It's (Acid) Raining, It's Pouring

Day Nine - June 20

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A cool type of sample that we regularly test are rain samples, and today we got in a very large batch of 97 bottles to test. The first thing we need to do is record the pH and Conductivity of every bottle. It can be quite a daunting task, but it is really interesting (and a little disheartening) to see just how many of the rain samples collected are acidic. Acid Rain is a result of pollution, so it was kind of sad to see today that almost every single sample taken was acidic to some degree.

After testing for pH and conductivity, the next thing to do is prepare the samples for IC analysis. Since the matrix of these is just water, we can run them through the instrument without having to do any dilutions; just a simple vial up is all that is necessary.

Since this was such a large batch, it took me all day to process these acid rains, so I wasn't able to do anything else for today. Hopefully we can get all of these onto the instrument soon, so we can get their reports out to where they need to go.