The Martlet

Dr. Laurenz Thomsen from Jacobs University, Germany, turns on his laptop, takes a sip of coffee and logs into the NEPTUNE Canada cabled seafloor network. He turns on the light to see the ocean floor halfway around the globe and wraps his hands around the controls of Wally, a deep-sea crawler robot whose name was inspired by the Disney movie Wall-E.

Soon, fish are swimming around their new robot friend and spider crabs are observing him curiously. But the ocean floor is unpredictable. A big jellyfish drifts in and promptly sticks to Wally’s microsensors, which are crucial for his scientific mission. And Wally just can’t deal with it by himself. NEPTUNE Canada rescued Wally during the July maintenance cruise, repaired him and returned him to his home in Barkley Canyon last week.

The ocean floor, reimagined

The field of ocean science has been transformed. For one hundred and fifty years, researchers studied the ocean by going to sea once, or at most, a few times a year. Through these limited trips, scientists tried to explain and understand what happens in the depths of the oceans that cover 70 per cent of the planet. Oceans give us food, transport our ships, influence our weather, and absorb CO₂ from our atmosphere. But we know more about certain regions of outer space than we do of the ocean. Now, researchers can “be” in the ocean all the time and control instruments on robots like Wally through the Internet.

Dr. Thomsen, who developed Wally the crawler, is one of many scientists involved in a research project with NEPTUNE Canada. The robot is deployed in Barkley Canyon, a submarine canyon 96 kilometers off the west coast of Vancouver Island, at about 850 meters depth. The stout undersea robot is equipped with a camera to observe curious deep-sea species, and sensors to measure methane, turbidity, pressure, temperature, water currents and salinity.

NEPTUNE Canada, part of UVic’s Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) observatory, is the world’s first regional-scale underwater ocean network located off the west coast of Vancouver Island. NEPTUNE Canada allows people from around the world to study the ocean in real time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Dr. Kate Moran joined NEPTUNE Canada this month as the program’s new director. Dr. Moran is a world-renowned ocean engineer who has just completed a two-year term as assistant director in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in Washington, D.C.

“Earth observation networks are critical for understanding the Earth system, particularly in the oceans, as they become further impacted by climate change and in seismically active areas, such as Canada’s west coast,” said Moran in a press release.

NEPTUNE faces many challenges

There are many challenges to installing and making everything work in a hostile marine environment of high pressure, low temperature and salinity.

“We’re starting to switch to the maintenance mode for some of our instruments,” explains Dr. Kim Juniper, new associate director science at NEPTUNE Canada. “Seawater doesn’t mix well with electricity,” he says with a smile. “Some instruments work right out of the box; others take more development time. And you can’t just dash out and fix something when it breaks. Repairs and maintenance require expensive seagoing missions with a robotic submersible that are planned a year in advance. Winter weather in the North Pacific is too nasty for maintenance work, so repairs have to wait until summer. We’re getting really good at squeezing the last bit of data out of a crippled sensor.”

The Victoria Experimental Network Under the Sea (VENUS), the coastal network of the ONC observatory, is located in Saanich Inlet and the Strait of Georgia. Dr. Richard Dewey, associate director research for VENUS, is still amazed after five years of data streaming.

“We have continuous eyes on the ocean and a continuous view of what’s happening down there, and we still have surprises,” he says. “There’s way more structure than we thought; the environment is that crazy.”

Dealing with constant streaming data from the ocean is a real change for ocean scientists. Dr. Dewey uses the meteorologist analogy: “Think of a meteorologist that is only able to study weather by looking out the window once a month.” Suddenly, the window is constantly open, causing a flow of information. This is the situation marine scientists experience with the sea floor observatory. New tools are needed to deal with so much data. It’s a slow process.

Crowdsourcing and science

Benoit Pirenne is the associate director of information technology and manages data for VENUS and NEPTUNE Canada.

“We’ve got this exponentially increasing amount of data on the seafloor coming from all the sensors that we have underwater,” explains Pirenne. “Hundreds of hours of videos are sitting there in the archive, under-exploited, because we don’t have enough pairs of eyes or scientific minds to perform the analysis of the content of these videos.”

The solution? According to Pirenne, it’s crowdsourcing. “I’m asking a lot of people out there, who are potentially interested in what I’m doing, to spend a bit of time reviewing some data and tell us what they’ve seen in it,” he says.

Discovering a new species could be around the corner for anyone. According to Pirenne, the crowdsourcing exercise will take the form of a “game with a purpose” where volunteers are performing what’s called “citizen science.” Projects like these exist in the astronomy field. For example, the game “Planet Hunters” allows the public to help NASA find new planets by logging onto a web portal called Zooniverse. Cathy Ruedinger, program co-ordinator at Texas A&M University, is one of the 397 000 participants on the portal.

“It’s all about learning,” says Ruedinger. “I love to continue to learn things and the Zooniverse provides endless opportunities to do that. It also means being a part of something huge.”

It is this type of energy and public involvement that Benoit Pirenne hopes to attract for NEPTUNE Canada and VENUS.

Pirenne is working arduously on a crowdsourcing project called “Digital Fishers” for NEPTUNE Canada and VENUS, which could potentially be the first crowdsourcing project in ocean sciences. This game is a joint project with the Centre for Global Studies at UVic and is supported by Canada’s Advanced Research and Innovation Network. Pirenne says the new version should be available by the end of spring and will have different levels, like a game, so people can learn and become a pro.

“People will be able to flag when there is a fish or a sea star for example. Once you have that, you help scientists pinpoint directly where things of potential interest to them are located,” Pirenne explains. “There is an incredible richness and potential in engaging the public in projects like VENUS and NEPTUNE Canada.”

One of the main challenges of the game is streaming high-resolution videos to a lot of people at the same time. Pirenne’s development team has been testing the game by feeding high-resolution videos to UVic students, and, so far, it’s worked well. Last year, a senior-level biology course at UVic studied marine taxonomy with this prototype, but even high school and older elementary students would have fun exploring the ocean with the submarine-like interface. Pirenne hopes to bring the game to the general public later this year. The public will be able to view 15-second clips of undersea video and give a description of what they saw using a game-like application that has levels and rewards.

As a result, researchers like Dr. Thomsen in Germany or future marine biology graduate students at UVic will be able one day to benefit from citizen science. The public will be collaborators, part of the scientific community, and part of the new discoveries and understanding of the ocean. This will not only help the public to understand science projects, but also understand the scientific process.

Besides documenting species, the seafloor observatory can also track or predict earthquakes and tsunami with pressure sensors. Researchers were able to use this feature on March 12, 2011, when sensors measured the tsunami waves approaching the west coast of Vancouver Island after a massive earthquake hit Japan. This new window into our oceans is going beyond providing raw data for scientists and will have many benefits for the public in the years to come.