Materials that makes me think

This place have these neat "Solid Round Clear Acrylic Cabachone Half-Balls". I'm thinking that hollowing out a pair of these and fusing them together could make a great clear ball to house cameras and electronics. I wonder if somebody sells acrylic half shells?

The purpose of Cii

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The purpose of this blog is to be a project log for the Cheap in Ice project. Cheap in Ice (or Cii from now on—pronounced "see").

The spark for this was an email from Johan to Andrea:

I keep thinking that Rog sjön with its amazing mirror like quiet days might be the perfect place to try some of these ideas. I should be writing you a longer email with ideas for a real robotic marine biology research project that has probably not been done, but I keep getting distracted, so here is the short version.

How about if we placed a tethered remote controlled submersible below the ice at Rog with Internet access. Basically a cable to a central point at a deep spot in the lake, and then a tether to a RPV that can explore a few 10's or hundreds of square meters of lake bottom. Dump it in the lake in late fall and let the ice form above it. Check on it regularly for the whole winter (assuming it lasts) and then pull it up in the spring. If global warming continues, this might be a golden opportunity to capture an echo system that will disappear in a few decades.

Has anybody studied fresh water fish in the winter under the ice for a whole winter? I suspect not. I can contribute hardware/software/money resources, but there is so much hands on work, monitoring and real science that I don't have the capacity to do, never mind that I don't know much if anything about marine biology or that I can barely tell a Gädda from an Abbore (the Abbore goes inside the Gädda... I remember that), i.e., I couldn't generate an actual research paper from the results if my life depended on it, so I do need your help.

Interested? If not, I'm sure there are other things I can think of, so don't worry about it if it doesn't grip you. The world is so full of interesting ideas that one should not waste time on the ones that aren't calling to your soul.


--j

(As you can see, some Swedish words keep sneaking in. I'll build a dictionary for a few of them later.)

Andrea responded:

Well, it could be really interesting! But one problem could be that there isn't so much fish in Rog sjön, only in some places, but we could take the area that we are going to explore where there is some fish.When should we do it and with wath robot? Do you have one?

Johan then wrote:

We would have to build one. First we should build something that works for an extended time and try it during the summer where it is easy to bring it to the surface and fix it if it breaks. Then we can work on the internet and winter aspects later. In the meantime, can you find out where the fish typically goes (and what it does) during the winter? For the summer I would put it in Grönhålet, but I think that freezes solid during the winter.

Einar and I will start working on the submersible, if you can figure out where to put it and what we should expect to see. One thing I have no idea about is how dark it is under the ice in the winter. Do you think you could drill a hole and submerge an exposure meeter during the winter? Having a set of light readings above, just below, and for a few different depths during different daylight conditions would give us a good feel how much we can do in natural light and how much will need light. At first we don't have to do this at Rog. I suspect you have some frozen coastline near the school in the winter, or is the water too brackish and warm to freeze there?

Maybe I can get something simple like a camera and LED lights that can be dropped below the ice ready for this winter.

We should set up a blog to keep the notes for this. Any suggestions? We can always use blogger.

--j

Cheap in Ice is the first step in getting this done.