Designing Wireless Sensors To Be Dropped Into Volcanoes

Posted by Soulskill on Monday September 20, 2010 @05:31AM from the appeasing-the-spectrum-gods dept.

Thorfinn.au writes with this quote from El Reg: "Topflight engineers based in Newcastle have hit upon a radical plan for warning of volcanic eruptions. They intend to build a heatproof sensor unit which can be dropped into a volcano's caldera and wirelessly transmit data to monitoring stations despite being possibly immersed in molten rock. 'At the moment we have no way of accurately monitoring the situation inside a volcano and in fact most data collection actually goes on post-eruption. With an estimated 500 million people living in the shadow of a volcano this is clearly not ideal,' explains Dr. Alton Horsfall of Newcastle Uni's Centre for Extreme Environment Technology. 'We still have some way to go but using silicon carbide technology we hope to develop a wireless communication system that could accurately collect and transmit chemical data from the very depths of a volcano.'"

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Re:I have those already by Pojut · 2010-09-20 05:45 · Score: 2, Insightful

Only a few? Why not all? ::rimshot::

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Living With a Nerd
Re:I don't think so by jandrese · 2010-09-20 06:25 · Score: 3, Insightful

I'm more curious how they plan to power such a device, and how they plan to wirelessly transmit signals through molten rock.

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I read the internet for the articles.
Umm, ok... by sean.peters · 2010-09-20 08:47 · Score: 2, Insightful

Venus sounds like a metal-ore refinery, and I'd love for someone to decide that it's worth a few (hundred) billion bucks to go get some of that Unobtanium (or whatever) and bring it back to Earth.
Yeah, it would be cool for someone to decide that. Trouble is, it's almost certainly not true. Someone did the math here on Slashdot once before (in the context of mining Mars) and came to the conclusion that even if there were bricks of solid platinum lying about on the surface of Mars, it wouldn't be economically feasible to recover them (given realistic estimates of the costs involved in going to get them and bring them back). Going to Venus would be even worse, both because of the extreme environmental conditions there and the fact that the metals are not, in all probability, lying about in the form of preprocessed bricks.