By Trista McKenzie As I’ve been sitting in the Sydney Airport for the last ten hours waiting for my horrendously delayed flight home to Honolulu to finally take off, I’ve had some time to reflect a bit about my stay in Australia and the connections I’ve made. While I came here to specifically work with one person, I’ve formed working relationships and connections with many. From graduate students working on …
By Trista McKenzie Since returning from fieldwork in Sydney, I have been spending a lot of time in the lab processing samples. Radium is one type of sample we are analyzing, which is a naturally-occurring radioactive tracer for groundwater. One of the advantages of using radium is that there are four naturally-occurring isotopes, all with different half-lives. One half-life represents the amount of time for half of the unstable atom in the nucleus …
By Trista McKenzie We’ve just returned to Coffs Harbour after a successful week of fieldwork in Sydney! We were able to cover five different sites in Sydney Harbour and Botany Bay, which was really because we had a great field team. Sampling Plan At each site, we made “groundwater wells” by digging in the sand until we reached water. Each well represented a different section of the beach with respect …
By Trista McKenzie This last week I have been mostly preparing for fieldwork in Sydney. This includes not only preparing and packing supplies for fieldwork, but also discussing the sampling plan with everyone that will be joining and assisting in the field. My project looks at how perigean spring tides (also called king tides) influence groundwater and wastewater discharge to Sydney Harbour and Botany Bay. King tides are the highest tides …
By Trista McKenzie I have been in Australia for four days now, and so far it has been a relatively easy transition. I am a PhD student at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa working with Henrietta Dulai and during my time in Australia, I am working with Isaac Santos at the National Marine Science Centre, which is part of Southern Cross University in Coffs Harbour. My research here involves …
