Hidden Earth 2019

Progress with the British Cave Monitoring Centre

30 minute Lecture|John Gunn

Abstract

In 2018 the trustees of the BCRA and the Buxton Civic Association signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the objective of establishing a British Cave Monitoring Centre (BCMC) at Poole’s Cavern (Buxton) "to monitor cave climate and environmental conditions over a prolonged period and to facilitate cave related study and scientific research". Gemini Data Loggers UK who manufacture Tinytag data loggers very generously sponsored the BCMC by donating their latest radio logger system together with probes to measure air temperature, pressure and drip rate data in the cave and rainfall, temperature and humidity outside the cave. The data from within the cave are “bounced” out and together with the outside weather data are stored on a dedicated computer. Work is in progress to enable data to be automatically uploaded to the web so that they can be viewed 'real-time'. Carbon dioxide and radon concentrations are also being measured at stations in the cave using logging instruments but these need to be manually downloaded and as yet, there is no means by which the data can be viewed 'real-time'.

During 2019 there have been two meetings for cavers at Poole's, four undergraduates have been collecting data for their dissertations, a project to monitor crack movement in real-time has been instigated with the Czech Academy of Sciences and two cavers have deployed instruments that they designed and built themselves to compare with commercially available instruments. In this lecture I will briefly run through the data being collected and the opportunities for future work