Last week Derek and I lined up all of the sections of lake core “E” in order to identify any transitions that we wanted to investigate. After opening up each of the 5 thrusts and laying them end-to-end, we decided to look at a transition in E4 (the fourth thrust down from the sediment-water interface).
We chose this section because lots of the core was a reddish-brown color, but then all of a sudden it changed to a dark black color, indicating that there were many organic materials present at this time. This is especially interesting because usually the organic materials are near the top of the core, but in core “E” we found the most organic-rich materials to be at the very bottom.
Derek and I cut out some pieces of sediment out from the transition and began picking organics out of these pieces under a microscope. We will send these to Beta Analytic (a radiocarbon dating facility) to determine approximately when this transition took place, and our class will do some investigating into any possible climate events that occurred at this time.
