New partnerships, technologies, solutions
With funding from StatOil and Esonet, the IRCCM (International Research Consortium on Continental Margins) is currently developing a long term instrument system, which will be deployed at 1,200 m water depth 65 km off the California coast at the MARS test site in the winter of 2004. Before taking off to the United States, the different instruments are tested extensively in the ocean laboratories of Jacobs University Bremen in Germany.
This project, however, marks a new method of cooperative research: In close collaboration of several scientific institutions, IRCCM initiated an ocean observatory, which comprises newest technologies and can be operated from all over the world. This new approach, sharing not only knowledge, but also technologies, will make this project as efficient as possible.
The system consists of one central station with internet/power connection to land and several small tele-operated robots, which move along the seafloor and measure carbon/methane turnover rates. All crawlers will be connected to one central instrument system (lander), which is located up to 100 m away from the node, carrying additional sensors and transfers the data of the robots to the land based data center.
|
