The Martha’s Vineyard Coastal Observatory has become part of a new long-term program aimed at better understanding ocean ecosystems and climate change.

WOODS HOLE — Urging a group of Chatham middle schoolers to follow their dreams, filmmaker James Cameron handed the keys to the Deepsea Challenger, the only human-occupied vehicle able to reach the deepest parts of the sea, to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in a ceremony Friday morning. “The things you get excited about today, those will be some of the most important driving forces for you in the future,” Mr. Cameron told the gathering of 12 and 13 year olds who formed a semicircle in front of him.

With Cape Wind hoping to break ground in the coming years and a huge new swath of ocean opened for wind farm development south of the Vineyard, the impact of turbine noise on fisheries is still poorly understood.

“The long-term impacts of these wind farms are just totally unknown,” said Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution biologist Scott Gallagher this week.

The waters south of the Vineyard will soon become among the best studied in the world. At the continental shelf break, some 80 miles south of South Beach where North America begins its descent toward the abyssal plain, a huge swath has been identified by scientists to be monitored, dissected and measured in resolutions and over time scales unprecedented in oceanography.