On school and stuff

The other day in my Geology 202 lab, we performed one of the coolest experiments I've ever been privy too. For about 2 hours, our group of six got to play around with a stream table. Hydrologists use them to model fluvial processes, and on top of just being plain fun, it was very informative as well. Instead of sand, our professor used plastic granules about 0.05 mm in size. Apparently when you scale a river down to a 3 meter long box, you have to scale down the mass of the sediment too. Above is a picture of our stream table, taken on my crappy cell phone.

The box is slightly raised on one end so the water source (a hose) flows down to the drain at the other end. We put a few meanders in the basin and placed Lego "houses" where we thought they would get annihilated by the streams erosional power, just like a kid who builds a sand castle too close to the waves. I was surprised, however, by the amount of river structures actually appeared. Where the stream entered the lake a braided river channel formed a delta. And at one point, we actually had an oxbow lake formed after the river cutoff a meander. Pretty cool.

Now when I was a kid, seeing some water running through some sand meant one thing: Dam the hell out of it. So when our group had some time, we created Hoover dam. Unfortunately, this clogged the drain with sand and we had trouble getting water out of the system for a little while. Of course, the innocent Lego town built below the dam was decimated. All in the name of science!