Jacques Cousteau studied underwater life for more than 60 years and brought a previously undiscovered world to millions of landlocked television viewers.
But if he had lived long enough to see the Neptune Project, he might have wondered if it would put him out of a job.
Under the University of Washington project, 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) of fiber-optic cable will be placed 1 to 2 kilometers below the ocean's surface. Cameras and recording equipment attached to the cable will monitor marine life and its interaction with the ocean floor and weather. The images and sounds will then be streamed through the Internet to universities, laboratories, aquariums, museums and K-12 schools.
"The way the oceans are currently being explored is not a way to do science," said John Madden, vice chairman of the project. "In most of the sciences, conducting time series is absolutely crucial. But a lot of the events in the ocean are catastrophic in nature, and we can't be there every time something happens."
The Neptune Project -- which stands for North East Pacific Time-series Undersea Network Experiments -- could change that.
Placed along the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, off the western coast of Canada and the United States, the cable will stretch from British Columbia to California. Organizers chose this area because it is the most active tectonic plate close to the United States, said Pat Beauchamp, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories who is helping with the project's implementation.
For its part, NASA wants to see how well fiber-optic cable works as an undersea research tool. Fiber-optic cables are groups of strands of optically pure glass as thin as human hairs. They carry digital information over long distances.
"Jupiter's moon Europa has a thick ice cover and is postulated to have an ocean," Beauchamp said. "It would be an interesting investigation to go below its ice surface using fiber-optic technologies. The Neptune Project will allow us to see how successful it could be."
But the project has a few hurdles to overcome.
With an estimated cost of $250 million to install the equipment and maintain it for five years, the project has yet to secure funding. Also, there is concern that deep-sea fishing trawlers may interfere with the instruments that send signals to the cable.
Test beds are currently being set up off the coast of Monterey, California, to study how the equipment will work together, to monitor costs and to uncover potential problems. Organizers hope to have the project up and running by 2006.
"No one has ever done anything even close to this, in terms of magnitude, with an undersea project," said Marcia McNutt, CEO of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Neptune Project member. "Therefore we thought it would be prudent to create a smaller scale."
In 1999, scientists built the Venus (Versatile Eco-monitoring Network by Undersea-Cable System) observatory by placing 2,000 kilometers of submarine cable in the Ryukyu Trench off Japan's coast. Other countries have since followed suit.
No other projects before Neptune have endeavored to stream deep-sea information into the K-12 classroom.
Whether it will be a workable educational tool remains to be seen.
"It all depends how it's going to be implemented," said Gail Wortmann, who teaches science at Ottumwa High School in Ottumwa, Iowa, and was named teacher of the year in her state in 2001. "If the school has a large enough bandwidth to take the feed, which many still don't, I still think they would have to have a pop-up window explaining what you’re looking at and why it's interesting."
One of the project's goals is to develop curricula and activities for K-12 students that relate to the marine data. Educators, scientists and technologists are meeting in Neptune-sponsored workshops to design education and outreach programs.
Still, Wortmann is cautious. "It sounds like a marvelous concept, but I question whether or not there will be enough activity to keep a student's attention."
Madden believes bringing undersea exploration to the classroom will broaden its scientific importance.
When asked precisely how much marine life populates the ocean, Madden said, scientists' answers "might differ by a factor of 10" because there hasn't been enough research to know for sure.
"Our knowledge is absolutely minimal," he said. "We never assaulted the oceans from a scientific framework the way we did space. I believe this project will help bridge that gap."
