nola.com
Peter Vos, a Dutch geologist, finally hit the peaty part of the soil while boring into a vacant lot this week at North Dorgenois and Pauger streets in New Orleans’ 7th Ward. He pulled a slice out from the ground with a hand auger while his colleague, Sanneke van Asselen, used a wire slicer to shave away the muddy top layer and reveal the woody flecks of organic matter beneath.
“This does not look like it is oxidizing,” Van Asselen, a Dutch land subsidence expert, said Wednesday (Nov. 14). “But the density will tell us about the compaction.”
The Dutch are in town this week to kick off a study poised to be the most New Orleans-specific analysis of local groundwater movement and subsidence, the geological process of soil compaction and corrosion that causes land to sink. Funded by a federal grant, the study will be paired with a 3-D geological survey of the city and a new computer model designed to forecast the potential flood effects of incoming storms.
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