Mud, glorious mud

摘要

At the Port of Bristol in the UK, survey work is not just a question of obtaining the best possible picture of the seabed, or detecting shoaling, it's about mud - fluid mud, to be precise. The port of Bristol has a long-standing problem with fluid mud. In fact, Bristol is one of only a few ports in the British Isles where fluid mud is a characteristic of the seabed. It is a feature that Bristol shares with a small number of other European ports including Rotterdam in the Netherlands and Wilhelmshavn in Germany, and it requires frequent surveys to determine both its depth and the density of the material.