After three Deepworker seasons at Pavilion Lake – and multiple years of science scuba exploration before that – we are moving to Kelly Lake this year. You already knew that – but how do the two tie together? What will be similar and what will be different?
Kelly Lake and Pavilion Lake are similar in that they both have microbialites, and with similar morphologies (shapes) too! But at Pavilion the microbialites are just about everywhere – while at Kelly Lake they are only in a few locations. Why is that? We have done some scuba diving in Kelly Lake, but because of the limitations of how much time we can spend underwater, we haven’t been able to really map where the microbialites occur. So this year we’ll use the Deepworker submersibles to really get a close look at where all the Kelly microbialites are and how they look. They could all be similar to what we see at Pavilion – but until we go and look we just don’t know.
And speaking of mapping – we already have bathymetry (depth) and SONAR (surface hardness and roughness) data for Kelly Lake, which gives us at least some idea of where to go look for what we think are microbialites. But this data also shows us some interesting features that we haven’t seen in Pavilion Lake. For example, some of the sonar images look like gullies – the scours that are formed when water running down a hill causes a landslide. But this is underwater, so how did it form? Or there are some wavey features – what about those? Again, until we go and look, we just don’t know.
Our move to Kelly Lake is also interesting in an operational sense. After three years of having the submarines at Pavilion Lake, we largely knew what to expect. We knew how to plan missions, how long they would take, where to find the type of microbialites that a specific scientist was interested in. Because Kelly Lake is new, we have put together everything that we had learned from Pavilion Lake – both in terms of the science and the submarine exploration – and are using it to exploring our new Kelly Lake world. We have the bathymetry and sonar data, which are like having remote sensing data for another planet. So given that, how well can we do in planning the best missions, with the highest productivity and success for the selected tasks? This is really like going to another planet and using all of our training! The added pressure here is that we expect to only spend one season at Kelly Lake with the Deepworkers, which means that we have to do it all the first time: from general exploration of the lake, to selecting the best samples to collect, to which microbialites and features are of the greatest interest and should be imaged and explored the most.
This move isn’t to say that we have learned everything that we wanted to know about Pavilion Lake, but it does mean that our Deepworker exploration there has already yielded detailed maps of morphology distribution and mapping in the lake, and future work can focus on understanding choice locations through scuba diving. It is time to move to a lake like Kelly, where similar microbialites are present, but the environment is just different enough that it will put our understanding of how everything forms to the test.
