Back from Italy

Well, I got back from Bologna Italy, and I come bearing samples. We have collected three new cores. One core was cleaned, processed, and counted while I was in Italy. The other two were cleaned of sediment and brought back here to be processed and counted. When completed, this should bring our total number of cores to 16. These new cores are from a different project (and have different quadrant numbers) but were taken from the southern part of the Po plain. Our sampling in this area has been a bit sparse compared to the northern area, so we wanted to get a descent spread of the entire area. Now we have the entire area well sampled and can do east/west and north/south transects when we analyze the data. The two remaining new cores that were brought back to Virginia will be processed in the early part of this summer, adn then the project will focus on data analysis and the writing of papers.

The time I spent in Italy was both productive and an amazing learning experience. I had never been to Italy before, and had only been to Europe once previously when I was very young. Italy is an amazing place. I hope I get the chance to go back there again.