Union Day 3

With the SEM broken, the petrologists found other ways to occupy their time. Some powdered their rocks to be analyzed for chemical compositions. Some took pictures of their thin sections or did a point count to find which minerals were in their samples. Some read papers about what they're working on. At the end of the day, the rest of our samples from Dominica were delivered, so we have six more buckets (over 200 pounds!) of rocks to prepare to be analyzed over the next few days.

Team Geomorph didn't have a super exciting day either! The past two days have been spent plugging away on the computer, either completing GIS information, photoshopping the clouds out of satalliete imagery or plotting the landslides on the island. We've been eagerly waiting for our samples to arrive from Dominica, so when we got word from Holli that they were in it was a nice change of pace. There are a handful of things we want to do with the actual samples, while on Union's campus we want to begin the leaching process. In order to start that we need our samples to be dry, so at the end of the day Kira, Haley, Cole and I found some washing glasses which could withstand the awesome heat of the oven. Two samples that were fairly dry to begin with took less than an hour to achieve the nice sandy texture we were looking for, so that was a nice surprise and an even better way to end the day with. Well, kind of end the day with, there were four samples that we didn't have enough room for in the oven, so Haley and I went back at 8 to move around dishes that were done with the still damp ones.

The culmination of two days of HARD work