Modern lake geochemistry

My project focused on the study of Lake McCarrons in the St. Paul area. The lake is eutrophic and the city council had built a wetlands at one end of the lake in hopes of cleaning some of the nutrients out of the lake. The wetlands project didn't work as well as they anticipated and I believe was more or less abandoned. There was little to no information surrounding the history of the lake -- perhaps the lake became eutrophic due to the large residential runoff area into the lake. Or perhaps the lake was always like this.ÝAmy Myrbo (graduate student) set out to create a historical profile of the lake by studying the water over the span of a couple years and by disecting several mud cores from the bottom of the lake. Different processes used to analize the water and mud were DIC extraction and Mass Spec analysis, Carbon Coulometry (TC and TIC), and manual observation, all of which I learned how to execute. At the end of my time here we were just starting to get our data in so there wasn't enough time to start drawing conclusions from any of it, but hopefully she will be able to do so later this fall.