Other cabled observatories include the 2006 coastal Venus system and Neptune observatory in 2009, both now within Ocean Networks Canada (ONC), and the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). Orange has worked with French research institute CNRS on the Meust and Prima science cable projects. The IDMAR project, off the coast of Sicily, aims to provide scientists with data to better understand physical processes in deep marine environments. It hopes to find dark matter.ĪSN is working with Italy’s Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) to deploy an undersea laboratory cable incorporating a high-energy neutrino telescope. MK3NET aims to search for neutrinos from distant astrophysical sources like supernova remnants, gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, or colliding stars. The telescope will be distributed over three locations in the Mediterranean Toulon, France Sicily, Italy and Peloponnese, Greece. The Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT) aims to build on the previous Antares project off the coast of France as well as the Italian Nemo and Greek Nestor neutrino telescope projects (both deployed prototypes but were never fully built). Underwater telescopes make up a notable proportion of the dedicated and purpose-built science cables in the world. “This limits the reusability of telecom cables as scientific cables, unless the purpose is to transport scientific data between two locations, such as shore-to-shore communications." “Typical telecom submarine cables are designed to transport data and don’t have environmental sensors meaning they’re not intended to measure undersea temperature, pressure, vibrations, and so on,” says Brian Lavallée, senior director of solutions marketing at Ciena. The NPS Pt Sur cable runs 50km from Point Sur to Sur Ridge and is a retired US Navy acoustic cable operated by a naval post-graduate school. The Hawaii end of the retired HAW-4 cable is now being used for the ALOHA Cabled Observatory and is managed by Howe. There are few purpose-built science cables, but scientists also use retired commercial cables that have been moved and/or repurposed for research projects.
“My goal is to get more acoustics on all these cable systems to ultimately come up with the basin-scale system that can make these temperature measurements on a routine basis.” Howe, Research Professor at the Department of Ocean and Resources Engineering within the University of Hawaii’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST). “My whole career has been partly dominated by trying to measure large scale ocean temperature using acoustic transmissions through the ocean to infer that temperature,” says Professor Bruce M. The hardware was donated to other underwater neutrino projects. The Project existed from about 1976 through 1995, but was never completed.
The system proposed placing an underwater neutrino telescope in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hawaii, 5km beneath the surface. The Dumand project (Deep Underwater Muon And Neutrino Detector project) was an early example of dedicated science cables. And researchers have long understood the potential use of undersea communication cables for scientific purposes. The first subsea telegraph cables date back to the mid-1800s, with the first fiber cable going live in the 1980s. Fiber cables: good for science, if rarely deployed However, a number of upcoming subsea cables are looking to marry commercial cables carrying regular Internet traffic with sensors that could provide researchers with critical information about the status of our oceans and provide an important new source of ocean and climate data. Of the 400 or so subsea fiber cables in operation today, cables dedicated to carrying scientific data number in the dozens. It’s also key to understanding and measuring climate change and the changing patterns of the ocean that result from rising temperatures and melting ice caps. Understanding the oceans is critical to help understand our planet.