My General Oceanography 1 course thus far has been incredibly interesting. Right now the focus is on marine geology. Two weeks ago I went with my class to collect sediment samples from a small transect of Kane’ohe Bay. The samples were dried then last Wednesday I analyzed the distribution of the size of the sand sized particles. This was done, not on a ship at sea, but in the lab at Hawaii Pacific Universities Hawaii Loa Campus. In the transect we took only 3 samples, yet the analysis of those three samples took about 5 hours. I have yet to look at my data and will be starting on that soon.

I like to keep up on the goings on of the marine environment, not just Hawaii, but what is happening near San Diego, California (my home town). I tend to know better what is going on in the waters of San Diego, but that is because I’ve lived there for most of my life. It’s not that I’m uninterested in what is going on in Hawaiian waters, in fact I would say I’m more interested in what is going on in Hawaiian waters as it affects me the most, it’s just that my sources of data for San Diego are well established, where I’m just getting started here in Hawaii. It was recently brought to my attention that there was some major legislation passed recently in California that establishes some large marine protected areas. Many of the areas have already been protected, but in Southern California it is just now in the proposal stage. There are currently three proposals , all of which require public comment. There is a meeting coming up for just such comment, too bad I can’t attend.

Well I have a busy week coming up and it looks like my midterms just might align to create a perfect storm of test taking.

Till next time!
-Andrew