26 Jun Cortney Cashner: Environmental Science, Week Three

I am preparing for charcoal analysis by rinsing and sieving the sediment from the bleach and the sodium hexametaphosphate.

Wow, I can’t believe that I’ve already been in Tucson for 3 weeks! Time flies! My time in the lab is going well. I am nearly done with charcoal analysis and I’m not quite halfway done with LOI on the lake core. I had been using 29 crucibles for LOI but at this rate I wouldn’t have finished before my internship ends so Nicollette ordered about 30 more crucibles. Now the process will go by much faster and I should be finished with LOI before I head back home.

When I do charcoal analysis I usually look at 50+ petri dishes each week. I’ll pick one that is the most interesting or most unusual and share it with everyone. The dish of this week is the dish from a depth of 78cm. The dark rectangular pieces are charcoal. It was all one big piece but after I poked it with tweezers it broke into

Slide of the week!

more pieces. I chose this dish because I have never seen a charcoal piece this big. Most of the charcoal I count is about an eighth of this size. It’s huge!

This weekend Dylan and I went to Funtasticks. We spent nearly all day playing laser tag and mini-golf; and driving go karts and bumper boats. It was super hot, we were sweating like crazy but regardless it was really fun and thankfully we didn’t get sunburned.