Honolulu Weekly

In 1956, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography spearheaded the Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Program at the cloud physics observatory atop Mauna Loa. The program created a linear history of atmospheric data that allows scientists to establish patterns and witness changes in the earth’s carbon dioxide levels and hence the atmosphere in general.

This compilation of data has been monumental in forming hypotheses and theories on global warming and climate change, but it is also only a fraction of a larger whole, as oceanographic data reflecting changes like water temperature fluctuations or carbon dioxide concentration is generally inconsistent and incomplete.

Researchers and scientists from the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa are ready to put a permanent observatory on the ocean floor that will allow a continuous collection and transmission of data.

Station Aloha, a 5-kilometer-deep ocean site located 100 kilometers north of O’ahu, has been the place of monthly shipboard observations for the past 18 years.

‘Data was taken once a month, but a lot changes in that time. Oxygen goes down. Temperature goes up. But we couldn’t see what happened in between. Now we’ll be able to fill in the gaps,’ says Fred Duennebier, principal investigator for the Aloha Cable Observatory (ACO) and a professor at SOEST.

On February 16, Station Aloha received a major upgrade. A U.S. Navy cable repair ship pulled aboard 25 kilometers of electro-optical telecommunications cable and spliced a data collection and transmission device to it called a proof module. The proof module will act as a temporary observatory platform.

The cable and proof module have since been lowered to the depths. Within minutes of the descent, a part of the proof module called a hydrophone, a device sensitive to low frequencies, picked up whale songs which were then broadcast in real time to scientists.

Neat, yes, but not the intended purpose of the proof module. Instead, researchers plan to use the hydrophone to monitor deep-water currents, tsunamis and earthquakes.

In November, the proof module will be replaced with a permanent observatory.

With new gadgets in place to measure currents, ocean temperatures, and carbon dioxide and oxygen concentrations at multiple depths, the ACO will begin to record a history of oceanic climate change and open a window to new scientific perspectives.