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!

Bog Water Collection

This past week I stepped outside of the local Ordovician rocks and went to Brown's Lake Bog in North-Eastern Ohio with a group of friends from the geology department. As part of a field methods class we are off to the bog to sample water from a variety of sources.

We had amazing weather. The trees are just starting to bud, but we were still able to collect leaves from the canopy with the help of a slingshot ;)

Here I am using a bailer to clear out the monitoring well so we can be sure to be sampling a fresh recharge.

YES... I said sling shot :) We shot beanbags into the tree to release leaves from the top of the canopy.

Here's my friend Julia collecting water from the bog.

We will be running carbon and oxygen isotopes on each of the sample next week to think about the source of the bog water. These samples are apart of an ongoing research project so I wont be going into details, but I'll have to have some photos of our new mass spectrometer to show you when I am done.

After we were done with the bog we went over to the small lake and used a pump and filter to collect particulate organic matter (POM) at different depths. POM = dijon mustard of the lake

At the end of the day we packed up our gear and drove home, collecting samples from various waypoints along the way.

Next week... science happens :)