Deploying a Wireless Sensor Network in Iceland

A wireless sensor network deployment on a glacier in Iceland is described. The system uses power management as well as power harvesting to provide long-term environment sensing. Advances in base station and sensor node design as well as initial results are described. The Glacsweb project The Glacsweb project [1] aimed to study glacier dynamics through the use of wireless sensor networks. It replaced wired instruments which had previously been used with radio-linked subglacial probes which contained many sensors. The base of a glacier has a large controlling effect on a glacier’s response to climate change and there is a growing need to study it in order to build better models of their behaviour. Several generations of systems were deployed in Briksdalsbreen, an outlet of the Jostedal icecap in Norway. As a multi-disciplinary research project it involved people from many domains: electronics, computer science, glaciology, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and GIS. Initial deployments had to solve the mechanical design of the probe cases and the unknown radio communication issues. The solutions involved craft as much as science and engineering but the key success has been to create data which had not existed before [2,3,4,5] while advancing our knowledge of sensor network deployments. Hot water drills are used in order to produce holes which reach the glacier bed. Most probes are placed 10-30cm under the ice while some are placed within the ice. Due to the relatively slowly changing environment the probe sense rate is normally set to once every four hours, although an adaptive sampling algorithm has been developed in the lab [6] which would optimise this sampling rate.