The first eight weeks of my master's project are now complete. As per usual, I have had an extremely busy term and got swept along by Oxford life, leaving little time for updates on the blog. Now though, I'm back home for the Christmas break, so it seems like a good time to reflect on what has happened so far.
I think the first thing to address in terms of my master's project was that I went into it not really having a single clue what I was doing. So much so that if you have seen my initial master's project post I talk about the Blue Lias formation. I am in fact not using samples from the Blue Lias, I am instead using samples from the Belemnite Marls. Whilst they are both cliffs in Dorset that show nice orbital cycles (so like at least I was close) they are in fact entirely different cliffs, and I think that nicely sums up how prepared I was going into this project.
At the start of term, back in October, I met with my supervisors to discuss the project and what I would be doing. Having established that I was in fact looking at the Belemnite Marls, and that I would be using the LUMEX Mercury Analyser machine to look at the concentration and speciation of mercury in samples throughout this cliff, it was time for me to get lab access put onto my university card and get trained up on using the machine. This was probably the most exciting part of the project, the start was a little scary, it really felt like I had no idea what was going on, but after a couple hours of being shown the ropes I was let loose to analyse my samples alone. Lucky for me, my supervisors have been great! One of them, a postdoc, has been very patient with me, dealing with my questions and issues, showing me how to use the machines, how to use the code to process the data, and dealing with emails subjected things such as "Glass thing I don't know the name of", and "I'm really sorry", that refer to me having issues with the equipment. (Whoops)
I've been meeting with my supervisors regularly, like once every week or so, which has been super helpful in ensuring I get things done. Alongside the research project I have also being doing three seminar courses this term. They have all been incredibly interesting but also very time consuming, with very long reading lists. If it wasn't for the regular meetings with my supervisors it would have been very easy to neglect the project and put all my energy into the seminars instead. The meetings helped to keep me on track by meaning that I needed something to show for what I had done each week. They were also great for asking questions and seeing what the next steps might be.
So what have I actually done this term? Well mostly I've been in the lab running my samples. There are around 800 samples of rock taken up a 30m or so section of the cliff that had been previously collected back in the 1980s by Graham Weedon and Hugh Jenkyns, the latter of which is still around Oxford and is technically one of my named supervisors although I have only met him once and he is more there so I can use his samples and read his papers. These rock samples were already crushed and in labelled vials/bags, and already out of storage as they had been used for a master project about 2 years before me where the guy doing it had been looking at mercury concentrations, which I am now expanding on by looking at the speciation. Since the samples had already been collected and prepared, all I had to do was weigh them out and and stick them in the analyser, a 700C oven that heats up the rock which allows the mercury to be released, and then detects when that mercury comes out of the rock. The science behind this is that mercury can be incorporated into rocks by being hosted in (held onto by) different minerals. Most commonly, it is found associated with organic matter but it can also hosted by things such as sulphides and clays. The different species of mercury (ie the ones held onto by different things) are released when heated to slightly different temperatures. The ones that are released at a lower temperatures will be released quicker than the ones that need to get a bit hotter to be released. So this means that the detector will generate different peaks that show different species of mercury so I can compare the different species with things such as the concentration of mercury, organic matter, and CaCO3, as well as the minerals that are present. Hopefully I can then try and spot some sort of correlation to learn more about what determines how the mercury is hosted by the rock.
Once the data has been collected (of which I have about 200 samples left to run) it has to be processed. Again, lucky for me, one of my supervisors has already written the code I need to use and has walked me through how to use it. This is wonderful news as, whilst I do try my best, I would not say coding is a particularly strong point of mine and already having the code written has saved me heaps of time! In addition, the code is in a coding language called R, up until now I have only used MatLab to code so its a new language for me. I am starting to understand how it works a bit more but its definitely been a steep learning curve. The code gives me graphs, known as TDPs, for each of the samples. TDP stands for thermal desorption profile and is just a graph showing me the concentration of the mercury (by how high the line is) , and the different species present (by the number of different peaks). These can then be compared in different ways to look at different things, something I am currently working on.
Whilst this has all been going on I have also been conducting my literature review. Mercury speciation in sedimentary rocks was not a topic I had come across before so it was a whole new area of papers and research for me to explore. My supervisors gave me an initial reading list to get me started and from there I have been reading around the topic. Over the vac we all have to write an eight page progress report to submit to our supervisors in the new year. I'm pretty sure the main aim of this is to ensure we have all actually done something this term, but we also get a whole bunch of feedback on our writing style, and research, so far. We can choose to include whatever we want in this report so in our last meeting before the end of term my supervisors and I went over a plan for what I would write. I am including my introduction (involving the literature review), and methods section as well as making some figures. This will be great to not only have done and out of the way, although I am aware I will need to come back and make adjustments later, but also to get feedback on the style of my writing and to make sure there isn't any key papers I have missed. If I'm being honest I really enjoy writing (hence the creation and continuation of this blog) so the report doesn't really scare me too much. I'm at a point now where I have done most of my reading and have begun to write the introduction, I hope to get all the writing done before Christmas and then I can focus on figure making in the new year.
Overall, my first taste of research has been pretty fun. It's really cool to be answering questions that no one has answered before! I like the community aspect as well, although I am only a master's student its nice to chat about things with my supervisors, and even just my friends, to share ideas and to hear about what other people are up to. I'm super excited to continue on next term and to see where the project ends up!
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