Canada installs Chinese underwater monitoring devices next to US nuclear submarine base
- Ocean Network Canada confirms addition of hi-tech sensors built by Chinese scientists to its marine observatories in Pacific Ocean
- US state department has ‘nothing to say’ on matter
While the eyes of the world have been on the strategic tussle between Beijing and Washington in the South China Sea, Chinese scientists, with the help of the Canadian authorities, have succeeded in positioning four monitoring devices in waters just 300km (186 miles) off the United States’ Pacific coast.
The instruments, which use hi-tech sensors to monitor the underwater environment, are connected to the Ocean Network Canada (ONC), a grid of marine observatories stretching from the northeast Pacific to the Arctic. While the network is operated by the University of Victoria in British Columbia, its four new additions are the property of the Sanya Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering (IDSSE), a unit of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which also developed and built them.
The devices were placed on the Endeavour segment of the Juan de Fuca Ridge by a vessel owned by the Canadian Coast Guard on June 27. Now fully operational, they can be used to provide real-time streaming of data to the Chinese institute’s control centres in Sanya, a city on the island province of Hainan, and elsewhere.
The ONC initially confirmed it had sited the Chinese devices within its network, but declined to provide further information. On Tuesday, however, it said the Chinese instruments were being used to monitor deep-sea chemicals with a range of detection “not exceeding five metres”, and the data was then sent to its data management system and was freely available.
“Ocean Network Canada has an open data policy – the data from the IDSSE instruments is available to anyone,” the organisation said.