Cape Cod Trip Seepage Meter 1

the other method we've used we're trying is uh seepage meters any of you guys familiar with secret meters did you work with uh emily and uh all too familiar with seafood meters uh you know basically it sort of makes sense when you think about it we're not interested in concentration as much as we are in flux total mass coming in per year amount of water and that's hard to measure in groundwater as you probably personally experienced okay so what they've come up with are these things called seepage meters uh david lee and a few others came out designed them uh first in canada some years ago and um the idea being that you find some sort of a way to have a funnel or something you can put on the pond bottom and the groundwater that would be discharging the leg goes through that first and you can capture it and measure the rate okay that's a wonderful i that's that's that's the simple explanation everything after that gets to be complicated about it but uh so what we did is before they put the wall in we did about 150 seepage meter measurements out here to try to quantify the amount of water coming out and compared to our models we also looked at the chemistry of the water coming out and now we're going to try to do some seepage meter measurements afterwards and um what we did is we also set some permanent seepage meters in and if you guys rotate a little bit this way i'll show them to you there's one of them right close to the shore here i forgot to turn these on pete he'll be the highlight of the day no that's right um what we did is um for reasons i won't go into we decided to uh set in a number of permanent seepers meters basically they're 55 gallon drums that were cut so they were half a drum so they're open on the bottom so so what you have is a ring basically and we use some with with removable lids here's the lid to the drum so you see two of them right here uh we put them here because they look like they're awfully close to the edge but at high water you know you'd be underwater yourselves okay and the reason why we put removable lids is we want to be sure that there isn't some unique geochemistry occurring beneath a permanent meter so we want them to have the same you know bathing of pond water when we're not taking our measurements you know unlike what you may have done whoever was you may have done where they had the 55 gallon drums you guys will see those later so um so when we want to take a measurement uh of the flux coming out through the meter you can imagine groundwater is coming up do you have a question what was that groundwater is coming up through the meter okay and i can actually put the lid on like this and force the water up to a tube where i can measure the i can take a sample of it or i can get the flow rate for that area so you have ground water coming up out of the lake out of the ground water into the lake some car some portion of it's passing through that ring because those are only about this deep the rings and then you can just measure the flux for that area all right um unfortunately people forget to turn them on when i got here so we'll take another look i've got two of them set up right now we'll see how much water they accumulate in the next few minutes um i can tell you that we were seeing rates on the order of 30 liters a day on on these which is a lot of water in 20 seconds we fill up in 20 minutes we pull up we'll fill up a bag if these are working all right then you can take a sample of that water and actually analyze it and measure the flow rate so that's another way we're looking at at the uh flux we actually have some control sites that are outside the iron so they won't have you know they won't have had the treatment so we should show the difference that's what we're looking at uh the limnologist would say no apparently the amount of iron in a system like this is so large that this is trivial that's all i can tell you that iron would not be a problem they don't expect it to be a problem you better remember all this stuff brown color iron yeah it's iron everywhere there's only what's amazing is it's only three percent by weight iron in this sand this what makes the sand red very very low percentage of by weight oh that's what they said let me tell you it wasn't brain surgery when we were out here i had visions of you know guys with rods and little excavators and these were like my honking machines and there was mud flying everywhere and it was an ugly in fact what we'll do is we get a bunch of photos we can we can give you guys some photos it was pretty funny and i had one of my guys um tim mccobb who's a northeastern uh grad working with me and he's one of these guys who just has a natural for working with i don't wanna i don't wanna sound uh prejudiced here but uh construction workers you know you know some people can work with with that mentality type person and he was out there with his instrumentation little plastic tubes and things and these huge escalators hanging over him like monsters he's like no no no i have to put this in first you know and they would have killed me i wouldn't have been able i would have been dead but uh it was pretty funny um anyways anything else i can show them that we can try the head thing if you want uh yeah maybe we should uh pack it up a little bit then you can either hit the we do it here um let me let's try it here we're all set up right um i just want to prove to you how would you how would you know you're in a groundwater discharge area what would you look for anybody have any ideas probably not right uh what you'd want to do is you'd want to prove to yourselves that you're um let's see here if you can open that one which one is that can you move your foot are you standing on one you are okay that one's fine that one will work yeah this is a different