Can the World’s Largest Undersea Observatory Find a Kraken in the Next 25 Years?

The bad part about explore the sea floor is that there ’s water everywhere . It ’s dark , cold and not terribly compatible with breathing . But with Neptune Canada sprawled along 500 mile of the ocean floor like an ancient snake , nothing down there will escape our subject field .

The Neptune — North - East Pacific Time - series Undersea Networked Experiments — Canada Ocean internet is the world ’s bombastic cabled undersea lookout . It ’s sensors spread from edge of Western British Columbia , out along the Juan de Fuca tectonic shell , covering 530 miles of diverse submersed terrain .

Six nodes circulate out at various placement along the vertebral column line with more than 250 instruments among them . The datum that these instruments collect—60 terabytes yearly — is then transmitted back along the central cable to fiber visual lines to the University of Victoria where it is automatically file away and made available—free—atNeptuneCanada.ca . So far , Neptune Canada has racked up over 10 Tbit of scientific information since its activation in December ’ 09 .

This monumental serial of sensors measures and commemorate everything — from temperature , press , saltiness and current flow rate to sonar readings to still and video images , as well as nucleus and microbe samples . It ’s got underwater mics to record the sound of passing whales and seismometers to record the rumble of pass plates . With this uninterrupted violent stream of data , researchers trust to advance a potpourri of disciplines , from temblor and denture tectonics to climate change to longsighted - term observation of deep - ocean ecosystems . The system itself has an expected 25 - class serve spirit .

The Neptune Canada sea electronic web is headed by American scientist Kate Moran , who just recently took over as director of the ocean web in July of this year . Formerly , she served for two years as help director in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy , advise the Obama governing on the oceans , the Arctic and world-wide warming . “ Earth observation networks are vital for understanding the Earth system , particularly in the oceans as they become further impacted by climate change and in seismically participating area , such as Canada ’s west coast , ” Moran said in a press release .

The system be $ 106 million to install , and run with a $ 12 million annual budget . With that much money being thrown around , I postulate to see a Kracken — or at least a tone Giant Squid dash .

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