Canada’s newest deep-sea droid embarks on multi-day sea trial along our coastline

Plunging into the Pacific Ocean along the Island’s west coast, a deep-sea droid dubbed ‘Jenny’ has embarked on its first major expedition to collect ocean-floor data this fall with Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) and Canpac Marine Services Inc.

Jenny, a roughly $8 million remotely operated vehicle (ROV) capable of reaching depths of six kilometres, is off completing key maintenance tasks on ONC’s offshore subsea 800-kilometre-long cabled observatory infrastructure. It’s slated to be there until Saturday.

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“There are only a couple in the world that can work at those depths,” says Ryan Anderson, Canpac Marine president. It took one year to design and one year to build the robot says Anderson, noting that Jenny is about the size of a small VW hippie van.

“It’s great to finally get out for sea trials and see her in action.”

During the eight-day expedition aboard the Canpac Valour, the new ROV will swap out old instruments for fresh ones at three main sites along ONC’s observatory NEPTUNE (North-East Pacific Time-series Undersea Networked Experiments), a data collection loop that starts and ends at Port Alberni’s shore station.

Meghan Paulson, ONC executive director of observatory operations, says NEPTUNE has five nodes used for powering communications.

“Because it’s cabled and powered, we are able to collect data in near real-time and keep the instruments powered for years on end. If you think about instruments working at the bottom of the ocean, think of them as computers, sometimes they stop working,” Paulson says.

Deep reach, nimble control

Jenny can conduct “very complex tasks that need high dexterity”, according to Canpac’s director of ROV operations, Josh Tetarenko, who controls the ROV’s two arms using miniature versions on the ship’s control centre.

“When we move these around, the arm on the sub moves exactly where we move,” he says.

Depending on sea conditions, the droid will collect up to 12 hours of video footage each day from 11 high-resolution cameras and 300K lumens of light.

“It’s all basically 4K quality and the zoom capabilities are incredible. It has a lot of functionality,” says Tetarenko, an electrician by trade who has been working with ROVs for the past 15 years.

Plenty of capacity

Deep-sea ROVs have a whole suite of sampling capabilities, from shipwreck observation and recovery to marine debris collection and species monitoring.

“It really opens up a whole world for any number of scientific expeditions that are wanting to explore in the deep ocean,” Paulson says.

“The more we understand about the ocean, the more we can protect it; change how we are living and influence policy to make big decisions, particularly on things like the climate-change front.”

ROVs have been used to transect a specific line on the sea floor over many years.

“That video gets handed over to scientists to review and count the sea life and biology in it,” Tetarenko says.

“We’re actually starting to use machine algorithms to do fish counting for us, so grad students don’t have to sit and watch the video for hours at a time.”

Not only can it work at such an ocean depth, but the droid features a 7K-long cord that can lift objects as heavy as 3K kg, Tetarenko says.

“The inside is made of Kevlar around the conductors we need to power the ROV, which are extremely high-voltage, outside looks like a wire roped, armoured around,” he says.

Robot can go where needed to find earthquake data

For this fall sea trial, Jenny will be working in waters as shallow as 100m (close to the coast at Folger Passage Node) and as deep as 2.5K metres.

Since stepping into her leadership role with ONC four-and-a-half years ago, Paulson says some of the earthquake data they’ve collected has made her sit up and take notice.

“We have a whole network of seismometers and accelerometers on our NEPTUNE observatory. We are in a seismically active area. I’m not from this coast, but I was surprised at the frequency of earthquakes that happen here from the low-magnitude,” she says.

Activity is particularly notable around the Endeavour site, some 200 nautical miles off the Island’s shores.

“In one area, in the Endeavour area, it’s at a spreading centre where continental plates are moving away from each other, that activity has certainly increased over the past two-and-a-half years,” Paulson says.

Coastal First Nations and Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) recently protected 133K square kilometres of deep-sea territory located off the southern tip of Haida Gwaii.

The Tang.ɢwan-ḥačxʷiqak-Tsig̱is Marine Protected Area (MPA) is home to extraordinary seafloor features, including more than 47 underwater mountains, known as seamounts, and all confirmed hydrothermal vents in Canada. It is now the largest MPA designated under Canada’s Oceans Act.

Tetarenko says the group hopes to work with DFO next summer to do more seamount research and he emphasizes that the impacts the ROV has on any biology is “extremely minimal.”

“We try to make sure the ROV doesn’t touch the seafloor when possible. We put a lot of effort to make sure we don’t leave any debris or any oil,” he says.

Watch the fall expedition live here.

Watch the fall expedition live here.