The Earth We Live In

As a child, my dad would sometimes drive me and my siblings over to a store called "Dave's Down to Earth Rock Shop". Inside you could find beautiful minerals polished into beads including small rabbits the size of your thumbnail, blue and purple geodes cracked open like eggs, and fossils tucked into petrified mud on bright glass shelves. After looping around the store, a doorway can be found where stairs follow down to the basement containing an array of fossilized creatures. To this day I still have my treasured bag of rocks and fossils from the shop. Now I am an undergrad studying Environmental Geology, and I can seek out rocks on my own with some contextual understanding on how these formations metamorphosed from exposure to various degrees of heat, pressure, and tectonic shifts over a long, long ... long period of time. To think that something so tuff and seemly stationary continues to change and evolve is pretty wacke! 

So now you know that rocks really do rock and you that you never want to take them for granite. I do however have interests of my own aside from these awesome rocks. 

Like a rock or mineral, I myself have had exposure to things which have caused my interests to evolve. The summer after my freshman year of college, I was given the opportunity to work in my school's Beloit Urban Garden for the summer and the local Community Sharing Garden. Before that summer I had scoffed at gardening, a task that involved much weeding I learned from the chore my dad assigned to my siblings and I in our elementary school years. We also were told to harvest dozens and dozens of smelly tomatoes which coated our hands in yellow pollen.
Gardening now brings me great joy -- to be in the sun and around happy plants raised from a tiny seed. Plants are pretty wild!! 

Additionally, I am an avid composter and I am proud to say that my family now voluntarily save veggie and fruit scraps in a bucket sitting proudly on our kitchen floor. Once full, the contents are dumped into our home compost pile where a party of insects and microbes feast on the pile night and day. I am also having fun picking up playing piano again amidst my daily activities, bike riding on nature hugged trails, and spending time with my much loved Red Eared Slider turtles. 

The margin at which these personal interests converge with the research I am doing this summer is within the movement of environmental and sustainable actions. Every being, critter, nook, and cranny within this planet makes it (and us) exist. My wish is for there to be an equal love and respect for our earth and each other, for this planet you are sitting in has allowed life to survive through its finite resources and beauty.

My research project focuses on learning how the presence of dissolved iron affects the growth of cyanobacteria and understanding the nutrient content within some of the Red Cedar Watershed rock formations. For my end result, I hope to discuss possible ways in which cyanobacteria blooms can be mitigated in waterways including Tainter and Menomin Lake. These waters contain speedy fish, muddy turtles, and sun-soaking plants stretching up to the sky.

Lets clean these waters not only for ourselves but for the life which thrives in it.