One week of laser, mud and sever sunburn

I have spent the last week walking around in the top-soil removal sites in Całowanie peatland.

The problem has so far been that the summer has been unusually wet, which has resulted in the sites being filled with water. Since the bottom is also uneven we decided to measure the terrain of the bottom with a laser nivelator (it measures the difference in elevation between a reference point and any other point). Anyway, this week happened to include an enormous amount of hard work, and I am thankful to my thesis adviser, colleague and probably most of all my brother in law who did a tremendous amount of work for free in horrible heat. Numerous times what looked like stable peat bottom turned out to be very unstable indeed. My colleague has wading pants (vadarbyxor) which are about 0,5 m high, and he soon found himself sinking into the mud with a mixture of water and mud filling his wading clothes. My wading clothes go all the way up, but that is of little help when a collapsing bottom catches you of guard and makes you lose the balance. The biggest surprise to me happened at an elevation that was above the water level. It looked like stable soil, but when I stepped on it I fell down 1 meter with the leg before I had time to react. There was no possibility to pull the leg up by pushing away with the other leg, since the ground was about to take that to. I decided to lie down in the mud and by doing that the leg came loose from the mud's grip wile I crawled toward more stable ground. Apart from this the last day included temperatures that reached above 30 degrees for most of the day, which resulted in a bad sunburn despite using sunblock factor 50. Now the work with measuring the terrain of the bottom is over, and while I am punching in the data on the cpu the laundry machine is running overtime to clean everything. During undergraduate studies, our professors mentioned that the benefit of laboratory experiments is that you have good control over all variables, but it is less comparable to the natural environment. On the other hand a field experiments IS the natural environment, but you have less control over the environmental variables. Well, this summer has been a true experience in what it means to not have influence of the variables. I just hope the water will sink enough now so that we can do our experiment.