Yesterday was our first field visit to our research site, the Queens Laundry hot spring at Yellowstone. The oldest structure in the park is located there -- a bath house. Considering the name is Queens Laundry I am wondering what kind of bath house it was *wink wink.* It is about a 45 minute hike from the parking site to this remote location so the general public doesn't really bother us.
Today at the site we began mapping the site. I was on the GPS team so I went around mapping the outline of the main pool and the outflow channel. Getting close to the high temperature zones (50-100 C) is very dangerous. Lips over the pools and streams form from the silica dissolved in the fluid. These ledges can be a few feet thick to just inches. I kept an arms length from the edge and held the gps unit over the edge. In some cases I would check the temperature of the ground. If it was warm the water would be close to the surface and I would not step there. I'd then document how far away I was so we can correct the data later. The head instructor knew someone whos foot broke through the ledge. By the time they got the shoe off it took his foot with it. On the other hand at the cool end of the outflow I was sinking into mud. When my boots dried off they were covered in a thin crust of silica.
The other team were doing detailed cross sections of the outflow stream. Their methodology kept changing as none of us have really done anything like this before. Now they have more clear idea of what data they want so they can have a better idea of how to collect it.
That evening I attempted to pull the GPS data from the two units. The laptop from the Geology department only had the software for one unit but noth the other. I was going to attempt to download it but quickly discovered that the drivers for the wireless connection were missing. We don't have administrative access to the machine so we couldn't install them. Not only that but the license for the main GIS software to overlay the data on a map is aquired from my university's servers, which we don't have access to out here. I was going to use my machine for it as I have a little background in GPS and GIS from my Web GIS class, but my laptop lacks a serial port to hook up the GPS units. It was a good day overall otherwise. I had a lot fo fun in the field. I do enjoy hard work. Emerson would be pleased.
Pictures are uploading...
two comments
Glad to hear that you are having fun. I misses you!
Glad to hear that you are having fun. I misses you!
Derek (Email) (URL) - 12-07-’08 11:56Aye! Happy you’re having a good time, remember to get some purple bacteria for me. :p
LogicSequence (Email) - 12-07-’08 17:43