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Sea Floor - Surface - Satellite - Shore
slambo writes: "Wondering how research is conducted on the ocean floor? One of the methods, as described by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is to put sensors on the sea floor that transmit the data through a cable to a buoy that then bounces the data through a satellite to the land station. They have an overview on their website. The main advantage of this setup is near real-time monitoring of activities on the sea floor."
The big problem is that >95% of the radioactive waste is stuff like wrenches and clothing. This stuff is still very poisinous and we preduce many tons of the stuff per year.
I worked for WHOI for a year doing onboard science support (net admin, programmer, technician, whatever it took, etc.). There is a heavy use of linux by oceanography folks. The WHOI and UW ships all use linux mostly, though Scripps uses a lot of Solaris.
Dropping down at intervals in Alvin (or whatever other submersible, crewed or not) is pricey, and you can only be down for a little while every once in a blue moon. Only a few vent sites have been visited regularly enough to get a sense of how things change there. Put down remote sensors with a steady signal back, and you can maybe try to figure out how tube worms and shrimp and so on colonize new areas. This is a totally different basis for life down there; those animals live on chemosynthesis at the base of their food chain, not photosynthesis, and we know almost nothing about them. What we need is to do what old time naturalists did -- watch a while to get the basics down.
Plus, our clumsy sub's scared off anything mobile by the time it staggers noisily into view. Here's hoping architeuthis dux slips into view of one of these remotes at some point.
As for dumping nuclear waste down there -- you think putting nuclear waste directly into a fault makes sense? Even if you didn't have to lower it down through pressures that'd crack all but the most specialized, titanium sub, that'd be idiotic. (Here's hoping that giant squid mutates like in an old movie and comes for you.)
The End?...
Water is more turbulent than a vacuum or an atmosphere. So it would be more stressfull on mechanical items
Plus there is the old maxim about the ocean. Put something in the ocean, and either something will grow on it, something will try to eat it, or it will corrode.
This provides for a number of interesting engineering problems.
the simplest solution is what is used right now. You drop the submarine to the bottom, and release ballast to float to the top.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Some people have used/studied old military sensor
data works and obselete telephone cables.
"Yup, it's wet today again"...
A recent study of ocean temperatures says there
may not be as mouch 20th century global warming
as thought. Human settlements distort land-based
measurements. Subsea measurements are rather sparse.
It would be nice to know better.
Now, I'm not taling about low level crap lie booties and overalls, but the higher level srtuff.
Now, some people may argue that breeder reactors can cause increased nuclear proliferation, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Just like the second amendment postulated, as more states are armed with nuclear weapons, wars break out less and less, and stability increases. Smart guys, those founding fathers.
Monitor activities? They may say they're looking for seismic disturbances, but we know who they're really looking for...
In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
Ia, Ia, Cthulhu Ftaghn!
In post-9/11 America, the CIA interrogates YOU!
> Summary of data for 1/10/1901
The data is very old or there is a software problem
> Humidity: %100 +/- 0%
The probe is in water
> Light: 0 Lumens +/- 0 Lumens
It is dark
> Pressure: OVERFLOW
The pressure is too high to read
> Temperature: 0.56 C
It is cold, close to freezing
informative huh? surprising deep sea conditions!
Having worked in Woods Hole for three years, I can tell you that it isn't NEARLY as cool as it sounds from the web pages. The system is working, and the buoy farm offshore makes for a highly effective testbed, but the complications associated with satellite delivery of data from floating buoys make the data connections tenuous at best, and horrible at worst. Ever try to deliver data to a satellite from a floating ocean buoy when it's raining? Don't bother.....
In a geology class I once took we studied turbidity currents. These are basically undersea sediment avalanches. Since nobody had ever seem one (only the deposits) we couldn't figure out how fast they moved.
Eventually someone in the trans Atlantic cable business noticed cables breaking at regular intervals, based on the distance apart they were.
It turns out the turbidity currents were breaking the cables. We knew where the cables were, and exactly when they broke! So that's how we figured out how fast these avalanches are.
You cant just drop the fuel on the surface, most of the top of a plate is acreted off and shoved upwards. To get a subduction you'd have to drill a long way down, and thats once you've gone down a few km's of ocean!
Also what difference does it make? Oceanic plates subduct at a rate of a few cm's per year. They dont melt for hundereds of km's under the continent they are subducting under, or millions of years. Some theorys about some plates say that the plate gets all the way to the taylor/guttenburg without melting!
Now I'm not normally a rabid environmentallist, but this concerns me very much. Apparently the US Navy is planning to deploy a low-frequency-sound based submarine detection system over much of the world's oceans. These devices use 200 decibel (!!) constant blasts of sound to detect ships. Unfortunately, this has the side effect of making hundreds of square miles around each sensor site completely uninhabitable to dolphins, whales, and other sea life that relies on sound for life. Do you have any idea how much 200 decibels is? Decibel is a logarithmic scale (like the Richter scale). 120 db is a very loud rock concert. 150+ is permament hearing damage in humans. I can't believe this plan is seemingly going forward! It will be disaster for Earth's sea life!!! Well I guess thats not important to the Navy or our "national security." Just wanted to bring this to people's attention. If you want I can find more references / links to this issue.
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Like... um... little crabbies walking along? Now we'll um... know when those crabbies move 3 feet to the left! Imagine the advancement of science! And... um... we could incorporate the star wars defense system to ah... catch lobsters! Yeah! Why, there hasn't been such a huge advance in lobster catching technology since the lobster cage!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
.. under very high pressure.
I've thought from day one that this "last frontier on Earth" stuff was a bunch of WHOI.
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Personally I think that we're not spending enough on things like this, because at the rate that America and the rest of the first world is using up natural resources and producing pollution soon the only place left with any kind of survival and resource potential is going to be on the ocean floor near hydrothermal vents where we can life alongside the bacteria and algae.
But apart from that this is pretty interesting, and a much better use of our scientific resources than YADMP (Yet Another Doomed Mars Probe). It makes more sense to understand our own planet before we go haring off into outer space, because despite what techno-fetishists tell you, space is no solution to any of our problems, whereas the sea is a resource we haven't really begun to tap.
Now before anyone misinterprets my words to mean "ocean dumping of nuclear waste" or says something nonsensical like "what if it 'comes up' in a volcano somewhere else", recall that ALL of the Earth's current internal heat is generated by the natural radioactive elements present in the Earth (see: http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/env99/env087 .htm).
And since most radioactive elements are heavy, they tend to sink and not come back up. Those that do reemerge to the surface are diffused across the globe and are indistinguishable from natural radioactivity.
Support subduction zone dumping of nuclear waste now! Write your legislators! Get funding allocated to research this at your local University. It *is* a good idea. And far better than anything else yet conceived of what to do with the waste.
"Why not just quit making the waste? You overlook world energy shortages."
DSFP (Deap Sea Floor Probe) #223-K
Summary of data for 1/10/1901
Humidity: %100 +/- 0%
Light: 0 Lumens +/- 0 Lumens
Pressure: OVERFLOW
Temperature: 0.56 C