WATCH: Monitoring Submarine Volcano
As part of the National Science Foundation Ocean Observing Initiative (NSF-OOI) Cabled Array project SubC Imaging was selected as the vendor for providing underwater cameras (1Cam) and lights (Aquarea LED) to the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington for the CAM HD instrument.
The APL-UW team integrated the camera/lights into a system which added a pan/tilt and other metadata sensors and 10Gigabit fiberoptic interface to the Cabled Array infrastructure.
The system transmits uncompressed video to shore over the cable where it is recorded and then compressed for live streaming over the Internet. The instrument is currently deployed at Axial Seamount and is imaging an active hydrothermal vent with a diverse biological community.
The cameras are offline for 3 hour intervals to preserve the natural marine setting.
