Jackson Chu is a UVic PhD candidate who has a passion for seeking answers to the mysteries of the ocean at his doorstep, including how changing oxygen levels affect animals in the ocean. Chu is the lead author on a paper with UVic professor Dr. Verena Tunnicliffe which was published in the journal Global Change Biology (April 2015).

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.

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

Dr. Richard Dewey, Associate Director, Science

Updated: February 3, 2016

On 7 January 2015, a magnitude 4.8 earthquake rattled houses in Tofino on Vancouver Island’s west coast shortly after dark. It was one of over 170 quakes to strike the BC coast during the first three weeks of the year. And while this crustal quake caused minimal damage, it gave residents in BC coastal communities good cause to consider their earthquake and tsunami response plans. There is a 1 in 10 chance that the west coast of Canada will experience a megathrust quake—over magnitude 8.4—within 50 years.

Ocean Networks Canada’s Strait of Georgia ferry monitoring program officially expanded operations to a second ferry, the Spirit of Vancouver Island, in October 2014. This ferry, part of BC Ferries fleet, connects Vancouver Island and the mainland transiting between Victoria, BC, and Vancouver, BC.The main oceanographic interest of this route is that the ferry travels through more saline, oceanic conditions on the western part of the route through to fresher Fraser River influenced waters on the eastern part of the route.

The surface waters of the northeast Pacific are the warmest in several decades, and ONC's Folger Passage monitoring station has recently (November 2014) detected this anomaly. The story of a warm north east Pacific continues into 2015.

Understanding how the oceans work is hard, because we almost always don't have enough measurements to even know what the ocean is doing, never mind why. One of the exciting things in the VENUS Observatory expansion plan was the installation of a radar system that was specially designed to provide estimates of surface currents over a large region covering the Fraser plume. What's the Fraser plume?

An important part of climate change research is measuring and predicting the magnitude of ecosystem response. The northeast Pacific is a global hotspot for future oxygen loss driven by climate change. Overall oxygen content in the oceans will drop if sea surface temperatures continue to rise because warmer sea water holds less oxygen. If oxygen levels drop too low (hypoxia), animals will have to migrate, adapt or die – but how do you measure these thresholds for animal life?

Each year, ONC teams travel to Cambridge Bay, Nunavut for an important maintenance expedition to clean and upgrade the observatory infrastructure and instruments. It’s also a great opportunity to reconnect with the residents of Cambridge Bay.

The biological transition from winter to spring conditions in the Strait of Georgia is characterized by a spring phytoplankton bloom. Understanding the dominant factors influencing the timing of the bloom is therefore the subject of considerable interest.

On April 1 at 4:46:45 PM, a magnitude 8.2 earthquake occurred off Chile's Pacific coastline. Shortly afterward, Ocean Networks Canada seismometers detected the tremors as they crossed the North Pacific.

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Twice a year, the Ocean Networks Canada engineering and science teams head out to sea to service and maintain our coastal observatory in the Salish Sea.

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Started in 2010, the Seafloor Earthquake Array–Japan-Canada Cascadia Experiment (SeaJade) is a multiyear, two-phase collaboration involving the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), University of Victoria, Geological Survey of Canada and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.