The Global Foundation for Ocean Exploration has taken to Kickstarter to try and crowdfund a project that would see a team of engineers building an underwater robot to explore Yellowstone Lake. Yellowstone Lake is the largest freshwater lake above 7,000ft in North America.
The leader of the team Dave Lovalvo, a keen ocean and large lake explorer for the last thirty years now wants to take on the lake. The team he presides over already has a robot called the Deep Discoverer robot. He has already sent a robot into the lake before in the '90s but now they are starting a new project.
Talking about the team he set up, Lovalvo said:
So I started the foundation. I made the commitment to build a team of young engineers who are passionate about this - as passionate as I was when I first started. In the last year the foundation has grown signficantly. We have mechanical engineers, we have electrical engineers, we have software engineers, we have video engineers.
Lovalvo's stance is that the only way to preserve Yellowstone Park is to study and understand it and that also involves studying the lake. The team say they need $100,000 in crowdfunding to make the robot happen, with a donor that will match every dollar that comes in.
According to TreeHugger, "the geothermal activity of Yellowstone creates an ecosystem that consists of a variety of organisms that exist nowhere else on Earth."
Once the Yellowstone project is complete, they will continue to use the robot to survey other lakes and oceans so that they can be studied.
To contribute to the Kickstarter campaign:
CLICK HERE
