Yet Another Update

    On Tuesday, I met with Dr. Gaines, the chair of the geology department at Pomona College, at 1:30PM.  Mom dropped me off and, as with Mr. Crane's office a few weeks ago, I found myself frantically searching for Edmunds Hall.  Finally, I ended up at the front of the hall and made my way up to the geology department.  Dr. Gaines proceeded to walk me around the department,  introducing me to faculty, students, and iron reducing microbes alike.

Behold - Edmunds Hall

     The earth has a long and tumultuous story to tell, and it is up to the geologist to read that story.  This entails going out into the field, collecting samples, and manipulating them to extract the most meaning out of them.  To put it simply, this requires that rocks ground and split into factions according to characteristics like magnetism.  Speaking - or, rather, writing - of magnetism, Gaines showed me this super cool...thing in the basement.  I don't recall what it is called and I have yet to Google it (funny how "google" has replaced "look up"), but what it does is strip samples of magnetic field they've caught over time until the original field is recovered.  You see, when a rock comes into being, its structure aligns latitudinally with the earth's magnetic field.  By reading this alignment, geologists can tell where a rock originally was.  In this way, they can tell how parts of the earth have shifted over timing, drawing a picture of our world as various points in time.
     Pretty cool, huh?
     Gaines also showed me this small vial containing iron-embedded clay, lactate rich media and a culture of iron-reducing anaerobes, which is kept in a cabinet, waiting.  The point of this arrangement is to gage the iron-reducing capacity of these little guys.  I'm not sure what microbes these were exactly, but they are like the Shewanell that Crane mentioned and which Kenneth Nealson specializes in.  Metal-resistance has proven to be quite valuable in radioactive waste processing, as with a study that Crane referenced in which the Shewanella were more able to immobilize radioactive compounds than Deinoccocus radiodurans - known for being THE radioactivity-resistant microbe - because of its metal-resistance.

This post needed another photo.  Behold - the lunar eclipse that occurred a week ago!  
Actually, GIS is a geological tool that can used to determine the composition of
such heavenly bodies as our moon and Saturn's moon - Titan.  

     In the aforementioned basement lay mechanisms for grinding down rock into super-fine (fresh, and fly) dust, whence it can be melted down into glass, ground, melted, ground, melted, until the sample is adequately homogenous.  Then, it can be placed in an x-ray spectrometer used to determines how much of certain elements are present within the sample.  With a diamond pencil, classifying information is inscribed onto each glass disc and it is stored away.
     By the end of the tour, Gaines had given me a nice taste of geology, a paper he wrote a few years ago on a main cause for the Cambrian explosion (fascinating), and an acquaintance with members of the department.  I hope to take an intro to geology course at Pomona.  Will I become a geologist?  Time will tell.  Gaines reminded me time and time again to "keep an open mind".  Freshman year will be about laying down my foundation (chemistry, physics, biology, math) as well as exploring my interests.  At Pomona, I can take as many leaps as I want with the assurance that a safety net will be there to catch me.