Tremendous amounts of fun

The Fieldwork shows real dedication to science!
DiscoDisco, discordance, discoballs. The terrameter is rupsig (not possible to translate), guys in the field with the terrameter: Electrify the bitch! At the end of the day Julian has our darling (the terrameter) on his lap. well well watertight!! Nerd on board, como una racketa & the tubo de sol. All the guys in the cellar and in the racemonster. Everybody is driving... Do the stuifzand. Search the piezometer (measuring tube) for 2 hours before fallen over it. Your carefully placed totalizer is ploughed to pieces. Looking for a ppa (Personal Portugese Assistant) and avoiding a pdn (personal digital nightmare). Put the radio on CidadeFM. And in the weekend go to the pleasureparc.
All this with tremendous amounts of nutrients!

Evaporation, ecohydrology and hydrochemistry

We always start our field course with a select team of students setting up a meteorological tower that will give them potential evaporation, as evaporation is always the largest component in our water balance.

Corine, Sjef, Sonia and Michel working on the meteorology

Ecohydrology is the science of water and ecosystems. Studying this can be done with computer models, which is tedious work, bad for your back and only sometimes useful. The answer on how ecosystems really behave, however, can only be found in the field. The quest here in this field course is to find out how trees behave. This means that we want to find out at what time they wake up in the morning and start consuming water and nutrients, how much water they transpire, and when they go to sleep in the evening.

We have a little trick that allows us to find this out, which is called the sapflow method. Yes, we are measuring sapflow and we do this by sticking needles in the tree, in its sapwood where the water is transported up to the leaves. This means that we have to drill small holes in the tree to stick the needles in, here gently done by Nikki. One of these needles is heated, while the other one is at normal temperature. The heated needle will lose heat depending on the velocity of the sap in the stem and by comparing this with the non-heated needle we can find out when sapflow occurs and what the velocity is. Then we wrap the stem in aluminum foil and start the power and logging system.


The sapflow team done with their business

The following days were spent on hydrochemistry, taking samples from open wells, rivers, and piezometers. As our piezometers are not installed with the purpose of having access to clean drinking water, we often have a lot of suspended matter in our water and this needs to be filtered out, with force! This is done here by the team of Lieke, Carolina and Nikki, with Carolina turning red from the effort.

Pushing muddy water through a filter

Of course there are easier ways as Anna, Rosa and Sonia are demonstrating in a very nicely restored fonte where the older Portuguese get their lunch water.

Water sampling at Fonte de Angeao

We'll ship these sample to the VU University where they will be analysed and published in the papers written by our students in July. Ate logo!!!

Waiting for the rain to come

All the instruments are in the field now, at least our Ford van is empty. This year the students seem to have a "tremendous go", no time for coffee, they want to have it all.
The only thing that is missing until now is water, the "rios" are at a very low level (tremendously low some would say) and everybody is waiting for the rain to come. We spotted some thunderstorms but they did not provide any rain so far.
No worries, dry periods are even more interesting for hydrologists, we like the extremes, we need these in order to predict the effects of climate change.


We already met some of our Portuguese friends, especially Mario and Carolina in Montouro (no centro do mundo). Their bar is the place to be in the centre of this small town and they make us really feel at home (thank you!). This is were we meet the students in the field for instruction and discussions.

Next weekend we will join Carlos Gangreio (University of Aveiro) in his investigations in lake Pateira, we will meassure the earth resistivities down to a depth of 70 meter with an underwater cable of 400 m. When this works, we shall show the results and keep you updated.

Michel

The start of the action...

Well, in the previous post we told you something about the excursion. We started our visit with the youngest Cretaceous deposits, which were deposited when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and then went back in time to the oldest Cretaceous deposits in our area.

At the C5 clays we did some geophysics, just to get the hang of it, and because the weather was nice, and to know the resistivity of the clays for later use.

After the group picture we went on to these older whitish sands, and we have been staring at these sands for over an hour (see below), which you can only do if you are an earth scientist. So just to baffle all of you non-earth scientists, here are a few professional words that were used many times: crossbedding, muscovite layer, well-rounded poorly sorted, contact spring, aeolian and fluvial deposits, marine clays, pyrite oxidation, conglomerate, discordance and fault. Of course we also found 200 million year old fossils.



The next day we had a day of "learning to know your area" where we pick the right places for installation of rain gauges and discharge measurement stations. With this done, today we went for the real action, which is the installation of stuff and the formal start of our measurement campaign. The staff gauge of the "boy group" was removed by someone very interested in old metal and they had to install a new one. For this activity Sjef had put his yellow underpants and his special boots on, which filled up with water soon after he entered the Sao Romao creek, Julian put on his teletubby suit and Ruben got bitten in his toe by a very aggressive shrimp.


These things make my days... Tchau!

Day 1: excursion

Hi everybody!

Today we went on an excursion through the beautiful surroundings of Aveiro. Of course this couldn't be done without our rental cars. Six of us went to Aveiro to get 3 Citroen C3's and the bigger Seat Ibiza. The boys were the lucky ones for the Seat, the other cars were for all the girls. (at least they are small enough to park ;))

At 11 we started the trip to the east. We passed the small island of Vincent, he will join us in about two weeks for his research, and drove towards the Rio Boco catchment. This is a pretty big catchment and we will work in four different groups on the chemistry, groundwater flow, water balance and the discharge of the area.
Today we had a closer look at the geology and the different landuses and water qualities in the aquifer systems. After a long day (until 20.00hr) we finally got home and ended up in the pizzeria at the corner where they have an internet connection. Tomorrow the real work will start.

Yesterday we could enjoy a real day off, relaxing on the beach was part of that :). At the end of the day it became somewhat cold, we are allready not used to low temperatures... Hopefully we will get used to low temperatures when we get back in Holland, otherwise there is no other option than staying here.
Barra (where our apartments are located) is a nice, small city at the west coast of Portugal, near Aveiro. The beach resembles that of the Netherlands, except for less people on the beach (which we all really like). Some of us brought surfing boards to enjoy the waves in a different way. Hopefully the waves will be somewhat better, otherwise we really have to make some kitesurf friends.

Up to now we really enjoy our stay here and we are looking forward to the next few weeks!

Now up for a good night sleep!

Ciao from Barra

Arrival in Aveiro

Yesterday morning we left Spain and arrived in Aveiro. We first unloaded the equipment in the van into the garage that was kindly made available to us by the Department of Geosciences from the University of Aveiro. Then went out for a good coffee with pastel de nata.

Michel at Cretaceous rock outcrop near the town of Bustos.
In the afternoon we went out to prepare the geological/hydroloigal excusion, which means visiting the excursion locations to see if everything is still there. One time, we found out that somebody had constructed a building right in front of our Trias formation outcrop, which had become inaccessible. This time, everything was still as it used to be so we are confident that we can go ahead with the excursion tomorrow.

Preparation at VU University

The Aveiro part of the Portugal field course is about to start. This is the part where the students have to demonstrate what they have learned over the past year, including earlier field courses in Twente (NP) and in the Algarve. For Linda, Michel and me it has been a period of frantically collecting and testing instruments, which are normally stored in the basement of our university, and finally loading everything in our van. I am pretty sure that we haven't forgotten enything, mainly thanks to Linda's and Michel's throrough checking

Today we departed from Amsterdam in the morning and we are now in Chatellerault, France, resting from the many hours of driving. Tomorrow we'll continue our trip and hope to arrive in Salamanca, Spain. We would then arrive in Aveiro on Sunday and we'll meet the students there and start our field course on Tuesday.