Images and photographs

El Siglo

Alright folks,

This is a thread dedicated to environmental related imagery and photographs. Same rules as other threads, keep them clean and if possible within reasonable sizes (i.e. no massive jpgs).

I'm looking forward to seeing them already!:)

All the best,

El Siglo.

prettygurrly

aw...not many takers on the photos...here's my fave from my lake that I'm doing my PhD on

El Siglo

prettygurrly wrote: »

aw...not many takers on the photos...here's my fave from my lake that I'm doing my PhD on

Aye, not many takers at all, think I started this thread in my first week of moderator zeal! Nice picture. What lake is that? What sort of stuff are you doing in your PhD? Any coring at all?

muckish

Bog Burst near Glencolmcille, Co. Donegal. Can't remember when it happened but I think it was about 2 years ago.


This bog burst flowed across the road (it has been cleared up since) and blocked access to this area for a few days.

prettygurrly

Hi El Siglo,

the lake is in Co. Monaghan and is called Sreenty Lough near Corduff. You can find out more about my programme that I'm in at www.teagasc.ie/agcatchments

yes we did some coring last year for a separate project under the programme but it was interesting to see the results and I did some analysing of slides so I know how much pollen and what type is in the core at various depths...plenty of grass...over and over and over again!

my PhD specifically is concerned with Phosphorus (P) loading to Irish water bodies. So on the lake I'm trying to determine how much of the P is attibuted to internal loading from various chemical and physical reactions and how much is due to overland flow from external sources. I also have a site in Dunleer Co. Louth (also in the programme see above) which I will be using time series analysis of P concentrations and discharge rates in the White River to attribute the P loading to particular sources and in fact to critique the use of Load Apportionment Modelling to do this. And finally, I'm also going to use data from the Blackwater River in the north to substantiate my critiquing of LAMs or possibly the other way round, we'll see how it goes!

what are you doing?

Nice pic muckish...how did you get it to load in your comment? mine just has a file to click on...

prettygurrly

whoops, forgot the most important thing...why i'm doing what i'm doing!

by 2015 ireland has to have all water bodies (lakes over 50ha, rivers, coastal waters and groundwater) at "good water quality status". if ireland doesn't we have to be able to explain ourselves. my work is going to provide some background to our explanation and try to give some sort of time frame for when the water bodies that dont reach this standard will....that's it in a nutshell...

El Siglo

Coring in India last November.

prettygurrly

aaaah that sorta coring...to make boreholes to draw water up from. i thought you meant sediment coring of lakes where you look at past history or Phosphorus, pollen and diatoms...

we have couple of boreholes at the Dunleer site somewhere I think. However, I'm not really concerned with groundwater anymore bit sad as the whole reason i got back into academia was to get into groundwater again...but life has a funny way of turning out sometimes!

muckish

prettygurrly wrote: »

Nice pic muckish...how did you get it to load in your comment? mine just has a file to click on...

you need to host your photo first on a photo sharing site such as flickr or picasa. those site will have a sharing option which will give the html or BB code for the image's location. Copy the code bit that starts with http://www.... and ends with .jpg etc. Paste this into the insert image option in your boards post.

prettygurrly

thanks for fixing my photo el siglo!

muckish

Raised Beaches at Malin Head.


High and Dry
Water erosion feature high above current sea level. Evidence of Isostatic rebound. Shroove Head, Greencastle, Co.Donegal.

muckish

Sediment plume pushing out of the mouth of Lough Foyle. You could watch this plume moving quickly out the lough to the open sea. Amazing.

El Siglo

prettygurrly wrote: »

Hi El Siglo,

the lake is in Co. Monaghan and is called Sreenty Lough near Corduff. You can find out more about my programme that I'm in at www.teagasc.ie/agcatchments

yes we did some coring last year for a separate project under the programme but it was interesting to see the results and I did some analysing of slides so I know how much pollen and what type is in the core at various depths...plenty of grass...over and over and over again!

my PhD specifically is concerned with Phosphorus (P) loading to Irish water bodies. So on the lake I'm trying to determine how much of the P is attibuted to internal loading from various chemical and physical reactions and how much is due to overland flow from external sources. I also have a site in Dunleer Co. Louth (also in the programme see above) which I will be using time series analysis of P concentrations and discharge rates in the White River to attribute the P loading to particular sources and in fact to critique the use of Load Apportionment Modelling to do this. And finally, I'm also going to use data from the Blackwater River in the north to substantiate my critiquing of LAMs or possibly the other way round, we'll see how it goes!

what are you doing?

Nice pic muckish...how did you get it to load in your comment? mine just has a file to click on...

That project sounds really interesting so it does! Are you taking many cores then as well as surface samples? It sounds like a lot of work, a lot of sampling involved. The modelling will be tough going so it will. I did environmental science in Trinity and it reminds me of the stuff that Norman Allott or David Taylor does, mental hard work altogether!

At the moment I'm looking at sedimentation provenance in the West Bengal Sundarbans. My site is the former delta of the Ganges-Brahmaputra rivers but about 5,000 years BP these switched over to the Bangladesh side. We now have a delta with no direct river coming in, however we haven't seen the disappearance of the delta itself or of the islands but instead there has been a reworking of the sediments where some areas lose sediment and some areas gain sediment. It's a lot of coring as my supervisor is big into facies analysis. Essentially I'm hoping to show where the sediment has been moving over the last 2,500-3,000 years (just got 14C dates back yesterday). I mainly use XRD (mineralogy), grain sizes, heavy metals (XRF, possibly later on AAS/ICP-OES) and hopefully very soon stable isotopes of d13C and C/N ratios in order to determine provenance of sediment.

prettygurrly

well well well, david taylor is indeed my supervisor and i work in Norman's lab so I know him well. Such a small world in environmental science!

yours sounds very similar to a project that a chinese fella in Geography is doing on the Yahtzee (sp?) river. He's looking at history of sediments in the delta as well although to what end i am unsure.

yeah there's a lot of sampling although i am only doing surface water. the coring was done as a separate project by a postdoc. i just had a bit of practice at looking at pollen for experience's sake!

the modelling will be hard but thankfully i'm trying to critique as opposed to develop brand new models so it might be less headachy. It's my aim for the winter to get my head around it. particularly as i have my transfer report soon and the modelling aspect is a rather large part of the project and i've nothing done yet!

El Siglo

prettygurrly wrote: »

well well well, david taylor is indeed my supervisor and i work in Norman's lab so I know him well. Such a small world in environmental science!

Ha that's mental so it is!:D Oh I spent manys a day in the Norman and Mark's lab doing the aul IC and ICP-OES, great times altogether! I know one of David's other students actually through IQUA, Gayle? Do you know her? Are you based in the Museum Building then?

yours sounds very similar to a project that a chinese fella in Geography is doing on the Yahtzee (sp?) river. He's looking at history of sediments in the delta as well although to what end i am unsure.

William? He was starting when I was finishing up I think? Aye, I think his stuff is very similar alright, how the Yangtze Delta has developed over the last couple of thousand years.

yeah there's a lot of sampling although i am only doing surface water. the coring was done as a separate project by a postdoc. i just had a bit of practice at looking at pollen for experience's sake!

Ah fair enough, that sounds class so it does. The surface sampling can be a pain though, especially if you're looking at any seasonal changes. Not to mention any land use stuff. Have you found it alright getting access to your sites? No farmers chasing you off their fields?! :pac:

the modelling will be hard but thankfully i'm trying to critique as opposed to develop brand new models so it might be less headachy. It's my aim for the winter to get my head around it. particularly as i have my transfer report soon and the modelling aspect is a rather large part of the project and i've nothing done yet!

What sort of modelling is it? Is it more stochastic? Will you be looking into the likes of kriging or markov chains at all? Yeh, we call the transfer report "differentiation" in Queen's, have to do it meself next month, spent the last month doing XRD and now finishing LOI and CaCO3 content. The modelling stuff can get pretty melty alright. Like running the models on the programme (R, GRASS, GSLIB etc...) can be tricky enough, but knowing the maths behind how the model works is a whole different kettle of fish.

I know, I'm full of questions today!;)

muckish

Guys.... off topic surely! Where're the images?:)

El Siglo

muckish wrote: »

Guys.... off topic surely! Where're the images?:)

My apologies! I should probably know better!;) Nice pictures by the way muckish, I like the plume of sediment one.

Here's one of my cores from India.

prettygurrly

em i'm not sure, i know him as Alex so...

yeah i've had no farmer chasing off their farms yet. i'm a walsh fellow so teagasc has a fairly good relationship with the farmers!

yes I know Gayle. she cant wait to be finished with her thesis. it's driving her slightly mad

What sort of modelling is it? Is it more stochastic? Will you be looking into the likes of kriging or markov chains at all? Yeh, we call the transfer report "differentiation" in Queen's, have to do it meself next month, spent the last month doing XRD and now finishing LOI and CaCO3 content. The modelling stuff can get pretty melty alright. Like running the models on the programme (R, GRASS, GSLIB etc...) can be tricky enough, but knowing the maths behind how the model works is a whole different kettle of fish.

i'm really not sure about that one. as i said i've done nothing with the numerical modelling yet and have yet to work out what sort of analysis to determine how accurate my results are I'm going to do...

i did my masters in queens, which department are you in? I was in SPACE doing a MSc Environmental Engineering.

and to keep muckish happy, please find attached a photo of the state of my lake during algal blooms, the whole point to my phd!

El Siglo

Walsh fellow, good stuff! Farmers aren't all that bad, have dealt with a few on fieldwork and lot of them are more curious than anything else.

Gayle's sound out alright! Aye, people coming to the end of their phds are really all over the shop, not looking forward to it!

Fair enough, I only mentioned those yokes cos they're big into the numerical modelling in my department. There's lads doing stuff on modelling air pollution or peat depths and when you've a limited number of sampling points you estimate the missing stuff using techniques like simple kriging or ordinary kriging or kriging with external drift. They're like geographically weighted regression or inverse distance weighting except they're not deterministic. If you've more than 100 sampling points you can robustly estimate the surrounding points. Really worth having a read over if at all anything, as it's pretty exciting stuff!:pac:

Ah environmental engineering, nice!:D I'm based over in Geography (GAP), it's alright at least it's not as easy to get lost in the Geography building than in the David Keir (place is like a maze!).

Back to photographs!;)

Here's a jetty on one of my island sites, health and safety goes right out the window!



What a mangrove forest looks like:



How we moved some of the coring gear around one of the islands:



It's probably the most mental place I've ever worked in. Like I've done fieldwork all over Wicklow and Dublin and down in Clare and Limerick and done a few trips around NI (the Mournes, Murlough, Warrenpoint etc...) but this is definitely the most mental place. Any fieldwork that is to be done has to be planned like an expedition, and there's a constant threat of being attacked by tigers, crocodiles and snakes!:eek: