Chapter 12 



Tagged Water Masses for Studying the Oceans 



129 



OPERATION "hare AND HOUND" 



Figure 3 



local water. There are several reasons for pre- 

 ferring a design leading to inexpensive construc- 

 tion and single use; the cost of decontamination 

 of apparatus of this type would outweigh any 

 benefit from repeated use. Suggestion is made 

 of the use of a salt such as sodium nitrate which 

 has both high solubility, and an endothermic 

 heat of solution which would serve to overcome 

 the adiabatic heat set free during lowering. It 

 would appear that one or more tons of a nitrate 

 salt, mixed into bottom water by use of a few 

 kilowatt hours of energy, stored in oil-sealed 

 accumulators, could produce a compact body of 

 very heavy water which would rush like a 

 freight train across the terrain dropping a 

 streak of traceable radioactive eddies as it trav- 

 eled. 



A fixed, water-mixing quern, of the sort 

 described, might produce a tagged water mass 

 behaving in a manner appearing realistic to 

 both the disposal planner and the submarine 



geologist; however, its use is not likely to lead 

 directly to the extremely simple results needed 

 for the very first experiments. The employment 

 of a dragged hare might be preferable at the 

 outset — and its metering machinery might be 

 somewhat less elaborate than that of the 

 quern just described. 



One might contemplate using 1,000 or more 

 curies for making streaks several kilometers 

 long so that location would not be difficult with 

 a simple gamma device dragged by a ship. In 

 Figure 3, Ship A is shown dragging such a de- 

 tector which might be called a "hound" for 

 obvious reasons. For very great depths, no elec- 

 trical wire is presently available with the dura- 

 bility equal to that of an ordinary dredging 

 cable. It would, therefore, be wise to first con- 

 sider the use of a compact multichannel chart 

 recorder inside the dragged pressure shell E so 

 as to make permanent records of signals picked 

 up by a set of gamma detectors suspended by an 



