Bon Voyage

Yesterday we said bon voyage to our fearless leader. Off to exotic places for some dives trips, some talks, then more dives. Whoever said scientists spend all day in the lab must not be in our field!

In the mean time I am still working away in the lab. I am currently finishing up the weighing portion of a DiploBlaster project from the Flower Gardens. DiploBlaster has become my new name for Diploria now, it sounds funny and makes me giggle :) At some point I will have a name for everything if I continue to stay so late in the lab. Coffee, Coke, and Skittles can only keep you awake for so long while drilling before insanity sets in.

They lab is now wonderfully decorated with Donax, Mesodesma (Messies) and oyster shells in various stages of processing. Julie cut the umbos of her oyster samples the other day and has put them in epoxy for thin sectioning. They look awesome all lined up on our tables!

Becky is off to Peru now. Becky is currently an archeology student but we are slowly turning her over to the paleoclimate side. "Come to the climate side we have cookies!" Her work with Messies produced some really nice images for band counting. Becky has told us she may take a trip to the Peruvian coast during her dig trip to see if she can find some modern Donax for reconstruction. I think we have done well in converting her.

I have yet to figure out how to set up a sun lamp in the lab so I can at least get some sun this summer. Not to mention I would get a heat lamp out of it. They like to freeze us in the labs on the first floor. I bet I am the only person in Louisiana wearing a Mountain Hardware fleece jacket during the day, or at all this summer.

Here Ye, Here Ye!

To our fine colleagues,
If you have tallied up records with decadal to sub-annual resolution or are exploring methods for reconstructing climate at such high resolutions, we invite you to consider our session for this Fall's AGU in San Francisco!

PP005: Climate Variability From High-Resolution Proxies

K. Halimeda Kilbourne
Univ. of Maryland Center for Environmental Science

Robin M Cobb
Louisiana State University

Kristine L DeLong
Louisiana State University

Paleoclimate records with decadal–subannual resolution provide a unique perspective on past climate on centennial–seasonal timescales. High-resolution paleoclimate data often overlap and extend the instrumental record, providing the increased observation period needed to investigate aspects of climate variability such as El Niño-Southern Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation, Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and Atlantic Multidecadal Variability. However, high-resolution records may include environmental noise that combines with analytical error to confound interpretations of relatively small signals. We encourage abstracts involving high-resolution records, either exploring paleoclimate, or exploring methods for improving these records.

Session details are at http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2012/session-search/single/climate-variability-from-high-resolution-proxies/
Submit your abstract today! http://agu-fm12.abstractcentral.com/

-Hali, Kristine, and Robin

Drilling Away Again in Margaritaville

I have been spending most of my days hidden away from the horrible Louisiana heat in our drill room working on a new project. I am working on a replication study within a core on a Montastraea colony. I have lovingly named it "The Monster" due to strange ability to sequester my milled powder or to randomly pinch out thecal walls. Working with our drill, Dante, I have gotten five years milled along two paths. Strangely enough Dante has been rather pleasant this project. He earned his name several projects ago when he would randomly lose his location or reset his origins. He drilled out his own level in the bowels of the underworld.

For this project Kristine and I created a new holder for the coral core. We were not able to slab the coral as is typical in our lab, so we just stuck the whole darn thing up there! Be it, the prototype was the best looking one but it broke. Its harder to work a jigsaw than you think, and to keep your lines somewhat straight or following the semicircle. I also figured out how to rig up our digital microscope to the drill so that I could see the walls in detail to adjust the path. I though it was quite clever. I just need to create something a little more permanent.

Autocat has become somewhat of a mascot. I created it when I was learning how to plot using the SuperCamp software. That was when Dante was acting up and instead of plotting lines I just gave up and created that little guy. I still have yet to name the gremlins in the computer.