Vancouver Sun: After almost a decade of planning and installation, the planets have finally aligned for the NEPTUNE Canada project. Billed as the world's largest undersea cabled observatory, NEPTUNE consists of five main data-collection sites off the west coast of Vancouver Island. They are spread over an expanse of the ocean floor and connected by an 800-kilometre loop of fibre-optic cable.
The final link in the NEPTUNE chain was completed this week at Endeavour Ridge, a volcanically active area of undersea mountains about 300 kilometres from land. The node there has been outfitted with instruments and the final lengths of cable have been laid, essentially completing the data network. The installation team has just returned from a month at sea...
It's now poised to bring in more than 60 terabytes of data in the next quarter century -- the equivalent of the text contained in about 60 million books -- yielding information about biological, chemical and geological processes, which can be applied to all manner of research...
The application of the data collected could include insight into earthquakes, since NEPTUNE's area of coverage includes the Juan de Fuca plate... Pollution and climate change are other key areas of study that could benefit from subsea data...
Its name stand for North-East Pacific Time-Series Underwater Networked Experiments, indicating both its location and its goal of providing 25 years of continuous information from beneath the ocean's surface... A remotely operated underwater vehicle was used for the project.
