Doing Science · 8:00am Jun 26th, 2014
So I'm not writing at the moment because I'm deep in the depths of work for my masters thesis. Since my adviser is crazy, he's signing us up for a conference in Vancouver in the fall that requires us to send at least a preliminary abstract by mid July. This means that I have to essentially do all of my data collection, something that usually takes people the better part of a year, in one month (maybe two weeks given that things aren't going terribly smoothly with the method development). So yeah, I'm essentially spending every waking hour in the lab and won't be able to think about writing until sometime in July.
For any of you wondering what my thesis is about, I'm taking samples from sediment cores from Tulare Lake, California and trying to extract long chain hydrocarbons (specifically C27, C29, C31, C33, and C35) that come from ancient leaf waxes that would have washed into the lake as debris. Monocots (grasses, grains, etc.) and dicots (shrubs, trees, etc.) have slight differences in how they do photosynthesis, which results in different ratios of these hydrocarbons in their leaf waxes, as well as differences in the istotopic ratio of Carbon-14 vs Carbon-12 (though I'm just doing the first part, someone else is going to do the isotope work). If we get a record of these long chain hydrocarbons, that tells us the ratio of monocots to dicots in the area through time. Since dicots do slightly better in dryer climates than monocots, this ratio acts as an indicator of rainfall. This feeds into the bigger picture of the climate record for pacific lakes over the last 10,000 to 20,000 years.
So I'm a physics major working on a geology masters, doing a paleoclimatology thesis, which results in my day to day work being a ton of organic chemistry (which I've never taken but am learning at a break neck pace).
if you need to learn organic chemistry quickly, Clayden/Greeves/Warren is a good textbook!
Oh, summer...