may the force be with you

Think of it as the Mars Rover but at the bottom of the ocean, remotely exploring our own planet's most alien landscape for scientists back at mission control.

"This is how the science is going to be done," said Deborah Kelley, a University of Washington oceanographer.

		Niki Desautels / P-I
	UW oceanography graduate student Colleen Evans, left, and Zurich doctorate student Adelie Delacour notice a grayish hydrothermal fluid as they observe the remote exploration of the "Lost City."

In 2000, Kelley led an expedition using a manned submersible to explore the deep Atlantic Ocean. Her team stumbled upon something never seen before. The researchers discovered a startlingly massive collection of limestone towers located miles away from the tectonic "spreading" cracks in the seafloor that typically produce such structures.

Some of these hydrothermal vent towers were hundreds of feet high, prompting the scientists to call the unprecedented find the "Lost City" after the myth of Atlantis.

Yesterday, Kelley and her colleagues were in Seattle and also "virtually" back at the Lost City to demonstrate how robotics and information technology can transform deep-ocean exploration. What once required dangerous and time-limited manned exploits can now be done by remote control on a ship deck or in an office thousands of miles away.

"Bottom time is critical ... and we can now work 24 hours a day, seven days a week," said deep-sea explorer Robert Ballard, best known for discovering the wreck of the Titanic.

He spoke to Kelley and others at the UW from a ship cruising above the Lost City, about 1,600 miles east of Bermuda.

Ballard and Kelley are collaborating on this "proof of concept" project, largely paid for by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's office of ocean exploration.

	Shelf-like "flange" structures jut from the wall of one of the spires in the Lost City hydrothermal field. (IFE URI-IAO, Lost City Science Party and NOAA)

"Our oceans are 95 percent unexplored," said Ballard, speaking by a satellite video link-up from the NOAA vessel Ronald H. Brown. The celebrity scientist tossed out some other figures -- 72 percent of the planet is under water and so is 51 percent of the United States -- to make the point that there is a lot left to explore.

In a darkened room on the UW campus, the makeshift, temporary command center featured Kelley and her colleagues surrounded by video screens depicting Ballard along with the remote-controlled submersible Hercules poised alongside one of the stark, shimmering white towers of the Lost City.

The Lost City towers are distinct from the "black smokers" found at the seafloor cracks off the Northwest coast, which feature creatures that have figured out how to survive on the light-deprived, toxic and extremely hot edge of an undersea volcano.

Life (mostly microbial) in the Lost City is just as bizarre and extreme, but less well understood.

"One of the main questions we're looking at is how does life thrive down there," said Kelley.

Nobody has ever seen anything like the Lost City, said Kelley, but it probably isn't unique -- it's just that so little of the ocean has been explored, she said.

While there is some scientific research being done on this expedition, which started last week and ends Monday, the primary goal of the exercise was simply to show that the technology and approach could work for deep-sea exploration.

There is perhaps nobody better at promoting ocean exploration than Ballard. Yesterday's event at the UW often seemed more like an announcement of a new IMAX film (which, by the way, is involved in the project) than a typical scientific news conference.

A list of sponsors and supporting organizations, including National Geographic and Ballard's private organization, the Jason Foundation for Education, was prominently mentioned or displayed. A high school class from Woodstock, Ill., that won a naming competition for a new NOAA ship was honored.

"It's certainly a different way of operating," acknowledged Kelley.

But if that's what it takes to get the science funded and the public educated about research, she's comfortable with it. Kelley noted that the National Science Foundation's budget for oceanography was recently cut, which means some of the research ships will stay in port.

After most of the media and the high school students left the command center, Kelley and her team at the UW got back to work seeing what other information they could get Hercules to collect from the Lost City before calling it a day.

source:http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/234479_lostcity29.html