What Now?

As I am finishing my paper that covers the research I did in Albuquerque, I wonder what will I do for the rest of the summer. I don't have a job lined up. I'm really hoping that my brother gets his grant, so that I can help him with his graduate school research as a paid assistant. I originally had planed that when I got back from New Mexico that I was going to be a lifeguard at the pool, but I thought the training was in early April and not late March and missed it. They only other local lifeguard training was the weekend before finals week for 8th block at Cornell, so that timing on that one was pretty bad.

Right now it looks like I will be able to watch the Tour de France two to three times a day, so I'm not complaining. All I have to do now is convince myself to start riding my bike now. I've had no motivation to workout at all since I got back from New Zealand. It just has been a hard semester on me mentally and emotionally. I had Petrology (study of rocks and their formation) and Speleology (study of caves and cave formations) back to back after my trip to New Zealand, both of which where my hardest and most time consuming classes at Cornell. Hopefully I'll find the time to go for a short ride later today.

Studying in Albuquerque

I've completed another year of school and now I'm at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque for my internship for the month of June. I have been here improving the chronology of some stalagmites from Australia and Portugal using the Uranium-238 to Thorium-230 decay series with one of my professors from Cornell, Rhawn Denniston. The basic steps of what we do are as follows:

1. Drill some powder from a stalagmite.
2. Do some "cookbook" chemistry to concentrate the uranium and thorium from the powder and to remove all of the junk that we don't need.
3. Send the samples through a $700,000 mass spectrometer and obtain uranium and thorium ratios.
4. Plug some numbers into a spreadsheet and then push calculate. Once the computer is done processing our numbers in some crazy complicated equation it spits out an age.

Sounds pretty easy right? Well the work itself is pretty easy, but understanding it all rather complicated. The more I learn about this process, the more complicated it seems. All of the chemistry and mass spectrometry has to been done in a clean lab in order to reduce the amount of contaminant uranium and thorium. Calculating the age has several corrections to account for such as the initial thorium in the stalagmite along and corrections for alterations done to the stalagmite after it forms.

After we are done working Rhawn has field trips planned for us in order to see the awesome geology that surrounds Albuquerque. So far we been to Tent Rocks National Monument, Bandelier National Monument, and the Valle Grande Caldera. We also plan on see the Great Unconformity near Sandia Crest, some ancient volcanoes from the Rio Grande rift, and Carlsbad Caverns.

Tent Rocks National Monument

Bandelier National Monument

Valle Grande Caldera

Albuquerque also have a pretty nice cycling scene. There is a lot of bike paths/lanes throughout the city and there is always people on it. And unlike Iowa, Albuquerque has a pretty nice "hill" that you can ride up. The climb is about 10 miles away from where I am staying and is 25 miles long and gains around 4,800ft. Here is the profile:

Unfortunately for me, I have not been riding very much. Along with Albuquerque comes the goathead plant, which is a weed that produces thousands of seeds and each seed contains 3-5 thorns. Every ride I have been on so far I have flatted about ten-twenty minutes in. I even bought some Continental Gatorskin tires and I still flat about ten-twenty minutes into the ride. Except with the gatorskins I only have to pull one or two goatheads out instead of ten-fifteen of them with my old tires. I guess that's a plus right?

Overall Albuquerque seems like a nice place to live. Maybe I'll come back sometime after I am done working here.