Today my official mentor Sam, a post-doc, officially arrived with the samples she collected in China. There were kilos and kilos of... well, dirt, and we're going to need to process it all.
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| The majority, but not all, of the samples Sam brought back |
First we're going to be looking at small cropland samples taken from 69 field sites around Wuhan, China. Each field site has a sample taken at the surface (0-2 cm deep) and one taken approximately 10 cm below the surface. We'll be processing the shallower samples first so that we can get some data as soon as possible.
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| The samples we're going to process first - deep & shallow samples from 69 field sites around Wuhan, China |
By "processing", I mean that we'll need to take each sample, dry it completely, grind it into a fine powder, and place it into a labeled 50-mL tube.
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| Large tubes where we'll put the powdered samples after we grind them |
From there, we'll be able to use the powder in the XRF machine to get heavy metal concentration data, and we'll be able to perform acid extractions on the powder and run the ICP-MS machine like I did with Sarah to get lead isotope data.
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