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moss

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Edited Aug 18, 2007, 11:48

Re: Silbury's structural integrity

Aug 17, 2007, 11:45

nigelswift wrote:

,
“There is no evidence of water cascading through the hill”. Well, not sure anyone ever thought there was (although actually, it might be better news if there was). Instead, “it is more a change of the overall saturation state of the whole mass of chalk”. This sounds worrying, to a lay person anyway. Is this a regular occurrence or unique? If the latter, is there a chance that prolonged saturation of chalk and clay causes irreversible chemical and mechanical changes? And if the latter, we still haven’t heard precisely where this water is thought to have come from and when. There have been tunnels in Silbury for 230 years and worse rainfall in that time. Is the structural integrity of the hill in August 2007 somehow more precarious and the situation more urgent than it has been previously? If so, why? The account so far provided simply doesn’t answer these perfectly natural questions.

That’s interesting, when I was wandering round Silbury a week or so ago just after the flooding, first thing I noticed was how dry the ground was. Apparently 3 days before the water had stood over a metre round the mound., it struck me though at the time that any water entering the mound would have come from the top as the Atkinson tunnel is much higher than the moated area, so are any of the the turves that are being examined from this latest EH update ....
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/upload/pdf/q7.pdf
contaminated as well? It also must surely have followed that the new chalk infill lying in the low ground of the compound also would have been contaminated with seed and spore from the floodwaters?

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Silbury's structural integrity (nigelswift)

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