Seminar: SMART Subsea Cables for Observing the Ocean and Earth: An Update

Current and planned submarine cables span the oceans, crossing through zones of oceanographic and seismic interest. As they are replaced over their 10-25 year refresh cycle, SMART capabilities can be added to gradually obtain high data rate global coverage. (data from cablemap.com)

Bruce Howe Ocean and Resources Engineering School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology University of Hawaii at Manoa JTF SMART Subsea Cables (Joint Task Force, Science Monitoring And Reliable Telecommunications, 1) is working to integrate environmental sensors for ocean bottom temperature, pressure and seismic acceleration into submarine telecommunications cables. The purpose of SMART Cables is supporting climate and ocean observation, sea level monitoring, observations of Earth structure, and tsunami and earthquake early warning and disaster risk reduction. Recent advances include regional SMART pilot systems that are the first steps to trans-ocean and global implementation. Building on the OceanObs’19 conference

China and Ocean Observing

Photo of Drs Feng Zhang and Bruce Howe

During the last week of April 2017, ORE research professor Bruce Howe visited China to learn more about their ocean observing efforts, specifically using cabled systems. Tongji University is leading a major push by China in this area, somewhat similar to our NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative. Other partners include Zhejiang University and the Chinese Academy of Sci-ences. Two cable systems are planned, one in the East China Sea, and one in the South China Sea (see fig-ure). The current vision for the latter is a 1400-km multi-node system, quite ambitious and never been-done-before. The budget for the total effort is

Deepest ocean observatory celebrates ten years of operation

ACO image

The ALOHA Cabled Observatory (ACO), the deepest operating ocean observatory on the planet that provides power and internet communications to scientific instruments on the seafloor, recently celebrated 10 years of operations. The development and deployment of the nearly 3-mile deep observatory was led by SOEST and supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to UH Mānoa.“Since the HMS Challenger plumbed the deeps during its 1876 circumnavigation, measurements of the deep ocean have remained sporadic and extremely sparse in time and space. Our goal at ACO has been to establish a permanent toehold in this extreme abyssal environment, enabling