Day 51: Seabed Cable Lay Completed!

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Cable Installation at Node Locations

This short white paper describes cable installation at node locations, with diagrams.

Cable Installation at Node Locations

While OOI scientists at sea on the R/V Thompson for VISIONS '11 are conducting work at Hydrate Ridge and Axial Seamount, Cecile Durand, OOI Maintenance Operations Manager, University of Washington, is onboard the TE SubCom Dependable during OOI cable laying operations.

We have achieved another great milestone: As of midnight, last night, all OOI cable has been laid on the seabed! We have dropped the last of our clump weights at the eastern, shallow end of Segment 4 offshore of Newport, Oregon, at about 110m water depth (node PN1D). (See accompanying white paper for role of clump weights and cable installation at node locations.)

We will now backtrack along the cable route and concentrate on using the ROV to bury all cable ends that could not be buried with the plow deployed from the ship. We will also return to a few areas of “shallow burial” to see if we can improve burial depth with the use of the ROV. These tasks should take us another 8-10 days or so. We’ll keep you updated!