Robert Walter
Dorothy Merritts surveys a bank for clues to the history of Great Seneca Creek in Maryland.
For 2 Geologists, Collaboration Blossomed Into More regular webpage with the same video from the original story
Posted on 6/24/2008, 9:03:54 PM by neverdem
LITITZ, Pa. — Dorothy J. Merritts, a geology professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., was not looking to turn hydrology on its ear when she started scouting possible research sites for her students a few years ago.
But when she examined photographs of the steep, silty banks of the West Branch of Little Conestoga Creek, something did not look right. The silt was laminated, deposited in layers. She asked a colleague, Robert C. Walter, an expert on sediment, for his opinion.
“Those are not stream sediments,” he told her. “Those are pond sediments.” In short, the streamscape was not what she thought.
That observation led the two scientists to collaborate on a research project on the region’s waterways. As they reported this year in the journal Science, their work challenges much of the conventional wisdom about how streams in the region formed and evolved. The scientists say 18th- and 19th-century dams and millponds, built by the thousands, altered the water flow in the region in a way not previously understood.
They say that is why efforts to restore degraded streams there often fail. Not everyone agrees, but their findings contribute to a growing debate over river and stream restoration, a big business with increasing popularity but patchy success.
Many hydrologists and geologists say people embark on projects without fully understanding the waterways they want to restore and without paying enough attention to what happens after a project is finished.
In part because most projects are local and small scale, it is hard to say exactly how much Americans spend each year to restore rivers and streams. A group of academic researchers and government scientists, writing in Science in 2005, put the figure at well over $1 billion, for thousands of projects. Efforts are under way to bring...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Isn't this, in a nutshell, what always happens when the enviro-fascists, and greenie-weinies have their way??
Reparations needed immediately!
Imagine how much in taxes was wasted because they had no clue to what was there origially. IMHO, you would need high grade topographic maps like the military uses and good geology reports. I don’t think they were in existence at the time. I wonder how good were the surveys that George Washington and his contemporaries made?
In that time , good ole Mother Nature has rearranged the stream bed beyond recognition from what it was when I was in high school---and that was even before the present year with record rains (not seen since 1993)--
It was a huge farm and the farmer had...and correctly so....drained his land and made the water flow...and that is as it should be.
Wait till we have a few deaths from mosquitos. Many of the wetland plants effect asthma sufferers. Beware....
We did have a "poplar tree" asthma lawcase...The tree lost...
There’s probably a reason why poplar is a “cheap” hardwood.
Gee our 18th and 19th century ancestors were not concerned about how they disturbed the wetlands. How shameful!
And I bet they weren’t concerned about their carbon footprints. We know they didn’t have a carbon credit trading system, so I bet they didn’t give a hoot about carbon.
Around our parts, poplar is known as a junk tree.
LOL!
I had floodplain talks several times with my mortgage company wanting more take. I asked for their maps and then, as a geologist, noted the elevation, took soil samples and mentioned vegetation citing book and verse the COE and USGS citations. Never heard a word again.
I smell Hype
This pond stratification should only exist for several hundred ft above the former location of the dam - the area below should be primal pristine making it very obvious.
Poplar is the softest hardwood(Domestically from Ohio Eastward where I logged). It grows fast and straight and makes great boards, yellow(tulip) can become a pretty purple too. I worked for a company that logged, milled, dried and built our own cabinets and moldings. That said, I always felt calling poplar a hardwood was being generous. It's soft, light, easy to work with and has decent coloring. I was always partial to red oak and Cherry. Now Oak, Hickory, Ash, Walnut, Maple, Cherry...those are "real" hardwoods.
A distant relation of mine runs cattle in Northestern Oregon and the bugs and bunny types made him stop running cattle on the Forest Service land near this one creek. They came in and cleared all of the blowdowns and crap that had made its way into the creek - got it nice and clean.
The trout didn’t do very well in those conditions, so after a few years they put all the crap back into creek. Seemed they STILL didn’t do very well.
Some other biologist came along and said that the cows in the creek help disturb the sediments and that helps somehow. So, he is back to having his cows stomp through the river and the trout are doing fine.
Leave it to the NYT to make the dynamic, intriguing topic of silt boring.
After which another colleague was heard to say-
"My sediments, exactly..."
Exactly....This is an extremely interesting article.
This pond stratification should only exist for several hundred ft above the former location of the dam - the area below should be primal pristine making it very obvious.
After dams were built — as many as 8,000 in Pennsylvania — water accumulated in millponds, and the sediment it carried settled to the bottom. When waterpower fell out of favor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the dams deteriorated until they failed or were removed.Freed to flow more swiftly, streams began incising channels through the beds of silt. The fine material eroded rapidly, sending tons of sediment — much of it carrying agricultural chemicals like nitrogen and phosphorous — downstream to the Susquehanna River and, ultimately, Chesapeake Bay.
With nitrogen level up, Chesapeake Bay in for a bad summer
I beg to differ. With all the goo goos clamoring for restoration of everything willy nilly, costs be damned, when they don't know what it was originally like, and don't understand the effects of their efforts, I liked the story because it takes a different perspective.
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Thanks neverdem, another excellent early America topic. |
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