6/21/16 Blog

In today's meeting we solely discussed the element Mercury - the properties of it, the effects it has on humans, its uses in society, and important experiments that his has been researched in. We began today with a discussion of the paper we had to read for the week. This was a scientific article based out of Yale University, and the research was done close by in the New Haven Harbor. In this experiment, the goal was to determine how the concentration of Mercury has changed over time in the harbor. In order to effectively do this, the group took sediment core samples from outlined locations in the harbor, brought them to a lab and used a mass spectrometer to determine the concentration of various metals in the core. What they determined was that the concentration of Mercury has decreased in recent years, with a correlation between Mercury changes and other metals.  Additionally, they realized that there was a huge variance of Hg concentrations throughout the harbor, so many samples are needed to accurately show the variance.