Water Chestnuts - Issue 8

Where will you find us next – up the Congo?

Well 'yes', or more accurately in the Democratic Republic of Congo demonstrating our Window Sampling Set for mineral exploration.

After much preparation and discussions with different embassies, airlines and international freight hauliers Vincent made it to the region to visit and train fieldworkers of the Banro Corporation, engaged in mineral exploration for gold.

And in Wales...

Where Jonathan went onsite with Noel Chard of Silent Valley to set up an e+Sense telemetry system to monitor and test water levels at a landfill site in Ebbw Vale, South Wales.

The research programme at the Waste Research Unit centres around sustainable waste management in energy and the environment and is primarily based on the desire to find a solution to the growing problem of using landfill to house large amounts of domestic and industrial waste.

It's not hard but it can make a huge difference – use fewer plastic bags

In the UK we are being urged to send fewer plastic bags to landfill by making an effort to carry spare cloth or plastic bags before going shopping because a recent survey by the Department for the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, has revealed that each of us uses an average of 13,000 carrier bags in our lifetime – far too many.

Now even better value than ever...

As we've updated and improved our Environmental Soil, Groundwater Monitoring & Remediation Training Course to now include a groundwater risk assessment module. Risk assessments can vary from simple comparisons to more detailed computer based models and with our extensive experience of a broad range of situations with this new training we can help you reduce costs and /or improve your research programme.

SPECIAL OFFER - on all standard, handheld water level meters

We are delighted to offer – for a limited time – a 10% discount on the purchase price of all our standard, handheld water level meters. Water Level or Dip Meters are used to measure water depth. They are available in various lengths from 10 metres to 50 metres. Graduations are in cm increments and trigger a light and sound signal when immersed in water.

This is a vital piece of kit and should be part of every groundwater researchers’ equipment list.

For all you professionals measuring soil moisture – a new precision meter

If you measure soil moisture our new precision TDR moisture and temperature measurement meter is the latest, most efficient available – even though we say so ourselves!

It is small, easily portable and extremely accurate and enables fast soil moisture measurements at different points with different probes. It is designed to withstand heavy usage in the field for professionals working in environmental research, agriculture, education, horticulture and the geotechnical industries.

Look what we've added to our rental fleet – a MULTISAMPLER

So if your research takes you to lakes, wetlands, rivers and even - tanks, you may want to consider a Multisampler!

Our Multisampler is a transparent piston type sampler which can capture an undisturbed sample of wet, solids or fluid materials in a 1m liner and can be used to a depth of 5m. The sample is profiled for visual identification, classification and sub-sampling.

Why is it so hard to get governments to react?

At the recent G20 summit participants scarcely mentioned the "other" debt crisis – the environmental crisis – the consequences of which are dire indeed for humanity.

World leaders dropped everything to tackle the financial debt crisis that spilled from collapsing banks but the ecological debt crisis, which threatens much more than pension funds and car manufacturers, is left more or less untouched. It’s like worrying over wallpaper whilst ignoring the fact that the walls themselves are collapsing on subsiding foundations.

From landscape to laboratory and back again – Geoarcheaology 2009

We recently attended the Geoarchaeology 2009 conference at Sheffield University where we were privileged to meet delegates from as far a field as Al-Qadusuta University, Iraq to geography, archaeology and environmental sciences departments in some of our finest British universities. We also sat in on lectures from Professor Iain Stewart, Professor of Geosciences Communication, School of Earth, Ocean & Environmental Sciences University of Plymouth on "Seismic Faults and Sacred Sanctuaries - cultural responses to earthquakes in Antiquity" and Professor Mauro Cremaschi of the Earth Sciences Department, University of Milan on "Land use and water management from the Copper to the Bronze ages in the Po Plain (Northern Italy): a geoarchaeological approach".

In the pink!

Whilst at Geoarchaeology 2009 the picture of our pink MRZB proved a great topic of conversation and anyone thinking of upgrading from a traditional window sampling set was keen to find out about our new micro-drilling rig.