Photo: Margriet van Vianen
In the meadow beside the lovely meandering Dommel, two men are holding onto a long plastic tube. Covered in mud from top to toe, and their hair tousled. Beneath that palette of shades of brown are Jasper Candel and Niels Kijm, a PhD candidate and an MSc student in the Soil Geography and Landscape chair group. And the tube they are pushing into the ground with all their might is a soil sampler, a kind of suction drill with which they can ‘look’ five metres under the ground. Candel is using the data they get to make a geographical reconstruction of the Dommel. He wants to know how the stream acquired all its bends. They have already taken 180 samples, about 9 a day. The drill brings up metres-long sausage-shaped columns of soil, which Candel then analyses systematically. Every coloration of the soil has a story to tell, and he takes notes in telegram style on what he sees. ‘There is a whole world under your feet which nobody knows. We know a lot about the major rivers, but we actually know very little about these kinds of streams.’ The fieldwork is lovely but it is not for wimps. Stinging nettles and mosquitoes are always lurking. And cows. Candel: ‘This morning the cows ate all my sandwiches. I didn’t pay attention for a moment and my backpack was empty: nine sandwiches gone.’