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 聽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.聽 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 UW鈥檚 large research vessel, the RV Thomas G. Thompson, returned May 8 to its home port after more than two years exploring the world鈥檚 oceans. A scheduled cruise in Tahiti has been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so the return is roughly two months earlier than planned.

The 21-member crew and two marine technicians will be under strict quarantine for two weeks.

After a major midlife overhaul, the UW鈥檚 274-foot vessel left Feb. 5, 2018 and has traveled for 823 days away from its home port. In that time the ship has done research expeditions off Massachusetts, Hawaii, New Zealand, Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, Australia, South Africa, Antarctica, Namibia and Uruguay. The ship traveled over 100,000 nautical miles, equivalent to more than four times around the world at the equator.

The vessel returned to its home port for maintenance and to shelter in place until explorations resume.

For more information, contact Hannah Hickey at聽hickeyh@uw.edu

After an “extreme makeover” that went from stem to stern on five decks of the ship, the is ready to get back to work exploring the world’s oceans.

The 91探花’s School of Oceanography, part of the College of the Environment, operates the 274-foot ship, which arrived on campus in 1991. In summer 2016, with funding from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation and the UW, the vessel headed to a Seattle shipyard for an 18-month midlife refit that will extend its life for another quarter century.

“The Tommy Thompson has a rich history of science and exploration, and now she鈥檚 better equipped than ever to travel the world鈥檚 oceans and help students and scientists make new discoveries,” said , professor and chair of the 91探花.

Upgrades to the ship include:

• New propulsion plant with four diesel generators, new switchboards, new propulsion drives, new controls and a new alarm and monitoring system
• New navigation and control systems on the ship’s bridge
• Adding a catwalk outside the bridge to facilitate maintenance
• More than 6 miles of new cabling and thousands of feet of new piping
• New air conditioning and refrigeration systems, higher-capacity desalination machine and a quieter exhaust system
• Upgrading and installing a new bottom-mapping sonar
• New fiber-optic network for faster data transmission
• New instrument well to deploy instruments from the ship and more electrical power for supporting remotely operated vehicles
• A complete update of the science team’s computer lab and new fume hoods in the lab spaces

The ship will leave Seattle on Monday, Feb. 5, for an expedition in New Zealand led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The vessel is fully booked with research cruises and likely won’t be back in Seattle for more than a year.

Douglas Russell, the UW’s manager of marine operations, has overseen much of the project work, which was done by Vigor Marine LLC at its Seattle shipyard.

“After all these months, I can hardly wait to see it get out and go to the South Pacific,” he said.

The R/V Thompson is the first of three university-based research vessels, all owned by the Office of Naval Research and part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System fleet, to get a similar midlife upgrade. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s vessel, the R/V Roger Revelle, will be next, followed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s R/V Atlantis.

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For more information, contact Russell at dgruss@uw.edu or 206-543-5062. Find of the vessel, and more photos of the .

This week, the ship will begin a yearlong stay in protected waters and dry dock near Seattle’s Harbor Island for a complete overhaul of its propulsion system, navigation and many core engineering systems. The $34.5 million project, funded by the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation, will allow the boat, originally intended to operate for 30 years, to continue for another 20 to 25 years.

The bulk of the is a roughly $23 million contract awarded to Seattle’s LLC. The boat leaves the 91探花dock Thursday at 9 a.m. to transit to Vigor’s shipyard near downtown Seattle. There the vessel will have its six diesel engines replaced, be outfitted with modern navigation and control systems, and get new plumbing and upgraded heating and ventilation.

“It’s like an old car, eventually things start breaking and you’re spending more and more time and money on repairs,” said , the UW’s manager of marine operations.

The overall project also includes training for the ship’s two captains and crew on the new systems, installing a new lifeboat, replacing the winches that lower instruments into the ocean from the deck and getting a fresh paint job.

The upgraded and overhauled Tommy Thompson, as the ship is commonly and affectionately known, will use less fuel, produce fewer emissions and will have the capacity to support new, high-powered ocean instruments. Several local maritime companies will be involved in the work, including Ockerman Automation Consulting of Anacortes and Markey Machinery Co. of Seattle.

“We are extremely proud of the Thompson and her crew. They play such a key role in our research and educational programs,” said , professor and director of the UW’s School of Oceanography. “She was already a fantastic ship to sail on 鈥� I can’t wait to see what she’s like in this next phase of her life.”

The Thompson was built in Moss Point, Mississippi, and arrived at the 91探花in 1991. Named for 91探花alumnus, professor, chemist and oceanographer Thomas Gordon Thompson, it was one of three similar vessels built in the 1990s to support U.S. oceanographic research.

The Thompson can accommodate 21 officers and crew, two marine technicians and up to 36 scientists. Designed to carry out research, the ship is optimized for stability, not speed. Its typical cruising speed is just 11 knots, or about 12.5 miles per hour, but it can hold a fixed position to collect observations and lower instruments while at sea.

The ship typically spends 260 to 300 days a year in open water, on trips that can last up to two months.

Over the years, the ship has from smoking vents on the seafloor, witnessed a submarine , used robots to and carried local to sea. It has even made a or . The Thompson did most of the installation of a off the Pacific Northwest (the new R/V Sikuliaq will carry out this summer’s maintenance cruise). For its last voyage, the Thompson deployed an ocean robot to off Washington’s coast.

The ship is owned by the Office of Naval Research, managed through the and operated by the UW. It is used by researchers from the 91探花and other institutions who secure research funding and then apply for time aboard the ship.

The Washington legislature also funds 45 days of ship time per year to support undergraduate research and education. 91探花undergraduates have traveled to the , and our own . Many also accompany 91探花faculty on research expeditions. The 91探花is among a handful of institutions where undergraduates can do research aboard a world-class research vessel.

Between the serious and sometimes round-the-clock work, passengers get to view beautiful vistas and marine wildlife, as well as continue traditions like at sea.

The ship’s namesake, (1888-1961) was a chemistry professor who founded the UW’s School of Oceanography. He developed ways to measure trace amounts of metals, salts and nutrients in seawater, ultimately exploring how these affect the water’s physical properties. Thompson was born in New York, earned his doctorate in chemistry at the 91探花in 1918 and joined the 91探花chemistry faculty in 1919. He founded the UW’s Friday Harbor Laboratories in 1930 and formally established the 91探花School of Oceanography in 1951.

The R/V Thompson is the first of the three similar major U.S. research vessels built in the same era to get such an overhaul. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution research vessels will undergo their refits in 2018 and 2020, respectively. The Thompson’s overhaul is expected to be complete by late spring 2017, and the ship is already booked to go back to sea next summer once the work is done.

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For more information, contact Russell at dgruss@uw.edu or 206-543-5062 and Armbrust at 206-616-1783 or armbrust@ocean.washington.edu. At Vigor, contact Jill Mackie at 206-623-1635 ext. 262 or Jill.Mackie@vigor.net. More photos of the ship are .

Journey 300 miles off the Washington-Oregon coast and dive nearly a mile deep into the ocean as scientists and 20 students use underwater robots to explore, map and sample methane ice deposits, an underwater volcano and seafloor hot springs spewing water up to 570 degrees F.

Just click yourself aboard, thanks to the Internet. On the Enlighten ’10 expedition , images are being updated each day of the four-week expedition and short documentary-style videos will be posted.

While at the site, don’t miss seeing preparations for the ship’s departure to Flight of the Bumblebee, the first from the chief scientist and, under the “Arts” heading, the poetry and . Yes, along with all the science topics, there is a section for the arts, celebrating such events as the Bosun’s Poetry Night.

The expedition, under way through Aug. 23 on the UW’s vessel Thomas G. Thompson, is laying the groundwork for a $126 million seafloor observatory comprised of science nodes, moorings and instruments all connected to land with a cable for power and real-time, high-speed, two-way communications.

The 91探花is leading development of this cabled project called the Regional Scale Nodes. It’s part of the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative and represents a major investment by the foundation in new approaches to science in the ocean basins. The Ocean Observatories Initiative is managed by the Consortium for Ocean Leadership in Washington, D.C., and other partners include Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Oregon State University and the University of California, San Diego.

“In time, hundreds of sensors on the seafloor and on fully instrumented water-column moorings will be deployed at sea and controlled by shore-based personnel, thanks to the electrical power and high-bandwidth telecommunications capabilities provided by this cabled network,” said Deborah Kelley, 91探花professor of oceanography and co-chief scientist on the cruise. The main cable carrying data and power will come ashore in Pacific City, Ore., and connect to high-speed Internet in Portland.

Work led by Oregon State University scientists also is being conducted during the Thompson expedition to define several coastal components of the Ocean Observatories Initiative.

Other participants on the current expedition come from Arizona State University, and groups from Woods Hole are providing support for the remotely operated vehicle Jason and the autonomous underwater vehicle Sentry, both cutting-edge platforms for conducting high-resolution mapping of the seafloor, according to Kelley.

At times, live video will be streamed from the seafloor showing exotic life forms or scientists at work on the ship. When visiting the website check the “Webcast: Streaming Live from the Sea” link to see if scientists are using the high-definition underwater video camera for mapping and surveying. The webcast allows you to watch over their shoulders and occasionally hear commentary.

“By 2014, the 800-kilometer network of fiber-optic and electrical cables and instruments will allow scientists, educators, students and the public to observe and interact with the oceans via the Internet in entirely new ways, 24/7, for decades,” said John Delaney, 91探花professor of oceanography and chief scientist on the cruise. “The Regional Scale Nodes is one of the first such systems — by 2020 there are likely to be many such installations across the global ocean,” says Delaney, who has recently traveled to more than 10 countries to discuss the project.

For the first time scientists have seen molten lava flowing from a deep-ocean seafloor volcano, exploding into 35-foot-long streams of red and gold and rising as bubbles as much as 3 feet across.

“Volcanic rocks, especially pillow basalts, are one of the most common rock forms on Earth, and yet no one has ever seen them forming in the deep ocean before,” said 91探花 oceanographer Joe Resing, chief scientist of an expedition earlier this year when scientists witnessed the sight at a volcano 4,000 feet below the surface. “More than 80 percent of volcanic eruptions take place underwater and we’ve made completely new observations to better understand fundamental processes shaping our Earth.”

Video was released for the first time to the media today during the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. In the footage, clouds of milky-yellow sulfur gas billow vigorously, molten red lava explodes into the icy ocean water and turns almost instantaneously to black rock while water vapor creates huge, glowing lava bubbles several feet across. The video was recorded during a May 5 to 13, 2009, expedition to West Mata volcano, about 125 miles southwest of Samoa, funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation.

Watch the clip on YouTube at .

This is only the second seafloor volcanic eruption ever seen. The other, found in 2004 and revisited by oceanographers this past April, is near Guam. It sends explosions of debris, gases and steam into the ocean, but no flows of molten lava have been observed at that site.

All other expeditions that have traveled to sites with telltale signs of eruptions either have been unable to find active eruptions or arrived after the action was over.

The video released publicly this week is not only great for TV, it’s useful.

“The whole ocean floor is created by this process of extruded lava but we’ve never seen it so we don’t know how rapidly this occurs, the volume of rock produced or how these eruptions build lava flows hundreds of meters thick,” said Robert Embly, a seafloor geologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center. Embley, who was co-chief scientist on the expedition, said he’s waited his whole 42-year career for a chance to see this.

Seeing seafloor eruptions might also be a way to better understand eruptions that occur on land because scientists can get so much closer to the ones on the seafloor, Resing says

For one thing, the recent eruption occurred so deep that water pressures tamped down gas explosions and limited how far molten lava spewed. The streams of lava seen shooting up to 35 feet in the water and volcanic rock fragments thrown 150 to 300 feet from the eruption would have been even more expansive in air. Also, oceanographers have unmanned, remotely operated vehicles that can maneuver near molten magma unlike anything available on land. During the expedition, for instance, the remotely operated vehicle worked within eight feet of the eruption site to insert instruments into billowing water and gases.

Scientists found evidence that eruptions were taking place six months before the expedition where lava flows were seen. 91探花oceanography professor Marv Lilley was on that November 2008 expedition and recorded very high hydrogen concentrations in the water.

“I knew that these high levels could only be produced during an active eruption,” Lilley says.

The findings merited a return expedition aboard the UW’s research vessel, the Thomas G. Thompson. Scientists zeroed in on the summit of a small volcano and found eruptive activity in an area 325 feet long with big vents at either end. The most violently erupting vent with molten lava was named Hades. The other vent, Prometheus, was erupting with low-level, nearly continuous fire fountains and ejecting debris.

Scientists were surprised to find boninite lavas, believed to be among the hottest lavas that erupt on Earth. These had only been previously found long solidified at old, extinct volcanoes.

Resing and other scientists wonder what kind of volcano this is. One possibility is an arc volcano, which forms above regions in the ocean where one tectonic plate is sliding under another.

Arc volcanoes are most commonly found in the Pacific Ocean and have resulted in creation of such island-arc chains found in Hawaii, Aleutians and Japan.

Resing is a chemical oceanographer whose 91探花appointment is through NOAA and the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Oceans based at the UW. Other scientists on the expedition included those from the University of Hawaii, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Western Washington University, Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Portland State University, Harvard University, University of Tulsa, California State University’s Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, University of California Santa Cruz and Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory.

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For more information:

Resing: resing@u.washington.edu; to reach Resing by phone during AGU contact Sandra Hines, 206-543-2580; after AGU his office phone is 206-526-6184

While the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was running a six-part series on problems plaguing Puget Sound, 91探花undergraduates, graduate students and faculty were at work on board the UW’s 274-foot research vessel gathering information needed to help puzzle out some of the sound’s most pressing problems.

Work during expeditions on the Thomas G. Thompson last month included tracking low-oxygen water from the Pacific Ocean through the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Hood Canal, where oxygen-deprived water is a concern when it kills fish. Another expedition sampled other sites in Puget Sound where shellfish beds have had to be closed in past years because of toxic phytoplankton blooms or bacterial outbreaks, a human health concern.

The 91探花is the only U.S. university that uses a ship as large and sophisticated as the Thompson for student education, according to Rick Keil, an associate professor of oceanography whose undergraduate class developed its own science plans and then executed them during a four-day expedition to learn more about low-oxygen waters of Hood Canal.

“Nobody has done a transect like this during 2006 that extends from the Pacific into Hood Canal and, in fact, nobody I know of has done one in the fall, so the class had a pretty unique opportunity to explore how the ocean connects to Hood Canal,” Keil says.

“We wanted to compare water on the outer coast, in the strait and in Hood Canal looking at phytoplankton, zooplankton, dissolved oxygen and species richness so we might quantify what’s going on,” says Chantell Wetzel, a senior majoring in aquatic and fishery sciences. The 20 students in Ocean 442 were divided into three groups. Wetzel’s group, for example, was concerned with benthic biology, the species found in the sediments.

Another student, Wendy Guo, a senior in oceanography, described work leading up to the expedition saying: “We got possible research topics and a basic outline of ship capabilities and we went to work on our own cruise plans. We had to decide the best ways to get the data we wanted.” Classmates then reviewed each group’s plan and Keil gave advice on what was feasible.

Their initial findings point to a system that isn’t rebooting itself by flushing.

“There didn’t appear to be a lot of deep ocean water going into Hood Canal,” Guo said.

Hood Canal is stagnating again, as it does every year, Keil says. “The coastal upwelling that fueled the inputs of new ocean water into the canal is finished for the year. Because of the way water is mixing in the eastern straits and in Admiralty Inlet, it is preventing any new deep water from getting into Hood Canal.”

“It also looks as if there is a small bloom of phytoplankton in Hood Canal that is growing in the low-oxygen water that was upwelled and killed the fish a month or so ago. Since phytoplankton aren’t sensitive to low oxygen, but are limited by nutrients, the upwelling that killed the fish was a boon for the phytoplankton. They are growing, assimilating nutrients, dying and sinking in the canal faster than the water is being flushed out. What this means is that they are acting as a nutrient-concentrating mechanism, which means that the canal is keeping its nutrient load and, thus, exacerbating the problem.”

Check the class Web site at http://courses.washington.edu/pugetoce/ for photos and video from the expedition and at the end of the quarter for the groups’ papers about their findings.

The situation in Hood Canal can cause deadly conditions for fish while other spots around the sound have posed dangers for humans in recent years. Algal blooms in Puget Sound are increasingly producing domoic acid, which can sicken and 鈥� in high enough doses 鈥� kill humans, other mammals and birds when they eat fish or shellfish contaminated with the toxin.

Since the 1991 discovery of domoic acid along the Washington coast, samples of shellfish have regularly been collected and analyzed by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, tribal nations and Washington Department of Health. When levels are too high, beaches are closed to harvesting. The closure of commercial shellfish beds near Port Townsend in fall 2003 was the first domoic acid-based closure on Puget Sound

Understanding these toxic blooms is the focus of the Pacific Northwest Center for Human Health and Ocean Sciences, a national research center based at the UW, and of another expedition last month on the Thompson.

Human-health concerns did not prompt closure of any areas in Puget Sound this year, giving researchers a chance to look at the characteristics of water at sites where there have previously been problems, says Gabrielle Rocap, an assistant professor of oceanography and chief scientist for the cruise Oct. 12-15. The researchers did extensive sampling, she says, visiting sites in the main basin of Puget Sound, Port Madison, around Vashon Island, Hood Canal, Strait of Juan de Fuca, Discovery Bay, Whidbey basin and Penn Cove.

According to preliminary analysis done on the ship during the expedition, the diatom Pseudo-nitzschia, which is harmless unless it is producing domoic acid at dangerous levels, was found at highest concentrations in water samples from the Whidbey Basin according to Micaela Parker, a research scientist with oceanography. It was found in much lower concentrations closer to the shore in that area.

Where the diatoms are concentrated and where they are carried are among the things researchers are trying to discover as they investigate the environmental conditions that trigger blooms of harmful algae. How the blooms affect public health, for instance determining what populations are at greatest risk, was another area of concern for the researchers who were on board the Thompson.

During the expedition, some time each day was devoted to working meetings between the oceanographers and public health researchers to share research discoveries and discuss plans for a new course in the field of oceans and human health. The Pacific Northwest Center for Human Health and Ocean Sciences, co-directed by Elaine Faustman, professor of environmental and occupational health sciences, and Ginger Armbrust, professor of oceanography, is in the midst of a seminar series this fall (see details at )聽and hopes to offer a course in the fall of 2007.

“Every field has its jargon, its way of communicating concepts,” Parker said. “We’re trying to learn to communicate oceanography in ways that public health participants can understand and they are trying to do the same for us.”

The human health expedition included two undergraduates who worked on projects last summer with center researchers.

“A unique attribute of our educational programs is having the resources to use the Thompson in ways that provide both hands-on learning experiences for our students and at the same time enables research that contributes to addressing complex problems of importance to our region,” says Russ McDuff, director of the School of Oceanography.

In addition to the longer cruises last month, the school also offered three shorter outings using the Thompson for undergraduate classes led by lecturer Richard Strickland, professor Chuck Nittrouer and aquatic and fishery science’s Thomas Pool.