VENUS

Not only the second rock from the Sun. It is also the Victoria Experimental Network Under the Sea. Check it out: VENUS - the Ocean online, real-time, anytime From their website:

Make your connection to the ocean through our cabled seafloor observatory.

VENUS, The Victoria Experimental Network Under the Sea, is a facility that connects you via the Internet to underwater instruments on the ocean floor near Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

The platform is expected to expand out to 50 different instruments such as physical and chemical sensors, acoustic (active and passive) sensors, and cameras. They also have instruments that are placed in sediments, on the bottom and on an �elevator� (profiler) that rises through the water. All of this is relayed via fibre optic cable to a shore station and made available over the internet to anyone wanting to use the data. The location (the Saanich Inlet in the Strait of Georgia) is a very interesting location for several reasons so their choice was excellent. Very cool! When I was in college, I majored in Physical Oceanography and Marine Biology. Wanted to be another Jacques Cousteau. Unfortunately, there were the other 999,999,999 people who also wanted this job. Got into computers back in 1978 and am happy with that decision but I still skim the journals and want to get another boat in the next five-ten years. Stuff like this is brilliant and major props to UVic for making it publicly accessible. This is a major boost to their schools but also to Oceanography in general.