Apologies to all, who have been following this blog, for a rather late round-up of events in the final stages of the experiment. There is no other excuse than last-minute computer glitches and exhausted scientists! So, now that we are all back in our respective institutes and the plants have well and truly disappeared (helped by the Hamburg team expertly mowing the marsh for our final wave tests!), we can report that the experiment has been a great success – and that means that we now have rather a lot of data (over 6000 data/image files have been generated).
More data… (measuring stem densities after wave impact and before mowing)
All of this now needs to be processed and analysed to extract our various messages, for scientists and engineers, coastal managers and anyone who is interested.
For now, here’s just a small summary of what we have learnt and a taste of what is to come once we have analysed our data:
- It can be done! Marsh blocks, when excavated like this, positioned in the wave tank, and hand-patched together with care do not float away when submerged to up to 2m water depth above the soil. The pressures generated by the simulated storm waves, too, did not manage to destroy our reassembled saltmarsh!
But at the end… the mud is still there – after all it has been through!
Storm wave crashing at the front edge of the mowed marsh
- Mice can swim (and survive when rescued by expert crane and net operators!), fish can make it into the flume (and out again), and so can toads… 🙂
- Waves, even those generated in storm surge conditions, do not easily destroy a marsh – at least not by eroding the soil surface (and we will be able to say a lot more on this when we have had a closer look at the data!).
- Wave energy thresholds do exist (we will have the detail!) beyond which marsh plants do become damaged and break (again, detail to come!)
More floating plants – destroyed by waves and gathered here for drying and weighing
- There really are wave energy and water depth thresholds that control whether (and by how much) marsh plants reduce wave energy… (again, more on this when the number crunching has finished!) – a key finding for the coastal protection people out there, particularly in the face of sea level rise and other coastal challenges!
And, finally, and most importantly, none of this would have been possible without funding from the European Union under the Hydralab IV scheme and without the amazing support we received on a day-to-day basis by the people on the ground, at the Grosser Wellen-Kanal (GWK) in Hannover: the driver of the fork lift truck, the electricians, the detritus-fishing-net builder, the crane drivers, the giant hydraulic ‘cake-slice’ operator, the mouse rescue team, the cabling and data acquisition experts, the coffee suppliers, and the cake bakers. Thank you all – you know who you are!
Remains just one more thing to point out: This blog will stay ‘live’ and we will post further news as and when it becomes available while we publish our findings (though be patient while we crunch our way through the mountain of data!) – keep following us, comment on the blog, and get in touch if you would like us to send you copies of publications!