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About an eighth of a University of Alberta collection of ice cores has melted due to a freezer malfunction:
A precious collection of ice cores from the Canadian Arctic has suffered a catastrophic meltdown. A freezer failure at a cold storage facility in Edmonton run by the University of Alberta (UA) caused 180 of the meter-long ice cylinders to melt, depriving scientists of some of the oldest records of climate change in Canada's far north.
The 2 April failure left "pools of water all over the floor and steam in the room," UA glaciologist Martin Sharp told ScienceInsider. "It was like a changing room in a swimming pool."
The melted cores represented 12.8% of the collection, which held 1408 samples taken from across the Canadian Arctic. The cores hold air bubbles, dust grains, pollen, and other evidence that can provide crucial information about past climates and environments, and inform predictions about the future.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 11 2017, @08:51PM (1 child)
So we have a overly complex monitoring system without redundancy.
I have a couple decades experience in telecom... The point being I'm not sure if there is any other kind of enterprise sized monitoring system.
I seen some stuff...
Honest to god I worked at (name redacted but it was a big name) and a freshly promoted admin was provisioning "whats up" ping monitoring of a production system using 127.0.0.1 as the monitored device IP addresses because they didn't want to deal with 2am phone calls about red alerts on telecom gear thats not even been shipped to us much less carrying prod traffic, because the MS Project gnatt chart said monitoring system had to be operational before installation could proceed.
My guess is looking at SCADA type stuff "alarm condition" stuff probably is at best 50% effective if its non-hazardous to life. I hope refineries and chem plants and nukes where lives depend on monitoring, take it more seriously, but if there's no dead bodies then 50% savings of enormous damages will still fund the monitoring project even if it fails 50% of the time.
I mean you have to be realistic. Nobody died. Nobody drowned. You can't expect NASA/NRC level monitoring. Its a great excuse to dig up some new cores...
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday April 11 2017, @11:43PM
I think that considering the expense of the cores. And the possibility that they possible can't be replaced or at least risk contaminating the source. Other research groups may depend on the availability of the ice cores. When funds are tight and global warming skeptics are abound it's necessary to be able to prove the case. And if one fails a lot of lives may be destroyed indirectly.
Do you believe it's a SCADA system that has been used for this freezer?
Still if the monitoring system depends on a database. That adds something that can go wrong and which isn't strictly needed. The second weak point is the need to interact with a complex campus wide network. Control rooms are also abound with complexity. On top of all this there's no little redundant 8-bit MCU doing any just-in-case-fubar alert. On a systematic level there seems to been a blindspot for the case where if the temperature is too high. Turning on the heat pump will actually increase the temperature. That is tricky, but should be something professional freeze room designers and users should take into account in my opinion.
Still curious about this incident. There's many missing pieces of information and there' s probably something to be learned.
I think a found a suitable word for this incident inspired by the original article.. Incorepetence ;-)