Swarms of tiny robots to monitor the oceans

In September, after more than a decade of planning, OOI received funding for construction from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and from NSF. (You can see the location of observatories here.)

And efforts to monitor the ocean don't stop there.

OOI will integrate into a larger, multiagency, public-private effort called the Integrated Ocean Observing System, or IOOS.

And IOOS itself will plug into the greater Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), in which 80 governments are participating.

Here and there, pieces of this earth-wide ocean monitoring system are already in place. One section, formerly known as NEPTUNE and now rechristened Regional Scale Nodes (RSN), has various "nodes" up and running. Underwater stations connected to dry land by fiber optic cables currently monitor conditions on the Juan de Fuca plate off the Pacific Northwest, which straddles US and Canadian waters.

The Monterey Ocean Observing System (MOOS) and Monterey Accelerated Research System (MARS), meanwhile, already observe life at a depth of 2,923 feet in the Monterey Bay. (They served as testing grounds for methods, technologies and materials used in the larger NEPTUNE project.)

There's also a NEPTUNE Canada, which is connected, like some of the other initiatives, directly to the Internet. (Here's another called VENUS.

And earlier this week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration deployed the seventh in a series of "smart buoys" meant to monitor water quality and weather conditions in Chesapeake Bay.

Incrementally and in fits and starts, humanity, it seems, is extending sensors into the vast unknown of the world's marine environment. And in so doing, we're wiring the world's oceans.

Editor’s note: For more articles about the environment, see the Monitor’s main environment page, which offers information on many environment topics. Also, check out our Bright Green blog archive and our RSS feed.

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