Sea-Floor Sunday #57: Ocean Observatories Initiative

This week’s Sea-Floor Sunday is from a press release from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Consortium for Ocean Leadership (COL) earlier this month about the launch of the Ocean Observatories Initiative.

Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) will provide a network of undersea sensors for observing complex ocean processes such as climate variability, ocean circulation, and ocean acidification at several coastal, open-ocean and seafloor locations. Continuous data flow from hundreds of OOI sensors will be integrated by a sophisticated computing network, and will be openly available to scientists, policy makers, students and the public.

To illustrate this they put together this nice diagram of the bathymetry of the Cascadia continental margin, the Juan de Fuca plate, and associated spreading center and transform zones.

credit: NSF

Click on the image to go to the OOI site to learn more about what kind of sensors will be deployed and the overall program.

The Cascadia margin is one of my favorite continental margins — I’ve shown similar images before (here) and it was the focus of the third part of the subduction denialism series (here).