"Bingo! We said, 'Let's do something about this,'" he says. "That was a long time ago."
Undersea network
Now the vision is becoming a reality. A commercial cable-laying ship has just finished spooling out 900 kilometers of fiber optic cable. One strand starts from Pacific City, Oregon, goes out to the edge of the continental shelf and then loops down toward Newport, Oregon.
Another line heads far out to sea to an underwater volcano. Separately, scientists on the U.S. East Coast are anchoring test buoys for another advanced instrument network. This array off New England, south of Cape Cod, will be connected to shore by satellite and wireless links.
Scientists plan to attach dozens of instruments to the cables and buoys. Seismometers could give us a better idea about the offshore earthquake threat. Other sensors will track fish migration, ocean acidification, weather trends, and dissolved oxygen, just to name a few. Underwater microphones could capture whale calls, like these hard-to-find blue whales recorded earlier.
Real-time Internet data
Delaney says the undersea network is designed to funnel a fire hose of open source, real-time data to the Internet, 24/7.
"So people that are interested - and I'm hoping it will be a growing number of people - will have the ability to tap into what we're doing. They'll be able to watch over our shoulders electronically as we discover things, as we make mistakes," he says with a laugh.
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2013-11-27
2013-11-27
2013-11-27
2013-11-27
2013-11-27
2013-11-27