Printed from “The Discovery of Hydrothermal Vents - 25th Anniversary
CD-ROM” ©2002 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
INTO THE FUTURE: Deep-Sea Observatories
Since deep-sea hydrothermal vents were first discovered 25 years ago, scientists have learned a great deal. Marine biologists, chemists, and geologists have continued to sample and study vent sites around the globe to understand how mineral deposits form, and how life is sustained in extreme environments, and how vent animals find and colonize deep-ocean sites.
But hydrothermal vents and vent life are the result of many interacting processes. At vents, geology, chemistry, physics, and biology all combine. It's difficult to see which factors cause what effects—especially when scientists must wait years before they can revisit a vent site.
Because the oceans are vast, the deep seafloor is hard to reach, and ships and submersibles are limited, scientists have gotten only a few snapshots of vents for a few hours a day in Alvin during expeditions. What scientists need is the ability to monitor sites continuously over long periods of time—to see how and why vents and vent communities change and evolve, over timescales ranging from seconds to decades.
They need to see not only what’s down there, but what’s going on down there.
Breakthroughs in technology
In recent years, dramatic advances in deep submergence vehicles and technologies
have allowed scientists to survey and sample vent sites and make more-detailed
maps of vent sites. Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are being developed
and tested. These unoccupied vehicles will have the capacity to stay submerged
for long periods. They will be dispatched into remote regions that scientists
haven’t been able to reach yet, including ice-covered polar oceans.
Scientists and engineers are also developing new oceanographic instruments
and robotic systems that can remain in the oceans for long periods of time—including
deep-sea cameras, chemical and temperature sensors, and devices to measure
small earthquakes and changes in the shape of the seafloor.
Their goal is to create long-term, deep-sea observatories arrayed with instruments that can continuously monitor events and processes occurring on the seafloor.
One already existing example is the New Millennium Observatory (NeMO), established by NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents/nemo/index.html). It is located at an active seafloor volcano called “Axial Seamount” on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, about 250 miles off the coast of Oregon and Washington.
In a new era of oceanographic exploration, scientists envision many long-term,
deep-sea observatories. Some may use novel communications technology to
transmit data to the surface and then via satellite to shore. NEPTUNE (North
East Pacific Time-Series Undersea Networked Experiments) is a plan to establish
a network of seafloor observatories throughout the Juan de Fuca Plate—all
linked to each other and to shore via submarine fiber-optic cables (http://www.neptune.washington.edu/).
Deep-sea observatories will provide the capability for scientists in their labs to monitor deep-sea vents and control experiments and equipment on the seafloor thousands of kilometers away, and thousands of meters beneath the ocean surface.
Nearly 99 percent of the ocean floor is still unexplored. It remains a frontier. What extraordinary discoveries will the next 25 years bring?