Mud from marsh to incubation

These past two weeks have been a hectic time in my world of research! I've been doing soil incubations. I'm using soil incubations to examine the effect of belowground bacteria on overall methane production. To perform this task I take soil samples from different depths (0, 10, 20, 40, 60, 80cm belowground), remove the roots and place 6g of soil in labelled jars in the anerobic chamber (a no oxygen bubble), add 5mL of water to create a slurry, then take methane gas samples over time to see the methane gas production by the bacteria in the soil.

Here's the step by step process of what I've been up to for the past two weeks:

1) I put all my incubation jars through the dishwasher and labeled them with my color coded labels for each depth. On each different color tray is my two sample sites of GCREW and Fox Point.

2) I went to the store to buy lots of ziplock bags. I needed a bag for each sample. That's 104 ziplock bags! And yes, there's also ice cream in that purchase although it wasn't made with petty cash and a tax exemption card from SERC.

3) At both sites I extracted soil cores (with lots of help from Fred, Tom, and Josh since I don't weigh enough to use the big Russian peat corer by myself) to down to a 1m in depth.

4) Once the core was extracted, I cut out 5cm sections at each depth, and placed each sample into its own color coded ziplock bag.

5) Back in the lab, the soil core samples sat in the 4C freezer until I was ready to extract the roots. The cold stops the processes occurring in the soil, so it remains in the state at which the core was taken.

6) I removed the roots in the anerobic chamber. Anerobic means all the oxygen is vacuumed out. The bubble is instead filled with a nitrogen and hydrogen mixture.  This step takes a long time with each sample taking about 30-40 minutes depending on what the soil to root ratio is, since I only want to 6g of soil and not the roots.

7) I created a slurry by adding 5mL of water to the vial. The jars are then sealed within the anerobic chamber to endure no oxygen entered the vial.

8) I took a sample of the gas within the anerobic chamber to record my time zero of carbon dioxide and methane levels from the headspace within the vials. Then for each vial every other day I take the carbon dioxide and methane levels as the bacteria do their thing within the vials.

So that's been my life for the past two weeks. It's had its ups and downs. But it's all been a learning experience for which I am grateful to have the opportunity to be a part of.