Connecticut Week 2- The Project

           Wow, the past two weeks have been amazingly busy! I’ve been back out on the boat to collect more data, filtered and weighed hundreds of samples, travelled around the area both for geology and environmental studies and for fun, and most importantly decided on my project topic!

            In addition to continuing the CTD and water samples data collection from last week, we got to go out and get a few core samples. Collecting cores is a process that involves hammering a hollow plastic and metal cylinder, or core barrel, several meters into a river, pond, or lake bed and pulling it back up. The result is a cylinder full of mud and sand layers that are preserved in the same order that they exist in the ground. Because these cores are the result of hundreds or thousands of years of sediment deposition, they can be dated and examined for a variety of chemical, biological, and environmental changes through time.

           Our group got cores from an entirely freshwater cove of the Connecticut River last week and tomorrow we’ll be getting some from South Cove, which is in the saltwater section of the river.

A core that was just pulled out of Selden Cove.

Cutting open the core barrel to expose the sediment.

An opened core from Hamburg Cove. Some color and compositional changes are visible.

            How do these cores relate to my thesis project? Well after about a week of library research, talking to all experts that I could find, and a slew of trial and error test runs, I decided that studying the plastic particles in the Connecticut River wasn’t the project for me. Although all of the researchers that I talked to thought it would be a great project if it worked, each of their emails began by informing me that they had no experience with such small particles of plastic or a river setting and that while they wished me luck, they couldn’t be of much assistance in developing a protocol to use since it has never been done before. While I would love to be able to claim that I invented a new method of plastic diagnostics and came across groundbreaking results, the sad truth is that I simply do not have the time or persistence to do an innovative but potentially unsuccessful project.

            Instead, I decided to pursue a project studying diatoms, single-cell phytoplankton algae with complex silica cell walls. Their skeletons are well preserved in cores and because each species lives in a very specific environment, they can tell us about the environmental conditions at they time that they formed. I haven’t worked out all of the details yet, but I’ve decided to do an analysis of the marine diatoms in the saltwater cores in hopes of finding evidence of changes in sea level and water quality.

Several species of diatoms. Cool huh?
From: http://www.urbanrivers.org/drawingdiatoms/diatoms.html

I’ll keep you updated on my progress!

Liz