Results
Despite our original hypothesis, every test we conducted showed no difference between the two waters. The pH test was the same for both waters along with the bacteria test, proving that ash and chemicals in the ocean does in fact not create excess bacteria. The final water quality test also proved that despite the minimal ash and chemicals in the water, it really doesn't affect the water that much.
Analysis
Our results proved that ash and chemicals from a wildfire don't affect the waters pH, bacteria levels, or necessarily its water quality. However, because we took the water over 3 months since the initial fires, our results may have some inaccuracies. Most of the ash has likely spread to other parts of the ocean, leaving a low concentrate of ash in our samples, possibly skewing our results.
Reflection and Next Steps
This process was extremely challenging. There were few classes when both of us were here together leading to communication errors, causing things to take longer than they should've. Additionally, after writing our essay we had to change our experiment completely, offsetting our initial plan and timeline. However despite this we were able to successfully complete an experiment coherent to our original idea and work fluently together. Moving forward if we were to do another experiment we would like to tie it back to coral, and definitively test how much ash in ocean water would be deadly to the coral. Overall this was a successful and informative experiment in which we had to overcome challenges and use critcal thinking to solve difficult problems.