Vatnajokul? Are you there, its me, Sarah...

Happily, I'm in the lab on Independence day- I'll spend it interdepent on the Thermo Finnegan Element 2 ICPMS, I shall call it Finny from now on... Me and Finny are processing a bunch of Antarctic supraglacial and proglacial streams now for 18 elements. I have approximately, 5 minutes of dead time while Finny drinks the samples up in some ultraclean tubing and mixes with 17% of a 5 ppb internal standard of Cesium, Thalium, and Indium--- Finny is finicky, so the internal standards automatically adjust to the natural changes in sensitivity (ability to detect)that occur throughout a day of running samples. I also run check standards on the elements I'm actually investigating, but this is more straightforward than feeding Finny an IV of Ce, Tl and In....Its my 3rd day straight of running samples. I'm going until my eyes fall out an role onto the adjacent laser ablation table... the reason, if another scientist runs their samples, they will inject all kinds of nonsense 'high' elemental concentration seawater and digested otoliths (fancy word for fish ear rocks) that will ravage my ability to detect at the lovely low concentrations of 10 ppt.



Read about more artistic glacier interactions.... here