Dominica Round 2

Hello Everyone,

Marcus here, and this will be my recounting of another eventful winter-term project. As mentioned in Ely’s post, we went back to Dominica for post hurricane Maria sampling. In preparation for the trip I worked on mapping any visible landslides from satellite imagery available after the storm. I was able to spot well over 500 in the regions of the island that weren’t covered in clouds. Im sure if I had clearer pictures I’d be able to find another 500. The good news was that they seemed to be mostly small, not affecting huge swaths of land.  The bad news was that even though landslides didn’t move that much earth, the island still was catastrophically affected. As I was searching for anywhere which could’ve been hit by a mass-wasting event I noticed large areas of bare and downed trees. I didn’t really know what to make of that, but I figured it was important and marked it down anyway.

Dark brown regions indicate lots of downed/bare trees while the red/black dots & points are landslides. Much of the eastern portion of the island satellite imagery was blocked by clouds.

Going back was truly a wild experience from start to finish, especially because we didn’t know if it was happening until December, and even still, nothing was set in stone until almost two weeks before we left! Obviously, its very hard to complain about leaving the oh-so-warm Ohio January for an island in the Caribbean, but this wasn’t just a vacation. We were working. Hard. The trip started with us leaving for the Cleveland airport at 4:30AM on Thursday, Jan 18^th, and ended with us returning at midnight, Friday, Jan 26^th. There was tons to do everyday, the first three days were dedicated to sampling. We had 31 unique locations to go to all across the island, and from each we wanted around 3-4kg's of sand. Our final day was spent organizing the mess and preparing it for the four flights home. Have you ever checked 350lbs worth of '''soil''' through three different customs offices? Its an exciting time for all parties involved.

The trip itself was very bittersweet. On one hand, it was amazing to be able to go back—this information is really unique in that we rarely ever have the before data for serious natural disasters. On the other hand, just seeing what the storm did to the island was breath-taking in every sense of the word.

Before                                                                          After

Both sets of photos are from one of the main natural attractions on the island, Trafalgar falls. I really can’t describe what being there in person was like after being there over the summer, it was surreal. I’d seen pictures right after the storm on Facebook, but the gravity of the situation really just isn't the same unless you’re there.

After the storm, 2018 on the left - Before the storm, 2017 on the right. (its wrong, i know, i know)

                                              

This is another sample site, the pictures are harder to compare but that’s largely because the shape of the channel evolved so much after the storm. As seen in the before picture, the water is very shallow and easily navigable. To go to that same spot in the after picture would’ve put me in over my head.

And scenes like this were common in most of the streams we sampled. It was a complete 180 from what we observed over the summer. Being there in person really put into perspective what I was seeing from the satellite imagery, and the magnitude of the hurricane. These trees didn't look anything like those that I saw over the summer, instead they were like something out of Horton Hears a Who.

And then there was the toll on buildings..

The location where the KECK group stayed at over the summer.

But overall, it was a successful trip, it was and still is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. We stayed at a variety of places across the island and had the luxury of waking up to views like these.

Which makes it that much easier to spend the whole day collecting sand. In total, we wrangled almost 400lbs of wet sediment from 20+ different rivers and streams across the island. We are hoping to use the gammaspec in the lab to understand how these water systems are sourcing material across the island. Now that we have two sets of data, we are also trying to understand what a massive storm like Hurricane Maria does to erosion in general on the island. This specific question will be one of the primary focuses of my honors project. I think another big portion will be a comparative analysis of before-and-after’s for the locations we sampled. As I showed in those initial pictures, so much has changed.

Since we’ve been back Ely and I have had the enormous task of preparing the samples to be analyzed. That means moving every particle of sand from the bag we packed it in into another bag to be autoclaved (a fancy way of sterilizing it) and then dried again. Luckily, we don’t need to dry all of it, just enough for us to keep here, and we can ship the rest of the wet stuff to Melinda at the University of Vermont. We also had some issues with sample collection in the field that we figured we could take care in the lab, so there’s been a fair amount of sieving going on in the Oberlin College Geology department. It was such a fun activity to do for 3 straight days in Dominica that I’m glad we get to do it here too!!! In all honesty, it wasn’t bad; it’s a pretty monotonous task but it goes by fairly quickly.  Now that we’ve got what we need all of the samples have been repacked and will soon be en route to Vermont. The last thing to do is tidy up the lab before everyone else arrives and sees the mess Ely and I have made of it.

As the data is time locked behind 24-hr run cycles through our gamma-spectrometer it’ll be somewhat slow going at first, but I hope to see some initial results within the next couple weeks. I’d like to try and post updates to this blog more consistently in the coming two semesters, as a way to track my progress as well as keeping me on track, with Amanda’s approval of course.

I’ve also been working with Jason Williams and his STEM based initiative, Get With the Program, more and more recently, but as this post is already so long I’ll post some updates for that in a little while.

Until next time,

Marcus

Also just a fun picture of the trail to one of our bed-n-breakfast locations. We had to cross a knee-deep river by headlamp light in the pitch black. It wasn't too dangerous or anything, there was a safety rope if we needed it.