Superlab field-trip to St. Jones River, DE
Last Thursday, the Chemistry superlab took a trip to Delaware to sample along the St. Jones River.
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- site 1 – lebanon landing
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- first core
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- site 2 – scotton landing
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- core 2
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- plane from Dover AFB
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- mud mud mud
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- core retrieval can be tricky
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- biology?
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- site 3 – little creek wildlife area
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- looking towards the ocean
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- finding a spot for core 3 was not easy
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- team 3 persevered
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- saltmarsh
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- let’s see if we can get a longer core
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- by jumping on it
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- it was a beautiful day
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- trash heap? tbd
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- the team (minus photographer/ field expert – Sarah Choyke)
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- back in the lab the fun continues
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- core extrusion
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- labeling is crucial
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- sectioning core
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- team 1 core sectioning
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- team 2 core sectioning
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- working hard!
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- nearing the end of a good day’s work
March 22nd, 2010 at 9:40 pm
What a Super(Lab) adventure!
After a 90-minute drive we arrived at our first site, Lebanon Landing, at high tide, just to make things more fun. It smelled like sulfur and mud. Upon taking a few steps into the marsh everyone had sunk knee deep (if not further) into the mud. The key was to keep moving. Group 1 struggled a little with their core (since it was high tide) but they were successful in retrieving the first core of the day!
We made our way to the next site, Scotton Landing, where we saw some men fishing near a sign warning consumers to only eat 2, 8-oz meals from this river annually (I hope they obeyed this rule). Luckily this site was on solid (but very muddy) ground and there were crabs running around everywhere. The mud was very fine with a thin oily orange layer on top, a gray layer about 3-6 cm thick and black organic matter below that. Team 2 set a deep core but the struggled a little getting it out, they ended up shoulder deep in the mud. Luckily it was easy to wash off… but don’t eat anything after going into that water!
Lastly we came to Little Creek Wildlife Area, found the special unmarked road and walked to the end of the path to find the perfect coring spot beneath the reeds, passing some lovely red bacterial mats on the way. Although unsuccessful in the first two attempts, Team 3 never gave up. They too found the perfect coring spot and after jumping on the coring tube a little, they retrieved their core. We all piled back into the van and Helen took us home (with an accidental detour to the airport) so we could section and dry the cores for further analysis during this quarter of SuperLab.
Good luck SuperLab, great work in the field. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!