Hi Aaron,
Donald has certainly pointed out some strange openings in Antarctica-
perhaps you can explain these. Looknig at them on Google Earth, they
are most impressive. In addition to LIDAR surveying, can you take and
transmit images of the features that your quadcopter is flying over?
Can you do thermal imaging, to look for temperature variations as you
fly over these features? What is the maximum distance range between
where you're controlling it and the quadcopter? What's its elevation
range; i.e., how high can it fly? I ask these questions because there
are several apparently deep, large diameter openings on the northeast
rift zone of Mauna Loa in Hawai`i that we'd like to know more about: are
they deep crevices, evacuated magma chambers, or open vertical volcanic
conduits? Are they active? Given their location on the NE rift zone, I
doubt that they're skylights into lava tubes. Two of these openings are
shown on the attached images.
The first (Mauna Loa pit 1) is at elev. 9250' and has a diameter of 90'.
The second (Mauna Loa pit 2), is at elev. 11,470' and is 95 feet
across. Both of these are 3-4 miles from the nearest road and given the
rough terrain, we have not hiked up to either one. If you can bring your
equipment out to Hawai'i and can control it from several miles away,
then we'd be happy to help you out. I have a permit to do lava cave
studies in the Mauna Loa Forest Reserve, which is where these features
are located, and can try to make whatever arrangements are needed to get
you set up, should you have an opportunity to travel to Hawai`i.
Good luck in Antarctica,
Doug Medville
On 8/28/2012 3:37 PM, DONALD G. DAVIS wrote:
Hi Lee & SWR list,
You may be interested to hear I will be using flying robots to explore
the ice caves on Mt Erebus this December as part of my PhD project at
New Mexico Tech. I am currently testing an xAircraft X650 frame with the
open-source ArduPilotMega 2 flight controller. I hope to purchase a
Hokyo lidar which I will either mount on the xAircraft frame, or if I
can find sufficient funding ($12,500) I would like to purchase the
Ascending Technologies SLAM Pelican system. My current research is on
Erebus but I would of course use this system in traditional karst as
well. I've done plenty of traditional cave surveying, and some cave
lidar surveying, and think that quadcopter-mounted lidar systems are a
great solution, and the technology is here already. I have an old blog
post here: http://www.diydrones.com/xn/detail/705844:BlogPost:839613
Feel free to get in touch with me if you are interested, or have
suggestions for further funding sources.
Cheers,
Aaron
A question for you as an Antarctic speleological researcher: Larry
Fish brought my attention in May to bizarre features visible in Google
Earth--two huge holes in rough-looking black terrain with patchy snow and
ice near the coast of East Antarctica. The larger one (about 300 feet
across!) is at 66d 33' 11.77" S, 99d 50' 21.33" E; the smaller one (about
100 feet across) is at 66d 36' 12.57" S, 99d 43' 12.36" E. The latter one
looks to have some dark-colored, curving hood-like structure, with a
raised margin, arching over half of the opening (or at least gives that
illusion when viewed without stereo capability). The other may have a
shell of ice along the right side, with a gap between that and the rock.
My first thought was volcanic fumaroles, with emerging fumes interacting
with subzero surface air to form cryokarstic equivalents of rimmed vents,
like the ice towers made by this process on Mt. Erebus.
But this area with the apparent pits is in Queen Mary Land, near the
Bunger Hills, a quarter of the way around the continent's margin from the
Mt. Erebus volcanic zone, in terrain mapped as very ancient Precambrian
with some younger overlying sediments. This would seem to preclude
volcanic venting. There's been some science done in the Bunger Hills, but
I've no idea whether anyone has ever looked at these pits up close.
Whatever these holes are, they are shown as at only about 500 feet
elevation, so they presumably can't go deeper than that without going
below sea level. My only other guess is that the chaotic-looking black
landscape is not bedrock but stony glacial drift, and that the pits might
conceivably be where massive chunks of ice have disappeared from
underneath a permafrost-stabilized rubble surface. But, with the sole
exception of the round pits in volcanic rock on Mars, these are the most
alien-looking cave mouths I've ever seen, and could be right out of H. P.
Lovecraft. I wondered whether you might have any insights about these
remarkable features, or know any experts on Antarctic geomorphology who
could at least tell us what the black host material actually is, and what
processes in that environment could account for such cavities.
--Donald Davis
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