . The platforms and instruments are spread across seven arrays, or hubs, in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

The centralized opened for the first time in January to allow users 鈥� scientists, educators and the public 鈥� to access the data for free. Since then, the quantity of data available and tools for downloading and plotting data have steadily increased, and the OOI continues to expand its data availability.

“The OOI is placing as much ocean data online as possible and making it available in real time,” said , the NSF’s assistant director for geosciences in a . “In addition to scientific discovery, we hope to spark the public’s interest in the sea.”

Other currently available data sources for the Cabled Array include from the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, a central hub for seismology data that has a data center in Seattle, and tilt and inflation data from the displayed through a site from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A 91探花research website on the 2015 eruption of Axial Volcano includes a of a 500 degrees Fahrenheit hot spring that lets viewers zoom in to explore individual deep-sea lifeforms.

https://youtu.be/qAm3N8yvjCw

Together, data from the OOI will help researchers gain a better understanding of earthquakes and shifts in undersea tectonic plates; learn about the unique lifeforms that thrive around deep-water hydrothermal vents; observe the methane-based ecosystems near gas-rich seeps on the seafloor; monitor the upwelling of nutrient-rich water that fuels productive coastal fisheries; and tease out links between ocean circulation, weather, and climate.

Scientists aren’t the only ones who will benefit. , including data visualization exercises and lesson plans, will allow educators to engage students. Commercial or recreational fishermen can also monitor offshore conditions by checking data from nearby buoys.

“The complexity of myriad interacting oceanic processes and the fact that we all depend upon the ocean in many ways, demands that technologically innovative approaches be employed enabling persistent human telepresence to be projected into entire volumes of our oceanic ecosystems,” said , a 91探花professor of oceanography who came up with the concept of the first tectonic-plate-scale cabled ocean observatory and led its design and installation.

91探花students have already used observatory data in separate projects to track whale calls, investigate sounds related to the and study plumes of methane bubbles where the coastal shelf slopes down to the deep ocean.

“I tell students: No matter what dataset you look at, you’re going to make discoveries,” Kelley said. “We’ve never had this kind of resolution before and availability to see significant events unfold as they happen 鈥� not just for a single instrument, but for multiple instruments in the same area, which means you can start looking at how things respond to environmental events.”

Several scientific publications related to the recent eruption of the Axial Volcano are in the works, and the team expects more research and educational collaborations to emerge. At the UW, the undergraduate is working to build a smaller, test observatory on the 91探花Oceanography dock in Seattle. Kelley and colleagues are helping local and college students on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula to build their own ocean sensors and interpret the data that come back.

“It’s all part of building the pipeline of students who will apply a new way of learning about our oceans,” Kelley said. “This data is just a first taste of how so many scientific fields can benefit.”

Kelley will lead a from July 11 to Aug. 14 to swap out instruments on the Cabled Array, polish off camera lenses, and bring some of the tethered robots in for annual maintenance.

The OOI is funded by the NSF, and construction and initial operations were overseen by the . Partners include the UW, Oregon State University, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Rutgers University and Raytheon.

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This was adapted from an NSF .

For more information, contact Kelley at 206 685-9556 or dskelley@uw.edu and Delaney at jdelaney@uw.edu or 206-543-5059. At the NSF, contact Cheryl Dybas, 703-292-7734 or cdybas@nsf.gov; at Consortium for Ocean Leadership, contact Leslie Smith at 202-787-1613 or lsmith@oceanleadership.org. See links for high-resolution and .

When an in April off the Oregon coast, researchers knew within minutes that something spectacular was happening more than 300 miles offshore. Precision hardware installed by the 91探花 last summer let scientists see its effects almost instantly from shore.颅颅

A team of researchers, engineers and students is now at sea t颅o maintain that equipment and assess the volcano’s aftermath. The cruise 鈥� from July 4 to Aug. 7 aboard the UW’s Thomas G. Thompson research vessel 鈥� is the first trip to the site since the eruption. The , where a cable brings power and the Internet to waters off the Pacific Northwest coast, provides a real-time, virtual eye on the deep sea. It’s part of the National Science Foundation’s .

In the lead-up to this summer’s expedition, a film crew visited the 91探花team in early June to hear about the project:

The cruise now under way includes 18 undergraduates from the UW, Bellingham’s Western Washington University and Aberdeen’s Grays Harbor College. Majors include oceanography, fisheries, engineering and Earth sciences. The students are working around the clock to help a specialized swap out sensors and platforms for annual maintenance and help scientists and engineers check in on other instruments, which include a high-definition video camera and deep-sea water and DNA sampler. They also will undertake their own self-directed science and outreach projects that will continue through the fall.

The group is posting daily news updates on the , which includes and . You can also follow live updates on Twitter at .

Last summer, in an led by 91探花oceanography professor , the team successfully installed the last of the hardware for the more than 100 networked instruments. This year is the first annual cruise to maintain the observatory, which will continue to gather data about climate change, marine chemistry, deep-sea life and seismic activity for a quarter of a century.

“The cabled observatory allows us to put equipment from high-tech labs at the bottom of the ocean,” said , a 91探花professor of oceanography who is at sea for the cruise. “It really gives us eyes that we’ve never had before.”

The cruise has been going well, she said, thanks to the work of the team at sea and on shore, and the energy and enthusiasm of the students.

Khadijah Homolka, a 91探花Earth and space sciences student who participated in the first of the three legs, in July about getting used to the ship’s motion, mistakenly sitting in the captain’s chair, working on marine science instruments and getting ready for her 4 a.m. shift logging the operations of the deep-sea robot.

“It is a little intimidating, but it’s often the nerve-wracking experiences that turn out to be the most memorable ones,” Homolka wrote. “I’m currently in the open ocean, an incredibly hostile and fickle environment, so why not try something a little scary?”

This summer’s work includes swapping out three refrigerator-sized “” designed and built at the 91探花. These 200-pound pods require annual maintenance to let them zoom up and down through 600 feet of water collecting data nonstop. The team will also install three to patrol the deeper depths.

The full 35-day itinerary includes checking each of the Cabled Array study sites. These range from an active underwater volcano and scalding-hot vents to seafloor deposits leaking methane gases closer to shore, and a site where the shallower coastal ocean drops off into the open sea. The ship will come ashore in Oregon briefly July 19-20 to swap crews and load new equipment.

Meanwhile, other team members are watching from the 91探花campus. The ship lowers the tethered robot down nearly two miles beneath the ocean’s surface to plug in equipment. As soon as that equipment connects to the cable, it’s online and data flows at the speed of light to land. The onshore team runs installation and checks to make any adjustments before the robot’s work is complete.

So far, preliminary data is available on the seismic activity, pressure and at the volcanic site. The interface that will publicly display all the data streaming in from the observatory is and is scheduled to launch by the end of the year.

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For more information, contact Kelley at dskelley@uw.edu and Delaney at jdelaney@uw.edu. Kelley will be at sea with intermittent email access until Aug. 7.

A 91探花 oceanographer has helped create the first full-color photographic atlas of the ocean floor. “” (Cambridge University Press, 2015) was almost a decade in the making and contains more than 500 original illustrations and color photos, and access to online .

Its pages contain a history of deep-sea science and a global tour of the volcanoes, hot springs, rocks and animals that exist in extreme environments in the ocean depths.

“This book lets people see parts of the Earth that most of them have never seen or thought about before, and the processes that form fundamental parts of our planet 鈥� and it does it in a very illustrative way,” said co-lead author , a professor in the 91探花.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OYG485OeAg

The book comes with endorsements from ocean explorer Robert Ballard; Kathy Sullivan, the head administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and filmmaker James Cameron.

“This is the book I wish I’d had on my eight deep-ocean expeditions, to better understand the wonders I was gazing upon,” Cameron writes. He calls it “a must-own for anyone in the ocean sciences, and for those simply curious about what lies down there in the most remote realm on our planet.”

The book covers the history of exploration of the deep sea, and the geology and biology of the roughly 40,000-mile mountain chain of underwater volcanoes that cross the world’s oceans.

Kelley was lead author of the chapter on hydrothermal vents, including the black smokers venting metal-rich fluids of more than 700 F that she has studied for decades. Local examples include the vent fields and , off the Pacific Northwest coast.

Also described is the vent field, a completely distinct type of hot spring environment in the Atlantic Ocean that Kelley in 2000. There, limestone chimneys tower 180 feet above the seafloor hosting bizarre lifeforms she and her students have since .

“The life in these systems is very diverse, and in many ways we’ve just touched the tip of what’s down there,” Kelley said.

Other authors are Jeffrey Karson of Syracuse University, Michael Perfit of the University of Florida, and Daniel Fornari and Timothy Shank of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

A veteran of the deep sea, Kelley has traveled to the seafloor more than 50 times to depths of more than 2 miles (4 kilometers) in the specialized submersible called , built to protect passengers from the bone-crushing pressures and near-freezing temperatures of the abyss.

She has seen ocean imaging technology evolve from grainy images to the high-definition photos contained in the book, and the HD video available on an accompanying .

“When I was first going to sea, we were still using 35 mm cameras, and one of my first jobs at sea was processing film on a rolling ship,” Kelley said. “Where we are now, the technology is exponentially increasing.”

Kelley is part of a current National Science Foundation that recently wired the largest underwater volcano off Washington’s coast and surrounding areas of the seafloor. More than 100 instruments will use Internet and high-voltage power to observe these dynamic environments in real time.

The entire ocean circulates through the seafloor every 8 to 10 million years, and so the seafloor composition is closely connected to the waters above.

It is not yet known how volcanic eruptions on the seafloor affect the life and chemistry of the oceans, and how the biological communities of the deep sea originate and evolve. The unexpected discovery of life on seafloor volcanoes, that survive off toxic gases instead of sunlight, has raised questions that have yet to be answered.

“These systems have really changed how we think about the oceans, and life on Earth and on other planets,” Kelley said.

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For more information, contact Kelley at 206-685-9556 or dskelley@uw.edu. The book is currently available for in the U.S. For press inquiries, contact publicist Rachel Ewen at rewen@cambridge.org.

This summer and fall 91探花students had a unique experience off the coast of Washington and Oregon helping scientists and engineers complete construction of the world’s largest deep-ocean observatory.

The sixth leg is now under way, and will finish around Sept. 29. Throughout the 83-day expedition, groups of 91探花students have each spent two weeks or more working aboard the UW’s large research vessel, the Thomas G. Thompson.

Around 45 students, mostly undergraduates, are participating. Most are taking the , which has them working with scientists, engineers 鈥� and a specialized robot called ROPOS that installs cables, power and communication hubs, and instruments on听 the ocean floor as part of the observatory construction phase.

By the time the expedition wraps up the team will have installed tethered robots that zoom up and down 9,000-foot-tall cables while measuring chemical and biological properties throughout the ocean depths, lain thousands of feet of extension cables and installed 150 instruments on the ocean floor and in the water off Oregon and Washington.

Students were crucial to the mission during four-hour shifts in the robot control room logging operations that continue day and night. They record any interesting events and images that appear on the robot’s still cameras and livestream video, which is also streaming .

“It was really nice being a part of the actual science part of the cruise,” said Charles Garcia, a 91探花senior in oceanography. Students are also part of the daily updates from the research team and discussions about how to deal with weather and other factors.

“Being exposed to real fieldwork is something I wouldn’t have got otherwise,” Garcia said. “It’s pretty hectic on a ship and people work in an ever-changing environment.”

Garcia transferred from Olympic College on Washington’s Kitsap Peninsula to be part of constructing this observatory, he said. He signed up for the summer cruise as soon as applications opened. Other highlights for him were seeing deep-sea creatures and the poetry night on each leg’s last night.

The installation work provides a peek into views the network will provide. A routine dive to recover equipment “quickly turned into one of the best dives I have ever seen,” wrote Claire Knox, a senior in oceanography, in an Aug. 21 . Tiny squid changing color, a sablefish attacking a hagfish, cat sharks, decorator crabs and soft corals all appeared. Finally, “as the [robot] zoomed just above the seafloor, we saw an odd shape in the distance. It looked like a mound of rough sand however when we moved closer we realized it was an octopus. It slowly became increasingly red, ballooned with extra water, and finally jetted off into the distance.”

Chief scientist and co-instructor for the class recently got back to Seattle after six weeks at sea.

“The students put in really long hours,” Kelley said. “But they were all surprised at how fast two and half weeks flew by.”

Many students are in the UW’s College of the Environment majoring in oceanography, fisheries and Earth science, but several are from the UW’s College of Engineering. They range from students who had just completed their first year to a few graduate students.

“It was a nice mix,” Kelley said. “The engineering students spanned everything from students who are interested in corrosion, to mechanical engineers to chemists.” Students from different disciplines helped one another, just as in the science and engineering research teams, she said. Oceanography students might teach about the biology, and computer science students would help with programming or data visualizations.

This summer’s work completes initial installation of an ocean observatory that will bring power and high-bandwidth Internet to the deep ocean, providing a real-time, virtual eye on the deep sea and the ability to directly interact with the ocean 24/7. Still aboard the ship is principal investigator and co-instructor , a 91探花professor of oceanography and chief scientist on all legs of the cruise.

Each student also worked on a project, many related to public outreach. Some created multimedia information pages about the technology, complete with interviews with the creators and video of it being deployed. Others described the seafloor animals observed during the installation, which will be available as a biological catalog for the study sites.

Some students created mini-documentaries, including one about the at a deep-sea volcano. Another explains a that’s inserted into deep-ocean vents spewing fluid more caustic than battery acid and hotter than boiling water.

The Tommy Thompson, as the 91探花ship is commonly known, is an educational vessel where the crew members teach students about the ship’s operations. Students also help out, when safe, with deck work such as hauling equipment and spooling cables.

“People will always go to sea,” Kelley said. “I think it’s important for anybody who wants to be an oceanographer to go to sea and see what it’s like.”

For scientists and the public, the new observatory will soon provide real-time data on offshore earthquakes, mysterious deep-ocean ecosystems, and many more observations on processes such as ocean currents, warming temperatures and ocean acidification.

For 91探花students, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to be part of its installation.

The observatory is funded by the U.S. and managed by the . It is scheduled to begin operating in early 2015.

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