ASTORIA (AP) — Leaders of a revolutionary project in oceanography have spent the past year drafting designs for an ocean observatory off the Pacific Northwest coast.

Now, the team of experts at the University of Washington has preliminary approval to build their elaborate underwater research lab, part of which will use power and bandwidth from Warrenton to study the Cascadia Subduction Zone.

Program Director John Delaney, an oceanography professor at the University of Washington, toured the Oregon Coast recently with Assistant Director Michael Kelly and project manager Pete Barletto to discuss their vision with community members.

The project would install powerful fiber-optic cables on the seafloor, allowing scientists to deploy robots, cameras and sensors to study underwater biology, chemistry and geology in greater detail than before.

Better yet, with 10,000 times the bandwidth of a home Internet connection, the cables would deliver volumes of data — including video of seafloor happenings — to anyone using the Internet.

“You can do oceanography in Kansas,” said Delaney. “It doesn’t matter anymore where you live. You can interact with the ocean from 3,000 miles away.”

If all goes according to plan, Warrenton will be the landing site for a fiber-optic cable serving the part of the lab that examines earthquake and tsunami hazards in the Cascadia Subduction Zone.

Four other branches of the lab — with hubs stationed near natural gas reservoirs, earthquake fault lines, an undersea volcano and the middle of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate — would stem from a cable landing site in Pacific City.

With remote-controlled robots roaming the seafloor and water column, the lab would cover the central and southern portion of the Juan de Fuca plate. A complementary project in Canada will examine the northern portion.

Later, as part of a larger vision, the Pacific Northwest observatory will link up with similar labs in oceans around the world.

The assistant program director, Kelly, and the project manager, Barletto, have labored to pinpoint the right locations for the observatory’s SUV-sized “nodes,” which will serve as the power stations for monitoring devices.

It’s a balancing act between the logistics of laying fiber-optic cable and the interests of science, said Kelly.

“The best science is at the most geologically unstable parts of the seafloor, which is also the part of the ocean where you don’t want to put your cable,” he said.

The site selections are designed to cover a broad range of seafloor landscapes to help scientists worldwide better understand the Earth’s oceans.

Research instruments connected to the nodes would deliver a constant stream of measurements of underwater phenomena such as ocean currents, tectonic plate dynamics, volcanic seafloor creation and releases of 700-degree water from spouting spires and chimneys.

Scientists of all walks can compete to add their instruments to the lab and conduct underwater research of their choice.

Delaney said he hopes to have the $170 million needed to start construction in 2010 so the observatory can be fully operational by 2015.

The project was delayed this year by a change in federal budget policy. Delaney had expected to receive final approval on the project designs earlier this year, but the rules changed to require yet another round of reviews.

Delaney is part of a larger consortium of oceanographers in the Joint Oceanographic Institutions working together to secure $331 million in National Science Foundation funds for a broader network of observatories that would reach across the globe. Final approval for that funding is now scheduled for spring 2009.

While the delay could increase costs and give similar projects in other countries a competitive advantage, Delaney said the additional scrutiny is understandable.

“We’re asking the federal government to give us a quarter of a billion dollars to do something no one’s ever done before,” he said.

Delaney has been plotting the observatory for 15 years.

With its round-the-clock monitoring, he said, the innovative lab will give scientists new eyes to study the world that lies nearly two miles under water. They can correlate seismic and biological events in ways that weren’t possible before, creating entirely new fields of study.

The results could be earlier warnings of earthquakes, tsunamis and storms, new medicines derived from marine microbes, better understanding of the ocean’s role in global climate change and better fish stock management.

Some of the possibilities are unknown because so much about the ocean remains a mystery.

“We’ve had more robotic manipulations on the surface of Mars than in our own ocean,” he said. “The ocean is the most powerful engine on the planet for determining conditions on the continents ... It’s so fascinating but so poorly studied.”

———

On the Net: Cascadia Subduction Zone: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/structure/crust/cascadia/index.php