Update from Oberlin

The first week back at Oberlin is always a bit of jolt back to reality. After a break of sitting on the coach and eating homemade cookies, the idea of setting an alarm to get up in the morning seems pretty daunting. Working in an unfamiliar lab where the professor is on a different continent added to my apprehension. While a bit scary at first, figuring out what you need to do on your own is always fun. For me this is most apparent when using the Harbin, a machine that detects radioactivity in soil samples. The first few times of running a sample took half an hour of me and my lab partner Isaac carefully reading and rereading the manual, searching for buttons, and figuring out what the report said. After a few more times we are both more comfortable, and faster with running the samples. I also read a few papers that explain the implications of the numbers we are recording. Being able to really delve into one topic is the great part about winter term. I don’t feel like I have to memorize anything, or rush through it, I can take my time and really learn about what I am doing. As we keep moving through our checklist, I’m excited to see what new material I will have to work through next.

Update from Adrian!

Hello from Pudong airport in Shanghai! Amanda, Veronica and I (Adrian) are waiting for our flight to Kunming. I'm searching for a toothbrush and toothpaste to buy last minute and preparing for a couple weeks of field work. In addition to collecting samples for our study of erosion, we will also be collecting bulk sediment in four grain sizes at headwater, intermediate, and outlet locations. Part of my research on the grain size dependancies of the radionuclides will involve analyzing the sediment we collect in our Germanium detector "Harbin" back at Oberlin. When we get back to the states, I will be going to UVM in Burlington to prepare the samples for analysis of Beryllium-10. It will be a big change going from the tropics to snowy Vermont!

Adrian

Long sucky days

Greetings from Pu'er. We are supposed to be in Jinggu but didn't make it last night. The schedule said "today will just be a long sucky day". However, since the previous day was long, we met at 8 for breakfast. We didn't get to the first sample site until after lunch and then couldn't tell if it was upstream or downstream of a tributary. So we had to sample both places. Darn. By the time we were done with those it was 5:30 pm and an hour until sunset and 2 hours to the next sample site. We got there at 7:40 pm and found a gravel mine to get us down to the river. No over bank samples though because the entire mine was made of material pulled directly from the river. It would have been hard in daylight to find a good over bank site. Sieving in the dark didn't seem like a good idea because it would be so slow. Most of us forgot headlamps for the trip. The evening is the worst time of day for me, sickness wise. So, I sat in the car and used the headlights to give them some light. Adrian found a sandy spot. Yue used my iphone light. Veronica is organized and had a headlamp. Because when we didn't sieve last summer, we didn't end up with enough sample, we filled two gigantic bags with sample. We should have enough for the big sample we need, but may not have enough fines for the smaller grain sizes we are collecting to use depending on the results of Adrian's experiment. And no over bank sample. Below is a picture. 

After that we had a lovely dinner at a little roadside restaurant and met some professors and people from shanghai visiting a former student doing the Chinese version of teach for America in the rural place we were (basically a highway exit truck stop). Dinner was good and made me feel better. 

We still had 3 hrs to our planned destination but I started to get tired and to feel really sick. Chinese expressways have lots of really bright lots on them and I found myself squinting to see. Pretty awful. Then I got really sick and had to stop and throw up over the side of the highway rail. Yuck. But I felt better after. At least I know the baby is still doing well. 

We decided to stop in a big town on the way to our site. Yue found us a hotel and we got here at 11:15 pm or so.  After a quick shower I was in bed and trying to get rested for today. Today we resample sites from last summer and because 3 samples are for Adrian's project, we have a ton of sieving to do. 

More later. 

Amanda

Stupid GIS mistakes

Hopefully this will be supplemented with a post from one of the students. Also, Adrian's trip to China post has gone missing.... I will try to find it. 

In any case, a quick update from me. Today we had a long day of driving. Two sample sites. We got to the first site pretty easily and were done sampling by noon. Yue and I looked at the iPad to figure out where to go to the second site. The location on the iPad didn't look quite right to me, but I quieted my concern and went with it. After lunch at a road side noodle and BBQ chicken stall, we drove through an awful construction zone (as in a road under construction while we used it). We got through that and just about to the sample site when Yue said she couldn't see the sample points on the GIS anymore. Hmm... Turns out all the driving (at least 3 hrs) was completely the wrong way to the wrong place. It took us another 2 hours to get back to the highway and another hour back to honghe. I feel so stupid because I knew that it wasn't the right spot. We couldn't go get the sample because we were 5 hrs from it, plus sample time, plus 3 hrs back to town. And it was 4 pm. 

We won't be able to get the sample now because it would put us an entire day behind schedule. We decided that cutting a day from somewhere else wasn't worth it for a 109 km2 basin with 10 years data, particularly because we weren't positive which river the station was on. 

Anyway, it was completely my fault and the tour of the road under construction and banana plantations were interesting but collecting the planned sample certainly would have been better. 

Intro: Dom Fiallo

Hi Everybody,

I'm Dom and I'm a second-year from Western Massachusetts. I'm a Geology major with a minor in Chemistry and also play lacrosse at Oberlin. I started working in the lab this past fall and have been focusing mostly on the sediment erosion and transportation project. Right now I am at home running a lot and packing in as many days of skiing as New England's funky weather allows me. In a few days I will fly out to Oakland, California where I will intern at an elementary school for J-term and run a half marathon in the Santa Cruz mountains. This has been an amazing semester working in the lab and I can't wait to get back to research this spring!

This past semester I worked closely with Gabby preparing and running Soil samples in HARBIN, our germanium detector. When I get back to school Gabby and I will be able to look more closely at the sediment movement which has occurred in our watershed. I was recently accepted to the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Research Fellowship and will be continuing my research on this project over the summer. I am also interested in learning more from Adrian about the journey meteoric isotopes take in Earth's atmosphere and how it affects the way geologists use these isotopes to learn about sediment movement.

Look at all that geology! Dead Man's Canyon, Sierra Nevadas. 

Overview of lab research

Although I have an overview of all the different projects going on in the lab here and our research facilities here, I wanted to use this space to briefly introduce the research projects going on in the lab right now and the students you may hear from.

Location of several samples taken in summer 2013.
Photo by Tom Neilson.

One of the Chinese hydrology stations we visited.
Photo by Tom Neilson.

1. The biggest project in the lab at the moment is an NSF project that we are working on collaboratively with the University of Vermont Geomorphology Group, the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre, and Sichuan University. We are trying to understand how historic deforestation affected sediment erosion and transportation in Yunnan, China. Most of the students currently in the lab are working on this project. Yue Qiu (OC'14) is doing her honors research on one of the watersheds where we collected samples last summer; Gaby Garcia (OC'15) and Dom Fiallo (OC'16) are working on analyzing samples from another one of the watersheds we worked in last summer; Adrian Singleton (OC'16) is working on characterizing the grain size and mineralogical dependencies of fall-out radionuclides (including Cs137 and Pb210 which we measure in the lab, and Be10, which is extracted at UVM and measured at SUERC).

   

   Hard at work in the field.
   Photo by Tom Neilson.

   In January 2014 Yue, Adrian, and I will be traveling to Yunnan, China with three graduate students from UVM and Sichuan University, where we will complete fieldwork for this project. Adrian and Yue will be blogging about the trip. In January Isaac Pallant (OC'15) and Alice Lubeck (OC'14) will be keeping things moving in the lab here at Oberlin. They will be contributing blog posts from campus. Alice will be going to UC Irvine with a UVM PhD student to process and analyze radiocarbon samples collected in summer 2013. These will help us to determine paleoerosion rates for the region. 
2. A smaller project right now is one that is trying to characterize the source and timing of loess deposition and subsequent terrace formation (and the mechanisms of terrace formation) in Jiuzhaigou National Park, China. Alice Lubeck will be processing some samples from this project when she is at UC Irvine in January. Alice will be blogging from California.
3. I have been working on a project that aims to describe hydrological processes of large rivers draining the Tibetan Plateau through a case study of the Mekong River. This project was started with Alden Gilliom (OC'13) and is collaborative with two researchers at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences. I may post about this project a bit. 
4. Katie Dunn (OC'14) working on a Keck project on extreme events for her honors thesis. She did field work in Massachusetts last summer and is working on data analysis and writing this year.