Neptune stands for North east Pacific Time Series Underwater Networked Experiments but this dull description masks the biggest exploration of its kind ever mounted. Just over 70% of the world is covered by ocean, and most of it is unknown.
For more than a century, shipboard researchers have systematically measured water chemistry, taken depth soundings and dragged samples from the deep. But the data always remained uncertain, because the ocean kept changing, John Delany of the University of Washington, and programme director of Neptune, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle.
"When the ship moves to a new place, it's a new ocean. We can leave moorings at a single location and make long-term measurements but we don't know what is happening even 200 yards away."
Neptune will be based on 30 or more "nodes" or seafloor laboratories spaced about 60 miles apart and up to 3,000 metres deep. It will cover a huge, shifting part of the sea floor known to geologists and oceanographers as the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, off Seattle and Portland, Oregon. The centres will be fitted with remotely operated vehicles, sampling instruments and high definition television cameras.
"We will be able to explore a range of phenomena like erupting volcanoes, gigantic earthquakes, phytoplankton and zooplankton blooms, blue whales migrating, the fish stock assessment, pollution patterns, circulation patterns, El Niño events," Prof Delany said.
"Within five years, you will, from your own connection at your own home or schoolroom or your laboratory, be able to connect to the internet and go to any one of those nodes and call up the information that is there."
