Internships

Yapei Zhang ’14

My internship this summer at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences was part of a ­larger collaborative project to better understand how anthropogenic nitrogen ­fixation affects nitrogen deposition in the North Atlantic Ocean. My project focused on ­isolating a valid method for the collection and storage of rain and aerosol samples ­deposited over the island of Bermuda in order to obtain the best signal-to-noise ratio for ­determining the true concentrations of specified ions. In order to achieve this, event-based rain samples were collected over the period of 12 weeks. Each sample collection was ­divided into portions and each portion was subsequently subjected to a different set of treatment and ­storage methods. Each treated portion was then analyzed on the ion chromatography,an instrument that measures specific ion concentrations in the ­sample. These ­obtained concentration values were subsequently compared to determine the best method for sample preservation. A similar set of tests was also conducted for dry aerosol deposition samples.