We find ourselves right in the middle of what the United Nations has declared the Ocean Decade running from 2021 to 2030 and recognising the – at first glance – slightly astonishing statement that the quality of our human life on land largely depends on the state and specifically the health of our oceans.
Looking at oceanic research, we realise that here scientists explore one of our last “new frontiers”. Deep sea exploration triggers our interest, confronts us with the unknown and the untamed as perhaps only deep space exploration can match. It is a fact though, that we know less about our oceans’ floors than we know of our moon.
The SUBMERSE project is uniquely situated to contribute to the Ocean Decade and the exploration of this new frontier by making oceanic data available that we have never been able to collect before. The project makes use of six distinct data collection sites across Europe: from the Ionian Sea to Svalbard and across the Atlantic, sensors have been installed on submarine cables owned by the project partners. At these data collection sites, SUBMERSE employs Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), Polarimeter and the State of Polarisation (SOP) technology to collect entirely new research data sets for Oceanography, Seismology, Marine Biology or Tsunami monitoring.
And with this data collection SUBMERSE opens the door to contribute to Seismology research and Tsunami Monitoring in entirely new ways. An early example of the potential of SUBMERSE was highlighted when last October and immediately after the installation of DAS equipment in the cable landing station in the island of Madeira, SUBMERSE could prove itself by detecting seismic waves. Unlike traditional seismic stations which provide ground acceleration measurements, the DAS equipment allows the measuring of stretch and strain at many points along the cable, i.e. using the movement of the cable itself to detect these waves. Such data collected and curated will be feeding into vital Tsunami warning systems which in turn addresses at least four of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Furthermore, SUBMERSE also meets SDG14 (Life Below Water) by providing seabed data with relevance to marine life, with relevance and effects to climate change and interestingly also of human activity close to the ocean floor. SDG9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure) is supported by building the proof of concept for resilient detection systems based on submarine cable infrastructure, while SDG13 (Climate Action) is supported by adding data sets to foster the protection, conservation and responsible use of our marine resources.
Returning to the Ocean Decade and its 10 challenges for collective impact, SUBMERSE not only meets Challenges 5 (ocean-based solutions to climate change) and 7 (expand the Global Ocean Observing System), but very much also the ultimate challenge 10 – changing humanity’s relationship with our oceans, increasing our knowledge and building our awareness of the interdependencies between the health of our oceans and the sustainability of our life on land.