Signal from the Deep Sea

This film documents how a group of Taiwanese scientists and engineers successfully developed the ocean-bottom seismometer (OBS) after years of efforts through multinational and cross-functional collaboration. In the area of seismic research, the OBS is a delicate and expensive piece of equipment, which needs to be placed undersea for a long-time to track fault movement before recovery for data analysis. The OBS technology has been monopolized by the western world for a long time. Taiwan used to pay a lot to buy the OBS which was not only incompatible with Taiwan’s geographical features but also had a low recovery rate. However, in 2018, for the first time, Taiwan and Japan initiated a multinational cooperation in an OBS project. They deployed 35 made-in-Taiwan OBS units on the seafloor of the Ryukyu Trench, at a depth of about 4,000 meters. We join them in their long, arduous, unknown yet exciting journey. This film will lead us undersea into the world of OBS, and listen to the heartbeat deep from the earth.