"Who could ask for a better 12 years?? I am leaving VENUS with such a wealth of memories, experiences, new knowledge and cakes consumed..."

-Verena Tunnicliffe, VENUS Director (2001-2012) changes perspectives and says goodbye to VENUS.

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With the New Year just beginning, the VENUS observatory continues its Phase II expansion with the testing of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) in Saanich Inlet.

A joint team of VENUS and UVic/Ocean Technology Lab engineers tested a winch system on the Ocean Technology Test Bed (OTTB) Buoy in Saanich Inlet.

From Alaska to Vancouver, residents along the west coast felt the powerful magnitude 7.7 earthquake that struck the Haida Gwaii archipelago at 8:04PM PDT, on October 27th, 2012. Ocean Networks Canada seafloor hydrophones also registered the low-frequency rumbles from this earthquake, along with the calls of humpback whales in the area.

Folger Pinnacle instrument platform, part of ONC's Folger Passage observatory is now back online, streaming data and video from 23 m below sea level in Folger Passage.

The orange reel is >5 km of extension cable on the deck of the powered barge “Georgia Transporter” after a successful recovery. The Delta cable supplies power and a communication link from the East Node in the Strait of Georgia (175 m) to an instrument platform near the mouth of the Fraser River. This cable was damaged in June 2012 by an underwater landslide and will be repaired and then redeployed in April 2013.

Thanks to the help of three boat crews and a dive team, our Folger Pinnacle instrument platform is now reinstalled on a submerged reef inFolger Passage, ready to be reconnected to the network. The platform, which was recovered earlier this year, has been cleaned, refurbished and upgraded with new instruments.

Canada’s efforts to demonstrate world leadership in tidal energy research and technology are taking a significant step forward, as Ocean Networks Canada’s Innovation Centre partners with researchers and industry to design and install the world’s first cabled underwater monitoring platform specifically for extreme, high-flow tide conditions.

The ROV has just re-deployed a seafloor camera after maintenance.

The University of Victoria’s Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) is making its first foray into the Arctic, just as the sea ice extent is setting a new record low. The observatory has been granted a five-year research license from the Nunavut Research Institute for a cabled seafloor observatory system and surface weather station in the coastal hamlet of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. The community observatory, using technologies developed by UVic’s VENUS and NEPTUNE Observatories, intends to provide year-round, near real-time undersea monitoring of the northern environment, and to make research data available to the community for educational and other purposes.

In the first week of August, the Strait of Georgia VENUS array suffered a major power fault (see System Status). As a result, the field team retrieved all instruments on the seafloor leaving only the cable and the node frames.

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POGO (Profiling OceanoGraphic Observatory) is alive and well! The vertical profiling system, installed at a depth of 396 m on Barkley Upper Slope is now sending its instrument float on regular journeys from seafloor to surface and back. And some interesting new data products are available for examining a host of water properties through the depth of the water column.

In early July, the Ocean Networks Canada education team travelled up island to the quaint seaside community of Bamfield to meet with undergrad students and educators from across western Canada. The team was invited by the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre to introduce the Observatory to students attending the summer academic session and also to teachers and educators attending an annual workshop.

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On June 26, we completed our summer expedition, Wiring the Abyss 2012 aboard the R/V Thomas G. Thompson (University of Washington). Despite the inevitable challenges we encounter when deploying deep sea instruments, overall the cruise was a success.