Underwater video captured by Ocean Networks Canada will be featured in The Deep, the second episode of the BBC series Blue Planet II, airing today. The show will also appear in Canada on BBC Earth early next year.
The footage features the Endeavour hydrothermal vents, located 250 kilometres southwest of Vancouver Island at depths of between 2,200 and 2,400 metres.
Endeavour is home to the western-most instrument/sensor node in Ocean Networks Canada’s NEPTUNE observatory, a 840-kilometre loop of fibre optic cable with five nodes in all.
The vents are on a northern segment of the Juan de Fuca Ridge, between the Pacific (to the west) and the Juan de Fuca (to the east) tectonic plates. Declared a federal Marine Protected Area in 2003, the Endeavour hydrothermal vent fields were the first Marine Protected Area established in Canada under the 1997 Oceans Act. It is the world’s first protected hydrothermal vent ecosystem, host to unique ecological communities adapted to living on an underwater volcano.
Ocean Networks Canada, an initiative of the University of Victoria, was founded in 2007. Its observatories collect data on the physical, chemical, biological and geological aspects of the ocean.
