October 6, 2016
The following post is part six of a seven-part series where JSG grad students reveal what they were up to over summer break. Enjoy!
Summer 2016 has been the most atypical summer of my life, but yet probably pretty typical for a graduate student. This was my first summer working just as a graduate student. When my friends and family ask what I do every day, to them it doesn’t change. It’s always, “I’m working on my research, mom.” But for me, my day-to-day this summer was never constant.
The majority of my days were spent developing a box model that will be used to account for changes in the isotopic signature of carbon (δ13C) with depth in soil. As depth increases in soil, δ13C also increases due to a number of factors. One of the proposed contributors is the addition of isotopically depleted CO2 into the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels.
The most cited papers that investigate this use archived soils, but the true extent of this effect, known as the Suess effect, is difficult to constrain quantitatively due to the lengthy time scale and soil variability. The Suess effect is also coupled with increased atmospheric CO2 concentration, which is known to have an effect on a plants rate of photosynthesis. So, that’s what my model seeks to explain: the approximate isotopic contribution of anthropogenic additions of CO2 to the atmosphere to a soil profile.
My limited experience in modeling and MATLAB has made this a time-consuming task but the summer has really allowed me to devote most of my brainpower to the model. Since modeling only requires my computer, I was able to spend some time traveling to visit my family in New Jersey. While I was home in May I was also able to employ my father as a field assistant to collect some soil samples from Great Mountain Forest in Connecticut. Sampling in Connecticut faced me with my first and only brush with death this summer: encountering a mother bear with three bear cubs. While they were cute, the fear shook me to my core and I decided to stay safe inside with my model for the rest of the summer.
