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!