Vagueira beach groundwater: where is the salt...?

Last week one of our students had to leave early because of family health problems, we all wish him a lot of strength for the coming period. The work here continues... We got our water samples transported to Holland and are now concentrating on geophysics and special investigations. So Boris got lucky again and went to the beach yesterday with Jeremy, Diego, Roos-Anne, Inge and Andreas. Not to get more tan or to surf, but to investigate fresh and salt water in the beach soil. We use geophysics to study this and its a nice change from our smelly garbage dump project where we had been the past days...


Today, I got the more demanding task to make a groundwater monitoring well together with Andreas, Roos-Anne and Ingrid. As I am the heavy weight in this group, I had to do a lot of bailing to get the sand out of the well casing, while they turned me around (what's he talking about...?). We got to about 6.5 m deep down to a gravel layer, which forced us to stop. Good for me because I still feel my muscles ache from the heavy work.


Anyway, tomorrow we are going back to Vagueira beach to do some more measurements. Less demanding ones, that is. Geaophysics again and perhaps we'll make a shallow well near the estuary. We expect some rain the coming days and that will give some activity to measure stream discharge and collect rainfall samples.

Posted by Maarten Waterloo