My parents just got back from a trip to Arizona, and the Grand Canyon. They brought me back this stone candle holder. I find the different layers incredibly interesting, but I’m wondering what all the dark lines between the different sections/top could be-they are slight ridges that stick out of the side of the holder. […]
Month: January 2017
Help for the Mississippi River from Obama
http://www.nola.com/environment/index.ssf/2017/01/mid-baratara_sediment_diversio.html One of the last few things President Barack Obama did was approve this sediment diversion on the west bank of the Mississippi River. This sediment diversion is a beginning part of the 50 year, $50 billion project to stabilize the wetlands and coastline of Louisiana. The diversion will move 75,000 cubic feet per second […]
Sediment Loss on the Mississippi River Delta
The Mississippi River Delta is losing a football field of wetlands every hour. This is partly because of all the levees being built along the Mississippi River to stop the river from flooding communities. The levees may seem like a good idea to the people living alongside the Mississippi, but the river needs to naturally […]
A New Way to Protect Salt Marshes
This article discusses a new way people are determining if salt marshes are vulnerable to erosion. The system that they used creates estimates with large margins of error, meaning that this ratio can only truly be used to predict whether a marsh has enough incoming sediment to thrive or disappear. Perhaps this ratio can be […]
Channeled Scablands
20,000 years ago the Cordilleran Ice Sheet was moving north. In western Montana a particular ice lobe from this sheet blocked a crucial valley in a place called Clark Hill. Because this crucial pass was blocked off, melt water from the ice sheet began to fill a giant basin now referred to as Missoula. The […]
The Grand Canyon, From the Sediment Perspective
Madeline Kollegger and Taylore Grunert The Grand Canyon is known around the world for its incredible layers, and defying depth. It formed from the bed of the Ancient Colorado River, as it wound around the plateaus in the Colorado Plateau Province. The water in the river, and the sediment it carried wore away at the […]
The Awe Inspiring Power of Ice
River Incision experiment
We attempted to generate the highest incision rates as possible in this sediment simulation. By increasing the flow rate and making the channel as narrow as possible, the water will flow extremely rapidly. However, the channel continues to widen as the canyon walls collapse. This is especially true along the edge of the outside […]
Cross Bedding in the Flume
I was surprised to notice that, while we were playing with the flume, cross bedding had formed. The first layer of bedding was already there at the start of the lab. The next two layers formed once we changed the velocity of flow, causing the water levels to sink and rise. I thought it […]
Ganges River – Pollution
The Ganges River is one of the world’s largest, and feeds the largest delta in the world. This river starts in the Himalayas, getting fed by the melting glaciers there. Scientists estimate that the Ganges River and Delta, which have already seen their fair share of natural disasters, may become even more dangerous when climate […]
A Call for Levees on New York’s Waterfront
http://science.time.com/2012/11/02/manhattan-goes-dutch-building-levees-in-gotham/ In his discussion of the plan to build levees to protect New York City, Jeffery Kluger discussed the possible structural and economic impact posed by another storm such as Hurricane Sandy. In his article, he focused on Manhattan, discussing how the geology of the island is primarily granite. Due to this, if storm surge […]
$50 Billion Not Enough to Restore Louisiana Coastlines
On January 18, the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority had a meeting to discuss repairing the 1,800 square miles of land lost between 1932 and 2010. Unfortunately, complete restoration is impossible. “As much as we would like to have the coast that we had in 1932, there’s no question we can’t get there,” Haase said. […]
Sediment: Not Good To Spill
http://www.sltrib.com/home/4267539-155/dam-project-fills-american-fork-with http://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/north/american-fork/monitoring-clean-up-plan-for-tibble-fork-sediment-spill-still/article_20f70fe9-f9b9-59ea-90ca-89cc55c750ac.html These are links to articles that talk about a sediment spill in August 2016 that killed fish in the American Fork River. The sediment (which was accidentally spilled) was laden with heavy metals, and was part of a dam rehabilitation project upstream. As the fine grain sediment settled, in some places it made […]