An update from our India correspondent by Rory Flood

December 28, 2011

Fieldwork for me at one time meant hiring the cheapest, smallest car possible and driving down to a rain drenched field in Co. Limerick to camp for a couple of nights before coring and surveying sites with a dumpy level. It was a twelve hour slog of lugging around two leather bags of corers aptly named “Rocky” and “Ivan”, the TCD Geography department’s hand gouge and Russian peat corers. However, fieldwork like the Irish weather seems to have changed rather abruptly and rather drastically. Fieldwork now consists of three flights, hours of car journeys to cloistered ports and steaming across the estuarine-deltaic islands of the Sundarbans of West Bengal, India.

Since October 2010 I have been working on my PhD project at the School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) regarding the late-Holocene and contemporary sedimentary provenance and processes of sedimentation in the Sundarbans. The approach followed has been one based strongly on sedimentary facies analysis, thus coring several sites in the Sundarbans is one of the primary methodologies employed in this project. Fieldwork here is an entirely different beast than one might expect, especially since I’ve never left Europe and indeed have never experienced a tropical climate. The Sundarbans coring team consists of myself; my two supervisors Prof. Julian Orford and Prof. Keith Bennett with Dr. M. Satish Kumar from QUB, along with Mr. Vincent van Walt, and Mr. Somenath Battacharryya with Ms. Kakoli Sen Sarma from the Institute of Environmental Studies and Wetland Management (IESWM) Kolkata.

We have managed over two field seasons (November 2010 and November 2011) to obtain six cores from five islands across the Sundarbans using the percussion system of the liner sample corer and the Stitz coring system. The coring has been rather successful with cores ranging in depth from approximately four metres to ten metres, in spite of the constant spectre of tigers, snakes and crocodiles that inhabit these islands. Health and safety regulations tend to devolve onto the famous and possibly patented ‘orange tiger handling gloves’ by Prof. Orford and Dr. Kumar, yes the sight of these will surely deter the most voracious beasts of the jungle! If the threat of a Russell’s Viper or the infamous King Cobra isn’t enough to unnerve the steely determination of the burgeoning earth scientist then the sight of seeing ones dinner, an unlucky chicken, receive the chop by one of the both crew will certainly leave one a little shaken but not too stirred. As the night sky draws nearer and the stars seem brighter, another day of coring is completed one is reminded by the words of the Irish poet and playwright Oliver Goldsmith:

“But silent bats in drowsy clusters cling;

Those poisonous fields, with rank luxuriance crown’d,

Where the dark scorpion gathers death around;

Where at each step the stranger fears to wake

The rattling terrors of the vengeful snake;

Where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey,

And savage men more murderous still than they

While oft in whirls the mad tornado flies,

Mingling the ravaged landscape with the skies.

Far different these from every former scene,

The cooling brook, the grassy-vested green,

The breezy covert of the warbling grove,

That only shelter’d thefts of harmless love”.

 

The joys dear friends of fieldwork in the tropics, I do believe I must return to my troglodytic gin and tonic, lest it be warmed by the Bengali winter breeze. Adieu for now!

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