Geography Field Study River Investigation Coursework
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Introduction
Intro Aims * To investigate what patterns the river Allt Doire Nan Eun shows for wet water depth, water velocity and pH in its three courses. * To investigate whether the river shows textbook characteristics for erosion and deposition in a river channel. * To investigate how rock roundness and moss coverage changes downstream and at different points across a channel. Location During the course of this geography field trip my group set out to investigate the aims stated above. To do this we travelled to Scotland. Once there we stayed at the Kindrogan Field Centre in Enochdhu, Blairgowrie, Perthshire near Pitlochry. Why was this Site Chosen? We studied the river Allt Doire Nan Eun firstly because of the fact that each of its three courses were fairly close to each other due to the relative shortness (meaning that we could travel from one to the next quickly and therefore collect results from each of the three sites- upper, middle and lower course- within a day) ...read more.
Middle
experiment to explain changes in river velocity (often used in physics). Rivers run down a channel gradient. This experiment shows that the steeper it is, the higher the water velocity should be. - Finally I will make use of the Theoretical Long Profile: Terminology KFC- Kindrogan Field Centre River Course- The upper, middle and lower courses are approximate sections of the river (heading from source to mouth respectively) Ordnance Survey- The official cartography (map-making) agency of Britain Hypothesis- A statement that attempts to explain the reason for a set of facts or principles occurring in the manner that they did Textbook Characteristics- Characteristics that are identified in textbooks (information that is mostly unbiased and reliable) such as the AQA Geography textbook MCW/MCD/NSD- Mean Channel Width/Mean Channel Depth/Normal Stream Discharge Gradient- Steepness or shallowness of a surface Methodology Hypotheses * The wet water depth will increase downstream (due to increased hydraulic power erosion) and pH will decrease (as the river travels further away from the road and the human chemicals are slowly filtered out of the water for example by the forest's vegetation). ...read more.
Conclusion
and a stopwatch. The stopwatch was started and the hydroprop was placed into the water facing upstream. When it had reached the shaft end, the stopwatch was stopped. If it was taken facing downstream on a different occasion, the flow would have been twisting it in a different direction which may have caused the results to be less reliable. Flow Speed- This was measured using an orange, tape measure (stretched taut at 5m) and a stopwatch. The orange was dropped in the water and the time taken for it to reach the end of the tape measure was noted. A measurement was taken for the outside (thalweg) and inside bend. It is interesting to note that the orange almost always returned to the outside very quickly when dropped in the inside bend of the water. Sometimes a rock obstructed the path of the orange; it was questionable as to whether moving it would cause bias so we let the orange move naturally. Stone length/width/depth ( X/Y/Z respectively) - Stone Roundness- Powers' Scale of Roumdness (based on personal judgement): ?? ?? ?? ?? 1 ...read more.
This student written piece of work is one of many that can be found in our GCSE Physical Geography section.
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