Sedimentary my dear Watson - The Case of the Studley Silt with Alice Gent

For any of you have trouble sleeping at night, my mum would not hesitate to recommend what she believes is a foolproof antidote to the problem – sedimentation! After all, why on earth would you be even vaguely interested in reading a blog about the work of someone who in January 2012 will have spent a year planning, collecting, analysing and writing about, well, mud?

Actually, sedimentation is when eroded material from rock or other biological matter is being, or has been, deposited by water.

To introduce myself, I am a third year undergraduate Geography student at Lancaster University and for my dissertation I am studying the process and management of sedimentation at the World Heritage site of ‘Studley Royal Park including the ruins of Fountains Abbey’. This process is a critical threat for the site of Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal whose World Heritage status is based upon its spectacular Georgian water bodies which are part of the River Skell. I am sure many of you will have followed the progress of the Studley Lake project whereby 60,000 tonnes of sediment were removed from the lake, demonstrating that only through careful management can Studley Lake be conserved. It was this project that sparked two questions in my mind which have become the aims of my research:

1.) Is there an area of the River Skell catchment which contributes most to the sediment in Studley Lake?
2.) Is the effect of sediment removal projects sustainable?

This blog is a month-by-month summary of my research in which I hope to contribute to the future conservation of Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal. So, whilst admittedly my mum is right about the soporific effects of sedimentation itself (the woman is always right!), the contribution of such research to environmental management is vitally important as it is only through such management that we can begin to ameliorate the destruction we have caused across the landscape.

“Humans have changed the way the world works.
Now they have to change the way they think about it, too”
(The Economist, May 2011)