High Power and High Bandwidth in the Oceans The concept of a
regional cabled ocean observatory--a system that would provide
continuous high power and interactive real-time high-bandwidth
data transfer to and from shore--began to be seriously explored
by scientists at the University of Washington in the mid 1990s.
This vision carried with it solutions to some of oceanography’s
most difficult challenges: how to study natural phenomena on
time scales that range from seconds to decades and on spatial
scales from microns to kilometers. The vision provided novel
alternatives to science investigations based on limited and
uncertain life spans of battery-powered instruments and on the
vagaries of northeast Pacific storms that restrict ship-based
expeditions to field seasons of only a few months each year.
Exciting exchanges between scientists and engineers led to a
plan for a network of distributed sensors in the oceans attached
to submarine fiber-optic/power cables connected to land. The
fiber would provide continou