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On December 20th, 2010, the Consortium for Ocean Leadership
entered into an agreement with the Oregon Fishermen's Cable
Committee, Inc. (OFCC) becoming the fifth cable owning member
of the OFCC. The agreement covers the two undersea fiber optic
cables that will be laid off the Oregon coast near Pacific
City, OR. These undersea cables will be part of the Ocean
Observatories Initiative (OOI) Regional Scale Nodes (RSN).
One of those cables terminates near the Axial Seamount about
250 nm off Tillamook Head where sensors will monitor conditions
near the undersea volcano. The second cable will have segments
that approach the coast from the deep ocean abyss near Newport,
OR. The agreement addresses such issues as cable installation
and burial, inspection, participation in the OFCC Sacrificed
Gear Fund, a hot line number for fishermen to call to report
possible gear conflicts and the other topics found in the
usual OFCC cable agreements. As with other OFCC cables, fishermen
will be able to fish over the buried cable and be asked to
avoid towing over any exposed cable. These cables are unique
in that at four locations on one cable there are scientific
"nodes" that will have sensors and instruments attached. These
areas were selected in cooperation with representatives from
the fishing fleet in Newport in order to minimize the loss
of high value fishing grounds. The sensors and instruments
will be located in no fishing "safety zones" for their protection.
The OOI RSN will extend continuous high-bandwidth (tens of
Gigabits/second) and power (tens of kilowatts) to a network
of instruments widely distributed across, above and below
the seafloor in the northeast Pacific Ocean. As the world's
first ocean observatory to span a tectonic plate, this facility
will provide a constant stream of data in real time from the
ocean, on the seafloor, and below the seafloor within the
Juan de Fuca plate. This scientific data will be available,
via the internet, to the general public. The OOI is funded
by the National Science Foundation; for more information see
www.oceanobservatories.org.
The OOI has been developed to provide the U.S. ocean sciences
research community with access to the basic infrastructure
required to make sustained, long-term measurements in the
oceans.
The research cable will be installed in phases, with primary
cable backbone being installed in the summer of 2011, the
nodes being installed in the summer of 2012 and the secondary
cables, research instruments and sensors being installed in
2013 and 2014.
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