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Thursday, March 23, 2006
Gee, Mr. Wizard!
What better way to spend a dreary Thursday than learning how to fill up jugs of seawater? That's exactly what two classmates and I did this afteroon in south Tampa Bay as part of our paleoclimatology reserach project. We met up with our professor and a St. Pete PhD student to collect about five gas containers of seawater from a protected area of the Bay with the eventual goal of testing the nitrogen content of its organic matter. We took the samples to a lab on the St. Petersburg campus and got as far as passing the water through an incredibly fine filter which basically trapped everything that's not dissolved, creating a layer of brown goop on the filter. This is what we'll be testing. As you might have guessed, I'm no expert on whatever it is that we're supposed to be doing but I still enjoyed today's semi-productive field excursion and felt a little like a real scientist.
Here's a shot from the trusty camera-phone. Not exactly postcard quality but neither is most of the Bay area. We did get a few stares from some fishermen who were probably wondering why the hell we were wading in shin-deep water off the side of the road collecting gallons of bay water in the rain. We should have worn lab coats.
Posted by Will at March 23, 2006 09:30 PM in Graduate School