Testing water quality for Bergen Municipality

The Bergen Kommune has recruited one of my classes to test the water quality at various areas around Bergen. The class is divided into groups to test treatment plant outputs, swimming beaches, and river systems. My group was selected to test three different beach sites in an area north of the city called Arna. Yesterday, I woke up at 5:45AM to get to the campus by 6:45 to be at Arna by 7:30 and finish our sampling before noon so that the E. coli samples can be examined. I did the intertidal biodiversity sampling, since I knew I would be efficient at it thanks to all my experience in Auckland. I sure know my alga!! I wanted to try to use the waders and take water samples for the phosphate and E. coli, but we would have used too much time to change the waders from person to person, and we were on a time crunch.

Even though we don't know all of the results of our data, from what we could see, the water didn't look tooooo clean at one of the sites, especially. It was right next to an industrial area. I think that knowing all of these things about water quality has made me more picky about where I'll go swimming . Shame.

[Ole is sampling for E. coli at the first site (Garnes). Beautiful morning!]

[Our second site near the industrial area. Starting to get numb fingers now!]

[Benedicte digging some sediment samples for us to look at under a microscope in the lab at UiB]

[One of our sampling squares - everyone at UoA Biology would recognize these things]

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Smalahove

Image
Many Norwegian traditions are distinctly regional. Even recipes are variable by region to go along with dialects that can be different by town separated by just 50 kilometers. This tradition, that both Marius and I were new to trying, was from a town just about an hour and a half east of Bergen called Voss....smalahove, or half of a sheep's head that is cooked in a broth for several hours. Smalahove comes from two Norwegian words: smale = sheep, and hove = head. It is served before Christmas with potatoes, mashed rutabaga, and red cabbage. Many of my friends were telling me that the cheek is supposed to be the best part, and others were saying that they wouldn't dare eat it. So I can now say that I have done something that many other Norwegians haven't dared try. I actually really enjoyed it! It had a texture like corned beef and had a very nice flavor. Marius went as far as to try the tongue, and thought that eating the eye was a normal thing, so tried that as well...bu...
Read more

In case you missed it, I moved back to Bergen

Image
But only temporarily, as of yet. In the beginning of the month I took the train from Oslo to Bergen. It was a beautiful trip cross-country ascending to over 1000m above sea level and back down again. My friend Knut said that I could stay at his place until an apartment was available to rent. I picked up the key from his mom, dropped off my things, and went back downtown to go to my Norwegian course. He was out of town for the week for work, and my first day of work was not until the following Monday. So I used the next five days reacquainting myself with Bergen....mainly by running around my old neighborhood. On Monday (Nov 10) I started my new (tempoary) part time job at UniResarch Sars International Centre for Marine Molecular Biology...UniSars for short. Technically I am called a "research technician", but I'm more like a glorified dishwasher at the moment. I made sure to tell the researchers that I am more than capable to help them if they need an extra pa...
Read more

FIFA 2010 South Africa

Image
FIFA 2010 kicked off on June 11 and today, New Zealand will today make a return to the world’s greatest football stage exactly 28 years to the day since their FIFA World Cup debut. The All Whites will take on Slovakia at 11PM (New Zealand time). It is hard to say whether it will be a good game or not; however, the fact that NZ is in the world cup for the first time in so long is enough of a reason to stay up so late. Saturday morning was the big USA vs. England match. The Americans are so happy with a tie that the New York Post had this as its front page: The time difference makes it a bit hard to keep up with seeing the games, but it's always fun to rub in the fact that the British tied the US in their first World Cup game this year to some British friends. Next exam is Saturday for Invertebrate Diversity. And only 20 days to go til Thailand!!
Read more