A Guest Journal Update by Bre MacInnes
Guest journal written by Bre MacInnes
Misty has asked me to give a little report about the tsunamists’ (Jody, Tanya, Katya, Seriosha and my) time in Dushnaya Bay. As the weather is less than ideal at the moment (windy, occasionally raining, cold…) and I am reluctant to leave the comfort of our nice group tent during a typhoon, I gladly agreed.
Our intrepid team of 5 made landfall in Dushnaya Bay on 9 July 2007. By this time we had all been waiting to get there for a long time. We were dropped off by Iskatel-4 as part of an expedition lead by IMGG and not directly related to the KBP expedition. KBP just picked us up. As part of the IMGG expedition we were able to have two days of field work before being dropped on Simushir – one day on Urup and one day on Ketoy. The day on Ketoy was the first time I’d ever seen fresh effects of a tsunami. It was very exciting! I couldn’t wait to get to Dushnaya.
Tanya Pinegina holds the stadia rod to measure the tsunami run-up on Ketoy. The soil next to her has been eroded away by the tsunami. Jody Bourgeois is walking up into the vegetation to help make the measurements. (Photo courtesy of Bre MacInnes)
Jody and I were the last ones off the boat as someone had to make sure all of the gear went ashore. In the meantime, Katya had picked out the sweetest camp I have ever stayed in. It was up a 40 m cliff (we climbed up a steep stream valley to get there) in a beautiful half-forest/half-meadow. There were many alder and birch trees to provide shade, wind protection and convenient clothes lines and kadrach (scrub pine) for excellent firewood. Seriosha built an awesome kitchen and we had an excellent stream nearby for drinking water and bathing. If the weather was nice and the fog out to sea, the first view I had after crawling out of my tent was the majestic Prevo volcano.
Prevo volcano rises majestically above the tsunamists’ camp above Dushnaya Bay on Simushir Island. (Photo courtesy of Bre MacInnes)
We were in Dushnaya Bay for 18 days and got a lot of good work done. Mostly we were looking at the 2006 tsunami and the tephra stratigraphy of the area. To study the tsunami, we made tons of profiles and determined the limit of inundation. We also described the tsunami deposit, when there was one, as well as erosional features that we saw. To learn more about the tephra stratigraphy, we dug many peat excavations. This would also help the archaeologists across the way at Vodapadnaya to "tell time” in their excavation.
The summary of the tsunami study is….it was BIG. Not "holy cow” big, but definitely bigger than we expected. The bay is about 6 km long, and the tsunami was higher at the edges (>10 m) than in the middle (6-10 m). Specifically, where we innocently camped on the beach last year, the tsunami was 15 m high and the surface our tents were on is now covered in a layer of cobbles and pebbles a couple of cm thick.
Jody Bourgeois standing at the site of the 2006 shore camp at Dushnaya Bay, Simushir. About ten of the KBP science crew stayed overnight here last year and camped on the beach. Now the site has been significantly changed by the tsunamis of November 2006 and January 2007 and is covered with cobbles and pebbles. (Photo courtesy of Bre MacInnes)
See if I ever camp on the beach again! Over and over, we said "Thank goodness the tsunami happened in November and not August!” We would likely not have survived it.
Well that’s the summary. It’s brief, but Jody’s almost done heating some water for tea, and it’s time to get to work on other things. Got to take full advantage of "office days” in camp whenever possible … especially if we want pancakes at the end of the day (if we can make it so Jody has nothing left to work on, she’ll make us pancakes)!
That’s all for now! Bre MacInnes
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