HOUGHTON, MICHIGAN – Guy Meadows loves winter. It gives the director of Michigan Technological University’s Great Lakes Research Center(GLRC) in the cold, snowy Upper Peninsula a chance to do something few others can: study the Great Lakes under a cover of ice.
“Our arctic-like environment provides a wonderful opportunity to make the GLRC a true year-round research facility,” Meadows says. This winter, for example, the GLRC built and deployed a cabled observatory under the ice off the research center’s dock, on the Portage Waterway, which connects two parts of Lake Superior.
The cabled observatory is mounted on the bottom of the waterway, 17 feet below the surface. It is a collection of instruments including an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP); a YSI multiprobe that measures nine water quality parameters such as the temperature, amount of dissolved oxygen, pH and water turbidity or cloudiness; and a live, lighted color videocam. The instruments are connected to shore by an underwater cable that feeds power to the equipment and transmits data back to the scientists for analysis.
Meadows says the most striking thing he’s learned so far is how much light makes it down 17 feet below the ice-covered surface and through several feet of snow. “That’s important,” he explains, “because light drives the engine of the Great Lakes.”
For the full story, see http://www.mtu.edu/news/stories/2014/april/story104939.html
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