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

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.

(Honolulu, Hawaii)   It’s the fourth and final round and the Wave Chasers research team is optimistic in spite of the odds.    The score:  Ocean – 3; Wave Chasers – 0.   Well, not entirely zero.   In the past three botched attempts to deploy the Wirewalker robot to the bottom of the ocean this skilled team of researchers has learned a lot.  First of all (and they knew this already), the ocean doesn’t always play nicely.   In fact, it rarely does.

Lead scientist Matthew Alford shows the "Wirewalker" system to our camera crew

The “Wirewalker” is what’s known by oceanographic researchers as a McLane profiler.   It’s a piece of equipment designed to “walk” up and down a 15-thousand foot long vertical wire, sampling the water for salinity, temperature and velocity numerous times during each pass.     It then transmits that data, via satellite, from the depths of the Pacific Ocean all the way back to the research team at the University of Washington.  When it’s operating as it should, the Wirewalker will provide the Wave Chasers with a constant stream of information that will open a new window into the world of deep sea internal waves.   But in six years and three attempts, the mission remains incomplete.

“We’ve seen it all,”  says lead scientist Matthew Alford.   “Problems including spheres crushed under pressure at the mooring deployment, a motor returned from the manufacturer wired backward, and bizarre hardware problems in our communications float have all prevented the system from working completely.    And the last attempt, well, that was just totally unexpected.”

The last attempt, this past January, ended in a full scale rescue operation by the U.S. Coast Guard when the team’s research vessel sprung a baseball sized hole in the hull.

“I think at this point we can say we’ve just about seen it all,” says Alford.

Ocean – 3.   Wave Chasers – 0.

Part of what makes the system so complicated is a pair of re-charging spheres– each containing 1,700 D-cell flashlight batteries.    A typical McLane profile unit will only function for about 44 days under normal operating conditions.    But the re-charging spheres, developed by Alford and the Wave Chasers research team, will allow the system to dock and re-charge itself, extending that window of operation to six months.

“A lot of things can affect the way internal waves behave.   Having a longer timeline of sampling data will only function to improve our overall understanding.”

Internal waves are waves just like the ones you see on the surface, only they build, move and break along the bottom of the ocean.   Down this deep, they can build to incredible heights of up to 800 feet tall, taller than your average urban skyscraper.   They pull with them enough energy and heat to affect the entire earth’s climate.  “Internal waves are a major component of the ocean’s circulation system and a key piece of the earth’s climate puzzle,” says Alford.

The next seven days offer the last hope in the foreseeable future for deploying the Wirewalker to the bottom of the Kauai Channel, a 15-thousand foot deep channel 80 miles off the coast of Oahu.   The Wave Chasers are cautiously optimistic.   The system tested and worked in the Puget Sound last month and as of today, is working on land, dockside in an Oahu boat yard.  But tomorrow, they take it out to uncompromising sea.   There, the re-chargable Wirewalker system could prove as important to deep sea internal wave research as the rovers to Mars research.   Or, if the worst happens and the system fails again, funding will run out and the project may sink.   Only time will tell if the fourth try is the charm.