The Organic Jacuzzi
Hey Fort Followers, We had a bit of an exciting treat in the lab this past month, busting out one of our biggest tools on campus. This beautiful work of stainless steel and PVC is a flotation machine; it’s a large, divided basin with an attached water pump that helps us turn a bag of soil sample from the sit e into manageable, sorted collections of sediments. The first step in the process is collecting samples. The soils are collected from particular units with specific research questions in mind, often relating to unique qualities of the units they come from. The soil sample I processed came from N6 E2, and it was collected because evidence of burning, apparent from the ashy, oxidized nature of the soil matrix, was noticed at the 30-35cm depth. One might expect abundant charcoal from a fire-related feature which is an excellent candidate for gathering by flotation. The next stage involved filling the flotation machine with water and depositing the sample. The soil enters the mai
.jpg)
