After weeks of fine tuning what I am going to do for my
research project I have finally come up with an experiment that I believe will
be a stepping stone for further research opportunities.
To start off let me introduce my scientific question,
Does temperature and
salinity have an effect on the leeching of Cadmium and Arsenic into water?
What I am planning on doing is running two separate experiments
testing the temperature’s effect as well as the salinity’s effect on the
leeching of the heavy metals from cigarette butts.
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| Graph from the EPA website |
I plan on testing two temperatures one based on the pre-industrial
average water temperatures, and then another at a predicted increased temperature
due to global climate change. I have read that by the year 2100 ocean
temperature will have risen by 1.2-2.6 degrees Celsius and that since 1980
ocean temperatures have risen by .85 degrees Celsius, but I am having trouble
finding out the exact temperatures. I may have to get today’s average and then add
or subtract based on these observations.
When testing the
salinity I will also be using two different concentrations to run my experiment.
I will be using a salinity concentration that is hyposaline (<30 ppt) and
one that is hypersaline (>38 ppt) to test to see if the increased salinity
has any effect on the amount of heavy metal leeching into the water. 
Due to my previous research on the experiment with cigarette
butts toxicity to minnows, I will be using one smoked cigarette butt with 1 cm
of remaining tobacco per liter of water. Because I will be using the two gallon
tanks in the lab I will use 7 liters of water with 7 cigarette butts. I will
take samples every day at the same time for five days during both experiments
and test them for both cadmium and arsenic and record my data. What I expect to
find is that the concentrations level out when the metals are fully leached out
of the cigarette butts, however I am interested to see if the salinity or
temperature increases or decreases this time period.
Amanda Sterns (sec. 51) I go to the beach a lot and can't stand the fact that smokers are constantly using the beach sand as their ash tray. I would think that the sand would really get far hotter than ocean surface water. Do you think the heating of these hundreds (if not millions) of cigarette butts in the sand combined with incoming tides, etc. would be an even bigger problem with leaching of cadmium and arsenic? Whatever--just YUK!!!!
ReplyDeleteHi Heather this is Caleb Douglas from OCE1001_02. Whenever I go to the Beach I think it is a disgrace to see people throwing their cigaretts on to the sand so that the ycan get washed up in the ocean and ruin the enviorment. How musch tobacco will it take to raise the ocean's salinity level?
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