#8: Lift Malfunction and Orton Hall (2-25-08)

In the morning I worked at Orton Geology Museum cataloging fossils from Precambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Pennsylvanian, Devonian, Mississippian and Permian time periods. Fossils are preserved organisms or traces of organisms that have solidified due to age and environmental conditions. To handle these thousand and million years old fossils is absolutely amazing, especially when the pattern on the exoskeleton of a cephalopod (of the mollusc class) is visible. Some of the specimen have been part of OSU since the 1800s.
During the afternoon I make my way over to USPRR to help out my submentor (inventing a new word), Julie Codispoti. Julie in serving as the official coordinator of the Rock Repository in the place of Anne, who is temporarily living in Japan. Currently she is braving a committee with her wit, GRE scores and hope to get her masters in geology. I feel like I learn a new field/profession every day, example: Anne is paleomagnetist. In short paleomagnetists study ancient magnetic fields through magnetic minerals (ie. magnetite) in rocks and sediments. Methods -and I am not going into that- are conducted on these rocks and sediments to determine past directions of the Earth's magnetic fields. All I am going to say is, my god! I never realized how complicated magnets and magnetism is.
The lift at USPRR stopped working, thankfully it was ground level and not raised 20 feet high.

#7: Orton Geologic Museum

Indianola Elementary School (now relocated elsewhere) would take field trips to Orton Geological Museum to learn about what is under our feet. The luminescent rocks and minerals under the black light in the velvet booth was my personal favorite. Ironic it is that eleven years later I am helping (more watching and taking notes) to give a tour to the newest batch of Indianola kids, the same age that I was.
Today I learned that minerals are classified by nine principals:
1) Shape (a 12 sided piece of pyrite is called a pyritohedron)
2) Cleavage (minerals that break into flat pieces/sides)
3) Fracture (opposite of cleavage)
4) Luster (metallic and nonmetallic)
5) Color (sometimes misleading)
6) Streak (take a tile then scrape the mineral against it to determine its "true color")
7) Specific Gravity (weight)
8) Hardness
9) Other (magnetism, taste, etc.)

Classifications for Rocks:
1) Igneous (rocks formed by cool magma)
2) Sedimentary
3) Metamorphic

#6: The Breakfast of Science Champions (2-20-08)

Annually public and private schools have "The Breakfast of Science Champions" at different OSU branches, including at Byrd Polar Research Center. Forty-eight 8th graders attended BPRC to have breakfast, a tour and lectures by various scientists. Throughout these activities I took notes on statistics, history, questions asked by kids and general information on the groups that compose Byrd. Data will be collected through my note taking and used by Dr. Carol Landis ( my main mentor).
Some of My Notes

• Largest *permanent* (aquatic animals are not completely terrestrial) antarctic creature is antarctic midge, an insect.
• Deep sea marine animals are more susceptible to gigantism due to oxygen content in water
• Antarctica has an average of 1 mile of ice over land
• An increase of 1,000 feet means a decrease of 5 degrees Fahrenheit
  
• Antarctica is the windiest, highest, coldest and driest continent
  
• Annual precipitation is is less than 10 inches defining it as a desert
• Katabatic winds (very strong winds) are prevalent in Antarctica
• Windiest place on Earth is Cape Denison
  
• Coldest temperature ever recorded was -129 degrees at the Russian Vostok Station
• Antarctica is called a "Canary in a Coal Mine"
• Extremophiles are organisms of macro and micro size that are physically designed to live in extreme terrains and climates
• Psychrotolerant means optimal growth at higher temperatures
  
• Polar Summer is from December to March
  
• One-half of the worlds population lives 60 miles from the coastline

There are 4 more pages of notes.
Oceans and coastlines are going to be the first impacted by global warming. Already entire villages near the coastline in Alaska had to relocated due to severe erosion.
Pictures of my Walkabout are not appearing for inexplainable reasons. Tomorrow I am going to get a new computer and it is in my hopes that will faithfully correct my problems.

#5: Olivine, Lifts, Crinoids

Today was my first official day at the United States Polar Rock Repository and Orton's Geological Museum. The majority of this week in going to be spent working with rocks, fossils and minerals. The Orton Museum has mass quantities of precious rocks and minerals from collections over a 100 years old. That being said it is difficult to keep track of specimens. Monitoring and maintaining information on the specimens is my responsibility (for this week) and other staff members. Today I worked exhibit fossils from Precambrian to Pennsylvanian. It was very interesting to see the crinoids.
At USPRR I did the same thing. However, this required a lift. Today I learned how to drive/lift a lift. It made annoying beeping sounds and I almost crashed once but it was enjoyable. Different fossils had to be put back on the 18 foot shelves thus requiring the lift. In a wooden box there was a rock slab partially covered in the beautifully green olivine. The mineral only has a Mohs scale (hardness) of 6.5 to 7, so it slightly crumbled under my touch. The little pieces that fell off she allowed me to keep.
I will attach a picture of the crinoids, lift and olivine when I have access to a working computer.

#4: Last Touches (Friday, February 15th)

Today was spent working with the Inuit Carvings Project again. Information needs to be clear and concise for whoever uses my project thus requiring much refining and updating. A few of the artifacts needed to be remeasured and data had to be switched around on the MediaManager website. What I have learned in the scientific field is that a project is never done.

#3: Mammoth Remains (Thursday, February 14th)

Orton Geological Museum (named after the first president of OSU) is part of Orton Hall, located near Main Campus. The architecture alone is incredible. Built in 1893 it was constructed to represent the geologic time scale. The building has noticeable layers representing the time periods that had persisted in Ohio. I learned that not all geologic time periods existed in Ohio because of different environmental factors that varied by location.

Mastodons and Mammoths

Mastodons are browsers and mammoths are grazers. Browsers eat autotrophs which are organisms that produce complex organic compounds from simple inorganic molecules (example: twigs and leaves). Autotrophs can create the organisms by using light energy or inorganic chemical reactions. Grazers are similar in the retrospect that they consume multicellular autotrophs and grasses, however, the terrestrial mammoths diet concentrates on low vegetation. These two terrestrial mammals are physically relative to the modern day elephant. The most significant thing I learned today was about the mammoths in mastodons. The remaining time at Orton Geological Museum was getting a general tour from the curator, Dale Gnidovec (my part time mentor).
The museum itself was interesting but I thought the what Dr.Gnidovec (a geologist) showed me behind the scenes was the most intriguing. The back rooms are filled with hundreds of drawers full of thousands of minerals, fossilized creatures and rocks. Dr.Gnidovec pulled a drawer out with the word "gold" printed on its metal exterior. My mentor let me hold a pure gold nugget half the size of my thumb. An excavation of mastodon skeletal remains are being conducted in Darke County by Dr.Gnidovec that was recently found by a farmer. They extracted 60% of the bones which is wonderfu. The problem that geologists, paleontologists and archaeologists have with retrieving the remains from ground is that these bones have been in the ground for thousands of years. After a long period of time bones are plastered with sediments of all kinds. Dr.Gnidovec offered for me clean the bones which is an intricate process or to dig for the remaining 40% of the mastodon bones.

#2:Finishing the Inuit Carvings Project (2-11-08)

The Inuit, Yupik, Russian Eskimo and Cree Indian project is nearly done. These artifacts were donated by Dr.Drake (who I corresponded with) after his wife, Rosalie, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Dr.Drake traveled through Alaska, Canada and all the way to Siberia. He bought the handcrafts from the natives in small and medium sized villages. Occasionally from a small store. My job was to discover information on the objects and create a document cited by APA format. Excerpt:

This is a snowy owl pendant made from woolly mammoth tusks. They looked like elephants with long, shaggy, brown hair. Woolly mammoths died 12,000 years ago in the Pleistocene epoch (Thor, 2007). The plumage of snowy owls varies with age and sex. The young female is marked with more bars, while the young male has fewer bars. As the owls age, they become whiter, especially the males (Josephson, page 155).

The Owl Pendant (once Rosalie's) is pictured in my hand. The last part of the Inuit project was to measure all of the artifacts (details are important to scientists). It is now available online for teachers and professors to implement in classrooms.

http://byrdpolarmedia.osu.edu/
^Link to the collection