If rain does not fall in sufficient quantities to fill the water tables, as climate specialists fear, new resources will have to be found. One chance: our subsoil is said to be full of untapped pockets of fresh water. Only 2% to 3% of underground networks are known. The rest? We still have to find them!
This is the objective of the Lez 2020 project, financed by the Occitanie Region: to explore the karstic subsoil in order to gain a better understanding of it, map it and find possible new resources.
Robot. Divers have already carried out several expeditions to the source of the Lez. “Thanks to these explorations and soundings, we now know that there is a significant karstic void in the underground networks of the source of the Lez, up to 2 000 metres below our feet,” says Lionel Lapierre, a researcher at Lirmm (Montpellier’s computer science, robotics and microelectronics laboratory).
But divers cannot go beyond a certain limit and it is therefore difficult to assess the size of this void. So Lirmm engineers have developed Ulysse, an underwater robot equipped with sensors and tasked with exploring this geological labyrinth with promising potential.
Read the article : la Gazette
