Miscellaneous China Samples Update!

Hello from Paige, Zoe H, and Zoë MDC!

The geomorph lab would like to welcome Zoe H. and Zoë MDC, who began working in the lab this spring semester! Zoe H is a second-year who worked in the lab over winter term. Zoë MDC is a first-year from Brooklyn, NY who is planning on majoring in biology on a pre-med track. Paige and Zoë MdC went on the “Parks and the Environment in Sichuan, China” winter term trip with Professor Amanda Schmidt.

During the trip in Sichuan, we visited some of China’s national parks, nature reserves, and UNESCO world heritage sites. We learned about and engaged in aspects of ecotourism, resource management, and environmental ethics throughout many mountainous hikes and guided tours with a focus on geology, sociology and religion. We were able to collect about 20 water samples and 6 sediment samples from streams and tributaries (referred to as SC), and these are one of the sets of samples we have been working with this semester. The other set of samples from China that we have been working with so far are from Jinsha (referred to as JS).

We are working with these samples to analyze fallout nucleotides in the soil which will tell us about the erosion rates within these areas and how/if erosion has changed over time. In the lab we have spent most of our time organizing samples, wet sieving the SC samples, and running the samples in detectors to measure Pb210 and Cs137 isotopes. For the rest of the semester, we plan to run all of the SC and JS samples of less than 63 micrometers in the detectors and analyze the data, then do the same for another set of China samples labeled YJ.

WT trip member Kayla collecting a sample in Sichuan

Paige helping collect a sample in Sichuan 

JS samples waiting to be ran in the detectors

Thank you for tuning in for our update!

Winter term on campus

Hi from Zoe and Emily!

We stayed on campus for winter term this January working in Amanda Schmidt’s research lab, so here’s a little update on what we were up to:

During the first week, we were lucky to be able to work with our lab mate Marcus Hill before he went abroad to London for his last semester here at Oberlin! This meant we were helping him on his Dominica project. We did a lot of smashing of dry leachate samples with a mortar and pestle which was a bit tedious but still very fun. After getting through a number of those, we measured and recorded their heights and weights. When we were not grinding leachate samples, we cleaned up our Geochem lab and also ran Cuba samples everyday through our trusty Gamma Ray detector, Harbin!

After Marcus left, we worked a bit on the Cuba project. Our lab collaborates with Oberlin alum Mae Kate as well as Professor Paul Bierman at UVM. They needed some 250-850µm samples sent over, so we ran them through Harbin, collected weights and heights, and Zoe worked on the angle calculations.

The rest of our time on campus consisted of autoclaving many China samples and putting them into new sample bags and new containers!

     

Thanks for tuning in!