Snow Dragon Phenology

I'm choosing to ignore the weather forecast right now. It's a balmy 70° F outside, but the chance for a wintry mix exists for tomorrow night through Friday. It appears winter is in for at least one more encore. Which is irritating, but since the semester is winding down, I've got plenty of work to keep me busy before I start up another Dispatch from the Dirt Lab or Kelly McCullough and I work on our next "Seekrit Projekt." Hint: think "Fruit Ninja."

I just finished editing together all 4,000 time-lapse camera frames from our Snow Dragon hijinks from last month. It was the longest time-lapse movie I've ever done: nearly 6 weeks total. I ended up editing out much of the night time images, because there wasn't much to see. But if you watch the movie, you'll see no less than four distinct April snow events. Plus, there's lots of good melting and sublimation.

If you missed it the first time, here's the first movie wherein we actually build the entire dragon and take some silly pictures:
Building the Snow Dragon from Matt Kuchta on Vimeo.
Time lapse sequence of our 5-day snow sculpting project. For more dragon-y stuff and info about this and other projects, visit kellymccullough.com.


And here's the finished project:
From Flake to Lake: The Birth, Life, and inevitable Death of a Snow Dragon from Matt Kuchta on Vimeo.
We built a giant snow dragon. It took us five days. Then we let it melt. That took five weeks. A time lapse view of the entire process (about 4,000 separate pictures) compresses six weeks into just 3.5 minutes. For more about this and other shenanigans, visit www.kellymccullough.com.

Creative Commons License: cc by-sa

Revisiting the Snow Dragon Birth, Life, Death

Some of you may be aware that Kelly McCullough and I built a giant snow dragon in Neil Gaiman's backyard a few weeks ago. We set up a camera to capture time-lapse images of the entire process. Then we left the camera running to capture it as it melted away. We ended up getting to decent snowstorms in the time it took for the dragon to disappear...

I'm stitching the images together - but there are almost 4,000 frames, so it's taking a little bit of time (even though I'm doing batch processing in photoshop).

How strong were those Sandcastles?

Well, I have some quantitative data for those super sandcastles. My soil mechanics students were charged with making the strongest sandcastle they could. I gathered all the class data, added some measurements of sandcastles reinforced with just one or two sheets of window screen and then plotted them all together.

The picture above shows the "Castle Crusher 3500," which was just a Vernier force plate and a lever made out of some ring stands and a 2x4. Putting the sandcastle under the lever allowed the students to measure the force required to cause a "failure" in the sandcastle. In this case, we defined failure as 40% strain (a change in height of about 5 cm). In the future, I'm going to try and rig up a strain gauge so we can measure deformation concurrently with the applied force. Stress AND strain!

Here's the data gathered so far. The plain sandcastles supported about 15 Newtons (about 3 pounds).Testing four sheets maxed out our gauge - one group's castle managed to support over 2,300 Newtons of force: that's more than 500 pounds! Given the size of the sandcastles, that was a stress of more than 4.5 TONS per square foot.

The trendline was fit to the maximum force required for each particular number of reinforcing sheets of "geofabric" (fiberglass window screen) and clearly demonstrates how much influence adding just a few pieces of tensile material has on the overall structural stability.

Let me put this another way: Assume I built a sandcastle the same way as before, but made it one foot wide, one foot long, and 6 inches tall (I don't exactly know how strength would scale vertically). That sandcastle could support an adult African Elephant (either a female, or smallish male).

Going Viral with Sandcastles

Well, it seems my Sandcastle video has also managed to get picked up by Boing Boing and then Gizmodo, and now Digg.com. That's after it was mentioned by Earth magazine and some other cool bloggers. I tried not to read all the comments, but it seems that some people just want the quick and dirty "cool part" of the science, while others appreciate the overall narrative a bit more.

This is worth exploring in the future - because as a science educator, it's all about tying the cool little details into the larger narrative. But from an "advocacy" or (to be perfectly honest about the venue/medium) "entertainment" perspective, too much explaining can get in the way. I managed to make the sandcastle video about 2 minutes shorter than the one about dry quicksand, but I still think 5 minutes is a good target length, unless I have some really sweet high speed video to show off.

For those of you who have stumbled upon this site via one of the above sites, welcome. Feel free to browse around and leave a comment if you care to. For those of you who already have been reading, you're one of those who knew about it "before it was cool." Not to say I think the recent attention makes the blog cool - the fun science makes it cool. I just try not to get in the way and give you a little more perspective on the topic.

And who doesn't love a little gratuitous high speed video now and then?
Kyle Stabs a Beer from Matt Kuchta on Vimeo.
WIth @dillhero's special Pirate Knife, Kyle stabs a beer. Don't try this at home, kids!

That's the awesome Kyle Cassidy, doing a little SCIENCE!

Okay, what the heck? This entire post is highlighted... weird. I've set the highlight color to black, so at least you can read the text.

Dispatches from the Dirt Lab #2: Building Better Sandcastles

It's getting toward the end of April - and while it's still snowing around here, summer (and time at the beach) is drawing close. In this episode, I talk about why sandcastles stand up in the first place, and how you can make them even stronger.


Here's a direct link for you.
Dispatches from the Dirt Lab #2: Building Better Sandcastles from Matt Kuchta on Vimeo.


The idea of reinforcing sandcastles occurred to me while I was teaching about "geotextiles." These materials are used to add strength to soils for geo-engineering projects like roads, embankments, and retaining walls.

And I have a question sent to me by a visitor. It involves robots, basements, and digging. I'm looking forward to putting an answer together.

UPDATE: The video has been picked up by a few people - and while I try not to read comments on big aggregator sites, a few people have made some good suggestions:

You should definitely remove anything you bring to the beach when you're done building the sandcastles. Pack out what you pack in.

If you are interested in a more biodegradable option, dry grasses woven together, or seaweed would have a similar effect. Ancient builders used woven grass mats to hold their mud brick structures together, so it's not like this hasn't been done before.

If you are building your sandcastles this way, you are indeed "cheating" in the sense that a "true" sandcastle is only held together by sand and water. But I see no ethical dilemma in using this technique if you are going for strength and showing off. If you are competing with others, it's probably against the rules.

Working on the next Dispatch episode

I've been working on a new Dirt Lab Dispatch. Here's a sneak peek:

Yes, that's a bowling ball being held up by a sand castle. If you're curious to see how you can make a super-strong sand castle, be sure to check out the next episode - I should have it done by the weekend.