Persistent Mobile Ocean Observing: Marine Vehicle Highways

Persistent mobile ocean observation platforms, supported by arrays of subsea marine vehicle service stations, will enable direct study of oceanographic and geological processes that, due to their transient nature and spatiotemporal variability, are not well understood. These include, but are not limited to, ocean-seafloor interactions and crustal ecosystems, mid-ocean ridge volcanism, coastal circulation and shelf ecosystems, reef health, and arctic sea-ice interaction. Further, certain types of subsea events, such as erupting submarine volcanoes, instabilities in methane hydrate deposits, marine mass-wasting events, turbidite flows, the ecological impacts of major earthquakes, breaking internal waves, the fate of mid-water vortices, and episodes of anoxic upwelling, can be energetic, transient, and unpredictable, often having unverifiable consequences. These cannot be readily detected, characterized, or quantified owing to the difficulty of anticipating the onset of such phenomena. The intractability of launching major sea-going assets with short lead times to capture and document such evanescent system-level processes from beginning to end means that our understanding of these and related processes is not readily expandable with current oceanographic tools.Marine Vehicle Highways (MVHs) will change the way ocean science is conducted by making temporally and spatially distributed data sets more attainable and accessible, opening the door for broader participation in transformative ocean science.