Here I'm at Virginia Tech.

Thank you very much to everyone. I got VT safe and sound after 24hour travel around several airports in USA. I'm happy to be back here and start this wonderful project

Cheers

Daniele Scarponi

Extra Geology--Iceland Volcano!

Daniele's arrival was delayed by the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano on April 15, two days before he was scheduled to fly over to the U.S. The eruption shut down flights from Italy for days as the ash cloud spread across Europe and might have caused jet engines to fail. Not a good time to fly!

Happily, Daniele was able to get a flight out later and arrived here Tuesday April 20th.

We are looking forward to working with him on identification of the many shells that Jackie, Troy, and Ceseley have sorted out of the samples, and then some analysis of paleoenvironments and other research while he is here. It will be great to get his input on some of our outreach plans also.

Sorting

After Jackie returned from her trip to Italy, she taught me how to sort through the shells, so we could later identify them properly, I manually sift through the shells and debris, and collect the fauna, that are not broken. For the bivalves, I have to make sure there is a henge visible in order for them to be valuable for research. Cephlapods and gastropod shells must have a visible point on them as well, if this is broken, it will be harder to identify them later therefore these specimens are not collected. After each sample is sifted through. They are put in small boxes, labeled with the same specimen number that were on the outside of each envelope the sample came in. This is a tedious process. I was also made aware that Daniele will be arriving from Italy tomorrow. Pictures will be posted shortly.

Specimens and Lab in Bologna

This is the new lab that I worked in separating Gastropods and Bivalves and then identifying species for each sample. To the right on the table is where I separated Gastropods and Bivalves by hand and I used the microscope to go through the sample to find small/tiny shells that I missed. Then after I would use the microscope to identify species and count the number of species in a sample. In a sample of 100 shells, it would take me 30 minutes to accomplish this process.

The lab used to be located in this room to the left and below. But on March 25 I came to the lab in the morning and saw that the roof had collapsed. Specifically on top of our specimens! Below is where I had put the separated samples and this is where the majority of the roof had fallen. Some samples were destroyed (three) but I managed

to recover most of them.

Here is an example of the samples separated into Gastropod and Bivalve. Inside the paper bags is the individual sample from a certain well depth that was sampled every 5-10 cm increments.

Heleobia/Ventrosia stagnorum is a common gastropod species found in lagoonal environments in the Po Plain.

Abra segmentum is a very common bivalve occurring in lagoonal settings. They are very delicate and it is very rare to find them as whole shells, usually they are found as unique fragments.

Lentidium mediterraneum is the most abundant and common bivalve in open marine inner/outer shelf environments. They are very tiny, but are robust and whole shells are easy to recover. Within one sample, 1,000s can be found, which makes counting them a pain.