Shear Pain...

Kate freezes on the bank for scale....

Wednesday till Sunday was the big shear vaning marathon at Rowley marsh. We are part of an NSF funded project to look at the impact of nutrients on the geomorphology of marsh platforms. Its called the LENS project (although I am pretty sure none of us know what that stands for...) and its being run in conjunction with a Long Term Ecological Research site at Plum Island Estuary (we call that PIE-LTER). Another NSF funded project at the LTER is artificially introducing nutrients (like nitrates) into the marsh to see what effect it has on the ecosystem (that project is called TIDE - we are very good at acronyms around here...).  But the folks at TIDE noticed that the geomorphology at the nutrient enriched site seemed to be changing compared to the control sites. Cue LENS. Which among other things looks to see how the channels are changing shape and if it differs in the nutrient-enriched and control sites.

We have lots of little studies that fit into LENS, but one of them is to look at the strength of the soils in banks of the creeks, both in the control and at the enrichment site. We use a shear vane....

Shear vane fully inserted horizontally into the creek bank. 

Not yet inserted on a vertical profile on the banks of Sweeney Creek. Its raining.

Here you can see the dial - you twist the black knob till the soil 'breaks' and then read off the number

Between Carol, Kate and myself, we did 2 horizontal and 2 vertical measurements at 36 points on 4 different creeks. Thats a LOT of bending over....

But we made it through... and now we hope that the big fat Spartina alterniflora roots don't cause too many crazy high numbers and we can see the trends.

BIG FAT ROOT that topped out my shear vane measurement....

And thanks to Kate Morkeski from the TIDE project for all these photos and for coming and helping us (and being a great sport in the field because Carol and I do sing quite a lot but mostly because it was cold, windy and rained, all except the last day).

More about the TIDE project folks and how we tried to help them in return soon....

A Day of Crate Building

Just putting up some of the pictures Joel took of Chris and I building our massive crates to ship all of our equipment away to fake France. These crates were all built from scratch and now weigh a ton (not really joking!) There was a fair amount of head scratching, but we measured twice, and most of the time only had to cut once! I skipped out at about 1ish, but Chris and Joel were working til the sun went down. With a lot of man power and the BU forklift hopefully the equipment, stowed safely in their new homes, will begin its voyage to fake France on Friday. See you on the other side!

 The raw materials!

 Using the sides as a model runway!

 Relaxing in my coffin or large bathtub!

Well done Chris and Joel!

Once more unto the beach...

Knee pads compulsory....

So, technically, field work started in March this year with a trip to measure the SET's in South Carolina.

Carol and Zoe measuring shear strength on the marsh platform in South Carolina

But it's going to really kick off soon with a five day event measuring the marsh strengths in Rowley, MA (and grilling/beer drinking at Marshview) with the MBL folks. The Boston-based crew are then off to 'Faux France' for a week in May... (aka Canada). And we have a new field site to scope out for work in July with UNO investigating tidal bars in Georgia (open invite to anyone who doesn't eat much, doesn't really need to sleep and likes to carry heavy stuff around all day).

Anyway before long, Carol will find herself living the dream...

and we won't be able to get the mud out from underneath our toenails until the end of the field season (luckily for you no illustration). But we will take photos and keep you posted on the science we will be doing...