Stable Isotope Lab: hands on experience

The stable isotope lab, pictured above, at the University of Cincinnati is a shiny new lab space where a lot of great science is happening. Through a field methods course I am taking under Aaron Diefendorf I am getting some hands on experience with the mass spectrometer and other essential lab tools. Last post I shared some of the adventure of collecting the water samples, and if you follow me on Twitter @OrdovicianDaily you saw I collected some snails too (yay carbonates).

Now that the water and gastropod samples are back at the lab it is time for prep.

Here a couple of us are labeling vials and getting organized to pipette standards and collected bog water samples.

Next we purged the samples so they were ready to be fed to the auto sampler aka life saver. 

While this was all happening we sonicated the collected shells to remove sand and grime. 

Once the shells were clean and dry we crushed them into a fine homogenized powder for carbon and oxygen isotopes. One shell I separated into the different whirls. The remaining shells were bulk samples. I am looking forward to the carbonate results and the techniques I learned are directly applicable to the work I am doing in the Ordovician :)

Back in the lab the samples have been loaded into the auto sampler and will run overnight. Tomorrow we learn how to process raw data from the mass spec!