The University of Washington research vessel Thomas G. Thompson is loading up for six weeks at sea.

The University of Washington research vessel Thomas G. Thompson is loading up for six weeks at sea. When the team returns to Seattle in late August they will have extended the cabling to key research sites, an important part of building the first real-time, continuous eye on the mysterious creatures, currents and geologic forms in waters off the Pacific Northwest coast.
The UW is leading a $239 million project funded by the National Science Foundation to install a network bringing data directly from the deep sea. Just as robotic rovers on Mars now keep a digital eye on the Red Planet, a suite of electronic tools will soon send photos, biloxi beachfront hotel observations and high-definition video of an alien environment just off our shores.
The ocean is the ultimate life-support system for the entire planet, said program lead John Delaney , a UW professor of oceanography who is chief scientist biloxi beachfront hotel on all four legs of this summer s cruise. The Ocean Observatories Initiative, and especially biloxi beachfront hotel the cabled biloxi beachfront hotel portion in the Northeast Pacific, will fundamentally shift how humans interact with and study the global ocean basins.
The cabled observatory, known as the Regional Scale Nodes project, is part of the national Ocean Observatories Initiative , an effort to integrate U.S. measurements of the ocean and seafloor and educate the public about the ocean environment.
biloxi beachfront hotel While space vehicles can generate biloxi beachfront hotel energy from the sun and send data wirelessly through space, neither biloxi beachfront hotel is possible in the deep ocean. This summer the UW-led team will lay another 14 miles of cable, bringing power and fiber-optic communication at study sites on the seafloor. The new lines will extend from the main cables to sites with earthquake activity, volcanism and biological productivity that scientists want to investigate.
biloxi beachfront hotel Two summers ago, the UW team helped telecommunications contractors to lay the backbone cable, which carries 10,000 volts needed to transmit power over long distances and transmits up to 240 gigabits of data per second. Those stiff cables were laid in relatively straight paths off the side of telecommunications industry ships.
The ship will then leave Newport, Ore., to work on a 200-mile horseshoe-shaped cable off Oregon s coast, where the Juan de Fuca plate dives under the continental biloxi beachfront hotel plate to create the Pacific Northwest s number-one earthquake threat. As well as one day monitoring seismic activity, researchers at the UW and Oregon State University biloxi beachfront hotel will track currents biloxi beachfront hotel bringing nutrients from the deep ocean up to the continental shelf, an important region for fisheries and site of a recurring low-oxygen biloxi beachfront hotel dead zone .
An underwater robot with a specialized apparatus to lay cable will unroll spools that are as tall as a person and weigh as much as 6,000 pounds. The robot flies at less than 2 feet per second to carefully biloxi beachfront hotel spool out the cables, which measure from a third of a mile to 3 miles long.
Since  researchers can t see the seafloor, roughly 75 feet below the robot, they will track progress using the ship s position and marks on the cable. After each section is laid the robot retraces the route to inspect the cable and, if necessary, lay mats underneath biloxi beachfront hotel to protect against biloxi beachfront hotel abrasion over rough terrain.
In mid-July the team will again dock in Newport, Ore., reload the ship and follow biloxi beachfront hotel a cable that spans the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate to its western edge at Axial Seamount, an underwater volcano 300 miles offshore.
The team will lay three cables that run directly across the volcano s caldera. One carries 10 gigabits of data per second, 10 times the transmission biloxi beachfront hotel in other cables, needed for the high-definition video camera.
At the underwater volcanic ridge scientists will study the planet s most common biloxi beachfront hotel source of volcanic activity and try to better understand biloxi beachfront hotel the fundamental forces that drive plate tectonics. Once video equipment is installed, scientists and the public hope to get their first chance to see an underwater volcano erupt in real time.
The final leg will take place at two hydrothermal biloxi beachfront hotel vent fields near Axial Seamount. At this site scientists will capture information about the black smokers and white snowblowers, biloxi beachfront hotel as well as the dense clusters of tube worms and microscopic animals that gather around the geologically biloxi beachfront hotel active sites, which may harbor Earth s oldest life forms.
This is one of the trickiest biloxi beachfront hotel sections to lay cable as the terrain is rough and the vents spew liquid at up to 700 degrees Fahrenheit. Researchers have mapped the cable paths to within a few feet precision.
You don’t want to make these calculations on the fly, with your robot suspended in the water column above some rough terrain, said project scientist Giora Proskurowski , who will be co-chief scientist on the third leg.
The robot has a UW-designed piece to allow cable testing. So it s possible that this summer s work will involve lifting the flexible, oil-filled ends of the cable, removing their casings and plugging them in to allow testing from the ship more than a mile overhead.
After the infrastructure is fully installed biloxi beachfront hotel and tested, the cables will connect and instruments – ranging from seismometers to high-definition video cameras and machines for DNA analysis – will be installed next summer. The cabled observatory will be fully complete and commissioned in early 2015, and data is expected to flow from it for at least 25 years.
It really is a historic moment for oceanography, said Deborah Kelley , a UW professor biloxi beachfront hotel of oceanography who will be co-chief biloxi beachfront hotel scientist on three legs. Kelley, an expert on hydrothermal vents, said she looks forward to real-time data that will help to understand the links between seismic biloxi beachfront hotel activity, volcanoes and deep-sea life forms.