Today was spent, like many Antarctic days, trying to fit something into an area much too small for it (see "making sleep kits at the BFC"). In this case, it was pounding metal stakes into a rock-solid streambed. Sounds simple enough, except for here, there is no soil. We're on an island of volcanic rock, with pulverized volcanic rock (called "fines") as our dirt. Anything below 4" deep is either permafrost fines or solid rock. Wonderful :) We needed to anchor these stakes 12" deep into a flowing stream, so they would support a probe that recorded velocity. We also used the stakes as beginning and end markers for our velocity tests (really high-tech - we floated a pingpong boll down a section of stream and timed it).
Rosa does have extremely cool equipment used for stream profiling. Her super hi-tech profiling device consists of a wire frame with thin wooden poles that drop down to the bottom of various points in the stream, forming a mirror image of the streambed on the bottom. We hiked all around the town looking for drainage patterns and mapping them out, and hiked way above the town to the snowfields at the beginning of the drainage basin, in order to identify the source of the streams. To the left is me holding the stream profiler, which we took pictures of its pattern while in the stream. The adjacent picture is Rosa looking out over the town.
Rosa is working with CRREL (Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab) and the Corps of Engineers' main goal is to assess the erosion patterns of streams and ditches passing through town. "Soil" is somewhat of a resource here, since the ground on this island is mostly rock or ice. Rosa and her teams' report will help the NSF make better planning and engineering decisions about how to improve the layout of the base.
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