A River Runs in It

ON A RECENT walk down to the Franz River Campus, where construction of UP’s newest building has been humming along all summer, I spotted a male osprey circling overhead, performing his mating ritual, a dizzying sky dance accompanied by a screeching chorus of “Pick me! Pick me!” The silence of his potential mate, hidden somewhere in the trees above me, suggested she just wanted to be friends. Off in the distance the St. Johns Bridge rose like a queen surveying her realm, and below it the Willamette River was so calm and peaceful it seemed charmed still. Idyllic scenes like this are precisely what the E. L. Wiegand Environmental Laboratory will enable professors to study with their students, as they continue to search for ways to protect, preserve, and restore natural habitats.

“It’s going to be transformative for us,” Steve Kolmes told me, with the cautious optimism of a scientist trained to measure his dreams against reality. As the newly retired, outgoing department chair, he’s particularly thrilled to see the building so close to the finish line. He co-founded the Environmental Studies program back in 1999, well before most of UP’s peer institutions had a similar course of study, and it exemplifies the school’s commitment to interdisciplinary learning. In addition to a degree in environmental science, the program offers an ethics and policy concentration. As a discipline it explores the complex ways we relate to the world, how we influence our environments and how they influence us in turn.

“You could think of it as an anti-discipline in this way,” said professor Norah Martin, the incoming department chair. “It takes all these moving parts—science, philosophy, and policy—working together to figure out how to solve the problems we face.”

Kolmes will greet the lab with a mix of pride and relief. It’s as though he and his longtime colleagues had spent their careers assembling the edges of a beautiful puzzle, but they were always missing one piece, a piece big enough to fill the center: a devoted teaching lab. Having secured that space, and an exciting young faculty to take the reins of the department, they can look upon the whole puzzle and call it good.

“We’re one of the fastest growing departments in the College of Arts & Sciences,” he added. “And it’s hardly surprising. Students nowadays recognize that climate change is the existential challenge for their generation. Good lab space like what we’re getting is only going to continue to attract good students. Our goal has always been to give them everything they’ll need to meet the challenges their future depends on.”

For years the program has been making do with a small computer lab and a modest space in Romanaggi Hall they outgrew long ago. Running experiments has required a scrappy MacGyver mindset—necessity is the mother of invention, after all. But as a result, students have been doing much of their research out in the field. This is an excellent, and necessary, means of knowledge production, of course, but the up-to-date equipment that professors have now will help them teach a new generation of scientists how to craft a reliable, sophisticated picture of reality, one they can consult while making assessments and predictions.

“With the lab in place, and the flume,” Kolmes said, “we can check all the boxes.” 

THE FLUME? YOU’D be forgiven for thinking, as I did, that the university had invested in one of those rollercoasters you ride in a crudely fashioned canoe, the kind of ride that ends with everyone inside gleefully soaked. Turns out a “flume” is also what scientists use to study how rivers move and change over time, what they call “fluvial geomorphology.” It was, of course, the arrival of one of these apparatuses—and not a private Splash Mountain—that had Kolmes and assistant professor Kristin Sweeney, whose brainchild it was to bring one to campus, so excited. And it’s just as impressive. This state-of-the-art piece of lab equipment will give undergraduates here access to research and observational opportunities they’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere else on the West Coast. It’s a tremendous boon for a school UP’s size.

Designed and manufactured by the Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory (SAFL, rhymes with “baffle”) in Minneapolis, the flume is a customized piece of experimental machinery. SAFL is part of the University of Minnesota, but its influence stretches far beyond where it sits on the banks of the Mississippi. Its engineering arm produces some of the most sophisticated, cutting-edge devices for studying fluid mechanics in the country, if not the world. What the Swiss are to watches and Army knives, SAFL is to aquatic gadgetry. Typically, they collaborate with a scientist, engineer, or research team to build a bespoke mechanism that will test a specific idea or hypothesis, an instrument that’s programmed to gather a particular kind of data or make a specialized sort of measurement. But UP’s flume is a little different.

“While still research-grade, this is more of an educational flume,” said Erik Steen, the SAFL engineer heading up the project. “It has to be really flexible.”

You can think of the flume as a cake slice of a river, one that our professors can fully control. To grasp why they’d need a segment of a river, it helps to know what they’re studying. The simple answer is sediment. The movement of sediment. That’s what causes rivers, and the landscapes they move through, to change over time. When Kristin Sweeney teaches her geomorphology class and lab, she likes to connect the shape of larger landscapes all the way back to the way individual grains of sediment move.

Paying attention to a single piece of gravel sounds a lot like a Buddhist exercise, and in doing so, scientists, like monks, see infinitely more than simple pebbles and specks of dirt.

They see time. How the Earth has evolved over mindboggling amounts of time.

Instead of playing her lab students YouTube videos of gravel bumping along a riverbed, Sweeney will now be able to show them in person, providing a necessary step in the scientific process, the ability to test formulas and ask questions of the river. It’s not just one river, either, not just “the Willamette” or “the Columbia.” With the ability to tailor how much water flows through the flume and how fast, as well as the amount and size of sediment in the water and on the bed, they will be able to create a number of fluvial environments to observe and experiment on.

“It’s sort of a jack of all trades,” Steen said.

LET’S TAKE A step back and try to wrap our heads around what this contraption looks like. For the flume’s chassis, its main body, imagine a massive aquarium nearly forty feet long, longer by a hair than the average city bus. To allow for easy observation of the channel, it will live on a heavy-duty, waist-high platform. Pity that poor platform: the channel can hold about two thousand gallons of water, which clocks in at a whopping 16,660 pounds, or roughly five grown hippopotami.

Functionally speaking, the flume is an eco-conscious closed system. After the water and sediment flow through the channel, the sediment is separated from the water, which is funneled into one of three 750 gallon holding tanks. There it’ll wait to be pumped back through the recirculation pipe and reenter the channel, keeping the experiment going. The flume’s peak flow rate, how fast the water moves through it, is 2,244 gallons per minute. Consider, for context, that the rate of a typical household shower is six-to-twelve gpm. Your faucet’s about three. The most powerful fire hydrants in the land, the ones with blue tops, pump out 1,500 gpm. 2,244 gpms would fill your bathtub faster than you can spell “Mississippi.”

And there, in a nutshell, you have the basic mechanics of an open channel flume. Impressive, sure, especially at this scale. But what truly sets a SAFL flume apart from the field are all the high-tech bells and whistles that generate the scads of information that scientists need to make their picture of the world.

On the downstream end, the bedload sediment is filtered out and weighed in real time. And athwart the flume sits the data acquisition carriage, monitoring the action from above like a traffic helicopter. It has a 3D laser scanner that zaps the riverbed and produces point cloud images of the data it collects, which look something like riverbeds painted by Georges Seurat. The second sensor is an ultrasonic rangefinder, which can be used to measure the slope of the water’s surface. Finally, there’s a sonar rangefinder that hangs suspended in the water, pings a single point on the floor—not unlike what a whale or dolphin does during echolocation—and records changes to that point over time. Unlike optical rangefinders, the sonar one works well even when the suspended load clouds the water. Take all these readings together and you get a rich, complex picture of a river’s behavior. 

WITH THIS KNOWLEDGE in hand, scientists can make a whole host of predictions and recommendations for how best to conserve rivers and their habitats. How will putting in or removing a dam affect sediment transport, upstream and down? How would either change conditions for the creatures that call the river home? And civil engineers, like associate professor Cara Poor, will be able use it as they explore new conservation techniques and demonstrate phenomena that students might not be familiar with, like the killer hydraulic jump.

“That’s when water goes over a dam or a weir and forms a dangerous standing wave at the bottom. [The flume] is going to be great for studying stream restoration, too,” Poor said. When a stream has been affected by a flood or excessive erosion, engineers shore up the banks with rocks. “It’ll help us understand the size of rocks we need to use.”

And it’s no secret that decades of unchecked industrial activity filled the Portland Harbor with pollution. The city’s remediation efforts, along with the investment and efforts of UP, have gone a long way to cleaning up the mess. But there’s still work to be done.

“The sediment down there is almost completely contaminated,” Steve Kolmes said. “And its movement is one of the major issues for the city. Understanding how it’s moving is an important step in fixing the problem.”

Literature professors are fond of pointing out that rivers are symbols of change, of time passing and life taking its course. As Kolmes discussed how the flume sets the program up to do research-grade experiments and how fortunate it is that the lab is situated right on the banks of a river that students can go out and observe, it was easy to recall an adage like “No man steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” His voice seemed to swell with pride, with the satisfaction that comes with fulfilling a long-held ambition. The department he helped start more than two decades ago seems poised for something of a superbloom.

“We had Environmental Studies 1.0,” he said. “And now we’ve been staffing up with this young, exciting new faculty and it’s like Environmental Studies 2.0 is taking over. The lab and the flume, they complete the launch pad for the new faculty.”

What future is the flume bringing to campus? What exciting discoveries and collaborations will it lead to? What fresh passions will be seeded in the new lab? Only time will tell, as it ferries us around the next bend in the river.

CHESTON KNAPP is Portland magazine’s senior writer and associate editor.