Q. What inspired you to choose your path in physical oceanography?

I was an assistant professor in radio astronomy at the University of British Columbia (UBC) when asked if I was interested in being a “Satellite Oceanographer” for a new Federal ocean institute on the west coast—the equivalent of the Bedford Institute on the east coast. 

Q. How would you describe your research interests?

Any favorite research stories? 

Grad school is like a big, continuous roller coaster ride. There are definitely bits where you’re feeling high in the sky and bits when you’re constantly screaming.

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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.

BC Coastal Marine Sciences Workshop
Victoria, February 16 & 17, 2015

Over two days in mid-February, Ocean Networks Canada hosted a Coastal Marine Sciences Workshop where more than 30 active researchers in B.C.’s marine science community came together for an open and progressive discussion on future directions for coastal oceanography.

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.

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.

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.

Dr. Miriam Römer, a research scientist with the MARUM Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen, spent the past 3 months working with Ocean Networks Canada staff scientists analyzing a large and disparate collection of data from Clayoquot Slope.

A winter's passage has been captured by cameras and instruments measuring ice thickness, salinity, oxygen and and phytoplankton abundance in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.

The little crawler that could, couldn't for a while. Then it could again, thanks to skillful and persistent efforts by a scientist driving it from the other side of the planet.

A new batch of interesting talks and posters were presented at the February 2014 Ocean Sciences Meeting by scientists using Ocean Networks Canada data and facilities.