So when the flip starts you basically have a few seconds to strap in before getting tossed around the capsule as it tumbles down the side of the berg right? Even if you are strapped in I feel like surely you're going to come out very concussed at the least.
Missing from the article is any details on ventilation. You need fresh air to survive, which means non-water tight holes will be somewhere on that thing. Normally on a boat, they would be on the part that's above water. On a spinning ball, that wouldn't be an option.
My best guess is that it will be integrated in the center tube. Buoyancy ensures the center of the ball is usually above water, and one end of the tube would always be above water.
> The survivors, including Nobile, spent a month wandering the free-floating pack ice, at one point shooting and eating a polar bear, until their rescue
This sounds like something Jules Verne could have written. In fact I seem to remember this exact plot device in a book a read when I was a teenager, but the name escapes me.
I’m amazed by the idea that providing escape capsules would have saved many lives. The Christmas tsunami caused about 230 000 fatalities in a densely populated area. People didn’t even get to higher ground. Where are you going to store the hundreds of thousands capsules that you’d need to even make a dent in that number. And how will people get into those capsules within minutes of the warning?
Stability of icebergs is tricky. They don't "become" top heavy as the article states, they are constantly top heavy.
The center of mass of the iceberg is above the center of buoyancy 100% of the time. What prevents the flip is a flat base which hopefully counters the small tilts by moving the center of buoyancy in the same direction as the center of mass.
> He’s working with a company to develop nanosensors able to detect movement in the iceberg so he has advance warning of a flip
The "nanosensors" doesn't sound likely at all. If I were to tasked to create a "iceberg sudden flip detector" I would break the problem into two parts. Part 1 is monitoring the shape of the iceberg as it is changing. Part 2 is modelling how stable the iceberg is given the measured shape. Both sounds like a wicked hard problem even if you have a large team of engineers.
For the first maybe you could do periodic ultrasounds from the inside out. Embeding an array of accustic transducers and an array of microphones in the ice and then using signal processing black magic to pick out the shape of the echo you get back from the ice-ocean surface. Or just hang around with a ship mounted side scanning sonar and monitor the iceberg from the outside.
The second one should be a "simple" monte carlo simulation. But to validate it you would need data recorded from the evolution of many icebergs. Which I suspect would be expensive and lengthy to obtain.
"Nanosensors" is useless technobabble. But I bet you could do it by carefully monitoring the rocking of the iceberg in waves. Watch the period of the berg's movements; as the melting brings it closer to instability, the period would get longer and longer, which could give you some warning. (You couldn't predict the consequence of some portion breaking off, but it might give you something.)
Another commenter asked how ventilation is supposed to work -- it does say "air ventilation vents" [1], though it's extremely unclear from photos where those are or how they work, and how it's compatible with not drowning when you get dumped into the sea and they're on the bottom.
But I'm also wondering about where fresh water is coming from and where waste products go. It talks about a water storage bladder/tank, but surely that's intended for weeks max, not a year?
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 48.5 ms ] threadThe first part is probably true. The second part is folly. "Remember the Titanic".
My best guess is that it will be integrated in the center tube. Buoyancy ensures the center of the ball is usually above water, and one end of the tube would always be above water.
This sounds like something Jules Verne could have written. In fact I seem to remember this exact plot device in a book a read when I was a teenager, but the name escapes me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGSyw2dHhrc
The center of mass of the iceberg is above the center of buoyancy 100% of the time. What prevents the flip is a flat base which hopefully counters the small tilts by moving the center of buoyancy in the same direction as the center of mass.
The "nanosensors" doesn't sound likely at all. If I were to tasked to create a "iceberg sudden flip detector" I would break the problem into two parts. Part 1 is monitoring the shape of the iceberg as it is changing. Part 2 is modelling how stable the iceberg is given the measured shape. Both sounds like a wicked hard problem even if you have a large team of engineers.
For the first maybe you could do periodic ultrasounds from the inside out. Embeding an array of accustic transducers and an array of microphones in the ice and then using signal processing black magic to pick out the shape of the echo you get back from the ice-ocean surface. Or just hang around with a ship mounted side scanning sonar and monitor the iceberg from the outside.
The second one should be a "simple" monte carlo simulation. But to validate it you would need data recorded from the evolution of many icebergs. Which I suspect would be expensive and lengthy to obtain.
Assuming they ever ship any, and to him. This story may just be their marketing to try to get there, anyway.
But I'm also wondering about where fresh water is coming from and where waste products go. It talks about a water storage bladder/tank, but surely that's intended for weeks max, not a year?
[1] https://survival-capsule.com/Products.html
> In 2017 I crossed the Vatnajokull, the largest glacier in Europe (Iceland) with skis and a sled in 15 days.
Bullshit.