Through the eyes of a geologist

Saturday's field trip began with an hour long journey south towards the town of Tombstone . This is a place I've always wanted to visit and to undertake fieldwork at this location too, kills two birds with one stone. Tombstone is a historic town of the southwest and was known for its regular gunfighting. Driving through the town felt as though I was in a completely different place altogether. It was like driving through a time machine, back a hundred or so years to the time of horse and carts. This trip was focused around the Walnut Gulch experimental watershed just a few minutes drive from Tombstone's centre. We was joined by Dr Mary Nichols who works for the USDA Southwest Watershed Research Center who was able to give the class a detailed insight into the setting of the watershed, tours of the flumes and data which we aim to manipulate to heighten our understanding of bed load transport. Walnut Gulch experimental watershed is an area covering 60 million hectares of b

Among exams and deadlines, I can always find a spare few minutes to blog. Following on from the Santa Rita fault scarp field trip... Our findings didn't match Pearthree's (1987) data. In fact, it didn't correlate to the full-fit or mid-point diffusion models either, concluding that the slope hadn't undergone extensive rilling as expected. Consequently, erosion at the top of the scarp and deposition at the base of the exposed scarp surface were not distinguishable when plotting elevation changes in cross-section, instead the relationship was linear. The reason for this I am still questioning and so expect another update soon! The Geomorphology team