Lately we’ve been trying to figure out how to track the movement of the Sólheimajökull glacier to determine where to take samples of the soil, which we are then going to extract microbe DNA and thenot sequence that DNA with the MinION  (as seen previously in the blog post wherein Emi was being very excited about her new gadget.) Moving away from the maps, we’ve passed the location torch to Dan and Ai Lena and georeferencing software, QGIS, as I found through several hours of soul crushingly fruitless work to get our three maps to the same scale that the analog method was not the best route. However with that issue off my plate, I am freed to work on honing my soil sampling, protocol following, and biology learning skills. So yesterday, for example, Dan, Cait, and I worked on practicing our pipetting so today we can gather soils from around campus to do a practice run of our DNA extraction kit and presumably the sequencing kit as well. I also learned that bacteria and archaea are different, also that I have a pocket that combines three pockets in one.