Artifitial Habitat

[andydiver06]

Here's an hypothetical question.....

Suppose in your area you cannot dive from June to Sep due to monsoon as sea is rough and visibility is in mm's . You Plan to develop and artifitial fresh water habitat on a property of 8000 m2 . How would you go ahead doing it.

My ideas are as follows :-

1. Pond Length 100m by 70 m
2. Depth levels 6 m , 12 m, 18 m and 24 m ( terraces )
3. Zones - Sandy, muddy bottom and gravel and rocks
4. Small ornamental tropical fresh water fish zone- Sandy side with vegetation, Large fish like carp zone with muddy bottom - Rocky Zone with small river fish zone ( All zones contained )
5. Overhead environment- for experienced divers
6. Hire a Habitat consultant to get more ideas and land scaping as different fresh water species occupies different depth levels.

What else could make this habitat exciting enough for divers.

 

[El Orans]

Similar to this?
[B]www.divedome.co.uk[/B]

 

[andydiver06]

Dive dome is a fantastic project but its a marine habitat environment and would cost a fortune, plus marine aquatic envrionments are very difficult to maintain. With that kind on money the whole bunch of us can dive all around the world our whole lifetime. lets discuss something feasible. Say land is available and the excavation equipments are available. Rain is heavy to fill up the tank.

 

[El Orans]

Add a wreck.

 

[The Kraken]

Don't know about the rest of it, but it'd take one bodacious filtration system to keep the water clear enough to generate enough interest among divers to keep the project financially feasible.

the K

 

[andydiver06]

We don't have filters in lakes and ponds but people still dive in them. What about quarry's. Viz can be regulated by bottom feeders, vegetation and the kind of aquatic life. Algal bloom can be a problem to reduce visibility. There must be a way to control them. Water level will be maintained by regular addition of fresh water by tankers. Partial circulation and filtration can be done low cost by sand/gravel bed filters - gravity flow to a sump and pumping back to the pond. (Anyway we dive in 0-5 m viz regularly. )

 

[andydiver06]

I just check out www.haighquarry.com which is a similar environment. We also have lots of Iron Ore Mines pit around here. Some of them are old and abandoned for a long time and have formed nice lakes. But during rains due to the runoffs it becomes red.

 

[Guba]

As most have already noted, keeping the vis more than "your fin tips" will be a problem. While there are quarries with very acceptable visibility, most of those are spring fed, which does a good job at refreshing the environment and keeping algae in check. Other "closed systems" aren't as fortunate. Most of the static impoundments I know of struggle with algal growth, usually reducing vis to a few feet at best and inches at worst.
As at least one poster noted, filtration (or huge input of fresh water) would be prohibitively expensive. However, there are some biological alternatives. Zebra mussels do have a positive impact on visibility, but they have annoying and sometimes harmful side effects and can "leak" out into other ecosystems. Bringing in non-indigenous species can often backfire, so that's not usually a good alternative.
In short, the type of environment envisioned would be extremely hard to maintain for the purpose intended.