Sounds like the backstory for a Lake Placid or Piranha-style movie...
1. See also the Malaysian Airlines disappearance thread.
The one thing the article failed to mentioned is the possibility they have no idea where to look for the dye to be coming out. It's easy to do this on an island (such as the famous Oak Island), not so easy at Kettle Falls where this waterfall is quite a ways inland and the only logical outlet would either be the Brule River, or a deep cavern that leads to the coastline of Lake Superior.
Add in the fact in some areas the lake can be as deep as 1,300 feet, and you've got one hell of a hard time trying to find out where the water goes.
Acoustically ping a serial number for a couple of days. Place an array of sonobuoys in the likely outlet area, scan with boats further afield. If there is a fish sized outlet, then they should be able to get out. If you start finding your fish you can start refining the resolution of the search and plopping more fish in the falls.
At the same time, lower teathered hydrophones into the falls at various distances. If the pingers accumulate somewhere there, then you have a suggesting of fish impermeable structure.
I might need to add lights to the fish so they can see.
Plus you'd get some great YouTube footage a fisherman who catches a fish with headlights.
Put a 1 week timer on it that releases some air inside it (a chemical reaction would be easier than compressed air) to make it surface.
Make a bunch of them, in case one gets stuck anyway.
At the very least this should give the first surface point for that undergraund stream.
Similarly, it may be that the water is getting to Lake Superior just fine, but that the path it takes has plenty of opportunity to get debris caught up or lost in a side-channel.
For plastic to melt it would be hot enough to make steam, and we would see that.
Should we get some geologists in to comment on your issue tracker and propose solutions for your bugs?
Ninja edit: https://xkcd.com/793/ applies to programmers, too
It would be one thing if it was a funding pitch based on uninformed proposals but as a forum conversation on a Friday afternoon, it doesn't seem too awful.
Yes.
> Should we get some geologists in to comment on your issue tracker and propose solutions for your bugs?
Yes. And if they're wrong? So what? Is that bad?
More ping pong balls also should work. The first few billion may get stuck along the ceiling of the cave, but if you drop enough, some will have to come out somewhere.
at the same time i just wanna see it go to 10k
There's been a lot of work on "down-hole communication" for oil and gas drilling. Modern drilling involves com links to the sharp end, with info coming up and commands going down. Some of the techniques work through the drill string, but some are VLF radios.
There are also high-powered ultrasonic pingers, with a range of several kilometers in water.[3]
If you could get info for the first kilometer or two, you'd at least know where to look for the rest of the path.
[1] http://radiolocation.tripod.com/ [2] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2010RS004378/full [3] http://www.sonotronics.com/?page_id=96
The half-life is 13.22 hours, and it makes some detectable gamma rays.
(No idea for longer wavelenghts, but we use GPR to measure ground water content in the MHz range. Normal penetration depth is at most a few meters.)
It's really unlikely that the water goes anywhere other than the lake. It just might travel through a fracture network and seep out of the lake bottom miles away, but groundwater tends to flow broadly following the topographic slope (driven by the gravitational loading of groundwater surface called the 'hydraulic head') and there typically aren't isolated tunnels where some water can flow unimpeded by regional groundwater flow.
Better photos here: https://roadtrippers.com/stories/revealing-the-mystery-behin...
