On July 18, 2008, the Bronx River Alliance placed more than 350 stormdrain markers (above) in Bronx River sewersheds, HP-007, HP-004, HP-009 and HP-008. Support, in the form of funding and ten energetic volunteers, for this project was provided by Goldman Sachs. Thank you to all of the staff from both the Alliance and Goldman Sachs who braved the extreme heat in the name of stormwater education! The Alliance aims to have a total of 500 markers placed by the end of August. Please visit the Storm Water Infrastructure Matters Discussion Forum to discuss stormdrain marking in more detail.
July 28th, 2008
While the Bronx is always an awesome ( in the Keatsian meaning) experience, getting out to see other parts is good too. Please peruse Banana Kelly teacher Carly Reiter’s little note about a small piece of her recent trip. DG
This trip to Bolivia was a bit of a whim. One day I was reading a travel article about the place and the next I was pulling an all-nighter to write a proposal for a teacher/travel grant I had heard of. Since I hadn´t really expected to win the $5000, I went a little crazy dreaming up the most outrageous trip I could think of. My wanderlust was in full gear that night. And admittedly, roaming around Bolivia in search of flamingos in the high desert and anacondas in an Amazonian sewer doesn´t sound nearly as daunting at 3am as it does after a good night sleep.
Someone once told me that if the prospect of a trip scares the shit out of you, it´s a sure sign that you should break out of you daily routine and go travelling.
Well, I´ve definitely gone travelling.
The first part of this adventure was set way up high on the Bolivian Altiplano. Altiplano in this case means extremely high altitude desert - and it has proven to be both. For the past few weeks I´ve been surviving at 4000 - 5000 m (that´s 13,000 to 18,000 ft) and have yet to see even one cloud in the sky, yet alone a single green plant. It´s crazy surviving on such little oxygen. And to add to that craziness, it´s winter here in the southern hemisphere. Temps can reach -4 below (Farenheight) at night - without windchill.
What attracted to me to this harsh place was a rare species of flamingo that survive in extremely salty, extremely cold, and extremely remote lakes way out in the middle of the altiplano. I wanted to see those flamingos for myself - and I wanted to test the water just as my students do back in the Bronx. My hope is that my students can figure out how those flamingos can survive in such harsh conditions.
I decided to spend a bunch of my grant money hiring an old Toyota Landcruiser, a driver/guide, and a cook. That sounds much more luxurious than it really was, but proved to be the only safe (and sane) way to find those flamingos. So, as we left the tiny town of Tupiza on that very first day, we were 6 piled into that LandCruiser. On the roof of the jeep was all of our gear, plus an enormous mound of food, water, extra gas, and spare tires that I didn´t think we could possibly use during the 6 day trip. It turns out that we used every drop of liquid on that roof, and those spare tires.
I really had any idea what we were in store for. It was as if we had landed on a different moon each day. The landscape was the most desolate - and harsh- as I have ever experienced. Vast and nearly empty, with no other people other than the occasional jeep full of similarly insane tourists and the odd llama herder or two. We did not see a green plant the entire time. And the only water we saw was in the lakes we were searching for. I take that back. We did stop at a couple of naturally-occuring volcanic hot springs, but those were not nearly warm enough for our frozen bodies.
Each day we ventured out in search of the next natural wonder. We drove through dry riverbeds and trackless volcanic sand dunes until we reached green, arsenic-filled lakes, ponds lines with naturally-occuring borax, wind-carved rock sculptures, thermal geysers, a 12,000 square kilometer perfectly flat salt flat, and one enormous, bright red lake filled with flamingos sifting silicon-encased algae cells out of the extremely salty (and extremely cold) water. Each night we found a ¨hotel¨ to stay in. Most were made of bricks made of either mud or cut straight from the salt flats. A few places had electricity for a couple of hours a night, but only one had working toilets or hot water. We went to bed by 8pm each night, cold, exhausted, with dust in our teeth, hair and up our noses, and with every piece of clothing we owned on.
I´m sure I make it sound like a miserable experience, but actually it was one of the most incredible trips I have ever had. I also bonded with Benhamin and Esther, the two hard-working (and hilarious) Bolivians who made sure we made it out of that desert alive - with plenty of data to keep my students busy for months.
Benhamin the driver took his job very seriously, but also made us laugh whenever he could. He badly wanted to learn how to speak English, so we spent some of our downtime practicing basic phrases. His favorites were trash bag and caca del donkey (he preferred caca over poo). Every time we passed a llama or donkey he would yell out ¨caca del donkey/llama¨, which made everyone in the jeep laugh. In addition to learning English, Benhamin couldn´t get enough of my science experiments. As soon as he saw my little water testing kit, Benhamin wanted to test every piece of water we passed. He had never learned how to read, but he quickly became an expert at testing the salt, pH, temperature, nitrates, and turbidity (dirt) in the water. I took some really cool videos of Benhamin and I testing water from one end of the altiplano to the other. Benhamin especially liked to explain the results of each test into the camera, and when I told him that most of my students spoke Spanish, he spoke into the camera as if he was speaking directly to the kids back in NYC. The cool part was that by the end of the trip, some of the other guides had heard about the testing and were asking Benhamin for his opinion about the results. You could see the pride on his face every time this happened. And by the end of the trip, I had multiple guides asking me for the results in writing so they could use them with their clients. This gave me the idea to get my students to send their projects (in Spanish or English) to the guides. They absolutely loved this idea.
So, I can definitely say that Part 1 of this adventure was a huge success.
At this very moment I am on a flight back to La Paz, preferring to spend the $70 to fly rather than suffer through another cramped 15 hour busride. I´m planning on staying at the famed Chalalan ecolodge for a while (it´s a 5 hour canoe ride up a river just to get there - my kind of place!). I´m also planning on taking a tour of the wierd Pampas wetlands where, hopefully, I´ll get to see an Anaconda along with some other strange wildlife most people have never even heard of. Then I´m hoping to catch a ride on a cargo boat down the Rio Mamore to a little town I´ve heard of that has anacondas living in their open sewers. Once I´ve found those anacondas, I hope to find a ride on a another cargo boat down the Rio Mamore to the Brazilian border. Hopefully.
This email is already forever long, so I´ll leave you with some of the more interesting thoughts from the trip:
-The witches market in La Paz was very cool, yet creepy. The dried llama fetuses were particularly wierd. I later found out that it´s tradition for Bolivians to bury a llama fetus underneath their new house. For good luck, apparently.
-I got good at peeing in the moonshadow at creepy bus stations
-I only met two other Americans this entire time. Everyone else seems to be European - especially French.
-Bolivians would rather send you to the opposite part of town rather than say Ï don´t know¨
-Esther our cook spent much of the trip admiring my hips and thighs. Apparently, big hips and thighs are a sign of beauty in Bolivia. Who knew?
Until next time,
Carly
July 27th, 2008
When my father would tell me that I was dense, I did not take it as a compliment, but I did not quite understand the insult either. It did not occur to me that what he meant to tell me was that I was incapable of learning, stupid, even, because I knew that for my father, to be dense was to be a jackass: stubborn. But density is oh so much more. There is a certain power in density, mass divided by volume, in certain circumstances that my father may have, in some askew manner, been actually keying me in on.
In the world of our river, density comes mostly in to play in the interplay between salt water and fresh. If you just consider the comparison between a glass of fresh water, and a glass of water of the same volume into which a table spoon of salt has been added, it is plain that the added salt would make the water weigh more and, therefore, be more dense than the glass of fresh water. But water is water right? So when salt water meets fresh, they should mix and find some medium between the two, right? This is true, but the mixing is not instantaneous. The variables of density, temperature and flow affect the time that it takes for the solution to find this medium point.
There is a fun way to test this effect. You will need four glasses, two of which are filled with water, blue and yellow food coloring and ½ cup of salt. One glass of water will remain as is, but into the other you should add the ½ cup of salt. Should the salt not dissolve entirely upon stirring, you can heat the water slightly in a microwave, stirring occasionally until dissolved. Add 4 drops of yellow food coloring to the fresh water, and 4 drops of blue to the salty water. Pour half of each color into one of the empty glasses so that you know have a two half glasses of yellow (fresh) water and two half glasses of blue (salty) water at approximately the same temperature. Slowly add the salty water to the fresh and ved versa and compare how the two mix and become another color or find where you can see where the two remain separate. If you have tries the experiment, or perhaps if you have not, you will note that the salty water tends to stay towards the bottom of the glass. The same happens in a tidal estuary such as in the Soundview area and farther upstream, only instead of water being added from above, you have two walls of water moving towards one another. The salt water is carried upstream by the tides and the fresh water is carried downstream by gravity. There is a point where these two meet and it is called the salt wedge. The Denser salt water pushes under the fresh water, settling towards the bottom, as the lighter fresh water floats over the top.
This wedge can stretch for miles as it does in the Hudson, or it can be much more vertical if the flow of the river is equally matched by the rise of the tide. In the case of the Hudson, the salt wedge is carefully watched since Poughkeepsie gets much of its drinking water directly from the Hudson. If the salt wedge runs too far north, the flow is increased to push it back down south. Sampling the water at different depths will show the differing salinities.
Fresh water means less than .5 parts per thousand (ppt) of salt, while brackish water is between .5 ppt and 17ppt, and oceans average 35 ppt. Most estuaries, like the Bronx River Estuary, are brackish. At our last monitoring of Drew Gardens miles above the mouth, Sally found2-3 ppt salinity from a surface sample. As a I walked upstream to get a few pictures of The Phipps Youth Employment Program students that were being introduced to water quality monitoring, I saw a nice size blue crab crawling across the bottom of the river in an area were the flow was quite slow.
I thought that the water would be dangerously low in salt for this creature which thrives 10ppt-25ppt but there could be mitigating factors. One is that the test we had done was surface which means that towards the bottom it could have been a little more salty. There is also an interesting study from 2005(POSEY Martin H. (1) ; ALPHIN Troy D. (1) ; HARWELL Heather (1) ; ALLEN Bryan (1) ) that discusses the tendency for juvenile blue crabs to seek areas of lower salinity(3ppt) in the summer and the fall. The theory put forward by the authors is that they are actually looking for waters safer from predators since salinity and predators were positively related. In any case, it shows the river’s improvement and, should this crab not be atypical, demonstrates the importance of this part of the estuary to all waters down river.
Dad may have been right about my being dense, but now I know that density can also have its advantages.
DG
July 21st, 2008
