January 28: Sandbox Survey

Introduction:
   Welcome to my geography field methods blog, where I will be documenting my progress in this course through the spring. This semester begins with a "sandbox survey" in which teams of three-ish were sent out into the world to develop our own terrain, and then were made to survey it with naught but chutzpah and yardsticks. I lucked out and got a team with both in spades, so we managed to clear away task one with time to spare.

Methodology:
    First, we developed our landscape in our sandbox. Below (image 1), I am making some of the terrain that we were soon to survey. In order to simulate real life conditions, in the event that we students ever need to use the Yardstick Method in the field, it was important that our icy wasteland featured mountains, ridges, valleys, troughs, hills, and plains. After our artificial Hoth had been fully constructed, we divided the total area into a grid of 10 cm² cells, 11 long by 20 deep (or 110 by 200 cm total). We began taking data at the origin of the lower left corner, and proceeded to record depths along the lower border of our constructed land.

Image 1

 

   Using the metersticks provided, we recorded 220 heights across our field in the freezing cold. Below is an image of the grueling process, props to Joey for being tough enough to not only taking down all those numbers, but doing so without the aid of any hand protection. This lovely action shot comes courtesy of Chuck, who did much of the measuring as well. In the end, we are going to import our data to a GIS and digitize the x,y data to formulate a 3-dimensional surface.



Image 2

Image 3

Conclusion:

   I also need to thank Joey for digitizing those notes, creating the ultimate excel data file which we will use this week to bring our rudimentary data into the 21st century. Naturally, the manual data collection will ultimately provide a less than stellar representation of the real fictional world that our team developed, because a) the aerial units used to record our data are still quite large relative to the size of our terrain, given the variation within that terrain and b) our terrain swiftly proceeded to melt, and then be snowed upon. It is quite possible that there is not much topography left in out sandbox.  However, the dynamic landscape that was developed will be immortalized through the wonders of modern technology as this coming week we leave the meterstick behind for some fun with the GIS.