An Unexpected, Pleasant Surprise

Since my last couple posts have been severely lacking in photos, I took some this morning to share, but they're a little dark because I took them at 6am when the sun was still rising. "Why," do you ask, "were you there so early? In order to get there by 6am you must have woken up at 4:30am!" While this may be true, the reason for my early awakening was so I could dive into the ocean! Unfortunately in my excitement I did not take any pictures all dressed up. My college student advisor and I jumped in to retrieve the 8 weighted tiles we threw into the ocean a couple of weeks ago.

As we were diving, we noticed something terrible for finding tiles but wonderful for the experiment which I may not be able to collect data for. A couple of months ago, the UV lights in the ocean were turned off since it was believed they didn't do anything. However, in this time, the visibility in the ocean plummeted as algae slowly took over and covered every inch of the ocean floor. Whether or not the lack of UV is the cause of this is uncertain but it is definitely possible, giving me a tentative result for what the results would have been if I had had the time to collect the data.

Because the visibility was so low, we were not able to find one of the 8 tiles in the ocean but the 7 that we did find were put in tupperware containers to be examined on Saturday. Then I hope to identify the types of algae that were growing in the various depths and locations as well as weigh how much algae grew to possibly find a correlation between depth and growth.

I don't have much time left at The Biosphere, and after Saturday, I don't know if I will be able to return before presenting my whole project to everyone. I hope that I can continue interning over the summer, though, when I have the time. I have learned so much these past couple of months and I feel like I am helping people with things that can really make a difference in our future. My experience at The Biosphere will help me in the future to further explore my love for our world and help find ways to preserve it as I continue through school. I am so grateful for my time here and for the opportunity to help out with so much.