Just like any good comic book character, landscapes have an origin story. Since no speech bubbles pop out from the soil, learning a landscape’s history requires alternative methods. Now, thanks to scientists, even a grain of sand can enlighten you.
One way to piece together the history of a landscape is to dig down into the soil and look at the layers. They offer a time machine thousands of years into the past, showing us what plants and animals once lived there, and even what the climate might have been like.
But if you dig down into the soil on the northern end of Calvert Island, you soon hit a layer of sand, and the time machine grinds to a halt. Or at least it did until now.
“All the sand below the soil poses a problem to piece together landscape history,” says Jordan Eamer, a PhD candidate and Hakai scholar at the University of Victoria.
Eamer and colleagues recently published a paper in the Journal of Sedimentary Research on their search for an efficient, cost-effective way to find out where that buried sand came from.
“We’re trying to put together how the landscape evolved over 15,000 years,” says Eamer. “We’re doing this to get a snapshot through time of what the coast looked like. A lot of archaeological research is dependent on where the shoreline was over time.”
Was that sand layer part of a dune on the old coastline? Underwater? Part of a coastal beach?
Previous research used time-consuming methods or expensive equipment like a scanning electron microscope to answer questions about a sand grain’s origins. But Eamer and his colleagues set out to do it with far simpler tools.
“We based this method on freely available software and optical microscopes, which are fairly ubiquitous in science labs,” says Eamer.
The software—called ImageJ—can be programmed to manipulate images and automatically detect certain shapes. ImageJ has been used for scientific purposes that range from highlighting thousand-year-old human rock paintings to counting bacterial colonies.
