Field trip: coring

We had our core sites staked out, and the weather forecast was fab. A good start to our coring day. It would start (and end), as all field days, with some annoying logistics: we made our way to Menai Bridge, jumped into one of the hire vehicles parked there, drove back to Bangor, picked up the students, drove them to Newborough, and went from there. That’s 3 bridge crossings. And we’d do 3 more at the end of the day. 

Jaco and I (and Martin as we had more students than fit in Jaco’s and my vehicle) took half the students to somewhere we could park near the core sites. And then we went to the first site. Jaco must have been a bit worse for wear; he’d just touched down the day before, flying in from Chicago. It didn’t show. And the weather was as good as the forecast said it would be! 

Me explaining how a log sheet works

I explained about how to document all the necessary information in a core log. And then we started coring. I knew we would core up a dark horizon. And we did. I tried to core through it, to get an idea of what was underneath it, but the sand got so sloppy that failed. Oh well! Two units is fine. And we needed to be quite snappy; we had an agreed time for meeting up for lunch with the geophysics crew working further south. We joined them on the beach.

Getting up close and personal with the sediment 

After lunch we took a fresh batch of students to the second core site. It took a bit longer to find the stake; this one was surrounded by, and therefore a bit hidden by, vegetation. There we took another core. And we again cored a unit of which I wanted to know what was underneath it. We went for a spliced core; just take a new core a short distance away (16 cm in this case) and go deeper. But the stratigraphy turned out to be different, so we had to call it another core. These marshes can be so laterally variable! 

When we had logged and sampled all that we went back to the vehicles, back to HQ, and then back to Bangor and Menai Bridge. First day of actual science done!