Technology Embedded in Ocean Floor Could Lead to Breakthroughs

Scientific instruments could be embedded in thousands of miles of communications cables running across the Pacific Ocean floor, bringing researchers new data on undersea earthquakes and tsunamis, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography has announced.

Scripps is in the early stages of negotiations with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the commercial telecommunications company TE SubCom on the idea.

The seismometers, pressure gauges and temperature sensors could relay data regarding temblors, tsunamis and various undersea forces, according to Scripps officials, who said later the instruments could measure ocean water temperatures.

The instruments could be deployed first on 12,950 miles of cable to be laid between Los Angeles, Auckland, New Zealand and Sydney, Australia, according to John Orcutt, of the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Scripps.

"More than 70 percent of the world is water and we need to understand much more of it," Orcutt said. "If this project expands to other oceans it could change the face of oceanography."

Scripps envisions that once deployed, the data generated by the instruments would be available to scientists around the world.

– City News Service