Mercury Moss Project

Rachel and I are working on a mercury moss project that deals with determining the amount of airborne mercury near an incinerator that's located near us. This project was first brought up to us by Dr.Anthony Carpi, he’s a professor at John Jay College in New York, and he had already performed this experiment so he was here at the museum with us last week helping us with our project. Today, we got our gloves on and started working with Lynne and she helped us rinse containers with mild ivory soap, which the containers we rinsed will be filled with distilled water and the sphagnum moss will soak in this distilled water for 24 hours. Once we did that we closed the container with its lid that was also rinsed with the ivory soap. For the poles that will be placed on the sites located in our map, we made measurements on the poles to indicate where we wanted the construction shop to drill the holes, the shorter pole that goes across the longer pole is 14 inches long and will have a ¼ inch hole through it to attach it to the longer pole, and it will have 2 ⅛ inch holes on each side of it to have the strings go through them and hold the moss. I drew a picture of how the poles should look like to give to the construction shop, and these poles are going to be placed near residents home that live near the incinerator, so Rachel and I also made phone calls to these residents in order to get their permission to place these moss samples. I’m super excited for the turn out of this project, I feel like the initiation of this project is off to a great start.