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.

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.

“The new network allowed us to see in incredible detail where the faults are, and which were active during the eruption,” said lead author , a 91探花professor of oceanography. The in Science is one of three studies published together that provide the first formal analyses of the seismic vibrations, seafloor movements and rock created during an off the Oregon coast. “We have a new understanding of the behavior of caldera dynamics that can be applied to other volcanoes all over the world.”

The studies are based on data collected by the , a National Science Foundation-funded project conceived and implemented by 91探花 scientists and engineers that brings electrical power and internet to the seafloor. The observatory, completed just months before the eruption, provides new tools to understand one of the test sites for understanding Earth’s volcanism.

“Axial volcano has had at least three eruptions, that we know of, over the past 20 years,” said , director of the NSF’s Division of Ocean Sciences, which also funded the research.听 “Instruments used by Ocean Observatories Initiative scientists are giving us new opportunities to understand the inner workings of this volcano, and of the mechanisms that trigger volcanic eruptions in many environments.

“The information will help us predict the behavior of active volcanoes around the globe,” Murray said.

It’s a little-known fact that most of Earth’s volcanism takes place underwater. Axial Volcano rises 0.7 miles off the seafloor some 300 miles off the Pacific Northwest coast, and its peak lies about 0.85 miles below the ocean’s surface. Just as on land, we learn about ocean volcanoes by studying vibrations to see what is happening deep inside as plates separate and magma rushes up to form new crust.

The submarine location has some advantages. Typical ocean crust is just 4 miles (6 km) thick, roughly five times thinner than the crust that lies below land-based volcanoes. The magma chamber is not buried as deeply, and the hard rock of ocean crust generates crisper seismic images.

“One of the advantages we have with seafloor volcanoes is we really know very well where the magma chamber is,” Wilcock said. “The challenge in the oceans has always been to get good observations of the eruption itself.”

All that changed when the Cabled Array was installed and instruments were turned on. Analysis of vibrations leading up to and during the event show an increasing number of small earthquakes, up to thousands a day, in the previous months. The vibrations also show strong tidal triggering, with six times as many earthquakes during low tides as high tides while the volcano approached its eruption.

Once lava emerged, movement began along a newly formed crack, or dike, that sloped downward and outward inside the 2-mile-wide by 5-mile-long caldera.

“There has been a longstanding debate among volcanologists about the orientation of ring faults beneath calderas: Do they slope toward or away from the center of the caldera?” Wilcock said. “We were able to detect small earthquakes and locate them very accurately, and see that they were active while the volcano was inflating.”

The two previous eruptions sent lava south of the volcano’s rectangular crater. This eruption produced lava to the north. The seismic analysis shows that before the eruption, the movement was on the outward-dipping ring fault. Then a new crack formed, initially along the same outward-dipping fault below the eastern wall of the caldera. The outward-sloping fault has been predicted by so-called “sandbox models,” but these are the most detailed observations to confirm that they happen in nature. That crack moved southward along this plane until it hit the northern limit of the previous 2011 eruption.

“In areas that have recently erupted, the stress has been relieved,” Wilcock said. “So the crack stopped going south and then it started going north.” Seismic evidence shows the crack went north along the eastern edge of the caldera, then lava pierced the crust’s surface and erupted inside and then outside the caldera’s northeastern edge.

The dike, or crack, then stepped to the west and followed a line north of the caldera to about 9 miles (15 km) north of the volcano, with thousands of small explosions on the way.

“At the northern end there were two big eruptions and those lasted nearly a month, based on when the explosions were happening and when the magma chamber was deflating,” Wilcock said.

The activity continued throughout May, then lava stopped flowing and the seismic vibrations shut off. Within a month afterward the earthquakes dropped to just 20 per day.

The volcano has not yet started to produce more earthquakes as it gradually rebuilds toward another eruption, which typically happen every decade or so. The observatory centered on Axial Volcano is designed to operate for at least 25 years.

“The cabled array offers new opportunities to study volcanism and really learn how these systems work,” Wilcock said. “This is just the beginning.”

Other co-authors of the paper are 91探花oceanography doctoral student ; Maya Tolstoy, Felix Waldhauser and Yen Joe Tan at Columbia University; DelWayne Bohnenstiehl and M. Everett Mann at North Carolina State University; Jacqueline Caplan-Auerbach at Western Washington University; Robert Dziak at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and Adrien Arnulf at the University of Texas at Austin.

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For more information, contact Wilcock at 206-543-6043 or wilcock@uw.edu.

Note to media: Images are at . Video is at听 and

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 .

Thanks to a set of by the 91探花 to bring the deep sea online, what appears to be an eruption of Axial Volcano on April 23 was observed in real time by scientists on shore.

“It was an astonishing experience to see the changes taking place 300 miles away with no one anywhere nearby, and the data flowed back to land at the speed of light through the fiber-optic cable connected to Pacific City 鈥� and from there, to here on campus by the Internet, in milliseconds,” said , a 91探花professor of oceanography who led the installation of the instruments as part of a larger effort sponsored by the .

Delaney organized a on campus in mid-April at which marine scientists discussed how this high-tech observatory would support their science. Then, just before midnight on April 23 until about noon the next day, the seismic activity went off the charts.

The gradually increasing rumblings of the mountain were documented over recent weeks by , a 91探花marine geophysicist who studies such systems.

During last week’s event, the earthquakes increased from hundreds per day to thousands per day, and the center of the volcanic crater (2 meters) over the course of 12 hours.

“The only way that could have happened was to have the magma move from beneath the caldera to some other location,” Delaney said, “which the earthquakes indicate is right along the edge of the caldera on the east side.”

The seismic activity was recorded by eight that measure shaking up to 200 times per second around the caldera and at the base of the 3,000-foot seamount. The height of the caldera was tracked by the , which measures the pressure of the water overhead and then removes the effect of tides and waves to calculate its position.

The depth instrument was developed by , an oceanographer at Oregon State University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who has also and predicted that the volcano would erupt in 2015.

The most recent eruptions were in 1998 and 2011.

The volcano is located about 300 miles west of Astoria, Oregon, on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, part of the globe-girdling mid-ocean ridge system 鈥� a continuous, 70,000 km (43,500 miles) long submarine volcanic mountain range stretching around the world like the strings on a baseball, and where about 70 percent of the planet’s volcanic activity occurs. The highly energetic Axial Seamount, Delaney said, is viewed by many scientists as being representative of the myriad processes operating continuously along the powerful subsea volcanic chain that is present in every ocean.

“This exciting sequence of events documented by the OOI-Cabled Array at Axial Seamount gives us an entirely new view of how our planet works,” said , division director for ocean sciences at the National Science Foundation. “Although the OOI-Cabled Array is not yet fully operational, even with these preliminary observations we can see how the power of innovative instrumentation has the potential to teach us new things about volcanism, earthquakes and other vitally important scientific phenomena.”

The full set of instruments in the deep-sea observatory is scheduled to come online this year. A first maintenance cruise leaves from the 91探花in early July, and will let researchers and students further explore the aftermath of the volcanic activity.

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For more information, contact Delaney at 206-543-5059 or jdelaney@uw.edu. See also a from Oregon State University. Read previous 91探花Today articles about the observatory .

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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Tests are underway for two types of , one working at shallow depths and one in the dark depths, that will gather continuous, real-time data about the ocean environment. The robots are part of the UW-led , funded by a $239 million grant from the National Science Foundation and part of the national .

The tethered robots will be able to collect long-term observations and respond to events such as large storms or microbial blooms associated with underwater volcanic eruptions.

“By having this infrastructure positioned vertically throughout the water column, we will have an unprecedented capability to respond to oceanic events as necessary and to fine-tune our short-term and long-term observational strategies, all without going out there with a ship,” said project scientist .

The robots are now being tested at the 91探花campus in a saltwater tank and in a tank that can generate up to 10,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. Nearby at the UW’s Friday Harbor Laboratories, a new seafloor is equipped with cables that supply power and broadband Internet to the robots so they can practice moving up and down to record temperatures, currents and other environmental variables.

Engineers at the 91探花Applied Physics Laboratory built the . They added rechargeable batteries to an existing oceanographic tool that can normally only operate for a month and a half. The new version will dock weekly to recharge from a high-voltage seafloor cable, while using a short-distance wireless connection to upload each week’s observations to the Internet.

While on the job, the machine carries sensors that record water temperature, salinity, currents, oxygen, chlorophyll and other chemical and biological data. Engineers modified the original so that it can carry eight instruments and added a more precise timekeeping system. They also added a piece built by a Bellevue, Wash., company that transmits information through the wire as it is moving, so that even while profiling it can send some status updates back to shore.

“It’s a big, complicated project,” said , an engineer with the 91探花Applied Physics Laboratory building the deep profiler. “It’s a rare opportunity to work on a project of this magnitude, which is hopefully going to have a transformative impact on ocean science.”

The deep system will operate from as much as 1.8 miles depth up to 300 feet below the surface. 91探花ocean engineers have already installed several similar profilers of this kind, McGinnis said, including one in even deeper water off the coast of Hawaii.

The shallow-water profilers, a custom system built by a team of four project engineers at the Applied Physics Laboratory, will operate nearby. The shallow profiler will move from two football fields below the surface to just below the influence of waves. It will carry an array of complex instruments through the depths sunlight reaches to support more marine life.

Home base will be a platform at 650 feet depth that holds stationary instruments, a high-definition video camera, and a winch that feeds cable up to the moving science pod. Two 2-mile-long legs will anchor the platform to the seafloor. One leg will carry electricity and Internet up from the seafloor cable. The other provides stability, with a quick release in case the system needs an emergency recovery.

From his office at the UW, project engineer recently monitored the Friday Harbor tests. Crabs scuttle by the docking station, and a real-time video shows that the cable is spooling correctly on the drum. Unlike the deep system, the shallow profiler will have electricity and Internet running continuously to the instruments. Data pouring from the instruments reaches shore within a second.

“Typically these profilers just stored data, and every couple of months you’d have to go out, pull it off the wire, take it up to the surface and get the data out,” McRae said. “In our case, the instruments are connected real-time to shore, and we can see the data from them instantly.”

If the data show something interesting 鈥� a geothermal plume coming off the volcano, say, or unusual material floating near the surface 鈥� scientists can override the robot’s instructions to investigate further.

Engineers tested the shallow profiler for two months before bringing it back to the lab in March to check for wear on bearings and other moving parts in preparation for the first year-long deployment.

“I think once people see the data streaming, they are going to be pretty happy,” McRae said.

After the prototypes have been put through their paces engineers will build two more robots of each type. They will be installed this year in off Newport, Ore.; in farther offshore; and at the base of an 300 miles off the Oregon coast.

Next year engineers will build three more, placing one set in the water while the other set is refurbished on shore. Anchors and cables will be replaced every five years during the observatory’s projected 25-year lifetime.

Scientists, engineers and students will be from July to October to finish installation of the high-tech facility, which will be the world’s largest Internet-connected ocean observatory. It is scheduled to begin operating in 2015.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTfVBTE2QtQ

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For more information, contact Nancy Penrose, UW’s OOI communications coordinator, at 206-221-5781 or penrose@ocean.washington.edu. Read a one-page project .

“It went well, we accomplished all of our goals,” said principal investigator , a 91探花professor of oceanography. “It’s very exciting to see this thing coming together.”

Most of the work took place on or around a mile-high volcano that sits in water 2 miles deep, about 300 miles off the Oregon coast.

The instruments are the eyes and ears of a project that aims to provide a new way of doing oceanography. The 91探花is leading construction and early operation of a $239 million National Science Foundation project to bring high-voltage power and broadband Internet to the deep sea, allowing real-time, continuous monitoring of a geologic environment linked to massive earthquakes, major currents and mysterious ancient life forms.

The cabled observatory off the Washington and Oregon coasts, known as the , is part of the national , an effort to integrate U.S. measurements of the ocean and seafloor.

The cruise was the first of two UW-led expeditions to install the observatory hardware. Now on the seafloor are a video camera, an instrument that monitors inflation and deflation of the volcano, two pressure sensors, current meters, seismometers and three of the junction boxes that connect the high-voltage power lines to the scientific instruments. All are ready, once they are plugged in, to send live updates from the seafloor.

A highlight of the cruise was the first real-time recording of an earthquake inside the volcano. , a 91探花professor of oceanography, tuned into the live video feed in late July to help locate and install the seismometers. During the system’s six-hour test, while a robot provided power and Internet connection, the seismometers recorded one and 14 smaller ones. Wilcock was surprised and wonders if that’s a typical level of activity.

“This volcano erupts every 10 to 15 years, and we haven’t observed it long enough to really understand how it works,” Wilcock said. “The opportunity to observe this whole cycle is really quite important.”

Another coup was getting the high-definition video camera to work. Engineers at the 91探花 adapted a camera to have pan, tilt, zoom and lighting functions that would work in the deep sea. After reviewing the first images the scientists decided the camera could remain nestled among the deep-sea hydrothermal vents until the network is ready for plug-in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5j44zkw-Jc

Twenty 91探花undergraduates participated in the cruise. Students kept and created , worked on their own projects for class credit, and assisted the research team by documenting dives and helping process water samples while at sea.

The main goal of this year’s expedition was that connect the study sites to the high-voltage backbone cables. The 11 cables laid this summer included three that run right across the caldera of the active underwater volcano.

Many times the research team had to change plans to avoid waves that could jerk the robot’s tether as it entered the water carrying loaded spools weighing up to 4,000 pounds. One day the team waited until conditions were right to launch and then worked 48 hours straight laying three sections of cable.

“The pace was just incredible,” said project scientist . “Everybody was planning two moves ahead.”

The team also prepared for next year’s work by installing caissons, which are like big sewer pipes that researchers insert into the soft sediment and vacuum out the sediment inside, to hold precision seismometers. Also still to come is a thermometer that slips into the mouth of a hydrothermal vent, a mass spectrometer that will perform chemical analyses, tethered that will zoom from the ocean floor to near the surface, and more instruments to monitor seeping methane gas off the Oregon coast.

The remaining instruments will be tested this year and installed during an 80-day cruise next summer. The observatory is scheduled to be complete and commissioned in early 2015.

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For more information, contact Nancy Penrose, UW鈥檚 OOI communications coordinator, at 206-221-5781 or penrose@ocean.washington.edu.

Read a one-page project .