Ice rafts not sails: Floating the rocks at Racetrack Playa, Paper by Ralph Lorenz et. al. Options

[ngunn]

Thanks once again to Jason B for making this intriguing paper accessible to all: http://barnesos.net/publications/papers/20...track.Rafts.pdf

[nprev]

Real blue-sky suggestion here, but would putting little RFID tags on the roving rocks be at all useful? What I'm thinking here is some way to obtain motion measurements (and, ideally, the rate of motion) without continuous human observation. If you had two RFID receivers plus recording and/or a remote telemetry hookup, presumably you could track 2D motion of the rocks 24/7/365.

Downsides:

1. This don't sound cheap (but there might be el cheapo ways to do it. I'm aware of the technology, just not conversant in it, but I do know that there's considerable commercial interest & concurrent development ongoing for logistics applications.)
2. Adding mass to the rocks might affect their behavior, even though this might be as little as a gram.
3. You might need more electrical power than I realize to keep an RFID interrogator running continuously, and it could be a royal (and expensive) pain to do fixes, maintenance, etc.

[rlorenz]

Real blue-sky suggestion here, but would putting little RFID tags on the roving rocks be at all useful?

Things like that have been proposed, but I doubt it'd be that useful and I very much doubt that would
be permitted. Research activities that disturb the visual appearance of the playa are forbidden.