(Final?) Day of field work - September 19, 2016

This past week, I finished what I hope is my final day in the field for my MSc thesis project. Our mission on Monday was to collect all our remaining sensors and data from the field, as well as auger a auger to a layer underneath the meadow that was imaged by the geophysics but difficult to interpret. The augering was messy and in the end not very successful; out target was at about 6 m below surface, but we did not get past 4 m deep. However, despite the slurry of mud that we got covered in, all the other data download went off without a hitch, and we were treated beautiful eye candy all day. There was a dusting of snow over the whole valley that morning, and the larch trees with their yellow, autumnal needles added a dazzling and vibrant element to the landscape. We may have looking like messy ogres by the end of the day, but we were treated to beautiful panoramas throughout.

A big thanks to Jen Hanlon and Polina Abrakhimova for helping me out in finishing off my field work!

For these coming weeks, I'm focussing on finalizing my inversion images and doing a proper depth conversion of my GPR data. Then the final interpretation on writing begins...

Downloading some time-lapse photos

A view of the valley on this cool September morning

Jen

Polina

Me

Happy to have a big truck to drive around this site

Some of my models of the subsurface based on 2015's resistivity and seimic refraction measurements. The black line shows the target of our digging.

This wet sloppy mess got all over us (but thankfully not on the camera.) With the sidewall collapsing and the suction on our auger so strong, we gave up after 4 m. 

A dried up Bonsai Lake in the background

In some places, where there is water in the lakebed, it just disappears into small openings in the clay. 

Polina points out some other places where there are holes in the clay layer where water might be seeing in to. 

On June 28, the water was almost at the top of this stilling well. Where'd the lake go?