
Land Subsidence in the Netherlands
At a symposium on land subsidence, I learned about how the Dutch transformed their country so that about a quarter of it is below sea level and how they cope with it.
Earthquakes, floods, sea-level rise and sudden shifts in river courses threaten many of the 150 million Bangladeshis living in the low-lying Brahmaputra River delta. Scientists from Lamont-Doherty, Dhaka University and other institutions have begun a five-year project to understand the hazards and the possible hidden links among them. Lamont geophysicist Michael Steckler keeps us up to date on the work.
Date: Started 2011
Project Lead: Michael S. Steckler
Project Website: BanglaPIRE
At a symposium on land subsidence, I learned about how the Dutch transformed their country so that about a quarter of it is below sea level and how they cope with it.
Our group of 24 Americans and Bangladeshis continued to explore the Sundarbans mangrove forest, rice farming in embanked low-lying islands, and heritage sites of Bangladesh.
Our group of 23 American and Bangladeshi students and professors traveled from the Jamuna River to the Ganges and Gorai Rivers, and then down to an island on the edge of the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest.
My undergraduate Sustainable Development course is in Bangladesh for a Spring Break trip to see what they have been learning about. We will be touring the country by bus and boat to learn about the environment and people of Bangladesh.
We finished our electromagnetic survey and mini-field school in northern Sylhet, Bangladesh, with lectures and field trips to see the geology by car and boat.
We were joined in our electromagnetic investigation of the subsurface and earthquake hazard by a group of US and Bangladeshi students and professors for a mini-Field School.
We switched to deploying our equipment for imaging faults and the structure beneath the surface to tea gardens to get away from power lines and buried the cables to protect them from gnawing foxes.
As we continued our geophysical measurements, we had to deal with heavy rains, flooding fields, and rats and foxes biting our cables. Many cables were broken soon after sunset, ruining the measurements.
We have come to in Bangladesh in the pre-monsoon heat to better image the active faults beneath the surface using electromagnetic instruments. We are using the fallow fields from the just-harvested rice crop for our sites.
We switched to a towed electromagnetic system to image the fresh and saline groundwater in Bangladesh, and ran into a variety of problems, including high winds, strong currents and running aground.