Day 4

A more hands on day today. We started a little late (technically difficulties one would imagine), then rotated through three stations. First off was a GPS tutorial wherein we walked around and got ourselves accustomed to using the trimble by making a smiley face over campus. Next up was the XRF, an X-ray machine which measures the makeup of soil samples. Yet another tool to help us determine as much as we can on the island, although I have yet to see how exactly these tools will come together. The final station was an introduction to the spectrograph, which allows you to measure the amount of light reflected by vegetation. This tool looked rather difficult to use but I don’t think we’ll be using it much anyways (at least not without the guidance of an expert). After that was a powerpoint about the work of Dr. Lipo on Easter Island where he revealed that his research will be published tomorrow as the cover article in National Geographic and will soon appear on a PBS Nova series. We ended the day on a fun note as we tested the blimp camera for the first time. This involved quite a bit of setup, then plenty of people running around trying to make sure we didn’t drop a very very expensive camera on the sidewalk. In the end we managed to avoid disaster, although I’m not sure we got too many great pictures out of it…