Captain's Log #3

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I almost forgot that I had a blog... Many things happened in the past months; I didn't have the time to write anything down here but to summarise: last summer, I did a research internship at the University of Göttingen regarding stable isotope geochemistry. Everything was awesome. Right now, I initiated two research projects, and I want to rather talk more about them for this specific entry as they are more recent and align more with the idea of actual "logging", because it's more recent, you know.

One of them is on paleoclimatology. We will do stable isotope analyses (carbon & oxygen) on ostracod samples representing 8400 years of Holocene section on 100 different levels. This will tell us about the atmospheric changes through most of the Holocene timeline; it will also tell us more about how ostracod shells interact with their isotopic environment. We also plan to use the paleoclimate dataset for correlating historical & archaeological events.

The other project is rather about geodynamics, but still regarding oxygen isotope geochemistry. I wanted to make a geochemical approach for the hypothesis of drip tectonics that is theoretically explaining the uplifting of the Central Anatolian Plateau.

For both projects, I had to go through sample preparation in a particularly short time period and that was so exhausting. Normally there would be no reason for them to be exhausting, but trying to rush things through also while having classes was a bit off-limits.

Yeah well... This is the workshop or lab or whatever you want to call, at Hacettepe Mining Engineering dept. for preparing rock samples. There is a rock crusher there at the corner. I used it for crushing my basalt samples, after washing all parts of it with a shit ton of alcohol of course.

CRUSHED N' WASHED!

(then dried)

Washed the samples and left them to dry in the oven.

Nothing was really hard until this part; I then had to separate all the olivines and the pyroxenes under the microscope. This was not hard, but so much time-consuming.

In the meantime, I also learned how to print something out with a 3D printer. There was a 3D printer standing right behind me in the lab, no one seemed to be using it so I asked for permission. I wanted to print a vial stand for my ostracod vials. Here is the result:

I know this isn't the best vial stand ever to exist, but it does its job!

I studied for my ore deposits final exam one day before in a pub and managed to pass.

Even though I did not take too many classes this semester, it was quite demanding with both projects and me not being too motivated to study for the classes. After I started doing actual research, classes seemed so boring to me, nothing was bearable anymore. Though they were still responsibilities I had to get done, so I came up with a solution: studying with the booze.