Executive Summary

Although the ocean covers nearly 70% of the planet and is central to the quality of life on Earth, it is largely unexplored. Rapid growth in our understanding of the complex exchange among processes throughout ocean basins is severely limited by the paucity of infrastructure able to support sustained and interactive observations of the dynamic ocean environment. Biological, chemical, physical, and geological processes interact at the air-sea interface, in the ocean, and at the seafloor in complex ways. Developing a more fundamental scientific understanding of these relationships requires new and transformational approaches to ocean observation and experimentation.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) was based upon a community vision resulting from two decades of workshops, meetings, and reports, which established science drivers for the proposed infrastructure investment. The OOI enables powerful new scientific approaches by capitalizing on a confluence of “disruptive technologies” that are often related to exponential growth in fields, including telecommunications, computer science, and genomics. The OOI has deployed a networked grid of sensors, which collects ocean, atmospheric, and seafloor data at high sampling rates, and will continue to do so for many years to come. Researchers can obtain simultaneous, interdisciplinary measurements to investigate a spectrum of phenomena including episodic, short-lived events (tectonic, volcanic, biological, severe storms), to more subtle, longer-term changes or emergent phenomena in ocean systems (circulation patterns, climate change, ocean acidity, ecosystem trends). Distributed research groups have formed virtual collaborations to collectively analyze and respond to ocean events in near-real time, for example the underwater eruption by Axial Volcano in 2015. The introduction of ample power and bandwidth to remote parts of the ocean by the OOI have provided the ocean science community with unprecedented access to high-frequency data on multiple spatial scales, required to investigate complex interactions in coastal, regional, and high latitude ocean regions. Mobile assets (autonomous underwater vehicles, gliders, and vertical profiling) complement fixed-point mooring observations.

The use of large numbers of interconnected, space- and time-indexed, remote, interactive, fixed, and mobile assets by a global user community, collaborating through the Internet and Internetenabled software, represents the most fundamental shift in oceanic investigative infrastructure, since the arrival of satellites. Ocean observing is stimulating major changes in funding strategies, our community structure, the nature of our collaborations, the style of modeling and data assimilation, the approach of educators to environmental sciences, the manner in which the scientific community relates to the public, and the recruitment of young scientists. Two metrics of the OOI’s success are that to date > 170 OOI-related peer-reviewed publications have been published and 84 NSF proposals have been funded, totaling an investment of > $52M. The discoveries, insights, and the proven new technologies of the OOI program also will be transferred to more operationally oriented ocean observing systems operated by other agencies and countries. In this manner, OOI is playing a key role in keeping the U.S. and international science community at the cutting edge of ocean knowledge.

FIGURE B. The Oregon shelf surface mooring is lowered to the water using R/V Oceanus ship’s crane. Credit: OOI Endurance Array Program, Oregon State University.