Seventy four samples!!

Fieldwork is all done and I'm heading back to Honolulu tomorrow. As the heading says, this was an extremely fruitful (and wet) field season - I'm now 74 water samples closer to finishing my thesis (not to mention the 24 samples I took while in Hawaii). Which of course also means that I have the lab time equivalent of 98 samples ahead of me. Wow.



If you look carefully you can see the sample labels: PH-08-74. SEVENTY FOUR!! This historical sample definitely merited a picture. I still can't believe that I actually managed to double the number of samples from last year!

All this sampling couldn't have been done without the drivers/field assistants here at NIGS (Nat'l Institute of Geological Sciences) at the UP (University of the Philippines) at Diliman; they are an incredible bunch of guys. Not only do they drive me from river to river in the insane Philippine traffic, they are also happy to stand in the middle of streams for half an hour while we take discharge measurements and then get straight back into the car and go on driving. They're real troopers, these guys!



This is William up to his neck in the Lauis River last year.

Things have gone a lot more smoothly here in the Philippines this time, as was probably to be expected given that when I went here last year I didn't know anybody and had no idea what to expect, whereas now I know quite a lot of people here and also the terrain (a big help when planning fieldwork...). I am very happy with what I accomplished here this time and I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes out of the water back in Ithaca. Oh, and I actually have a lab assistant this semester, whom I'll get to teach the analytical techniques and then have help me with the analyses. That's just too good!

Also, my coworker here is really interested in further collaboration and we're planning to sample over the course of the next year up to 8 streams in various locations around the country. That's really fantastic and I can see it leading to some further interesting work down the road.

So, in spite of my initial misgivings about this field trip I am now very happy with the outcome. Not only do I have a lot of what I hope are really good samples, I also have a nice feeling that my work is actually of interest to someone beyond myself and that I am beginning to become a part of the earth science community here, in whatever small manner that may be. That's probably the result of this trip that is the most beneficial to myself, psychologically speaking, because so far in my thesis work I've felt very isolated and it's been killing me. If I weren't as stubborn as a mule when it comes to my Ph.D., I would have quit a long time ago. Now however, I feel like I belong somewhere again, for the first time since I started my thesis work.