I just realized I never posted this. Last November we went out to the Croatan National Forest to get some more samples for my research. At the end of the post are some pictures. First we got some well water samples with the help of a lady from the NCDENR. She was really nice and loved the kids. She let them help her with measuring water levels and getting the water out of the wells (which basically involves attaching a bailer to a fishing pole, dropping it down into the well, and then reeling it back in). After that we drove around the forest and collected branches from trees.
After we got back I peeled the bark off of the branches with a pocket knife, then chopped the wood into small pieces, then dehydrated the wood, then ashed the wood. Once the samples had become ash, I dissolved them in acid, separated the strontium out, and loaded the samples onto filaments for the mass spectrometer. So basically we took a three hour drive just so I could get some sticks to burn. : )
The results for the vegetation samples were hard to interpret. The Strontium-87/Strontium-86 ratios didn't seem to have any pattern and they didn't really even match my surface water samples from before. My advisor and I suspect that it's because I sampled a variety of different trees, and the trees are getting their strontium from different depths of soil. We're going to go back this semester and get samples from all of the same kind of tree (probably pine) to see if there are any patterns found from sampling the same kind of tree in different locations.
The well water samples had high Strontium-87/Strontium-86 ratios, but not the highest Strontium-87/Strontium-86 ratios I have seen from my data, so that seems to indicate that groundwater is not the source of high Strontium-87, but it is mixing with that source, whatever it is.
The blue thing is the well.
These are some very strange bugs that Ryan saw on a tree.
No comments:
Post a Comment