BLASST Laboratory :: North Inlet Research (May 2003)

North Inlet Research
May 2003


	We arrived on Monday, May the 5th and spent the first day setting everything up. We went on a scouting mission in North Inlet to survey good data collection sites. Our data will form the basis of Chris Wargo's Master's Thesis.
	This is a picture of North Inlet the first afternoon we went out to scout the inlet. Weather conditions: a bit overcast and cool.
	The North Inlet Rangers include Dr. Richard Styles (the serious- looking one in the middle); lab tech Dara Hooker (not pictured); and graduate students Dallon Weathers (left) and Chris Wargo (right).
	This is a picture of our Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) mounted between pontoons.
	The white cylinder in the cage is a Conductivity, Temperature and Depth (CTD) profiler. The black cylinder strapped to the cage is a Laser In Situ Scattering Transmissometor (LISST), which measures particle size distribution in the water column. We gathered samples from 6-7 locations each day.
	This foam line is created when two opposing water masses (Town Creek and Jones Creek) converge, forming a barrier called an ebb-trailing spit between the two zones of flow. The foam line extends from the underwater barrier seaward during ebb tide.
	Here, Chris cleans out the sediment grab device in between deployments. We collected sediment and water samples each site, and later we used our Beckman-Coulter particle size analyzer to examine these samples back in the lab.
	This is not, I repeat, not a picture of Dara sleeping. She was just resting her eyes, thank you very much.
	Rich is clearly deep in thought here. He's already thinking about what's next for the BLASST lab.