Field Report: Bilal Khan From Temple University Study on Exxon Valdez Oil Pollution (3)
Editor’s Note: Field Reports are the unvarnished, unedited journal entries of marine researchers in the field. They are intended to give readers a unique, inside look at the day-to-day nature of field work, an essential part of all marine science. They should not be construed as representing the final conclusions or assessments of the study or of the principal investigator; merely a subjective account of the ongoing experience. We hope you enjoy this feature.
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Exxon Valdez Study Team, June 2009 - © Temple University
August 9th to 15th
Finally the time has come to go back to Alaska. Our final shipment just went out a few days ago and already it has arrived in Anchorage for pickup. All of us leave together tomorrow morning from the airport (Aug. 16th), until then we are just doing last minute checks of our simulations and checking protocols for field work.
Last week we finished building our proprietary dissolved oxygen chambers (DO chamber) for measuring DO in the field. It works very nicely and is a creative design built in house. The chamber is built from fiberglass, PVC, Silicon, and a number of fittings along with a little machine work. If all goes well in the field, we will get extremely accurate DO measurements; perhaps the most accurate measurements ever taken for DO on sight.
We have finalized and tested the injection system for use with our injection wells installed on the previous trip. The pumps will run tracer into the ground with some rather complex setups for the first day or so at each beach we will visit in the Prince William Sound. Afterwards we will sample for the tracer to determine its movement in the subsurface.
Just as last time we will take numerous samples from the field to be analyzed at a later time. These samples will be frozen upon collection, and sent back to Temple University for further study. We even bought some new equipment which some students have had extensive training on at school just for analyzing certain aspects of each sample. We hope this equipment will prove invaluable to our research later on.
This will be the last blog report for a few weeks, as we will be there for about 2 weeks. Look for more installments to this blog and also to our website then.
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Copyright © 2009 by Marine Science Today, a Publication of OceanLines LLC
