Out with the old, and in with the new!
For the last 6 months or so, a youthful-ish contingent of SUSS has been continuing the work on the downward phreas at the end of Ben’s Dig. Mostly organized by Ben Thompson, Toby Ward, and Ben Alston (though with club-wide input) we’ve got a good system going. On the trips I’ve been on, we’re extracting and storing about 7 grain sacks of spoil per hour by hauling up from the dig face, over the lip of the pot, and then filling bags with a traffic cone funnel. The bags are being stacked along the sides of the passage behind the dig, though we’re almost starting to run out of easy space to stack.
The vertical phreatic has continued down for a few more meters, requiring more staples in the wall and steps cut into the mudbank at the bottom. In the week-or-so between sessions, the dig generally gets about 10L of water accumulating at the bottom and we’re seeing many different layers of sediment as we continue down. So far we’ve had layers of very fine gravel through to silt and clay, with a recent layer of clay being a lovely orange colour and hard work to dig.
Recently, there started to be a solid rock ceiling over the dig face, with a nice phreatic shape to the new roof. This horizontal turn ended after only about 75cm however, with an entirely vertical wall of calcite which we have followed down for almost a meter.
Hopefully the suggestion earlier in this thread that we might have an equal amount of upwards digging on the other side proves untrue, as it’s taken at least 150 man-hours to even get to this point!
Any questions or advice, let us know!
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For those interested in the scalloping, see the below images. It's hard for any of us to tell if scallops are even present, never mind how the scallops are shaped.