BUBBLES And A Fish
Bubbles is a small ROV built from a kit with a customized camera mount for looking up at ice from below and down at the bottom. Her construction was motivated by some underwater footage of bed load transport due to wave action.
BUBBLES is an acronym for some combination of the words Bubbles the Underwater Undersea Blue Bathymetric Basal Buoyant Little Liquid Exploration Submersible or Submarine.
Bubble was previously deployed in a hot-tub and in Younger Lagoon, Santa Cruz, CA, as test sites. Recently Bubbles went swimming under the ice-covered Silver Lake near Kirkwood, CA. Due to the late season, we could not walk on the ice and the shore-based deployment was complicated by the shallow waters. Nevertheless, she again proved to be liquid-worthy, and spent some time swimming in the shallow waters with some fish.

Bubbles operations. Photo by E. Lynne Harden
Bubbles was built by Ken Mankoff and E. Lynne Harden.
Tags: fauna, ice, robots, Video