I left you last time with the promise to write something more about the social aspect of our experience. As I said, I would like to acknowledge how each individual played a different role in the success of the experiment and, to put it in the terms I used in the previous entry, of the cooperation we managed to have.  In doing so, I want to thank any single member of my group for making this positive experience possible.

Mark was one of the engines of the project. He immediately functioned as a sort of glue that was the starting point, I think, of the cohesion we reached afterward. His knowledge of the ocean allowed us to proceed quickly through our experiment on Friday night and Saturday, giving us the opportunity to focus on salinity conditions that are close to the real ones. He also proved himself to be competent in technology, both with the logger pro software and the blogging process, skills that he successfully taught to those of us who were not so accustomed to blogging.

Levi was probably one of the people I knew less when the project started. It’s been instructive and pleasurable to work with him and discover his personality and potentialities. In particular, it is to be acknowledged the passion he showed during our lab time, when he behaved as a valid and effective member of the group. In more than one occasion he doubted assumptions that we were making about the experiment, showing to the rest of us flaws in our reasoning and leading us back to the right path.

About Mido, I think it must be highlighted the way he enjoyed and contributed to the laboratory part of our experiment, working particularly well with Levi in the preparation of the solutions we used and adopting high levels of accuracy. I’m thankful to him particularly for his vitality and his special ability to involve all of us in what we were doing, creating a relaxed but professional atmosphere that well contributed to the discover of each other we had the occasion to do.

About myself, I honestly think I did my part in the project, but I would prefer what our blog, our work and what Mark, Levi and Mido have written of me to be used in evaluating my contribution.

I desire to conclude this entry with a note about communication, which is one of the most important aspect of the group four project. As a group, we decided not to use this blog to communicate between us, preferring having direct and “material” meetings to using the blog for updating each other and dividing our jobs. It is my opinion that one of the keys to the social success of the project directly derives from our interacting personally. We chose to look at the blog as a way to post and share our results and comments with the rest of the world, but not as a medium of interaction between us. I think that it is common thought of Mark, Mido, Levi and me that the way we communicated, involving in evening meetings and, on Saturday, of a breakfast in the caf, was effective and enjoyable at the same time.

I’m thankful for having been given the opportunity to work with students I don’t usually spend my time with. Even without considering the actual results of our experiment, I do think it’s been an instructive experience, that finally turned out to be pleasurable to. We sometimes need to be reminded of the value and the worthiness of the people who are around us. This project managed to accomplish such a mission.

Thank you for being with us and look forward to reading your comments.

Mattia and the Mare Bahar group.

As we complete our Group 4 project, and prepare to sign off of the Mare Bahar blog, we thought we should explore our procedure critically.

Were we to conduct our experimentation again, we would likely do a few things differently. We had an extensive list of controlled variables, but we also identified some potential sources of error. I will detail them below.

Potential Sources of Error

• The beakers used in the preparation of our solutions have uncertainties of +/- 5%. Such an uncertainty would affect the salinity ofthe samples we created, as salt was added based on what we presumed to be a reliable 20ml measurement.
• As we transferred the solutions from the beakers in which they were prepared to the cuvettes in which they could be tested, there appeared to be potential for a source of error. Not all the solution in the beaker was used, so, if the solution had not been evenly mixed, the salinity of the samples in the cuvettes may not have been as accurate as desired.
• Though we exercised due diligence in our set-up and calibration of the spectrophotometer, it is possible that the measurements of the devices were not always accurate. It is not a terribly precise instrument, and may not have picked up variations in transparency on the scale we desired.

Were we to conduct this experiment again, we would make some changes. We would be more persistent in our efforts to obtain a salinity meter, which would give us the flexibility to ensure that all samples being tested were of the desired salinity, rather than relying on theoretical calculations. We would also streamline the solution-creation process, and make doubly sure that all solutions were properly mixed. If possible, we would also try to obtain a more sensitive/accurate spectrophotometer.

Overall, however, we feel that we conducted a controlled, professional experiment, and we feel that our results are valid. We hope you’ve enjoyed following our progress, and genuinely look forward to hearing your feedback.

Cheers,

The Mare Bahar Team

It is all but easy, to be honest, to start a project with people you have never worked with before, particularly in the context of a scientific research, where full collaboration between any member of the group is the key to the success of the whole project. This is an aspect that I experienced personally and that, as I could find by talking to the other students in my group, they lived too. Particularly at Pearson College, four people means four different countries, uses, costumes and mindsets that have to find a way to cooperate and, in the best case, to enjoy the task they are doing too. I believe it is important to realize at the starting point of any reflection that truthful cooperation between human beings in general is one of the hardest achievement that can ever be obtained. The greater is the diversity that separates the single individual from his peers in the group, the more challenging cooperation becomes, at least when the project is taken in a serious, comprehensive and professional way. From my perspective, my group has never lacked self-motivation or will to begin and carry out our investigation. We managed to decide our research question during the very first meeting we had and we immediately fixed the date of our second gathering. But, since we had never really had any occasion to get to know each other before the group 4 project, the social relations resulted slightly difficult at the beginning. In particular, communication represented the biggest challenge.

However, I’m really glad to say that we managed to overcome our initial problems quite quickly and effectively. How? There is no specific answer to that, as well as there is no a specific formula for the success of any project. We just started to work together, dividing the tasks we needed to complete between the different members of the group and everybody always fulfilled the expectations of the others. This not only allowed us to be on the top of our schedule and proceed quickly with our experiment, but it also established an environment of collaboration that eventually developed in the opportunity to get along with the other members of the group, Mark, Levi and Mido. The differences I was talking about in my first paragraph became potentials, different mindsets meant a diversity of approaches to our research question. We even ended up making jokes and having fun while comfortably sitting around a table in the caf on Saturday morning.

But how did any single member of the group contribute to the social aspect of our investigation and how did we keep track of our progresses? To read the answers, you’ll have to wait until the next episode…

My mind has just run out of its daily dose of reflection…

Thank you for reading and don’t miss the next entries!

Mattia and the Mare Bahar group

Hello,

Saturday was the official working day for the Group 4 Project. After waking up bright and early to watch a clip of “Rocky” frolicking in the ocean, we sat down with Catrin and had an interesting discussion about our project.

We discussed our procedure to date, as well as our results. Ultimately, in order to test our research question a little further, we obtained a sample of true sea-water from Pedder Bay, and placed in in the spectrophotometer. We were hoping to show that, perhaps, using dilution, we could increase transparency, which would indicate that, though NaCl may not be the main factor, other chemicals in concentration in seawater have an effect on transparency.

Yet, our final experiment followed the path of all the ones that came before. Even fresh, salty sea water, direct from the docks of Pearson College, resulted in 100% Transmittance at all wavelengths when placed in the spectrophotometer.

Below is the graph generated in the testing of the Sea Water Sample. This graph is measuring the absorbance of light across the visible spectrum, not the % Transmittance. The message is the same.

As is plainly visible, the results are 0 absorbance across the board.

Conclusion

With these results in our notebooks, as well as the results from our main experiment last Friday, we were prepared to answer our research question, conclude our experiment, and finish our Group 4 Project.

Our original research question was: “What are the effects of salinity on Seawater transparency”. After a long process of experimentation, we now have an answer. Between 18.3ppt and 54.4ppt, as well as at full saturation and at the Pedder Bay docks, Salinity (NaCl) has no discernible effect on Seawater transparency.

Opportunities for further exploration on this topic abound. Would other salts found in seawater, such as bromides,  have an effect on the transparency of seawater? Based on the data obtained, we are unable to explain why salinity did not affect transparency. However, like most experiments, ours opened a whole new discussion, and has created a wealth of possibilities for further research.

Al-Salam Alaykom, Hello everybody,

I’m really grateful for having the opportunity to outline my perspective about the experiment that we have  done in group 4 project. Our gang is made up of very a fantastic combination, with two chemistry students, one physicist, one marine scientistand two bio students. I was actually amazed with the collaboration in our team. They are amazing students;  Mattia from Italy, Levi from France, and the British Columbian, Mark.

We took advantage of the group 4 project to get to know each other really well. I am not good friends with any of them, but after we started working together I recognized that these guys are really nice, and really reliable. Before starting the experiment we made out a plan and the hours that we are going to spend on everything, and we we started working really efficiently even from the beginning. Everybody had a mission to finish and everybody was to show his professional skills in working perfectly.

Friday evening, after a happy easter weekend, we decided to start our experiment earlier than it was expected. We showed our understanding in labs by dressing with the suitable clothes and tools, knowing where our equipment was, and using the equipment really well.

During our experiment, we worked together hand by hand, taking everyone’s opinion to make our experiment as acurrate as we can. We measured the tranperancy of water at different rates of salt and had our surpring results which were basiccaly nothing, because we found out tha the transperancy of water doesn’t change by the rate of salinity, once again we showed that we wanted a perfect acurrate result so we did our experiment again and again with the same result.

We cleaned up as a team and discussed our results at the end of the experiment. Afterwards, we talked to Catrin and she gave us some advice as an wonderful teacher who knows alot about biology and chemistry.

I actually enjoyed the experiment so much. Thanks for giving us the opportuninty to do so.

Thanks again,

Mido and the Mare Bahar Group 4 Team

Bonjour tous le monde, hello every one,

I’m really proud to write my first post on this blog. Friday 9 of April after a nice Easter at Race Rocks we all as decided at 8pm in the Chemistry Lab to work on our Lab experiment. Other post have been written to talk about the process and the experiment we did. In this post I’m going to try to give an other perspective of group 4 project and share more of the social aspect.

Mark, Mattia and Mido are people who I don’t spend much time with in Pearson daily life to be honest, and this was a very good opportunity to learn to know them better and share our wide scientific knowledge. I wasn’t so excited at the begining to work on a friday night on a science project in the Chemistry Lab but we ended up having lot’s of fun. Mattia was a great Italian who showed a lot of modesty about his wide science knowledge and helped us a lot ! He made sure we had the spectrophotometer and was welling to help during the whole evening. Mido is used to working in the Bio/Chem lab and therefore could very quickly find all the materials we needed which was very usefull. And Mark showed nice skills about information and could set up his computer and classify the data very quickly. This wide amount of team knowledge and science culture gave us the opportunity to move pretty quickly on the good road.

Discussions were an important part of the process, and every one gave great contributions: I remember for example that we first used a non graduated pipet and tryed to feel the becher until we rich the 20ml line but pretty quickly Mattia told me that it would be a better idea to use 20ml graduated pipette which would be more accurate. We end up finding that the beakers were at least 3 or 4 ml wrong ! Mark was very important on the social aspect as well and took it very seriously, he proposed that we should all put a jacket and glasses “just in case salt come in your eyes” and took a big amount of nice pictures which are good memories of that evening; he did all the computer work and data processing with Matia’s help. Mido for Palestine and myself had a lot of fun to prepare every sample. We braked down the process and while I was working on preparing 20ml beakers of distilled water he was using the balance to calculate the mass of salt we would need for each sample.

We end up working until 11pm in the Chemistry Lab and it was a great time.

Thank you !

Hello World,

As mentioned in our previous blog post, we’ve completed an experiment that answers our research question.

Decked in lab coats and goggles, your three intrepid scientists spent a friday night hard at work in the Bio/Chem lab. To test our question, we decided to prepare a number of samples of varying salinity. We started with a sample of 35 parts per thousand (ppt) of salt, which, in our 20ml samples, equated to 0.581g of NaCl. 35ppt is the average salinity of oceans around the world.

The beakers that we used have uncertainties of +/- 5%, which could have impacted the salinity of our samples.

We then split the 20ml sample into 5 x 4ml cuvettes. We tested these cuvettes in the spectrophotometer, analyzing the full visible spectrum of light. We also compared the 403.4nm wavelength. We set the spectrophotometer to measure % Transmittance over time.

Our results for the 35ppt sample were consistantly 100% transmittance. So, in following our procedure, we created an additional 6 20ml solutions, ranging in salinity from 18.3ppt to 54.4ppt. This range of salinities far exceeds the 33-37ppt salinity spectrum considered “normal” by the University of Carolina (1). However, when we once again split the sample up and tested each cuvette, we ended up with the same results: 100% Transmittance of all wavelengths. Below is a table of our results, once again at the 403.4nm wavelength.

Salinity (ppt)         Transmittance (%)
18.3                                      100
24.3                                      100
30.3                                      100
35.1                                       100
42.5                                       100
48.4                                       100
54.4                                       100

We tested various salinities in between these two samples, but, finding no difference in results, decided to go even higher. We completely saturated a 20ml sample with NaCl, even leaving suspended salt on the bottom of the beaker. However, even the saturated solution produced 100% Transmittance results virtually across the board. During the first 10 seconds of testing it showed results between 80-90%, due perhaps to suspended, un-dissolved salt, but these numbers rose very quickly and were soon entirely 100%.

So, based on the results of our experiment, we are prepared to answer our original research question. Salinity, at least when concerning NaCl, in room temperature, has no effect on the transparency of water.

We are trying to decide, as a group, what our next step in this investigation will be. As always, stay posted. We’ll keep you up to date with future happenings, and we’ll also elaborate a bit more on this experiment.

Cheers,

The Mare Bahar Team

(1) http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/Water/salinity.html&edu=high

We’re pleased to let you know that our group 4 project is moving forward quickly.

In keeping with the “oceans” theme of the project, we’ve going to try to answer the research question: “What are the effects of Salinity on Seawater Transparency”.

We’ll post more information on our procedure soon. Also, we’ve already conducted some experiments, and we’ll fill you in on our results in the days to come.

For now, hold your breath. The pictures below should make you excited. We sure are.

- Mark, Mattia, Muhammed and Levi

Hello everyone!

This is the official first blog post of the Mare Bahar Group 4 project. We are Levi, Mattia, Muhammed and Mark, and in the coming days and weeks we will be using this blog to update you on the progress of our project.

We intend to study the effects of salinity on the transparency of water. To do so, we propose using a spectrophotometer to measure the transparency of several different samples of water, all with different salinities. This is still, however, just an idea. If we choose to pursue this research topic, we will also investigate, through research, the effects of transparency on marine life forms, and in doing so apply biological knowledge to the project.

We have met twice now. The equipment request deadline is approaching, so our current priority is securing our required materials. We are also beginning research.

Stay tuned. We look forward to keeping you updated on the progress of our group 4 project.

Cheers,

Mark, Levi, Mattia and Muhammed