Although Summer 2019 is not over as I write this Mid-August, the energy of the impending return of students makes it feel like fall. But summer was not spent idle, as Mark Butler, Trevor Mackowiak, Ivan Mischenko, Eliza Fitzgerald, and Leon Moore had very productive summer field seasons.
Leon Moore teamed up with USDA-NRCS scientists to sample sub-aqueous soils from Jamaica Bay and Martha’s Vineyard. He also measured mercury in thousands of samples on the Direct Mercury Analyzer. Lastly, he worked diligently to get our new Gamma counter up and running!
Eliza Fitzgerald had a very productive summer collecting weathered and unweathered rocks from the Fitchburg Complex to determine the speciation/inclusion and release of heavy metals. She spent the later half on Cape Cod at the beach as a lifeguard, what a summer gig.
Mark Butler sampled ten rivers for dissolved and suspended sediments for their trace metal fluxes across the Thames River Watershed of Connecticut. In addition, he cored dozens of riparian soils to determine how metal burdens vary across the watershed, way to go Mark!
Corey Palmer led quite the excursion collecting weathering profiles of Shale to determine geochemical pathways and mechanisms. Quite the road trip from upstate New York down to Alabama but she knocked it out. It was a long haul but she came back with over a hundred soil, water, shale, and sediment samples. Go Corey, Go!
Trevor Mackowiazk planned out the excellent trip to California to collect weathering profiles from Malibu to Palm Springs to determine anthropogenic and geogenic loading of heavy metals. It was quite the trip in terms of ‘billy goat’ action up steep slopes and avoiding rattlesnakes, but was a trip of a lifetime!
Visiting graduate student Justin Mistikawy helped collect, interpret, and prepare rock samples from California and a former soapstone mine in Massachusetts. Kudos for all the help and providing the hard rock expertise good sir.
Ivan Mishenko pulled out all of the stops for a seemingly simple, but arduous project to understand the spatial distribution of metals in soils and vegetation. Ivan cored soils and used a throw-ball to collect upper canopy foliage for trees at 48 sites across New England. Then as fast as he could, hauled them to campus for the leaves to be analyzed for their spectral reflectance. Good show old chap!
Last but not least, I was able to set up and maintain long term research experiments from New Hampshire down to Virginia.
While Summer 2019 is almost one for the history books, the analytical laboratory work is just getting into over drive!