Deanna-Sample Sieving

Sample Sieving!!

I always enjoy actual lab time. Trying to be so accurate and precise, so you can have good data, is exciting to me!

Sieves, scale, and beakers

Before lab, I made sure that my samples (which were from the sand dunes and near the dunes on the beach), were very dry. We used a 150 um (micrometers) sieve that was about 8 inches diameter with a lid and a pan.

Grace showing us how it is done. Shake, shake, shake...

I measured out 200 mL of my control sample and poured it into a plastic weighing pan, and weighed the sample. I, of course, recorded the data for a future graph.

After getting the mass, I poured the control sample into the sieve, replaced the lid and shook it back and forth for 1 minute.

I took the sieve apart and weighed the contents of the material that remained on the screen (>150 um) and the fine particulates that were in the pan (≤150 um).

I repeated this process with the vegetation sample and recorded the weights.

I have to say, my error was nominal and I feel like my lab was a success! 

But what is all this data going to tell us? Is there a relationship between sediment size and the presence of vegetation? What other kind of info might we discover?

Now if we could only get our data together as a class, we could make a good graph to tell us the answers to the questions we seek...