The sounds of whales singing as they migrate the West Coast of Vancouver Island will be a few clicks away starting today, when a major Canada-U.S. marine research project goes online.

Neptune Canada, the Canadian portion of an international project to gather reams of information on the West Coast ocean floor went live on the Internet Dec. 8.

That means sounds picked up by underwater microphones in the Barkley Sound area will be downloadable to anyone with high-speed Internet access.

Scientists who study climate change, earthquakes, tsunamis and strange creatures and substances only found at great depths will now share their research with the world.

Whale sounds are picked up by sensitive equipment in a "node" of equipment at the bottom of Barkley Sound. It's one of half a dozen such nodes being built, strung out along communications cables stretching hundreds of kilometres out into the Pacific Ocean, forming a loop west of Bamfield and Ucluelet.

John Ford, whale researcher at the Pacific Biological Station, couldn't say if whale sounds will be streamed live onto the Internet or shortly after the sounds are captured. Either way, it will open up a new level of intimacy between humans and the giants of the sea.

"It's tremendously exciting," Ford said. "I've been involved with listening to whales almost 30 years. It's a fascinating field of study and I think for the average enthusiast of marine wildlife it presents a great opportunity to experience it."

Neptune Canada is an ambitious project to build the world's largest cabled sea floor observatory off the Island's west coast. The network, which isn't yet finished, extends across the Juan de Fuca plate gathering data from different environments, sending it through high-speed fibre-optic cables to the University of Victoria.

As of Dec. 8, much of it will be made available to anyone in the world, for free, over the Internet.

Some of the data will be streamed live, but archived images will be viewable throughout the project's 25-year life span.

While people around the world are able to surf the ocean bottom online, it will also allow ocean scientists to run deep-water experiments from labs and universities anywhere around the world. Each whale has its own distinct sound. Scientists can tell different killer whale pods apart by sounds alone.

Ford said a cluster of sensitive microphones arranged at Folger Pass in Barkley Sound will allow scientists and the public to track killer whales and dolphins and hopefully catch the occasional sound of a more rare and endangered species such as a humpback, sei, blue, or fin whale, or even a Wright whale, not seen on this coast for 40 years.

"By listening, we can actually get a good sense of the seasonal occurrence of them," Ford said.

And while most people imagine the floor of the vast Pacific as a quiet underwater place, Ford said listeners probably will be surprised at the amount of human-generated noise from boats.

The project is a consortium of university and scientific organizations, spearheaded by the University of Victoria and the 800-kilometre cable network has its terminus in Port Alberni. It is at neptunecanada.ca.

Neptune is the first undersea observatory of this scale.
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