Wireless Sensors Monitor Glacier Behavior 77
Roland Piquepaille writes "In a world premiere, an interdisciplinary team of the University of Southampton, GlacsWeb, has deployed a network of wireless sensors inside a Norwegian glacier to record its behavior. This news release, "Sensor Technology Comes in from the Cold" says that the sensor probes, housed in 'electronic pebbles,' are buried 60 meters under the surface of the glacier. And they transmit wirelessly their observations about temperature, pressure or ice movement to a base station located on the surface, which relays the readings to a server in the UK by mobile phone. The researchers think that similar sensor webs will soon be deployed around the world to watch what is changing in our environment. You'll find more details and pictures in this overview."
Re:Is it just me? (Score:3, Informative)
radio link (Score:5, Informative)
I'm surprised they got a radio link to work through 60m of ice. They're apparently [soton.ac.uk] using 1.8 ghz radios.
-jim
Re:Is it just me? (Score:5, Informative)
Here's another good site [columbia.edu].
Piquepaille, Call it what it is: BLOG / SPAM (Score:4, Informative)
"You'll find more details and pictures in this overview."
Hey Roland, stop being MISLEADING and DISHONEST and say up front that you've taken other people's pictures and links (NOT more details), posted them at your BLOG, and that you want everyone to visit your BLOG so you can make more MONEY from increased traffic and ADVERTISING.
I have never seen anyone so shameless about directing so much traffic to their own blog for financial self-gain. It brings a new definition to the term blog spam [weblogs.com]
This overview of Roland Piquepaille spam [slashdot.org] activities is the most insightful that I have ever read. Even Slashdot's moderators agree that it's insightful.
Re:Standards? (Score:2, Informative)
That said, there are people working on bringing the TCP/IP protocols to wireless sensor networks (a project at SICS in Sweden [www.sics.se]) but it hasn't reached wide-spread usage yet.
Roland==Spammer (Score:1, Informative)
Poster is a slashdot spammer [slashdot.org].
Re:radio link (Score:5, Informative)
The presentation you linked is a bit old, and I'm not sure where the 1.8 ghz figure comes from.
I am one of the field researchers on this project, and radio propagation through the ice has been one of the major difficulties. Initial work based on 868MHz has had limited success, so the followup work will use 433MHz with a backup low bandwidth 50kHz link.
Initial tests done last October with 433MHz indicated that we should be able get the range we need. The key is that ice has very different radio properties from water. It is much less conductive. This is countered by the problem that for much of the year there is a lot of water inside and on the gacier.
Re:Carrier (Score:3, Informative)
There is very good mobile phone coverage on the glacier, as there are antennas on the roof of a hotel in the valley below. This combined with excellent accessibility are the reasons this glacier was chosen for the study.
The hardware has to be very carefully designed to get the batteries to last. We believe that we can get up to a year worth of operation from a probe. I don't have the details of the batteries to hand, but this is the aproximate time period, taking into account the reduced performance due to the cold.
Re:How are these pebbles powered? (Score:5, Informative)
The glacsweb probes contain about 4 small batteries. They contain a realtime clock, and are in a minimal power sleep mode for most of the time. They wake up once a day to talk to the base station on the surface. The probes are designed to last for a year, and the first batch were deployed in August 2003.
Re:Is it just me? (Score:1, Informative)
Global warming denial is a symptom of people's memories being limited by their lifespan.