The Cascadia Subduction Zone runs from Cape Mendocino, Calif., to Vancouver Island, B.C. It is the place where the rocky plate underneath the Pacific Ocean pushes under North America, and the last time it moved (in 1700) it triggered a 9.0 earthquake and a massive tsunami. OCEAN and ESS professor Paul Johnson is one of the scientists measuring the features of this zone in the deep water – up to 1.5 miles deep. 

There’s live video coming in daily from the Northeast Pacific Ocean! The University of Washington’s Ocean Observatories Initiative team of scientists and engineers is at sea again this summer, and they are once again streaming live video via a website as they build the first U.S. regional cabled ocean observatory. Using the underwater robotic vehicle ROPOS deployed from the UW Research Vessel Thomas G. 

The oceans are the flywheel of the climate system. As atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases increase, the Earth system is warming, and over 90 percent of that increase in heat goes into the ocean. Knowing how much heat the ocean absorbs is vital to understanding sea level rise (the oceans expand as they warm), and predicting how much, and how fast, the atmosphere will warm. 

From Earth’s surface to hundreds of kilometers deeper than oilmen drill, the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) is investigating the surprising quantity of carbon in the deep, dark Earth beyond photosynthesis. Co-authored by OCEAN’s John Baross, the book Carbon in Earth outlines questions that will guide DCO’s program through 2019 and beyond. Click here to read more about this project. 

Check out OCEAN’s Michelle Weirathmueller’s guest blog post at Deep  Sea News, wherein she discusses the possibility of saving right whales by installation of passive acoustic monitoring. Also check out her personal science blog, which is super cool and we are so glad we found it!