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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

A ping pong ball or dye isn't going to work if it is surfacing in Lake Superior. That lake is so vast that the kind of a tracker they use in airplane black boxes is a good bet. Short of mapping the lake bottom, which is unrealistic, we may never solve the mystery.

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The US Navy has been quietly mapping ocean bottoms for decades, since nuclear submarines started going all over the oceans.[1] The resolution isn't all that great, but by now they know where most of the seamounts are. It's a boring job. Cruise across ocean in a straight line towing a sonar array, return along a parallel track, repeat.

But maybe nobody has bothered to do the Great Lakes in detail yet. Not much submarine traffic.

[1] http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/lewis_clark01/bac...

> Short of mapping the lake bottom, which is unrealistic

Is it? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/archaeolog...

Granted, these guys seem to be piggybacking on massive work done by oil companies, but the North Sea is roughly 3x Lake Superior, so you only need 1/3 of the effort. You just have to find an excuse...

A radioisotope might work, though good luck convincing people to dump tonnes of radioactive marker into a hole that nobody knows where it goes. A pinger from an aeroplane would do an alright job, but they are usually specified to work for a week which might be far longer than the period underwater.

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