Ocean Networks Canada

ONC delivers ocean intelligence for science, society, and industry to advance public and marine safety, scientific research, climate mitigation and coastal resilience, as well as accelerate ocean technology research and development. In collaboration with coastal and Indigenous communities, industry, and governments, ONC’s pioneering solutions address climate change, natural hazard risk reduction, and ocean health that, together, ensure Canada’s place in the emerging blue economy.

• Access to big data: ONC provides public access to live and archived big data captured by ONC’s cabled observatories, mobile platforms, and autonomous instruments via the Oceans 3.0 data management portal. Housed on the ONC website, Oceans 3.0 allows users to search, preview, download, and visualize information from the more than 140 terabytes of ocean data ONC adds each year into its 1.2+ petabyte data archive.
• Earthquake early warning (EEW): ONC has developed a British Columbia solution for earthquake early warning (EEW) capable of detecting earthquakes and sending advance notification before major shaking arrives. ONC sensor data will be shared with government organisations to issue public alerts. Notifications can also be sent to operators of infrastructure, helping coastal communities prepare for and improve their resilience to natural hazard events, including tsunamis and storm surge, and sea-level rise due to climate change.
• Tsunami resilience: Canada’s diverse geography and geomorphology, including fiords, arctic tundra, river deltas, bluffs, and sandy or rocky beaches, means hazard impacts vary considerably along the coast. ONC supports tsunami resilience in at-risk coastal communities by integrating detailed geographic mapping into sophisticated propagation models, allowing communities to prepare safety plans for expected inundation levels and current velocities.
• Solid Carbon: ONC leads the Solid Carbon project, an ambitious negative emissions technology (NET). Powered by renewable energy, Solid Carbon aims to remove CO₂from the atmosphere via direct air capture and inject it below the sea floor where it reacts with ocean basalt and mineralizes into rock, providing a safe, vast and permanent reservoir for this greenhouse gas. The technology has the potential to scale globally to reverse the course of carbon dioxide emissions and help meet planetary climate targets.
• Ocean-based carbon dioxide removal (CDR): ONC’s large-scale ocean infrastructure supports research on ocean-based carbon dioxide removal (CDR) in a wide range of ocean environments. ONC’s observatories can be utilized to conduct experiments and develop monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) for CRD approaches.
• Design and testing of innovative ocean technology: ONC works with both academia and industry to assist with the design and testing of innovative ocean technology to help expedite entry into the marketplace. ONC infrastructure offers the ability to communicate with devices in real time, both for data retrieval and command and control purposes. This makes it an ideal choice for testing new devices or monitoring experiments, allowing ocean technology companies to showcase the real-time functioning of their devices to a potentially global audience. A broad range of test environments are available: controlled environment test tanks; shallow coastal, deep canyons, abyssal plains, subduction zone, spreading ridge; Arctic; polymetallic sulphide deposit fields; methane hydrate fields; CO₂ sequestration sites; various fishery ecosystems (coastal/deep); and hydrothermal vents.
• Hydrophone calibration: ONC developed the world‘s first automated, low frequency, digital hydrophone calibration system capable of calibrations in extreme low ranges—from 0.1Hz to 750Hz, and from 2kHz to 100kHz in the high frequency range. This service is currently in use by international organizations that monitor noise levels for scientific purposes or in relation to industrial operations.
• SeaTube: Sound plays a critical role in remote sensing and communication in the ocean, travelling much further than light through water. ONC developed SeaTube, a video annotation and archiving tool that is web-based and easy to use, and that allows for annotation of either archived or real-time/live streaming video, as well as a fully searchable archive. Annotations can be automatically fused with data generated from other synched instruments (e.g., positional information from navigation systems). The ability to incorporate either custom vocabulary-constrained taxonomy or standard taxonomy (e.g., WoRMS) allows the resulting annotations to be easily downloaded and utilized for further analysis and for machine learning training data sets. Current users of this innovative digital logbook tool include the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and Fisheries and Oceans Canada.