Jonathan's Blog

When I ventured upon this Earth Science Internship at Stanford, I had no idea what to expect. Would I be one of those geologists who gathering samples from volcanoes or digging several meters deep to obtain samples? However, when I began working with my amazing mentor Peter, I realized geology was not comprised of only amazing finds and discoveries. In fact, geologists have to spend countless of hours preparing samples, weighing and carefully measuring specimens.

On the first day of work, Peter told me that I would be working with ostracods, a class of Crustacea that are normally only a millimeter in length, that he had excavated from a lake in the Tibetan Plateau. With these ostracods, we would use a mass spectrophotometer to determine oxygen isotopes concentrations of the valves. These values would help Peter to draw conclusions about the paleoclimate and paleotopography of the Tibeatan Plateau. For the first several days, I recorded samples into a log and labeled them accordingly. Then, I had to meticulously use a small brush to either clean or transfer ostracod valves to another slide under a microscope, since many of them often have sediment stuck in the valves. This kept me quite busy for several days. We are currently washing some valves by using ultrasound. However, many of them often shatter, which would leave us with few specimens to work on. We are hoping to find better ways to clean the ostracods, but I am extremely excited to prepare the analysis of the valves!