Nicole Yerena

What am I doing this summer?

This summer I will be working with Dr. Ivano Aiello and his team at the Moss Landing Marine Labs (MLML) in Moss Landing, California. I will be working as a lab assistant and helping to analyze sediment samples to determine their composition.

What are my career plans?

I’ve always been interested in the ocean and after graduating this June I plan to take a gap year before applying to graduate school to earn my Ph.D. in Oceanography. My ultimate goal is to teach others about oceanography and to share my passion for the ocean with others around me.

Before I continue my journey in higher education, I plan to take a gap year to expand my horizons and to learn more about my family history. I will be doing this by staying with my family in Mexico for a year and helping my uncle as a translator for his business.

What are my goals for this summer?

I’m hoping to gain more lab experience and to learn more about sediments while working at MLML. I’m hoping that working in Moss Landing will encourage me to visit Elkhorn Slough more often and to learn more about the area.

The pandemic this past year really shook up the plans I had for both field and lab experience, so I plan to get as much out of my experiences this summer as possible. I hope that with the help of GEOPATHS I will be able to expand on my professional skills before I leave at the end of the summer.

As an unrelated goal from the internship: I am hoping to improve my Spanish speaking skills since I know how valuable knowing 2 languages is and I want to be able to connect with more people.

How will attending AGU advance your academic and career goals. What aspect of the meeting will be most beneficial for your academic or career growth?

I think what I'm most excited about the AGU Fall meeting is the opportunity to connect with others in the academic community. I haven't been to a conference like this before and have been wanting to attend a fall meeting since learning about it a couple years ago. I think attending the meeting will be most beneficial to my future academic career since I am planning to attend graduate school in the next few years and a lot of my lab mates have told me how great this meeting is for networking with potential advisors and for learning more about current research in the fields I’m interested in. I have an idea of what schools I want to apply for but I think meeting with others that are from there will help me make a decision and also help me build connections outside of the people I know at UC Santa Cruz.

I also think this meeting will help me advance my career goals by broadening my horizons as a first-generation college student. I haven’t had as many career building experiences as some of my peers and I think attending this meeting will give me further insight into what others are doing in my field and future career options I could explore that I might not have known about previously. Overall, I think attending the Fall meeting is going to have a lasting impact on both my future both academically and career wise.

What have you learned in your internship so far? (week 3 update)

So far in my internship I’ve learned a lot about the Guaymas basin and sediment analysis. The core I'm working on is the U1545 core taken from the Guaymas basin in the Gulf of California. I've learned that this area is very tectonically active with lots of hydrothermal vents around the area and an active plate boundary. The core I'm working on has over 400,000 years of sedimentation history and I'll be lucky if I scratch the first 100,000 years by the time the internship is over. This area is great for sediment preservation because it goes through phases of anoxia which allows layers of sediment to be deposited undisturbed by benthic organisms.

I've learned about climate proxies such as δ18O for temperature, and δ15 N for history of anoxia and denitrification in the basin. For this project we’re expecting to see changes in denitrification that coincides with glacial and interglacial cycles using data we get from both isotopes.

I've learned lab procedures for preparing samples for freeze drying, crushing samples for analysis, and soon will learn about foraminifera picking and particle size analysis. A majority of my work so far has been crushing 2 grams of sediment for each of the 300+ samples we are working with, because of this I have gotten very good at knowing how much 2 grams is by just looking at the sediment. In order to get started with my work I had to learn how to read the labels for the sediment sample and pay close attention to matching each bag with the correct sample vial and keeping samples in order.

This project is a joint effort between Ivano Aiello’s Lab at Moss Landing and Christina Ravelo’s lab at UCSC. I’m currently working with Ivano’s grad student Noelle Lewis since part of this work will be used for her master thesis.