Venus charts the mysteries of BC's coast

Deep under the coastal waters of British Columbia, a $10 million dollar science project sponsored by the University of Victoria and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation is earning a reputation as the most advanced underwater observatory of its kind in the world.

The Venus Project, the Victoria Experimental Network Under the Sea, is a system of monitoring devices and cameras that is helping research scientists and amateur oceanographers from around the globe expand their knowledge about the murky and little understood underwater world, the project's executive director told a rapt audience at a recent Wednesday luncheon in 15th Field Artillery Regimental Hall.

"It's very easy to put a telescope up and map Mars, but it's not so easy to see into the oceans," said Adrian Round, a former naval officer who heads the Venus Project. "Seawater is opaque to most magnetic imaging techniques, including light and radio waves."

In fact, scientists know more about the surface of Mars than they know about the ocean depths, said Round, a former commander of Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt. For example, while a dozen men have walked on the moon, only three people have made it to the furthest depths of the Mariana Trench, the ocean's deepest point.

The Venus Project consists of three monitoring stations, called nodes — the first at a depth of 100 metres in the Saanich Peninsula, and two others, at 170-metre and 300-metre depths, near the mouth of the Fraser River in Georgia Strait - each fitted with an array of underwater microphones (hydrophones), high definition cameras and a variety of chemical and other sensors.

The first node, located in the Saanich Peninsula, was chosen because of its unique anoxic environment, where oxygen levels near the surface can fluctuate by an order of magnitude in just 15 or 20 minutes and most of the deeper water has no oxygen at all.

At the mouth of the Fraser River, along the steep sandy slopes that separate the shallow river delta from the deeper ocean waters, the sensor are paying particular attention to the impact of seismic activity.

But the scope of the Venus Project has expanded greatly since it first went online three years ago. "This is a fascinating facility that has turned out to be far more useful than we planned," he said.

Probably the best-known science experiment associated with Venus is its investigation into the mystery of the floating feet that have been washing up along the inner coastline of B.C. In an attempt to learn how long those feet might have been in the water, a researcher from the University of Victoria sank freshly killed pig carcasses beside the station, and then watched as marine predators stripped the flesh down to the skeleton in less than four weeks’ time.

The research is revealing secrets about the decomposition of flesh in a deep ocean environment and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has agreed to fund the next round of pig carcass experiments.

The Venus Project was first envisioned in 2003, after a ship-based monitoring project was set up to look at an underwater volcano 200 kilometres off the coast of Vancouver Island. Today, Venus is the largest of three cabled underwater laboratories in North America, although the U.S. has recently committed itself to building a $400 million underwater observatory by 2013.

Round said Venus is proving that cabled observatories are far superior to their ship-based counterparts because they eliminate or lessen five of the biggest limitations to the work: battery power; data storage area; speed and efficiency of communication; the ability to take continuous samples; and weather.

But the most unique aspect of the Venus Project is the fact that virtually all of that data collected, more than two terabytes to date, is relayed to the project's base station on Vancouver Island, where it is streamed, in real time, 24-7, onto the Internet for all to see. Round describes the website as offering "interactive 4D experiences."

Available at the website www.venus.uvic.ca, the information includes data on temperatures, acoustics, acidity, oxygen levels, current speed and direction, as well as a wide selection of photo galleries, Round said. The high definition cameras are turned on almost daily, and are good enough to allow researchers to count the hairs on the legs of passing crabs and lobsters.

So far, the website has attracted the attention of 19,000 users from 18 countries, ranging from working scientists and students to amateur researchers of all ages. Users can also sign up to obtain a password that offers the opportunity to link directly to the ethernet and participate in some of the experiments.

While the project is turning heads today, there were some dicey moments when the four-centimetre-thick fibre optic cable was first laid down in the Georgia Straight. Originally set to take place in September 2006, Round and other project organizers were told in March that they would have to finish their work by May, four months ahead of schedule.

The elaborate cable operation began in the "thick gelatinous ooze" near the Iona sewage outfall and used a ship equipped with GPS tracking and eight thrusters to help hold the vessel in place while the eight-kilometre sections were spliced together, a procedure that required staying within three metres of a given spot for up to 24 hours through all phases of the tide.

Then, when the ship was ready for the final splice, the cable was found to be 100 metres further from shore than expected. The entire operation was put on hold for two months, while Round and the crew worked out a plan to finish the work using a shallow water barge and three tugboats.

"We actually succeeded, and we had 30 metres to spare on a total 40 kilometre cable," Round said. "It's also where I got most of my grey beard."

And the discoveries never stop. Venus has confirmed the presence of 50 metre sand dunes that travel down the length of the Saanich Peninsula, and a colourful sponge reef has been found along the Fraser Ridge. For the first time, this fall, the project will also help track the migration of juvenile salmon out of the Fraser River.