Week 4

Last weekend was the ASE (the program I went through to get this internship) mid-summer conference.
All of the high school students who were chosen for an internship in Oregon met at OSU for two days
There were 3 sessions, mine were all on oceanography which was fun I got to look at how they take cores from the bottom of the ocean. There was a huge fridge full of core samples from as late as the 70s.
ASE: Buddies
There was also a group challenge everyday
Day 2 the challenge was to create a 2m high free standing structure that could hold up a ball
Each team had 10$. 1$ would get you a foot of tape and 2$ would get you 4 pieces of newspaper.
My team was amazing we only used 3$ and got 2nd place
GroupMe

This week Tawnya went and collected the water from Joe and we began our salinity experiment!

Big project
Let me explain what we did

First I labeled bottles for about a day in prep of the experiment as well as make a check list so that we wouldn’t miss any sample times

Then when the 2 jugs of water came in (one was filtered sea water-so any living phytoplankton were no more) and the other was Fresh water.
We had 6 other bottles for the experiment
SW (salt water)-a
SW-b
SW-c

In these 3 bottles it was 1/2 filtered salt water and 1/2 freshwater (we are looking at the reaction that the living phytoplankton have to the expose to salt)

In the next 3 bottles
FW (fresh water) -a
FW-b
FW-c

Each bottle contained 1/2 filtered freshwater and 1/2 freshwater (this bottle is kind of like our control because we are observing what would naturally happen if they were in normal environment)

We took original samples from the salt water and the filtered fresh water before mixing the fresh water

Then for each hour starting at time zero (the second they were mixed) samples were being taken

For instance
For hour 1 FW-a bottle a nutrient sample, a DOC, a CDOM, a NH4, and a Chl sample. That was repeated for b & c and the same thing for the SW bottles.

As you can imagine we have lots of samples now.
They were taken every hour for 8 hours and then at 22 hours at 28 and at 48

Now I am off to analyze the CDOM samples and start making charts!

-Jessica