Illuminating the Hidden Planet: The Future of Seafloor Observatory Science

摘要

Earths oceans are essential to society as a source of food and minerals, a place of recreation, an economic means of transporting goods, and a keystone of our national security. Despite our reliance on the ocean and its resources, it remains a frontier for scientific exploration and discovery. Scientists have been using ships to explore the ocean with great success over the past 50 years and this mode of expeditionary science has led to remarkable increases in oceanographic knowledge. A ship-based expeditionary approach, however, is poorly suited for investigating changes in the ocean environment over extended intervals of time. To advance oceanographic science further, long time-series measurements of critical ocean parameters, such as those collected using seafloor observatories, are needed (NRC, 1998a). For the purpose of this report the term seafloor observatories is used to describe an unmanned system of instruments, sensors, and command modules connected either acoustically or via a seafloor junction box to a surface buoy or a fiber optic cable to land. These observatories will have power and communication capabilities and will provide support for spatially distributed sensing systems and mobile platforms. Instruments and sensors will have the potential to make measurements from above the air-sea interface to below the seafloor and will provide support for in situ manipulative experiments.