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  • Writer's pictureHighlands IE

Science is Hard Sometimes

Updated: Sep 28, 2021


As scientists (or aspiring scientists, in Highlands IE students’ case), our job is to make sense of what we see around us. Our curious minds are driven to search for unbiased truth that can be tested and replicated. As Captain Kirk famously said, we dream of boldly going where no man has gone before -- we work tireless hours to cure cancer, unlock the mysteries of the galaxy, and bring back species from the brink of extinction. We develop poignant hypotheses and practice dependable methods of data collection to hopefully draw sound conclusions and formulate reliable rules of scientific fact.


But here’s the catch: the natural world is complicated, and in order to detangle the massive web that is our planet, it’s going to take more than a few tries. Although students at the Highlands Field Site may not be doing as groundbreaking and complex research as Stephen Hawking or Jane Goodall, experimentation of any kind requires countless hours of trial, error, and revision in order to get the worthwhile results.


This past week, IE students intimately got acquainted with this aspect of science. Our capstone class is interested in understanding how microplastic concentrations in the Chattooga watershed are affected by storm events. We decided to tackle this massive issue by collecting river water samples before, during, and after storms. We also wanted to see how microplastics are getting into our rivers through the atmosphere, so we set out stainless steel buckets to collect daily microplastic and rain deposition. The plan was to compare these collected samples against filtered DI water to see the changes in microplastic concentrations in the riparian ecosystem. Easy, right?


Students collecting data in the Chattooga River for the capstone research project.

Our first day in the lab at Western Carolina proved us very, very wrong. We were quite excited to filter and analyze all the samples we had collected over the previous weeks. However, we quickly learned that all did not go as planned. Turns out that microplastics are absolutely everywhere - in the air we breathe, on our clothes, on every surface. No matter how many precautions we took to minimize contamination, we were still finding exorbitant amounts of microplastics even in our blank samples. If we are getting contamination in our blanks from the lab, how can we calculate microplastic concentration coming from the atmosphere and storms with confidence? Things took another turn for the worse. When we went to filter our atmospheric deposition samples, we found that the steel buckets had rusted and collected loads of debris.


Attempting to filter atmospheric deposition samples contaminated with debris and rust.

Before we can continue with our study, the students will have to both identify sources of contamination (using the scientific method!) as well as implement alternative sample collection methods to ensure the study goes more smoothly.


Basically, science is hard sometimes, y’all. But messing up isn’t in vain; for every misstep, we learn a valuable lesson about our world and we contribute to the growing mass of scientific knowledge so that researchers in the future won’t make the same mistakes.


-NM

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