Lessons from the field:
Students take to the water to study inland coasts
 mong the most valuable lessons students learned
in Associate Professor Chin
Wu’s field-work-intensive summer course was how to think fast
on your feet—and, when all else fails, to roll with the punches.
A passionate instructor who is equally as passionate about his research,
Wu created the course, Exploration and Investigation
of Coastal Processes in Great Lakes and Inland Lakes (CEE 618),
to enable students to observe and explore coastal processes—such
as bluff and shoreline erosion—in the Great Lakes and regional
inland lakes, as well as to become familiar with the instruments used
to observe, measure and understand what’s going on in and above
the water. “I feel like a lot of times, the students just read
the textbooks,” he says. “Now they’ll really go out
and look at it.”
Wu launched the course, held June 18 through August
10, with two six-hour demonstrations of the myriad instrumentation he
has acquired. The eight students—a mixture of graduate and undergraduate
students—spent the remainder of the course either in the field
or analyzing data on campus.
The students got their field-work feet wet during initial studies of
sediment resuspension in a 100-meter-square enclosed area of nearby
Lake Wingra. But on July 10, they packed all of their instruments into
trucks and headed north to Lake Superior, expecting to encounter balmy
summer weather, pristine beach, and clear, sparkling, ice-blue water.
That day, however, 30 mph winds roiled the lake and made the students’
experience anything but calm. They carried just one large instrument
over the sand, waded through icy waves crashing against the shore, and
dropped the device into the water. “We were unable to perform
some surveys that we wanted, due to the wind and blowing sand along
the Lake Superior shoreline,” says geological engineering master’s
student Craig Schuettpelz. “But this was yet another learning
experience when doing field work. Until you actually get that equipment
outside of the laboratory and on the sand or near the water, you never
know how it is going to function.”
Schuettpelz enrolled in the course to gain a better understanding of
coastal engineering processes and how these processes affect infrastructure
along the coastline. “I enjoy doing field work and have not had
much experience with coastal engineering,” he says. “I know
how to use much of the geophysical equipment that the Geological Engineering
Program has and this was a good opportunity for me to apply what I know
about using that equipment on land to offshore processes.”
On the final two days of their trip, the wind subsided
and the group—which also included Assistant Professor Dante
Fratta, Professor Emeritus David
Mickelson and Sea Grant Institute Coastal Specialist
Gene Clark—viewed the Lake Superior bluffs from the water.
They took water samples to determine water quality and lowered instruments
into the water to gather such data as water velocity, temperature and
turbulence level; and sediment substrate, composition and structure.
Such information is important for learning more about bluff behavior,
says Wu. “When people talk about global warming, they talk about
the temperature going up and the sea getting higher,” he says.
“But in the Great Lakes, it is different. The trend of water level
is getting lower during the recent years.”
Lower water levels mean navigational issues for giant cargo ships that
sail the Great Lakes. But they also contribute, in large part, to receding
bluffs, says Wu. When water levels are low, waves hammer previously
submerged parts of the bluffs. “When the water scours away at
the low part of the bluff, and then raises, the bluff can’t stand
the force—and collapses,” he says. “These bluff recessions
are very episodic; water levels are low for a while and then high for
a while, and then the bluffs can suddenly collapse.”
A physical limnologist, Wu discussed his research at various points
throughout the course’s four field trips. However, he also developed
a multidisciplinary team, relying on Fratta’s, Mickelson’s
and Clark’s expertise to broaden the students’ knowledge
and set the data in context. In addition to Lake Superior and Lake Wingra,
the group also studied bluffs near Concordia University in Mequon, Wisconsin,
and evaluated E-coli water contamination
at the McKinley Marina beach in Milwaukee.
Despite the range of topics the instructors covered, Wu did not require
the students to have any prior knowledge of the subjects or the instrumentation
to enroll in this elective course. “Everyone had their own goal
who came to the class,” he says. “And I feel that it’s
a good thing that I didn’t need to set up strict criteria and
say, ‘You’ve got to do this and then you’ll get an
A.’”
Undergraduate Adam Bechle was among Wu’s more inexperienced students.
Not a coastal engineer, he wanted to learn about the instruments used
in coastal measurements, as well as how to synthesize the data into
actual conclusions. “From this course, I learned the value of
preparation for the worst in field work because very little goes as
planned when collecting data,” he says. “Organization is
key when working with many complex instruments, and having a plan and
sticking to it is very important. However, the ability to improvise
and problem-solve is even more important to fix any problems that occur
outside of the controlled setting of the lab—and duct tape is
always a good start. Maybe most important though, is that when field
work doesn’t go as planned, to not get discouraged because it
happens to everyone. It’s how you handle it and learn from it
that is most important so that eventually you get it right.”
Although duct tape didn’t enter the picture, Bechle and student
Josh Anderson improvised an ingenious solution when they learned that
the cable for their acoustic Doppler velocimeter (ADV) was too short
to measure water velocity in deep water. “After debating over
a preliminary design, we rummaged in the environmental fluid mechanics
lab for materials and ended up using an old steel bookshelf to create
a 4-foot box and used some old aluminum tubing to support the ADV and
its battery,” says Bechle. “After a few days of work, we
finally had something that would do the job, spray painted it red, and
christened it ‘Badger Drop.’ In the end, it worked great
and got a really good data set. Just being able to take something from
scratch, recycling what was seemingly garbage, and building something
useful and sustainable under a time crunch was pretty fun.”
Students in the course often worked in teams—a strategy Wu says
enabled them to solve problems on their own and mentor and teach each
other. “I partnered closely with a student more familiar with
coastal engineering processes and each of the sites we visited, so I
was able to learn more about the erosion processes of the coastlines,”
says Schuettpelz. “I think I taught him more about the equipment
and how to operate the equipment for the best results. We usually had
good conversations about how to best perform the surveys to optimize
our results while we were in the field.”
In addition to the collaborative aspects, the team-based approach also
had an unexpected benefit, says master’s student Dave Huwe. “You
can share classes with someone and form a study group, but working together
in the field really builds a bond between students like nothing else,”
he says.
Schuettpelz appreciated the chance to get out of the laboratory and
into the field. “More often than not in college, students are
not exposed to field situations enough,” he says. “The lab
and homework assignments are good teaching tools, but the hands-on experiences
of field work teach you how to think on the fly and improvise solutions.
These critical and decisive thinking skills are what earning an engineering
degree is all about.”
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