Week 5:
Baruch Institute for Marine & Coastal Sciences

June 17, 2013

This week was good. The sun came out from behind the clouds on most days, the scattered thunderstorms only visited twice, and they didn’t last long enough to ruin the sunshine. On most days, it was about 80 degrees and the humidity was relatively low. Right now as I type, I see the lovely reflection of the milky white clouds drifting along in the baby blue sky, while the evergreens sway gently in the breeze. To appreciate the view, however, one has to be inside so as to avoid the heat and bugs.

During this week, I eventually caught up with all the data I had collected. I spent hours and hours sorting the data to make the graphs for each plot or collection date. Honestly, I’m not a fan of the tedium of sitting in one spot for an entire day and sorting data. However, as it’s an essential part of all research, I suppose that it’d be better if I learned to love it. The process got more exciting as I started to see some patterns emerge as more of the graphs were put together. However, the first set of tiles that I put into the marshes was rained on, so I couldn’t get the data from those. When I was talking to Erik on Tuesday morning, both of us thought I was lucky because the rain had come during a high tide when the tiles were under water. Unfortunately, as I pulled out the tide data from that time and combined it with the plot elevation data, I found out there were four plots that were above water when the rain came. Despite the fact that they were only rained on for about 25 minutes, I had to abandon all 65 tiles. Due to a high probability of Tuesday evening storms, we decided to collect the abandoned set on Tuesday afternoon and put more tiles in the field on Wednesday. On Wednesday, Tracy came back from North Carolina and gave me a ride to put the tiles out. She was gone from last Friday to visit her dad and I was really happy to see her again since she is the person closest to me in this part of the world. It simply cheered me up when I heard her voice and chatted with her. She brought me a very cute turtle necklace (which I’m currently wearing) and a micaceous rock with a lot of flaky muscovite, some biotite, and some quartz from her dad’s cabin. I was about to collect the samples on Thursday evening, but, due to the 105 degree temperature, we decided to work on Sunday instead of risking having a heat stroke.

This week, I also spotted some more pleasant scenes of the wildlife here: a turtle crossing the road; a baby alligator out for a stroll; a mother turkey and her four poults. My favorite of all the wildlife spotting this week, however, were the hundreds of thousands of crabs that scuttled away as I walked on the board path in the marshes.

My faculty sponsor and advisor Rhawn is coming here next week with his family. I really look forward to seeing them and showing him what I’ve done so far.