Beacon Projects

These issues alienated the chemistry community which then prompted the development of a second Beacon Project, Beacon forms. Since the existing Icaris system was built using the form-oriented ISIS/Base and the first Beacon project did not have forms and it failed for chemistry, the lesson was assumed to be that chemists must like and need a forms-based system. Thus another project was formed to create a java application that implemented an optimized forms-based environment. Unfortunately, the first production version was extremely slow, awkward to use, fragile, and was not able to access the full range of important data sources. Coincidentally, a stealth project was underway at the time to develop a proof-of-concept CIDBS for Lilly based on ChemLink that eventually became Mobius. 

Fig. 19.3 The Cape Roberts Project drilled three holes through the sea ice about 16 km off the coast of southern Victoria Land at Cape Roberts. The cores are identified as CRP-1, CRP-2, 2A, and CRP-3 and were located close to CRP-1. The Cenozoic sediment at these sites dips away from the coast into the Victoria Land Basin. The cores consist of Oligocene to Miocene sediment composed of glacial diamictite interbedded with mudstone and sandstone. The sediment records the gradual cooling of the climate and increasing deposition of glacial sediments. CRP-3 bottomed in Devonian sandstone of the Beacon Supergroup (Adapted from Cape Roberts Science Team (1998) published in Terra Antartica vol. 5(1) 1-30, 1998)...

Whilst the full monitoring of deformations is desirable for many reasons, this is not always possible from the start of a project. When fill starts under water the installation of traditional settlement measurement equipment (settlement beacons) is not possible. A grid of settlement beacons normally is installed as soon as the fill is above water level. 

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