Welcome!

Welcome to the blog for the Oberlin College Geomorphology Research Group. We are a diverse team of students working with Amanda Henck Schmidt on geomorphology questions. This blog is an archive of our thoughts about our research, field work travel notes, and student research projects. Amanda's home page is here.

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Long sucky days

Greetings from Pu'er. We are supposed to be in Jinggu but didn't make it last night. The schedule said "today will just be a long sucky day". However, since the previous day was long, we met at 8 for breakfast. We didn't get to the first sample site until after lunch and then couldn't tell if it was upstream or downstream of a tributary. So we had to sample both places. Darn. By the time we were done with those it was 5:30 pm and an hour until sunset and 2 hours to the next sample site. We got there at 7:40 pm and found a gravel mine to get us down to the river. No over bank samples though because the entire mine was made of material pulled directly from the river. It would have been hard in daylight to find a good over bank site. Sieving in the dark didn't seem like a good idea because it would be so slow. Most of us forgot headlamps for the trip. The evening is the worst time of day for me, sickness wise. So, I sat in the car and used the headlights to give them some light. Adrian found a sandy spot. Yue used my iphone light. Veronica is organized and had a headlamp. Because when we didn't sieve last summer, we didn't end up with enough sample, we filled two gigantic bags with sample. We should have enough for the big sample we need, but may not have enough fines for the smaller grain sizes we are collecting to use depending on the results of Adrian's experiment. And no over bank sample. Below is a picture. 


After that we had a lovely dinner at a little roadside restaurant and met some professors and people from shanghai visiting a former student doing the Chinese version of teach for America in the rural place we were (basically a highway exit truck stop). Dinner was good and made me feel better. 

We still had 3 hrs to our planned destination but I started to get tired and to feel really sick. Chinese expressways have lots of really bright lots on them and I found myself squinting to see. Pretty awful. Then I got really sick and had to stop and throw up over the side of the highway rail. Yuck. But I felt better after. At least I know the baby is still doing well. 

We decided to stop in a big town on the way to our site. Yue found us a hotel and we got here at 11:15 pm or so.  After a quick shower I was in bed and trying to get rested for today. Today we resample sites from last summer and because 3 samples are for Adrian's project, we have a ton of sieving to do. 

More later. 

Amanda

No comments:

Post a Comment