Scientific Writing

I came upon this sentence in the methods section of a research paper assigned for ecology class:

"We then manually generated high water flow in the vicinity of the probe to check that it had not been inadvertently buried in sediment or covered."

Now, I can't be sure, but I imagine that what's meant is that a research splashed the water a bit with their hand to make sure that probe was still taking readings correctly. Once one breaks through the vocabulary used in research papers, nuggets like this make reading such papers much more interesting.