Somehow we have already gone through 5 weeks of our summer research! We’ve been very busy doing several different things compiling and analyzing data and continuing our readings of papers written about the Permian-Triassic Boundary in the Karoo. Some of the highlights have been getting our CHN analyzer (which measures the amount of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen in a sample) to start working, finally finishing detailed stratigraphic columns, and studying the thin sections from our samples. The thin sections tell us the proportion of different minerals in a sample, and the size of the grains, making them very important for identifying exactly what type of rock it is. In the coming weeks we will continue to analyze data from thin sections, the CHN analyzer, and outcrop photographs, and begin to draft a paper summarizing our findings for each of our sections.