What Lies Beneath?
Exploring the ocean traditionally has been like studying the South Pole one ice cube at a time. Oceanographic research vessels are scarce and operate at the whim of weather. Clouds can block satellite-based cameras and sensors. And deep-sea submarines are wildly expensive and difficult to use. The result is that our understanding of the ocean consists of scattered snapshots that don’t do much more than hint at what really goes on beneath the waves.
John Delaney wants to change this. The 62-year-old oceanographer with the University of Washington has carved out a distinguished career in research and exploration. He’s also one of the energizing forces behind Project NEPTUNE (North East Pacific Time-series Underwater Networked Experiments), a proposed undersea observatory that would monitor a large chunk of the North Pacific Ocean using sensors, robots, underwater cameras and other devices--all wired to land-based research centers and the public via the Internet. NEPTUNE is well on its way to fruition, with Canadian co-researchers having raised about $48 million and Delaney and his American counterparts another $28 million. NEPTUNE has the support--endorsements and money--of prestigious institutions such as the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and it will compete for full funding from the National Science Foundation early next year. (Delaney says building the project will cost between $170 million and $230 million, with annual operating costs of between $15 million and $25 million.) If all goes well, the first sensors could be in place in 2008.
NEPTUNE would give scientists unprecedented access to one of the most dynamic places on the planet, with lessons to be learned about oceans elsewhere. The North Pacific Ocean is roiled by earthquakes and volcanoes that remake the sea floor. Super-heated water billows from fissures and weird chimneys called “black smokers.” It’s a productive fishery, nurturing salmon, crab and halibut. And deep beneath it may exist giant colonies of mysterious microbes that resemble life on other planets.
For Delaney, NEPTUNE would end one of his greatest frustrations: the inability to visit the ocean floor for months or years at a time, or on short notice. Still, he has accomplished much, becoming an expert on the Juan de Fuca plate off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. In 1998, he became the first person to bring a black smoker up from the depths.
Placing instruments across the North Pacific floor could overcome the severe limitations of shipboard ocean research. Oversimplified, the idea is a variation of the Web cams that allow people to check traffic jams on the I-5. But the elaborate system planned for NEPTUNE requires a new generation of complex gadgets. The sea-floor sensors, tethered instruments and robots that Delaney envisions must withstand crushing depths and bone-chilling temperatures while sending a constant stream of data through fiber-optic cables. Some prototypes already exist, including a self-contained undersea robot developed at Woods Hole called the Autonomous Benthic Explorer.
Developing instruments that can handle that task could pay dividends beyond NEPTUNE, Delaney says. For example, the bizarre microbes that sometimes shoot out of black smokers may constitute one of the biggest masses of living material on Earth. Might other planets with volcanic activity and perhaps liquid water--such as Jupiter’s moon Europa--also harbor life? To answer that question will require devices that are tough and adept, much like the ones being developed for NEPTUNE. Says Delaney: “Whatever we send to another planet should be tested in an environment that is comparable, because it will have to do a lot of thinking on its own.”
Beyond that, Delaney says, there’s a constant need to understand how what happens in the ocean eventually influences what happens on dry land. For instance, El Nino--the occasional change in sea-surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific--causes sparse snow in Washington state, drought in East Africa, floods in Australia. These changes in turn have a direct impact on food production. As the world’s population increases, Delaney says, understanding how the ocean alters life on land will become more important.
Will NEPTUNE provide that understanding? Perhaps. Certainly, it’s a new approach to studying the oceans, which compose 70% of the planet’s surface. The big hurdle is funding. The National Science Foundation’s budget for fiscal year 2005 has set aside $245 million for oceanic observatories such as NEPTUNE. But NEPTUNE must compete against projects focusing on coastlines and wide-ocean areas. And while NEPTUNE has been broadly embraced by the scientific community, it also has its foes. Some fret that its wire-based concept is too limited at a time when wireless technology is expanding; others fear that it will siphon money from other research.
Still, NEPTUNE offers something that vague proposals about travel to Mars do not: a concrete chance to explore a great unknown. Soon. Michael Purdy, director of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, helped get a long-term ocean-observation initiative in the funding queue when he worked at the National Science Foundation. He says we’ve seen most of the ocean’s depths, but that we’re missing a sense of how the ocean changes day to day, week to week and month to month. “And it really is exploration, because each time we study a single place in the ocean over a period of time we find surprising things,” he says.
“People look at the ocean and see waves breaking on the shore, but it is far more fascinating than that,” Delaney says. “Some of the strangest creatures on the planet live there, the biggest creatures on the planet, the smallest creatures on the planet. But we can’t understand the ocean by visiting it now and again. We have to be there all the time.”
