{"id":313,"date":"2011-06-27T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-06-27T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/?p=313"},"modified":"2011-07-26T21:13:10","modified_gmt":"2011-07-27T04:13:10","slug":"science-is-hard-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/2011\/06\/27\/science-is-hard-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Science is hard work!"},"content":{"rendered":"
Starting Monday of last week, I was officially done with all of the safety training and background reading and began the real work for my internship.\u00a0 As an undergrad working in the labs at school, the logistics of the experiments that I do are for the most part already figured out for me, with this project at the EPA that is definitely not the case.\u00a0 Monday was the first test run that I was a part of.\u00a0 I went into work at about 10:00am and helped Caitlin make the artificial sea water for the chambers by adding nitrate, ammonium, and potassium compounds to five gallon jugs of water.\u00a0 The concentrations of these compounds are our variables that we expect to change over the course of our experiment, so we must take samples before and after we run the experiment to be analyzed for changes.\u00a0 Then we added the water solution to five 10-gallon cubitainers to be placed out into the marsh.\u00a0 After lunch we went out to the marsh right outside the EPA building and began our long day in the field.\u00a0 We had to add the chambers to the bases that we put out the Friday before and then we attached the cubitainers to the chambers with a long hose.\u00a0 The way this experiment works is that you place the cubitainers below the chambers in the channel bed and as the tide rises, the pressure of the water forces the water into the chambers though the hose and then back out again as the tide falls.\u00a0 I find it funny the easiest part of this whole process is running the experiment itself because after we got all of the cubitainers set up, we sat back and relaxed on the marsh for a few hours while only taking samples and dissolved oxygen measurements every 40 minutes.\u00a0 After the experiment was done at about 8:00pm we had to take everything down and run about 30 samples in the spectrophotometer called the ISUS to test for nitrate content.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t get home until about 11:00pm.\u00a0 All in all, the purpose of this experiment was to find out why our the nutrient levels that we were getting from the ISUS were lower than the nutrient levels that we were getting back from the lab at UC Santa Barbara.\u00a0 We found out that the reason that we were getting a discrepancy was because we weren\u2019t filtering our samples!\u00a0 Something as simple as that could mess everything up. <\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

This was my first taste of real science!\u00a0 There are so many statistical, logistical, and experimental problems to work out.\u00a0 For this experiment some of the issues that can make things difficult are: a lack of high enough tides, difficulties getting to a particular marsh, a lack of channels to put cubitainers in, a lack of marsh sites that have all of the habitats that we are looking for, inaccessibility to desirable sites because of private land ownership, problems running the experiment, slight mistakes in chamber building, inadequate sites to represent the whole estuary system, etc, etc. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Here’s a video of the different zones in the salt marsh: http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/thumb\/5\/56\/Salt_pannes_and_pools_high_and_low_tide.gif\/340px-Salt_pannes_and_pools_high_and_low_tide.gif<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The biggest aspect of working on this project is that everything here revolves around the tides.\u00a0 So, if the high tide is not until late, we are out late, if the high tide is really early, we are out really early.\u00a0 Because of this, I\u2019ve spent several late nights this past week scouting potential sites up and down the estuary at high tide to make sure that they low marsh that we are trying to sample is flooding at high tide.\u00a0 A lot of the time, the tides are not high enough to flood the low marsh, so when they are we must act fast to run our experiments on those days.<\/span><\/p>\n

After running that first test, I realized that I need to start doing pushups to get stronger.\u00a0 I am not particularly weak, but at only 100lbs lifting 20 gallon water jugs and carrying 10 gallon cubitainers in and out of the marsh requires a lot of energy.\u00a0 I\u2019m hoping that by the end of the summer I\u2019ll be much more in shape. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Picture of the estuary that I took as we were scouting for sites. <\/p><\/div>\n

This week, we will continue preparing for our next experiment which will begin around the 13th<\/sup> of July.\u00a0 We are switching to \u201cbladders\u201d instead of cubitainers so we need to figure out which bladder will work the best.\u00a0 We have to finalize the sites that we are going to go to for our experiment.\u00a0 We also need to buy more supplies and continue to figure out the logistics to make this experiment as successful as it can be.\u00a0 I\u2019m hoping that this week will be slower (relatively) than last week. Three late nights a week are no fun, but I know I have more coming up.\u00a0 I\u2019m excited though because I get to do science and field work all day which is a lot of fun and is definitely my passion. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Check out my personal blog to see what I’m up to outside of work! Sara Duncan<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Starting Monday of last week, I was officially done with all of the safety training and background reading and began the real work for my internship.\u00a0 As an undergrad working in the labs at school, the logistics of the experiments … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3008,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3569,1387503],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sara-duncan","category-summer-scholars"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3008"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":703,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313\/revisions\/703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}