Blog 8: Independent Component 1 Proposal

Only in my case, I will just leave them where I find them. Kind of sad isn't it. Darn you Department of the Interior (shakes fist angrily in the air).

1.  Describe in detail what you plan to do for your 30 hours.

- For my independent component, I plan on attending Gem-O-Rama in Trona California (it’s the event Mr. Holt talked to us about). Specifically, I plan on attending the morning events of Gem-O-Rama. The first morning event takes place Saturday morning and is called the "Mud Trip" where attendees dig through mud to find crystals of hanksite, trona, and borax; following the ending of that event, my plan is to visit the Trona Pinnacles where I plan to hike and hunt for fossils or possibly other types of minerals for the rest of the afternoon. On Sunday morning, I want to go to the "Pink Halite" event of Gem-O-Rama and then depart once again to the Trona Pinnacles in the afternoon; however, this time I will be there for less time, since the next day is school. After the trip, I plan on writing a paper about the viability of there being fossils at the Trona Pinnacles and what kind of environment these natural landmarks suggest ancient organisms lived in; this paper will later be peer reviewed and I will post the final draft on my blog as a google doc share-able link.

2.  Discuss how or what you will do to meet the expectation of showing 30 hours of evidence.

- To show evidence of my work, I plan on taking various pictures of myself doing the activities I just described, except the paper. I'm also entertaining the possibility of uploading several video logs of my daily progress and posting these videos as links on my blog, but I wish for the senior team to give me their opinions about that idea. For the research paper, I plan on posting a separate resources log into my working bibliography and on posting my pre-edited version of my paper as well as my final draft on my blog.

3.  Explain how what you will be doing will help you explore your topic in more depth.

- For the most part, the events I will participate in Gem-O-Rama closely reflect several parts of the acquisition of fossils. For example, the "Mud Trip" event parallels the jobs of excavators at the La Brea Tar Pits, who treat the fossils they find with specific chemicals to safely remove them from their surrounding matrix, since you also have to specifically use brine to remove the mud from the crystals without causing them harm. Also, the "Pink Halite" trip closely resembles the act of finding fossils in the field since Paleontologists need to keep a sharp eye out to find an exposed part of a fossil and it also shows the fact that you have to know where fossils to can be to even find any because if you recall the video Mr. Holt showed then one can see that the people looking through the salt flats were obviously going to find nothing. In short, the "Pink Halite" trip would help me see how useful knowing where fossils can be and being observant of the ground can lead to great finds and in the case of this trip, that find would be crystals in the stream Mr. Holt showed us. The trips to the Trona Pinnacles would help me explore my topic because I would literally look for fossils, which makes me apply my knowledge of what types of rock would host fossils and it would make me keep an observant demeanor to spot exposures. However, I won't be collecting the fossils I find since the land where the Trona Pinnacles are located on prohibits the extraction of fossils. The only artifacts I will take are any rock samples within the vicinity of the fossil that I could possibly use to uncover the type of environment that the fossilized organism lived in.  Furthermore, I will notate measurements of, observations of, and locations of any fossils I find on my trip which would reflect the field journal that most Paleontologists keep. In addition to the trips, the research paper would help me gain a deeper understanding of Paleontology by putting me in a position where I have to do both a fact based and observation based analysis of the Trona Pinnacles in terms of the topics I stated earlier. Overall, these activities would help me explore Paleontology more deeply by helping me explore what aspect of a Paleontologist’s work I would like to direct my overall project towards.