Deep sea cyber monitoring coming soon...

Shrimp on deep sea floor near volcanic eruption at Mariana Arc.Are you interested in turning your computer screen into your own personal deep sea aquarium - perhaps to watch underwater volcanoes erupt live on the internet? Well you're wish may become a reality soon. The US is moving forward with a large-scale, multi-year project to build the Ocean Observatories Institute (OOI),  a network of ocean observing components, and their associated cyberinfrastructure, that will allow scientists to examine ocean processes on global, regional and coastal scales. According to principal investigator John Orcutt, a professor of geophysics at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography,

"The OOI provides scientists, for the first time, an infrastructure to conduct interactive experiments in some of the ocean's most extreme environments. This interactive capability will be enabled by the OOI cyberinfrastructure, which links and binds the physical infrastructure into a state-of-the-art scientific network that can be accessed in near-real-time (within seconds of data collection) by any scientist; in fact, any person."

While other cyber monitoring initiatives have been undertaken, the near-real-time access and complete openness of the data are unique to the OOI. UC San Diego and Ocean Leadership have received an initial $32 million to begin construction of the project. Total project costs are $274.58 million, with $106 million coming from federal stimulus money. Initial data-flow is scheduled for early 2013 with final commissioning of the full system by 2015.

--by Rob Goldstein