Issue link: http://uwashington.uberflip.com/i/97397
Positioning for the future An NSF-supported effort to virtually inhabit the seafloor will reshape the future of our relationship to the world's oceans Professor and Principal Investigator John R. Delaney leverages technology to advance breakthrough research on the world's oceans. Unlocking the Oceans' Secrets I magine going to a Web site and transporting yourself to the ocean floor. You might witness a deep-sea volcano erupt in HD video, or listen to a blue whale sing. If you're a scientist or student, you could tap into a vast flow of real-time data about biological, chemical, geological and physical processes. UW oceanographer John Delaney has dreamed of this capability for over 20 years. Now, thanks to a multi-decade National Science Foundation (NSF) project called the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) and UW-IT support, that dream is close to becoming reality. "For thousands of years, humans have gone to sea," Delaney said. "By 2014, instead of transiting, we'll 'be there' in a virtual sense. For the first time, humans are on the threshold of being virtually present, 24/7/365, within the complex, restless ocean that supports life on earth. Unless we can observe this global system in real time, it's possible to completely miss the big events—eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, giant storms. Key processes in this ever-changing planetary life support system are not routinely accessible if one is constrained to a ship, which can only be in one place at one time." In pursuit of his goal, Delaney has led annual voyages on the UW's Research Vessel Thomas G. Thompson since 1995, often making incremental advancements, like streaming the first ever HD broadcast from the ocean floor. UW-IT, partnering with UWTV, has been instrumental in contributing to the design of the supporting infrastructure, both on board and on land. This infrastructure—including 500 miles of fiber-optic cable off Washington and Oregon and robot sensors in the ocean— 8 UW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY moves massive amounts of data between the ocean floor, the ship, a Ku-Band satellite, the UW and the global Internet. "UW-IT turned out to be one of our guardian angels," Delaney said. "They provided essential technical support to a number of our seagoing efforts." The partnership has enabled data to be rapidly beamed from ship to shore so people around the world can watch live video feeds of the scientists at work on the ship and on the seafloor. While helping to bring bandwidth to the bottom of the sea is one dramatic example of UW-IT's efforts, it is only part of an ongoing, multi-year initiative to provide cutting-edge capabilities and bandwidth, both wired and wireless, to all three UW campuses, the UW Medical Center, Harborview Medical Center, Washington's K-20 Education Network and more. "We're research partners," said Clare Donahue, UW-IT associate vice president of Networks, Data Centers & Telecommunications. "We want our students, faculty and staff to have the best tools to transform their work. We are always engaged with the future—and John's work is a perfect example of that." Delaney's ultimate vision is to capture enough data to enable highly sophisticated computer models to predict large-scale shifts in ocean behavior—events that may have a global impact. "That's the transformation we're contributing to," said Delaney. "A monumental effort to fully understand this incredibly complicated life support system that affects every human on the planet."