Bright blue: Advanced technologies for marine environmental monitoring and offshore energy

摘要

Major programs such as the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) seek to increase societal understanding of subsurface marine environments. This interest has arisen because of environmental concerns related to degradation of marine habitats, climate change, as well as the globally increasing demand for marine natural resources, particularly food and energy. These pressures now affect marine systems at scales that require active management of marine environments. Nevertheless, our ability to monitor and perform even relatively simple operations in subsurface environments remains limited and costly because of technological limitations. This paper provides an overview of advanced platform, power generation, communications, and sensing technologies that are intended to enable high-resolution environmental monitoring, real-time field surveillance, subsea infrastructure operation and maintenance, and unattended robotic intervention for event response.