
Into the Sundarban Mangrove Forest and Back
For the last week of our trip, we traveled by boat to reach the sites where we are measuring subsidence in the Sundarban Mangrove Forest and nearby embanked islands.
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
For the last week of our trip, we traveled by boat to reach the sites where we are measuring subsidence in the Sundarban Mangrove Forest and nearby embanked islands.
We continued to service our GNSS and RSET-MH equipment measuring land subsidence in coastal Bangladesh. Long distances, poor roads and slow ferries made for very long days, but we were able to complete the work at the sites.
After a week of meetings and a wedding in Dhaka, we headed back to the field to service equipment measuring land subsidence in Bangladesh.
I am finally back in Bangladesh after a pandemic hiatus. I need to repair precision GPSs that failed over the last few years. They are measuring tectonic movements for earthquake hazard and land subsidence, which exacerbates sea level rise.
My last days in the field brought us to monuments in a makeshift home near the ocean, a flooded field next to a school, and adjacent to a jute mill. Most of us now head back to Dhaka, the capital. Céline will stay on a few more days, then Hasnat with Saif and Nahin will continue until all the monuments are resurveyed.
We continued our GPS surveys of monuments to measure land subsidence. While the work general went very well, we faced challenges from obscured or tilted monuments. We also struggled with large traffic delays, particularly at unpredictable ferry crossings.
Getting to remote sites started to prove challenging, and involved many forms of transportation by land and water.
I am back in Bangladesh once more to investigate the balance between sea level rise, the sinking of the land, and the filling of the space with sediments.
We added a campaign monument to the tide gauge at Khepupara on the way to our last GPS and SET installation site at Patuakhali. We faced challenges such as bad roads and broken bridges, and leeches, but got the work done. The field work was now coming to a close.
We replaced the GPS at Khulna University, then met some colleagues in Barisal. We continued to Khepupara and the beach at Kuakata for more installations. The beach on the Bay of Bengal is fresh water in the summer due to the enormous water discharge at the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta.