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| Cheers! |
Whohoo! Day two of lab work. So I must admit, it’s kind of fun in the morning to head off to “work” in a foreign country. There is something relaxing about that. I feel like I am fitting into this whole new world a bit better.
Lexy and I had breakfast at home this morning, I made scrambled eggs. I’m not sick by the way, so apparently the lack of refrigeration at the store does not affect the eggs. I read somewhere that if you let eggs set to room temperature your cookies come out better. I may be willing to try that now... Anyway, eggs for breakfast and off we went!
Nice little walk to the University, through Viterbo, out Porta Romana, through the little park, past the Ubercoop, then voila, Tuscia University (In Italian Università degli Studi della Tuscia) We stopped by the bar to get our morning fix, Lexy is very happy she found the cafe freddo, and I had a cappuccino this morning. Very yummy. We started in our work space fixing up our blogs and working on lesson plans, then off to the hard work.
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| Samples: Settled, stirred, and soaked. |
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| Hello today's work! |
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| Me mixing the solutions |
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| Lexy rinsing a sample |
We had let 23 samples soak over night. It was interesting to see the difference even a day makes in the solutions. Irene had one soaking from the day before, so you can see how the sodium metaphosphate has broken apart the sediments. Today’s task was all about cleaning out those sediments so we can examine the organic matter. I’ll tell you right now, this is easier said than done. We’ve figured out some tricks, but really, it took us a while to get there. First we collected a new beaker, and a sieve. This is kind of a no brianer part of this, you simply slowly poor the sample through the sieve. Now, if you’ve ever worked with one of these, you know it’s not like pouring your macaroni into a colander in 1.5 seconds flat. You put a small amount, rinse it through with deionized water, then repeat. Remember, we had a good five centimeters of sediment to clean out. After all the more brown “stuff” was rinsed out, then it’s done. The sieve we were working with was gauged at 0.0098 inches. (Yes, inches... Right under that it said “Made in USA”)
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| Done! |
Took us about an hour to get through this sample. While we were working on this one, I started a second one with our second sieve. It was a tiny bit smaller, so no bid deal, right? I’ll tell you right now, one thousandth of an inch is a HUGE deal! That second sample took us two hours, with both of us working on it!!! Remember, we had set up 23 samples to get through. We need to finish 13 meters of this stuff. 5 centimeters at a time! GAH!! However, like I mentioned, we found our stride. Using only the bigger sieve, we can average 20-30 minutes per sample, with one person working.
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| Lexy removing plant matter |
After cleaning out the sediment, the left over particles then are transferred to a petri dish and examined under a dissecting microscope. Any objects that look like leaves are then removed and put in a small vial. These will then be sent to the lab for carbon dating, which hopefully will give us a concrete date of that depth of sediment. Lexy did this part today, it was interesting watching her with a petri dish containing a very small amount of water try to pull out microscopic pieces of leaf with a plastic pipet. She figured out how to do this pretty quickly, so major kudos to her. The remaining particles in the dish are then transferred over to another vial.
So, odd fact about Kristina... Centrifuges scare the crap out of me! In college I always let my lab partner do it - Objects flying at a million miles per hour in a circle??? I’ll stay clear, thank you! Turns out they aren’t so bad. The contents of the petri dish were transferred over to some test tubes, centrifuged out, the extra water then removed, and the rest of the contents put in a 2mL vial. So, all in all, we go from a 250mL solution with 5cm of sediment in it down to a 2ml vial. We got through four cores today. That’s 20cm of sediment... At least we are in Italy, not a bad place to sift through mud.
So, odd fact about Kristina... Centrifuges scare the crap out of me! In college I always let my lab partner do it - Objects flying at a million miles per hour in a circle??? I’ll stay clear, thank you! Turns out they aren’t so bad. The contents of the petri dish were transferred over to some test tubes, centrifuged out, the extra water then removed, and the rest of the contents put in a 2mL vial. So, all in all, we go from a 250mL solution with 5cm of sediment in it down to a 2ml vial. We got through four cores today. That’s 20cm of sediment... At least we are in Italy, not a bad place to sift through mud.
Alright, not that exciting, but a good day. Next week when we are back in the lab this will go much smoother. It’s nice to be helping out so much with this project.
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| Building we are working in |
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