More on lighting

To be more clear about how biking from school at night looks like

This is the first part of my trip (ignore the B indicating otherwise). It is well lit because the path is next to the main road. The path then passes over 66, which is represented in the next image:

The red ellipse indicates poor lighting, aka no light at all and total darkness. This is where I see most of my wildlife - deer, cats, rabbits, ghosts, ...

WOD

Washington and Old Dominion Trail-

For bikers, walkers, runners, people, Not Cars

The trail is 45 miles of paved goodness from Northern Virginia right into DC. It's great for commuters. This is how I get to school, I bike from Vienna down to the VTech campus in Falls Church.

It takes me about thirty minutes, and is about 5 miles... Good exercise if it happens three times a week. The only drawback to this trail is that it is not lit, so biking back from school at 10pm is a little scary.

For more information about this amazing trail, click here.

Yesterday they shut off my water

... just as I was about to brush my teeth before class, and my roommate J had to take a sponge bath with water from the rain water barrel.

World, I want to tell you that before my Chesapeake Bay class, I had no clue where my drinking water came from, or where my sewage went. It just isn't something that I think about during the day. Do you want to knowhow much cow and chicken poop goes into the river before they take it into the treatment plant? It's not very appetizing. So let me tell you a little about the geography of where I live.

I live on Tapawingo Rd (SW) in Vienna, VA. That's a suburb outside of Wasthington D.C., all the way out onthe metro Orange Line. It takes me about half an hour with the metro to get to the Potomac River (the border of VA and DC), which eventually drains into the Chesapeake Bay. The Bay watershed is

64,000 square miles large and reaches all the way up to the state of New York, down to Delaware and across to West Virginia. I am one of the 17 million people who live in the watershed (cbf.org).

(image from http://www.baydreaming.com/)

One of the larger rivers or tributaries to the Bay is the Potomac, where I get my water from. For the city of Vienna, we get 80% of our water from the Potomac and 20% from the Occoquan River. The water I drink is treated at the Corbalis Treatment Plant, on the Potomac near the entrance of the Seneca Creek.

The run-off from my lawn flows into the Hunter’s Branch creek, which is part of the Accotink

watershed. This leads to Lake Accotink, which then flows into Accotink Bay which leads to Gunston Cove, part of the Potomac River, and then leads down to the Chesapeake Bay. The groundcover in this watershed is varied, as it goes through suburban areas of Vienna, Fairfax, Springfield, and Fort Belvoir. The watershed goes through green areas such as parks (Mantua, Eakin Community, Accotink Stream Valley, Wakefield, and finally Lake Accotink Park), back yards, and non residential areas, where the ground cover seems to be shrubs andother plants, protected by trees.

(image from accotink.org)

My sewage travels to the Noman M. Cole Jr Pollution Control Plant, located on the Pohick Creek close to where it joins the Potomac River at Pohick Bay, according to the Fairfax County Water website. The Noman M. Cole Jr. Plant is a primary, secondary, and tertiary treatment plant, cleaning the water enough to release it into the Pohick Bay. The process of cleaning the water starts with primary treatment which separates the solids (trash and sludge) from the liquid. The secondary treatment process involves removing nitrogen by pumping the water through filtration tanks where microorganisms eat the organic matter and nutrients. Those organisms then settle and are removed from the water. Tertiary treatment removes Phosphorous from the wastewater and then disinfects the water with a chlorination process (www.waterandwastewater.com/plant_directory/Detailed/58.html).

Most of the places in this area get their water from rivers instead of aquifers, and it all flows back into the Chesapeake Bay. Makes you want to live upstream of all the farmers and development...

Invasive Species in our watershed

Learning about the invasive species in this area, I started noticing how INVADED our landscape is. Before I used tobike/drive/walk by Nutley or 29, and think, "Oh how Green and Wonderful itis!" while in reality, we have a lot of Kudzu.

Kudzu (Pueraria montana) comes from Japan and means Trash (according to my friend Ikumi) and can grow one foot per day. As a vine, it covers everything and anything it can climb over, eventually suffocating the plants it's climbing on. The only way to eradicate this plant is by destroying the root system completely.

(http://www.invasive.org/eastern/midatlantic/pumo.html)

Taking a walk by our water catchment area/ pond by Nutley and 66 I noticed that there was some plants on the surface of the water, and through further examination I noticed that it was Water Chestnut (Trapa natans).

This plant is not at all related to the chestnuts we eat (Castanea sativa), but named for the really pointed seeds that have a slight resemblance the chestnut fruit. Very slight. Mostly just pointy.

(http://www.invasive.org/eastern/midatlantic/trna.html)

Plants!

Some cool stuff that I looked up quickly... and I'm not an expert, but thought these were interesting comparisons that we talked about in class.
The first conversation was about Chestnuts, where one of my teachers did not know that some can by poisonous. This is the horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) which is native to Europe.

The next is the Chinese chestnut (Castanea mollissima) which is native to China and is (surprisingly) edible.

The last one is the Sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa) which native to Europe and Asia Minor and has edible nuts. Think chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

Then there are also other plants that have the name 'chestnut' but are not related (like the horse chestnut).

So it seems to me that the pictures that I downloaded from Wikepedia (mostly) of these chestnuts make me believe that the mollissima and sativa are very similar looking. Mmmm Chestnuts...

Velocity of water in a stream

Recently we went on a trip to Turkey Run at the entrance to the Potomac River.

To figure out how much water was flowing at the time through Turkey Run towards the Potomac, we first started with creating a section of the stream bed.

Using two people holding a rope and a measuring tape taught over the stream, and one person measuring the depth at regular intervals, we created this table:

Then we made a chart from those numbers-

Then using something that floats (a stick or piece of paper) we would measure out a distance (maybe 10 meters) and time how long it takes for that object to float that distance.

Multiplying these values (area x time) will get you the velocity.