Cable Observatory

A cable observatory is a seafloor science platform powered and networked by a submarine cable run from a shore station. The cable supplies kilowatts of power and gigabit data bandwidth, so instruments stream continuously in real time instead of logging to memory between ship visits. NEPTUNE and VENUS off British Columbia (Ocean Networks Canada) and the OOI Regional Cabled Array off Oregon connect seismometers, bottom pressure recorders, hydrophones, CTDs, and camera nodes across hundreds of kilometers, some at 2900 m depth on the Juan de Fuca plate. The continuous power and timing capture episodic events, eruptions, earthquakes, and turbidity flows, that batch-recovered moorings would miss.