Dispatch from Hawaii. Producer Jennifer Isenhart and a pair of Wide Eye cinematographers are on Oahu, shooting footage for a science documentary on deep sea internal waves.
Lead scientist for the Wave Chasers team, Matthew Alford explains how low-tech systems are often the best solutions when working with the ocean.
A critical component of the re-chargable Wirewalker robot is the wire. It must extend from a floatation device at the surface of the sea, three miles down to the sea floor. The 15-thousand foot long steel cable provides a fixed route for the robot, which crawls down the wire to take water samples, then crawls back up again to dock at the re-charging spheres.
So, how do you spool out 15-thousand feet of steel cable and sink it to the bottom of the ocean? With a train, of course. To be exact: with 36-hundred pounds of old train wheels. The low-tech solution offers several benefits to this high-tech mission. First of all, one stack of four steel locomotive wheels weighs in at almost two tons. That’s the perfect weight for pulling down 15-thousand feet of cable to the bottom of the ocean. Another benefit? “They’re cheap,” says lead scientist Matthew Alford. “When our mission is complete, we’ll pull up our expensive testing equipment by cutting loose the anchor. We can’t afford to leave behind expensive custom anchors every time.” One train wheel anchor costs Alford about a thousand bucks. But the price fluctuates with the value of scrap metal.
“We buy them from a guy in Seattle who delivers old train wheels to our warehouse at the University of Washington. I have about 16 sets of wheels welded together and ready to go out on our next voyage, where we’ll drop about a dozen wires for our research equipment at sites near American Samoa.”
If you’d like to see a diagram of the Wirewalker robot and its unique train-wheel “trainchor”, click the link, below.
Diagram of the Wirewalker Robot
