Week One USFSP

This week at USFSP was an introduction to the many different parts of oceanography that we will be covering over these next five weeks. There are four different parts of oceanography; physical, chemical, geological, and biological. As for the geological aspect of oceanography when taking a core sample from the sea floor, the newest sediment is always on the top and the oldest is always on the bottom. The reason for this is that new sediment is produced by detritus, shells, etc. and falls to the sea floor to make a new layer. This does not happen very fast, a small layer of sediment can tell you information about the sea floor from about twenty years ago. When you do collect a core sample from the sea floor, most of the time you do not get very distinct layers of sediment because events and organisms can mess up these layers. This was very interesting to me because you do not normally think that layers of sediment on the sea floor can tell you information about what the sediment was made of years ago, or when the sediment was mixed around and what might have caused it. On the last day we did classification of organisms. We were given five unknown organisms and we had to identify what species they were. This was very challenging for me because I have not had a ton of experience with identifying organisms or never seeing some of these organisms before. I learned that you cannot rely on the color of any organisms because when they are preserved after a while their color goes away, so you have to rely on key features you see on the organisms. After identifying a couple, I started to get the hang of using all of the different field guides. This week was packed with great information that will be useful for the next five weeks to come.