Week 3 has come and gone! I already find myself planning trips for every weekend we have coming up and it’s scary to see that we really don’t have many left.
Similar to Week 2, this past week mainly consisted of soil processing in the lab. We did have one field day in Tillamook Bay which ended up being really nice. The trip was mainly to make sure our wells were still in place and hadn’t been tampered with. Unfortunately, one of our wells had the logger taken out of it and we found the logger lying next to the well. In the field we were able to download the data and it looked like the logger was pulled only two days into the sampling period. It was a huge bummer to realize we lost basically all of the data for that well and we most likely won’t be able to make great conclusions about that transect because of it. We are fairly certain that it was most likely a person that tampered with the well due to how we found the scene and the time that the logger was pulled. Since the logger was found right outside of the well, it was pretty clear that whoever pulled it wasn’t doing it to steal, they were probably just curious. I do understand that, but their curiosity cost us really valuable data. So, just as a disclaimer to the public, PLEASE do not touch field equipment that clearly isn’t yours. In the grand scheme of things we are actually trying to help you.
On a more positive note, we’ve lucked out so far that every day we have gone into the field the weather has been beautiful. This past field day we of course stopped for some ice cream and then we got lunch at the Blue Heron which was an awesome little cafe.
Hopefully this coming week we will be able to start doing particle size analysis (PSA) on our samples and analyzing some of the data we have gotten back.
On the personal side of things, we took some cool trips to Otter Rock, the Devil’s Punchbowl and Lincoln City. We have also been barbecuing a lot which has been delicious.
Yesterday was the 4th of July and it ended up being one of the warmest days we’ve had since being here. We went to a small party at one of the apartments across the bay from Hatfield which had a perfect view of the fireworks Newport put on. We met some extremely nice people who lived in the community and ate so much that we had to go to sleep as soon as we got home.
Hopefully in the upcoming weeks I’ll be able to talk about some interesting trends in the data we’ve been collecting and maybe some cool weekend trips inland (I really need to get warm for a little while).
Until next week!
Argh, such a disappointment when field gear falls victim to curiosity…Any ideas on how to get the word out to a broad audience about leaving sensors in place?
Dang that is some annoying news that your site was tampered with! Way to look on the positive side and assume it was just a curious, rather than malicious, visitor. Field work is always unpredictable in those ways!
Hi Sarah,
That is a great question and I think that is a really complex issue for a few reasons. It would be ideal to be able to broadcast announcements about leaving scientific equipment in place if you come across it, but that also makes people more aware that there is scientific equipment out there. Most people tend to just be curious and want to know what they stumbled upon, but there are some people who do not want scientists, and especially the government, doing tests around where they live. There is a really gray area on how to approach issues like this and I’d like to think about a better way to dissuade people from touching/tampering with equipment, I’m just not sure yet the best way to go about it!