The 100-million-dollar Neptune Canada project will make it possible for life beneath the ocean to go live on the Internet, giving people an unprecedented experience. Led by the University of Victoria (UVic), it will provide 25 years of long-term monitoring of ocean events as they occur.

“At a time when our understanding of the oceans is clearly becoming more essential than ever, Neptune Canada will play a leadership role in advancing our knowledge of the oceans in ways not previously possible,”  UVic president, said in a statement.

The underwater observatory is consisted of five 13-tonne module-like structures, which will be lowered down to the sea floor off the west coast of Vancouver Island, where they will be connected to 800 kilometers of fibre-optic cable winding its way over the sea floor.

The modules contains hundreds of observation instruments that will send real-time data and allow researchers around the world to conduct deep-sea experiments. At depths of up to 2.6 kilometers, the module-like nodes will supply power and two-way communications.

Much of the project’s infrastructure was developed by Canadian company Alcatel-Lucent, a global transmission provider known for developing submarine cable networks.

Peter Phibbs, a Neptune Canada engineering spokesman, said the project has taken Canada to the forefront of undersea research.

Neptune Canada data is expected to start flowing in late 2009.

source: Xinhua

Unlike most liquids, water becomes less rather than more dense when it freezes — and it is densest not when it is coldest (at 0 degrees Celsius, just before it freezes) but at 4 degrees C.

These are just two of water’s host of anomalous properties, some of which are crucial to its behaviour in the natural environment.

In 1992, Gene Stanley of Boston University, Massachusetts, and his co-workers carried out computer simulations of water, which suggested that hydrogen bonds in water might produce two different types of liquid if water was made very cold and squeezed to high pressures.

In one form, the hydrogen bonds create a rather open, sparse network of water molecules, called low-density liquid (LDL) water. In the other, water molecules press closer at the cost of breaking some hydrogen bonds, forming a high-density liquid (HDL).

Stanley and his colleagues found that the two types of liquid water changed from one to the other in an abrupt ‘phase transition’, like the freezing/melting transition that separates ice and ordinary liquid water.

In this view, anomalies such as the density maximum at 4 degrees C are a reflection of the same competition between dense and less-dense states that creates the phase transition at much lower temperatures.

Now, Dino Leporini of the University of Pisa in Italy and his co-workers at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore say they have seen the two phases that Stanley’s team proposed in 1992.

The team used a technique called electron spin resonance to study the mobility of water molecules within tiny pockets of liquid trapped between crystallites of ice at temperatures down to around –183 degrees C.

They report that between about –140 and 0 degrees C, they can see two types of ‘liquid-like’ motion of the TEMPOL probes, presumably reflecting the presence of two types of water in the ice pockets.

One is slower than the other, and they interpret this as evidence for the presence of two distinct types of water: the more viscous LDL form, and the more fluid HDL.

According to Debenedetti, the results seem to reveal two different types of water, whose relative amounts change as the temperature changes.

ANI