A group of University of Victoria researchers is taking exploration of the Southern Ocean to new depths.
Ocean Networks Canada (ONC), a University of Victoria initiative, together with the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) successfully installed a replacement subsea-cabled observatory off the coast of Antarctica.
This new observatory will collect and transmit high-quality, near real-time data on environmental changes in the Southern Ocean via satellite, providing critical insights into one of the least observed regions on the planet.
"We re-installed a coastal observatory that is connected to the shore at the Spanish Antarctic Station," said Kate Moran, CEO and president of ONC.
The goal is to study the Southern Ocean 鈥� the Antarctic Ocean 鈥� which Moran emphasized is far more than just a vast ice sheet.
"Around the entire continent during the winter months, the surface ocean freezes; it鈥檚 called sea ice and that sea ice extent has been decreasing dramatically and we don鈥檛 fully understand why or how that might impact marine life," Moran explained.
Ruchie Custan, a marine equipment specialist at the Marine Technology Centre in North Saanich, led the challenging task of developing what Moran calls, a "shore station on a chip" for data collection in such a remote and harsh environment.
"The challenge with that [was] there is no readily available solution that would allow us for low-power and high-resolution data in these types of applications and that's sort of the reason behind why we had to develop our own controller and make it here in our facility."
The observatory, a palm-sized controller housed within an Iridium shore system, was deployed on March 7 as part of an ongoing partnership with the Unit of Marine Technology of CSIC from the Juan Carlos I Spanish Antarctic Station on Livingston Island. It transmits data from sensors submerged approximately 25-30 metres underwater and 200 meters from shore, directly to the Oceans 3.0 digital infrastructure.
"The controller resides on the shore so the antenna would be exposed and will be transmitting to the satellite," Custan explained.
The data is now freely accessible to researchers worldwide via the internet.
"Anyone in the world can go on the internet and the data are flowing," Moran said.
Adding to the excitement, the first all-Canadian expedition to Antarctica aboard the Royal Canadian Navy vessel, HMCS Margaret Brooke, is scheduled to visit the observatory soon to conduct seafloor mapping and measure water properties.
Oceanographic data from the observatory offshore at the Juan Carlos I Spanish Antarctic Station is available on ONC鈥檚 data management portal, Oceans 3.0.
For more information, including footage of the deployment, visit oceannetworks.ca.
