Ice Age - The Meltdown....

[john_bud]

I used the old Ford backhoe to scratch a little hole in the ground last fall. Silly water filled it in before I could finish. Then fall and winter came. Now spring is in the air. Temps have been soaring lately, in fact water has been spotted in it's rare molten form!

I wanted to see how the snow melt would look, so I started going out back every morning and snapped a picture or two from the same spot. (It's not quite EXACTLY the same, so there is a bit of jump -- sorry). I started this before we got any mentionable snow, so it goes from bare to white and fluffy with a maximum of 15-18". There are some gaps where I was laid up with the silly flu and didn't really want to walk back there thru 15" of snow...

Here's where the thin winter snow was starting to melt before the two major snows hit

1173628156.pbw - Slideshow - Photobucket - Snow build up


This is after the major snows and it is starting to heat up and to transform from solid to molten water.

1173628297.pbw - Slideshow - Photobucket - Snow and the melt starting


I'll add more as the days progress. It should fill up all the way and even over where I have been standing. Time will tell....

 

[Egon]

Starting to heat up?? Do you have a heat tape connected to the battery??

 

[john_bud]

Not heat tape, but a game camera. For some reason, critters seem to like water... go figure.

jb

 

[john_bud]

Added pictures of yesterday afternoon and this morning. BIG change overnight.....

Also am trying a "better" way to present the pictures.

 

[John D]

John. were did you find that old picnic table? had one just like er back in the 60s. jb

 

[john_bud]

Here are the pictures from yesterday and today. You have to move the slide manually to see the last slide. Goofy, but that's the way it works.

The pond is about all the way full by the way and there is still more snow!!

 

[john_bud]

Just in case the slides aren't working, here is the old fashioned way showing the fill up from 8 am to 6 pm today

 

[john_bud]

And today's pictures.
The first one is from 07:20 AM and you can see the water is up. The other two are from 1 PM today. You can see the progress of the water on the cable spindle. It looks to have gone up a foot from 7am to 1 pm. There is room for about 2 more ft then it has to leave the property...

 

[john_bud]

Well as of 6 pm the little hole and all of the surroundings are completely full. There is water flowing out. It's not a "dam", as the pond is not contained by a dam, it is completely underground. The overfull area gets bigger until it finds a low spot and continues to the next field.




The depth in the pond area is about 17' to the rim. About 5 ft of that was covered with ice and snow before the meltdown. Pretty amazing how much water has been flowing. I expect the level to start dropping pretty quick. The frost level wan't very deep and the warm water is taking it out fast. Once that is gone, the ground will start sucking down the water as it is pretty dang dry.

Given the amount of water flow, the erosion is minimal due to the ground being frozen and ice covered initially. My guess is that there was 1000 gpm or more as the maximum flow yesterday. 2-3' wide and 8" deep flowing fast ws the water from the big field. 1' wide and 6" deep was from a small field and a slightly smaller flow was from a different side. Any hydraulogists?


jb

 

[john_bud]

Here are the pictures of the water now. It has dropped a foot and then some of depth over the last 36 hours. I paced the area off and on average it is 60 yards long by 15 yard wide. The wide spots are 20 and the narrowestis 5-6 yds wide. Dropping a ft means that about 300 cu yds of water have soaked into the ground. That's quite a bundle of water! A quick calculation puts it at 60,600 gallons. Or 1600 gallons an hour drop rate.

Now, it filled up that last ft in no more than 2 hours, so it must have been going in at a rate of 30,000 gal an hour or 500 gal a min. Looks like my earlier estimate (pure guess) was not that close!