# University poster sets two auger tips against six kinds of ground

> A research poster from the School of Underlying Conditions compares the wear of boron-steel and carbide-hardfaced soil-auger tips at six stations from loose sand to stony clay, and finds the hardfacing's advantage narrows as gravel enters the profile

Anyone who has carried a soil auger along a survey line will recognise the subject of the School of Underlying Conditions' newest research poster before reaching its title. _Sand Takes the Edge, Stone Takes the Carbide: Abrasive wear of boron-steel and hardfaced soil-auger tips along one sand-to-stony-clay transect_ is the work of Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow, with Associate Professor Ragnhild Uzoma, Lead of the Basement Relations Group, and Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer.

> Every survey teaches a school something about how it goes about its work. This one taught us how long we had been asking one kind of steel to meet every kind of ground, and how patiently the ground had answered.
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> --- Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow, School of Underlying Conditions

Its approach aligns a single transect, a disciplined weighing regime and close reading of worn surfaces, situating tool performance within the ground conditions that shape it. Across 960 bores, the hardfaced tips outlasted their boron-steel counterparts five to one in loose sand, an advantage that narrowed steadily through the loams and all but closed among the ironstone gravel of the stony clay.

The work sits comfortably within the University's longstanding view that the instruments of fieldwork merit the same scrutiny as the findings they make possible. Dr Emenike described the poster as "a first step in a conversation the School expects to keep having, one transect at a time."

The full poster is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.r2d4q0.