An upcoming voyage by a СAPP oceanographer will take him where no person has gone before СAPP and the public is invited along for the ride.
Dr. Scott France will direct a three-week expedition to document what lies beneath the surface of a remote section of the Pacific Ocean. His trip aboard the NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer will take him from American Samoa to Hawaii, some 2,550 nautical miles away.
Using sonar mapping technology and a remotely operated vehicle, the scientists will explore geological formations and ecosystems in a vast section of the Pacific Ocean where no documented explorations have taken place. The ship will beam back real-time images to a worldwide audience watching on the internet or registered scientists participating via an online chat room.
СAPPThis is real exploration,СAPP said France, a professor of biology. СAPPItСAPPs so remote. We are going to places nobody on Earth has ever been before. We will literally be seeing it for the first time, and sharing that on the internet with anyone who wants to tune in.СAPP
It will be FranceСAPPs third voyage aboard the ship, which is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The 225-foot vessel is the only federally funded ship assigned to explore uncharted swaths of ocean to document geological formations and living creatures that thrive below the waves.
FranceСAPPs first sojourn, in 2014, explored canyons and underwater mountains in the North Atlantic. The following year, France joined a NOAA expedition in the deep waters of the Hawaiian Archipelago, the inaugural voyage of a three-year initiative focused on the deep ocean of U.S. marine-protected areas in the central and western Pacific.
The mission France will join later this week will help conclude that same program, called CAPSTONE, the Campaign to Address Pacific monument Science, Technology and Ocean Needs. Since its inception, CAPSTONE has mapped 115,831 square miles of sea floor СAPP an area roughly the size of Italy, yet only a fraction of the unexplored portions of the worldСAPPs largest ocean СAPP using sonar technology and the Deep Discoverer, a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV.
Researchers on board will direct 15 dives using the Deep Discoverer to explore seamounts as well as habitats of deep-sea coral, sponges and bottom fish living within the Pacific Remote Islands National Monument and the National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa, which both lie within U.S. territorial waters, and Marea Moana, a marine park governed by the Cook Islands.
The Deep Discoverer can descend 20,000 feet, or 3.7 miles. ItСAPPs tethered to the Okeanos Explorer by a fiber-optic cable that transmits images, captured by its nine cameras, to the ship and to anyone watching the feed online. Interactive features allow viewers СAPP scientists, students or the public СAPP to send requests to the ship via phone or an online chatroom.
As the missionСAPPs science lead, FranceСAPPs job will be to relay those requests. ItСAPPs a role he likened to that of an air-traffic controller, regulating how the mission plays out.
France will communicate directly with the team that controls the Deep Discoverer. The crew includes a navigator, who in turn will relay messages to the bridge of the ship to stabilize the vessel so the ROV might collect samples or capture close-up images.
Surface winds and currents, coupled with subsurface currents and topography, make the dives СAPPa complicated dance.СAPP
СAPPI have headsets and a microphone and I am talking to the (ROV crew), saying СAPPThis is what we want, now I want you to go here, get a close-up of that, we would like to sample this.
СAPPYou are streaming this out, so experts all over the world can be helping you identify whether (what they are seeing) is something novel or exciting,СAPP France continued.
This teleprescence allows the audience to СAPPliterally go to sea without actually stepping on a boat. The images are so clear you can hardly believe you are underwater.СAPP
Videos streamed from the Deep Discoverer during its dives have gained a huge online following, earning some 5 million views over the projectСAPPs three years. СAPPWe never know exactly what weСAPPll see,СAPP said NOAAСAPPs Kelley Elliot, the expedition manager. СAPPDuring the first two years of CAPSTONE, Okeanos Explorer expeditions discovered new species, observed unseen behaviors and found living animals previously only seen as lab specimens.СAPP
Despite these discoveries, however, France said scientists remain in a СAPPlevel of infancyСAPP in understanding life and geography in the deep sea.
СAPPThese expeditions are frustratingly tantalizing because we get just the barest taste and picture of whatСAPPs going on,СAPP he said. СAPPWe are just getting this one little picture. In fact, in a day, itСAPPs unlikely that the ROV will travel more than 900 meters СAPP
thatСAPPs basically three football fields. ThatСAPPs what we get to see.
СAPPImagine you are exploring somewhere in the Rockies and thatСAPPs the amount of distance (you cover). Do you think you know everything about that mountain from that one little trip? Of course you donСAPPt. But that's better than nothing."
France and the Okeanos Explorer will depart Pago Pago, the capital of American Samoa, a territory of the United States, on Thursday. He will arrive in Honolulu, Hawaii, on May 19.
Viewers can find more information and follow the journey at
Top photo: UL Lafayette oceanographer Dr. Scott France aboard the NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer during a 2015 expedition of the Johnson Atoll unit of the Pacific Remote Islands National Monument. HeСAPPll return to the ship СAPP and to the Pacific СAPP this week. (Credit: Scott France).
Inset photo: France communicates with the crew controlling a remotely operated vehicle during his 2015 voyage aboard the Okeanos Explorer. (Credit: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research).