For his part, Delaney is quick to deny that deep-water cabled observatories are of little interest to anyone but geologists. "I flatly disagree," he says. "There is a tremendous amount of oceanographic science to be done in the waters overlying the Juan de Fuca Plate." Niiler acknowledges that a cabled observatory offers advantages for studying ocean vents and the chemistry and organisms in the waters around them. But if you're interested in how the exchange of gases between the ocean and atmosphere affects climate change, he says, the cabled observatory has far less relevance. "They just don't go together," Niiler says. "To pretend they do is just not right."
Critics also fear that once major new observatories are built, future research grants will tilt in favor of scientists who propose to work on them. "It will be hard for [funding agencies] to resist the temptation to feed this big facility," says the anonymous U.S.-based oceanographer. "It's exactly like the [international] space station," adds Russ Davis, another oceanographer recently retired from Scripps. "We will have to have guys use this thing once we put this together."
Delaney and others respond that all the scientific projects associated with the cabled observatories will be peer-reviewed, although Delaney readily acknowledges that the oceanography community is still coming to grips with the facilities. "It's a vigorous discussion, as it should be," he says. Christoph Waldmann, a member of the European Sea Floor Observatory Network steering committee looking into a new European cabled-observatory system, says the dialogue under way in Europe and elsewhere is much the same. But he and others repeat that proponents of cabled observatories are not out to do away with anyone else's research but rather seek to open dramatic new possibilities to ocean research. "The science community is saying this is a capability we need to have," says Robert Detrick Jr., a marine geologist at WHOI who chaired a recent National Research Council report that favored building cabled observatories. "They provide a new capability for the community and approach ocean sciences in a different way."
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