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....