Every spring, plankton in many coastal temperate marine systems such as the Strait of Georgia will grow in number so rapidly and to such an extent that the water colour will become visibly green. This year, the spring phytoplankton bloom was the earliest we’ve had since 2005.

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• ONC Spring Expedition 2015 – March 28 to April 2 in the Strait of Georgia Observatory

When the M/V Oceanic Surveyor tied up at the dock in Steveston B.C., forensic anthropologist Lynne Bell was eagerly awaiting the tray of bones from pig carcasses #15 and #16, retrieved from Ocean Network Canada’s Strait of Georgia east observatory site.

Seismic sensors on Ocean Networks Canada’s seafloor observatory installed offshore Vancouver Island detected an earthquake in the Northeast Pacific Ocean on the morning of 24 April 13:56:16 UTC (7:00 a.m. PDT) 

The magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck offshore the Haida Gwaii Region, with its epicentre about 280 kilometres south west of Prince Rupert, British Columbia.

News stories this spring are reporting the presence of a large, mysterious, and unusual mass of warm surface water in the Northeast Pacific Ocean that has migrated from offshore Alaska to the western coastline, and stretches from northern B.C. to southern California.

Ocean Network Canada’s Dr. Richard Dewey reported on this anomaly with data from the Folger Passage study site in November 2014.

A new documentary about the changing Salish Sea was recently the talk of the environmentally conscious crowd in Washington DC. “Reaching Blue” co-producer and ONC’s Video Specialist, Andy Robertson, attended the festival and introduced the film screening to a full house at National Geographic’s Grosvenor Auditorium.

Play Digital Fishers while helping a marine biologist better understand how creatures in the deep ocean live – where there is no light and food is scarce!

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Sound is a powerful tool for studying the ecosystem beneath the surface of the sea. Nowhere is it more important than in the Salish Sea, the critical habitat of the endangered southern resident orcas.

JASCO Applied Sciences (Canada) Ltd. designs and manufactures instruments that measure and monitor the effect of noise on marine life. The company has recently taken its undersea sound-monitoring technology in a new direction through its participation in efforts to protect orcas off Canada’s west coast. “It’s a high-water mark for us from a technology point of view,” JASCO president Scott Carr said in an interview. “Technology originally developed to detect submarines is now used to protect sea animals.”

Robotic Exploration of Extreme Environments (ROBEX) is a programme funded by the Helmholtz Alliance (Germany). The initiative brings together space and deep-sea research. Composed of sixteen institutions from space and marine research in Germany, the programme partners are jointly developing technologies for the exploration of highly inaccessible terrain on earth, such as the deep-sea and Polar Regions, as well as in the outer space (on the Moon and other planets).

Some data archives from the VENUS Observatory in the Salish Sea, encompassing the Strait of Georgia and Saanich Inlet can now be accessed via Oceans 2.0 software tools.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - November 7, 2014

BC Girl Guides Dive deep with Ocean Networks Canada's Ocean Aware Challenge

VICTORIA, BC. - Ocean Networks Canada (ONC), an initiative of the University of Victoria, has teamed up with BC Girl Guides to introduce girls and young women from age 5 to 18 to the wonders of the ocean beneath the surface and to inspire their natural curiosity in marine sciences.

This year, Ocean Networks Canada launched a series of new deep-sea scientific experiments on NEPTUNE observatory. One such experiment is the deployment of whale bones at nearly 900 m depth in Barkley Canyon site, in front of our POD3 camera.

Mill Bay, BC. - Ocean Networks Canada (ONC), an initiative of the University of Victoria, today launches a pilot ocean science educational program at Brentwood College School to complement its growing network of community observatories program which saw its prototype installed off the school dock two years ago, in the waters of Mill Bay, BC.

 “Ocean Sense” is a free, novel online educational program based on analyzing, understanding and sharing ocean data collected by the observatories.

The underwater 3D reconstruction has been a popular topic in computer vision research community for the last decade and it still remains a challenging problem. The Computing Science laboratory at the University of Alberta (Dr. Herb Yang’s Lab) has been a long-time partner of Ocean Networks Canada in improving the 3D camera technology in the ocean.

Friday Sept 19th, 2014 marks a milestone as it will be the 10th in a series of carcass deployments in the Salish Sea. Almost a decade ago, Dr. Verena Tunnicliffe saw me give a talk at the University of Victoria on forensic entomology and she invited me ‘on board’ VENUS to deploy a pig carcass as a human proxy under a camera at the bottom of the Saanich Inlet. I was the first external researcher in VENUS.