It has been an incredibly busy week. We have had between 42 and 48 people here for the field school, including 35 students and 12 instructors (seven to 10 at a time). The first day was very light for the jet-lagged students, just a short introduction to the field school and some background, and then introductions all around as we started to get to know each other. The final group of nine students finally arrived around 9 p.m. They were the most worn-out, bedraggled bunch of travelers I have ever seen.
After a good night’s sleep we started on the first classroom day. Our full five days near the Brahmaputra River would focus on the river processes and the stratigraphy they produce. We stopped the lectures at 4 and all piled into the bus
to see the embankment built to protect the city of Sirajganj from the westward migrating river. As is often the case in the dry season, they were repairing the embankments from last summer’s collapses. We rented two country boats and sailed along the embankment and walked back to the buses on the top of it. It is an impressive structure, but in need of continual repair to keep up with the river.
The next two days were spent on the river and its mobile islands, called chars. Setting up the equipment for the river surveying was hampered by a lack of power for drilling holes. A Bangladeshi drill and bow solved the problem, but not before rearranging the schedule. On the first day we all visited the char near the 5 km
Bangabandu Bridge over the river. We spent the day viewing sedimentary structures and seeing the villages on this island that is almost entirely underwater during the monsoon. For the second day, we had to split the group. One contingent joined Jim Best as we surveyed the river with an ADCP, which measures water velocities from the top to the bottom of the river, and a sidescan that provides images of the bottom on either side of the boat using sound. The other, yielding to student requests, went to Tangail, the nearest city, for shopping. When everyone returned, we held a cricket match, with most Americans learning the rules on the fly. We finished the five overs per side as darkness fell.
We went back to the classroom the next day for more lectures on remote sensing of changes on the delta, stratigraphy,
subsidence and arsenic contamination. The hands-on experience was analysis of two sets of well samples that had been drilled the days before. Everyone had a chance to describe the samples, measure magnetic susceptibility and use a portable XRF machine to measure chemistry. We have found that magnetic susceptibility and strontium content are a good way to characterize whether sediments have come from the Brahmaputra River or not.
Finally, our last field day here was doing a resistivity imaging survey over the two bore holes and across the boundary between the Brahmaputra floodplain and the upland strata of the Madhupur tract. Generations have debated whether the transition is a fault contact or not. We would collect some data to try to answer the question. The students also got
to visit another tube well being drilled. Tube wells, drilled primarily for drinking water, is a local drilling method whereby a team of a handful of people can drill a 100m well in a day by hand. After everyone helped set up the 750m long resistivity line, most of the American students went to see the tube well drilling. The Bangladeshis, who have all seen tube well drilling, stayed with me to help run the resistivity line. As it turns out, Liz Chamberlain was pulled into a local villager’s home to have her hands tattooed with henna by a woman and her daughters. She missed the tube well drilling, but gained an exciting personal experience. It was also the first time the students were in a Bangladeshi village. We were the center of attention and many photos were snapped by both sides. We gathered up the resistivity equipment and then had informal student
presentations before the final night barbeque. We had successfully completed the first half of the course, and all the students (and instructors) were bonding.
