It’s been kind of a wacky but beautiful week for me. After returning
from my Father’s Day camping trip with Dad, I’ve been exhausted and sleep looks
so good but the energy from Ramadan lures me into staying up late. So now I’m
nursing endless cups of chai tea at the office just to keep myself awake! I’ll
press the reset button with a long sleep-in this weekend.
Anyway, it’s getting to that time where I’m preparing to return to school for my graduate degree! And I figured I’d share a bit about my work to see if anyone’s interested in learning about it, discussing it, or even potentially collaborating on it.
Anyway, it’s getting to that time where I’m preparing to return to school for my graduate degree! And I figured I’d share a bit about my work to see if anyone’s interested in learning about it, discussing it, or even potentially collaborating on it.
Basically, I’ll be studying the lithium-rich waters of an aquifer that’s
located in the Atacama Desert in Chile. This whole project is cool for a number
of reasons, the first being that this happens to be the driest desert in the
entire world second only to Antarctica. Yet, it happens to have a bunch of
springs that have created these small pools all over the place. If you
calculate the evaporation rate on these suckers, you’d see that the spring has
to be pulling in a mind-blowingly huge amount of water from the ground (cuz it
ain’t coming from the sky). My advisor has already worked with a previous
student on calculations for the size of this aquifer’s watershed, and it’s
calculated to be so big that it stretches into Argentina. It’s bananas.
Random fact: This one pool in the Atacama is a big-time breeding ground
for flamingos. Seriously. So random.
So what am I going to do in this super-cool-freak-show of a desert? I’m
basically going to help to figure out where the lithium is coming from. This
turns out to be an important question, since this one spot happens to be one of
the biggest sources of lithium in the world. We all need batteries! And, on top
of that, I get to learn Spanish!
I’m excited to share more about how my research is going as it progresses.
Stay tuned!
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