Stalagmites and Play groups : )

James collected these stalagmites himself from an underground cave in Mexico last summer. After cleaning and polishing them, making boxes and encasing them in epoxy, and finally removing them from the boxes, he is now almost ready to cut them and view them under the microscope. This is really exciting news for many reasons, one being that this is what his thesis is going to be about. The hope is to find mud layers inside the stalagmite, indicating that there was a flood in the cave, which in turn is an indication of past hurricane events. Stalagmites can record this information for as long as they've been growing (up to 100 thousand years!). With this information they can create future climate models.
Here's James scrubbing with a wire brush:



Sasha showing us the stalagmite inside of the epoxy:




She helped in many ways. Here she is scraping the tape:



Modeling the gloves:



And being cute:



Here she is in James' office:



...where you can clearly see that he's a proud daddy:




PLAY GROUP:

Sasha (and mommy's) play group. Both Sasha and I are going to miss them very much!