And they're off.

After two months of lab work, field work, and no work on beaches, it is finally time to pack up and head out.

A full moon rises on our last night.

Eilat has been a fun and unique experience.  With a different culture, climate, and geology, we have learned much from this beach town and are sure to carry those experiences forward in our research with present and future collaborators.

View from the roof top patio of our hostel.

 We spent one night in Jaffa near Tel Aviv to make catching our flights the following day much easier.  Luckily the drive this time had much less luggage because Adina transported some up beforehand.

The first summer of IRES so far seems successful. We are now going our separate ways, back to the US or elsewhere to visit family and friends and to share our experiences.  As with any good story, there is much to tell.

Petra: City of Stone

One of our last excursions while in Israel was to Jordan.  We crossed the border in Eilat and headed to Petra, the ancient capital city of the Nabataean people made wealthy by trade in spices like Frankincense and myrrh.  The trade routes covered much of the Middle East and Arabian Peninsula, reaching from Egypt to India to Turkey (modern locations, of course).  The majority of the buildings in Petra are actually tombs.  The larger and grander the tomb, the wealthier and more important the inhabitant during life.

The Treasury, as it is often known, was only called such because of the earn on top of the central rounded pediment.  It was believed to contain gold, so naturally was shot at with guns to break it open.  No such gold was found, but the name of the Treasury stuck for this tomb.

The architecture is rather fascinating because not often is the triangle roof of a building split like this.  Triangled roofs (or the pediment) are common to Roman and Greek architecture, but this split here is thought to have come from Alexandria in Egypt.  It actually rather reminds me of the Tempietto (little temple) placed in the upper center for Borromini's San Carlo from 1634.

The architecture is similar for other tombs of Petra, like Deir above, also known as the Monastery.  This one is much larger than the Treasury but surprisingly simple by comparison.  There are not as many decorations.

As with much of the region, Petra was conquered by Romans.  They built a separate complex outside of the main canyon, completed with a paved road triumphal arch long collapsed by earthquakes.

We spent the night at a Bedouin tent camp, and the following morning we went to Wadi Rum, a very large valley known for its geology and the presence of Lawrence of Arabia.  We also saw camels grazing in small figs.  They were friendly enough to allow some photographs.

The all-wheel drive suburbans took us through the shifting sands and dunes of Wadi Rum.  The surrounding sandstones were interestingly weathered and varied in color, giving a hint that their origins varied slightly to produce mosaics of reds and yellows.

We returned to Eilat from Wadi Rum after a brief but packed weekend.

Shekels and agorot

The currency used in Israel is the Shekel. There are 100 agorot in 1 shekel. You can only find coins of 10 agorots. There are also coins of ½, 1, 2, 5 and 10 shekels and banknotes of 20, 50, 100 and 200 shekels.

A fast way of converting shekel prices into dollars or euros is to divide the amount by 4 (4 shekels ≈ 1 dollar).

The shekel is represented by this symbol: ₪

Below I list the prices of different common products I purchased:

-a bottle of milk (2L) = ₪16

-a dozen eggs = ₪10

-soluble coffee (200 g) = ₪30

-a bag of pita chips = ₪11
-hummus (400g) = ₪12

-a bottle of water (1L) = ₪3.5

-spaguetti (500g) = ₪7.5

-tomato sauce (400g) = ₪12

-a bottle of sunscreen (200mL) = ₪34

-roll-on deodorant = ₪13
-tampons (20) = ₪22
-toothpaste = ₪20
-veggies=

Poems About IRES Projects

Inspiration for art can come form the weirdest places

A Haiku About Nitrate Isotopes (Joe's Project)
By Kyle

Joe came and sampled

For two days out of sixty

More work is ahead

A Sonnet About Collecting Tissue Samples From Corals (Ana's Project)
by Alanna

Oh corals that I smell

Little white and porous blocks

Like little birds within your flocks

On the table do you dwell

Knowing not you soon face hell

The airbrush awaits and soon knocks

Away falls your tissue like golden locks

Why your little bodies we destroy?

To study the genes of your tulips

And publish the findings in a journal

For the science we employ

The sacrificial polyps

Despite the methods most infernal

A Limerik About Groundwater Sampling (Alanna's Project)

by Kyle

Oh pit on the beach you're a crater

You took days of hot sweat and hard labor

But now it is done

It was all in good fun

The results could not have been greater

A Pontoon About Uranium Dating (Kyle's Project)

by Alanna

For Uranium, Thorium, Lead

To know the dates I need

238, 234, 210

The estuarine sediment

To know the dates I need

clean, Clean, CLEAN!

The estuarine sediment

Off to the Neptune do you go

clean, Clean, CLEAN!

For Uranium, Thorium, Lead

Off to the Neptune do you go

238, 234, 210

A Freeform Poem About Pb Isotopes (Chia-Te's Project)

by Joe (with a lot of help from Kyle and Alanna)

There's dust in the air I swear

Says the man whose skin is fair

We're not sure why it's there

Maybe we should be aware

Where all this lead is coming from?

Don't panic! We can correct for organics.

My lagoon sediments are rife with living creatures.  Bacteria, protists, algae, and sea grass live on top of, or down in, the sediments.  At the bottom of my carbonate sediment cores, the lagoon muds turn into organic rich peat left over from a vegetated area that flooded with seawater and drown.  If left over tens of millions of years, compressed and gently heated, this peat layer would turn into a coal seam.

At present, they are only about 5,000 years old and could cause some problems in interpreting the uranium/thorium ages I have spent the summer working on.  Carbon-rich sediments act like a sponge - they are good at absorbing uranium out of seawater and holding on to it.  If they begin with excess uranium, they will appear to have less thorium which occurs after uranium decays.  The result is an artificially young age.

Problems like this arise all the time in earth science because nature is typically not a closed system.  Different cycles and processes interact with one another and result in a signal that is smeared.  It is for this reason many experiments and data sets require long periods of observation or replicates (or triplicates, etc.) with the idea that more data will give a consistent average value which is the closest "true" value of a process.

Anyway, I digress.  In the case of my muds, I need to know how much organic content exists so I can correct for any absorption of excess uranium they might cause.  To do that, I essentially set them on fire.  First I way out a few dozen milligrams of my carbonate material and place them in glass wells.  I also weigh some standards (material we know the organic content of very well and compare it to the unknown samples).

My sample wells.

A close up of samples.  The dark samples are organic-rich carbonate mud.  The orange is a plankton standard.

I add hydrochloric acid to each of the wells to dissolve away the carbonate (the top left plate is already done in the image above).  Carbonate has carbon (it's in the name) in the form of CaCO3.  If I were to measure the pure sediments, I would get an overwhelming signal of carbonate.  By adding acid, the carbonate reacts to produce water and carbon dioxide gas which fizzes out of my sample.  This is good because now the carbonate carbon has left in the form of a gas, and the residual material is mostly unaffected by the acid.  I can dry the sample, collect my organic carbon residue, and stuff it into little tin capsules.  I compress these into little discs, and they are ready for measurement.

Tin capsules, a holding cell, and a stylus I use to compress them.

Once compressed, I can open the hold cell to get the disc.

Here is a before and after of a compressed tin capsule.

Now the samples are held in a container until it is time to ignite them.

By incinerating the tin capsule and measuring the carbon coming off of it, I can determine how much organic carbon was there compared the original mass of my mud.  This will give me a percentage (say, 2 or 3%).  I would use this value to then correct any oddities I see in my uranium data to help reconstruct the age of my sediment cores.  This extra step gives me more confidence that my ages are correct, and then I can move on to reconstructing the lagoonal environments that existed at those points in time in the past.

Current Weather Conditions

Eilat has been getting a bit of a heat wave the last week, with humidity to boot.  I would agrees it's warm outside, currently feels like 118 degrees Fahrenheit.

Coral sampling

Last month I collected some Stylophora fragments to use in my experiment. The IUI created a coral nursery to carry out experiments in situ and also to grow corals for collection without disturbing the natural reef. It consists of a series of metal racks fixed underwater between 6 and 12 meters deep approximately, where there are plenty of fish, sponges, crabs and even big octopus swimming around.

Mother colony number 1 growing in the coral nursery

We dove and collected coral pieces from 4 different mother colonies that were immediately placed in aquaria in an outdoor laboratory with running seawater. I glued them to plastic bases in which I wrote an individual number and painted with different nail polish colours to distinguish between the different mother colonies. After several days acclimating to the new conditions, temperature and pH of seawater in the aquaria was changed and my experiment started.

Aquarium with different coral fragments

Corals from different mother colonies. Note the pink tentacles going out of the skeleton. 

Eating Like an Israeli

We've been in Israel now for about a month and a half and have had enough time to sample a wide variety of traditional Israeli dishes.  In this post I outline a few of the dishes I particularly like for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Breakfast
Most days for breakfast I eat hummus and toast or crackers, but my hands down favorite Israeli breakfast is shakshuka.  I've had shakshuka twice while in Israel, but I would happily eat it every week.  Shakshuka is a thick stew of tomatoes, onions, and bell peppers cooked on the stove.  A few minutes before finishing a divot is carved out in the stew and an egg cracked into it.  The egg cooks to desired doneness (over medium for me) in the stew.  It's delicious, and I will be sure to make it when I go home to the states.

Some shakshuka I had at a restaurant in Tel Aviv.

Jerusalem: The Old City

Dome of the Rock

The buff colored stone streets are slick.  Smoothed and shined from over 4,000 years of people walking, running, laughing, playing, fighting, shopping, dancing, dying—Jerusalem is a city of history quite unlike any I have experienced.  It is among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, with much of the modern layout existing in one form or another for 4,000 years with other evidence of habitation over 2,000 years before that.

Modern civilization stems from the simple act of placing seeds and plants into the ground.  Over 7,000 years ago we learned to farm.  This city was here.  Came and went the the millennia, revolution after revolution—political, industrial, technological—and this city was here.

The Austrian Hospice

We stayed in the Austrian Hospice situated in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, the ancient, walled square kilometer of masonry upon masonry through which Jesus, the Apostles, the Romans, the ancient Hebrew people, walked and wandered.  A mosque across the street called Muslims to prayer at 4:30 in the morning, the sun itself barely awake.  We were swept up in the foot traffic, streets packed wall to wall with pedestrians as the occasional car tried to squeeze its way through.

Our time in Jerusalem was spent mostly looking at the religious history of the city, for history and religion are inexorably intertwined here.  We started off at the Holocaust Museum in the far eastern part of the newer Jerusalem built beyond the walls.  It is an incredibly well-constructed museum and display of arguably the most traumatic event in recent Jewish history.

The Place of Ascension, Mount of Olives

The next bit of our time consisted of going to all of the holy sites of three of the major religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.  These included places such as the Mount of Olives where Jesus is said to have ascended to heaven, with views of the Temple Mount (Dome of the Rock, currently a mosque), the room of the Last Supper, and the Via Dolorosa (way of sadness) along which Jesus walked with the cross.

Reconstructed Room of the Last Supper

View post on imgur.com

Our second day in Jerusalem was spent learning of conquest and fall of Jerusalem to a host of cultures, including Romans, Byzantians, Arabs, and later western powers (Britain primarily) over the last 2,000 years that have created the backdrop for the creation of Israel, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and the modern city of Jerusalem.

Scarfing It

Scarves are a somewhat mandatory part of being in Israel, at least for women when it is hot outside.  Many holy areas, for Jews, Muslims, and Christians require women cover their shoulders, chest to the collar bone, and legs past the knees.  A large scarf allows us to quickly cover ourselves when needed with our having to wear cumbersome long sleeves and pants constantly.  In the desert they can also provide sun protection.  I bought a large scarf for just such occasions.  Below I show off a few ways to wear it.

Ana and I model this style she learned in Tunisia.  The extra wrap around the face (meant to protect from blowing sand) can also be worn down the back in a cape-like fashion to protect the back and shoulders from the sun.  The wound scarf on the forehead provides a bill similar to a baseball cap that prevents the sun from shinning in through the top of my sunglasses.

Study the dust

Last week a major dust storm hit Jordan, shut down Queen Alia international port which is about 50km away from Eilat. 

You can see photos and videos from news list here.

http://www.weather.com/news/news/amman-jordan-sandstorm

http://www.jordantimes.com/news/local/rain-dust-storms-reported-several-areas-around-jordan

http://www.albawaba.com/loop/these-photos-show-what-it%E2%80%99s-weather-jordan%E2%80%99s-sandstorm-refugee-camp-725990

http://www.9news.com.au/world/2015/08/03/13/54/middle-east-swelters-under-record-temperatures

In Eilat we also experienced power the dust storm, you can tell how dust storm influenced the air clarity by comparing photos took at our apartment before and during it happens .

Dust brings not only negative health issues to human being, it also brings varies kind of nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphate and iron into the ocean which could benefit growth of phytoplankton. Varies of elements leached out into seawater after dust deposit to the ocean could alter chemical composition of seawater. My project here is to study sources and distributions of Pb in the gulf. We collect and analyze seawater samples to understand the distribution of Pb, beside that two week ago we set up a dust collector to sample dust. Briefly we pump air through a polycarbonate filter to collect particles in the air onto the filter surface. In following pictures you can see how we place the sampler and connect tubes. The filter was placed about 10 meters above ground to avoid collecting particles from ground and roof. In one of the pictures you can see the dust collected on the filter.

Dust sampler setting, on the top of  a metal stick filter was placed one a holder inside the white bottle, connected through a black tube to a pump

Barack is lifting the stick that filter holder was attached to, below is the air pump inside a controller panel. We will collect dust samples every 7 to 10 days.

Dust particles on the filter form one week sampling, you can see the gray/brown color of the dust. Generally speaking dark color dust is more likely from anthropogenic sources while brown color dust is more likely from the desert.

 After get dust sample we will analyze composition of it and compare this with elements in the seawater. Incorporate information from dust and other Pb sources, we will be able to better understand the sources and distribution of Pb in Gulf of Aqaba.

Ein Avdat and the Negev Desert

Despite the blazing sun and searing heat, our intrepid group decided to venture out into the unforgiving Negev Desert of southern Israel for a day of adventure (and minor heat exhaustion). One of our main stops was at Ein Avdat National Park.

Ein Avdat is canyon hidden away in the desert with some pretty spectacular sights to see. Walking in to the canyon, the first thing you notice is how dry and desolate things seem. Steep chalk limestone walls rise up on either side, which narrow as you travel further in to the canyon. Depressions and caves of differing sizes can be seen high up on the cliffs due to how easily the soft limestone weathers over time.

There is a fair bit of vegetation, however, all of which is extremely well adapted to live with very little water. The ground in this area is very salty, and some of the plants deal with this problem by secreting excess salts on to the outside of their leaves. You can easily notice this by rubbing your fingers on the leaves and tasting the gritty substance that comes off. This adaptation also helps some of the larger plants compete for habitat, as the morning dew helps deposit this salt around its base, keeping the area free of competing plants.

This lone large tree is a pistachio tree, the seed of which must have blown in from far away a long time ago. While this plant cannot normally survive in the desert of Israel, this individual is thriving. This canyon is a special place where water flows far more often, due to the many natural springs that emanate from the canyon walls further in, as we will see below. 

Life here just seems to find a way - this little guy was hanging out underneath the pistachio tree, and joined us for a quick water break in the shade.

Continuing in to the canyon, we finally come upon flowing water! This is actually a pretty amazing sight, as the Negev desert as a whole is extremely dry. These natural springs serve as an oasis for both the natural biology and for human populations, with tribes of ancient nomadic people using the water to survive for thousands of years.

Eventually we came to a big open pool with a waterfall at the end. We didn’t see any fish living in the water, but it harbored a large amount of algal material, and even a few little crabs. A family of doves also found refuge in the shade along the travertine near the waterfall.

The area has also been used by Catholic monks during certain periods of time, who took refuge in the remote caves in order to study their faith away from distractions, while still having access to life giving water.

Speaking of life giving water, nearby the canyon, and just outside the Ein Avdat National Park, we visited an ancient Nabataean water cistern that was carved into the ground. The Nabataean people lived in this area over 2000 years ago, loosely controlling a long trading route connected by these oases and water cisterns.

Cisterns like these were designed to gently collect water that flowed along nearby drainage routes during large, but infrequent, storms. Small diversions were built in to these drainages in such a way as to collect drinking water for storage without collecting large amounts of sediment. These diversions were built to be highly discrete, so that people other than the Nabataeans would never notice them. When threatened by foreign armies who sought to conquer them, the Nabataeans could shelter themselves in the desert where no other people could survive, largely due to these ingenious secret water cisterns.