Blogs

Hi everyone! I am the last intern to arrive to the CMOP program this summer, and I'll be the only CMOP intern at the University of Washington! Let me catch you up on how my first two weeks have gone:

WEEK ONE

Somehow, despite being summer, it was still overcast and rainy here in Portland for most of the week. Inside CMOP though, it's been bright and sunny, because we're running the photodegrataion portion of our experiment. These experiments are used to determine how the PAHs in oil degrade over time when exposed to sunlight. Some studies have shown upwards of 30% of an oil slick to be broken down by natural sunlight.

 I spent the third week largely developing an interface to allow users to select which data the wanted to comment on. This involved getting station, offering, and variable data from the database and populating <select> tags with it. This task also got me familiar with writing to the backend image-writing service the creates plots based on the url you give it. This will come into play later when I have to not only write these urls but read them. Finally, I finished getting Drupal user information which is required when submitting comments to the database.

I was more or less on my own this week as Pete was going to be gone for a wedding. And though it was a little nerve racking to be on my own, there was a lot to be done.

My second week here at CMOP was a little more exciting as I was in the lab almost the entire week. The main focus of the week was to look at the reaction kinetics of TCP with Zn64 to confirm that it is indeed a psuedo first order reaction. In order to do this, a massed amount of Zn64 was put into a serum vial with DI/DO water and allowed to equilibriate overnight. Therefore, I really didn't start experiments until Tuesday.

After much research, I have collected enough data so that we can begin running computer models of lamprey habitat requirements in the Columbia River estuary.

This week I finally started working with my mentor to create calibration curves for the fluorometric spectrometer. This process is very precise, as the concentrations are so low that spilling even a single drop could alter results. We only had 10 mL of PAHs in solution to begin with, and finished Tuesday with almost two liters of dilutions, though we only kept 5 vials. Wednesday and Thursday were spent on the fluoromax, running samples.