Great Salt Water Analysis

Determining how the salt levels change as you get further away from the Great Salt Lake

*I did get permission to get samples from the Great Salt Lake. I only got 4 ounces of each 5 samples. So, I only took 20 ounces total

Background of the Great Salt Lake

The great Salt Lake has about 4.5 to 4.9 billion tons. The reason why the Great Salt Lake is so salty is because it doesn’t have an outlet attach to it. Since it as so much salt, it cannot support fish and most of the aquatic specie, but there are several types of algae that live in the lake. Also brine shrimp and brine flies can survive because they can tolerate the high contents of salt. So much of the lake has shrink. There are some spots on the shoreline where it shrinks about 15 miles.

Introduction
I was curious to see if the salt levels would decrease as you went further out from the Great Salt Lake. I wanted to test the Great Salt Lake because I thought it would give me better results since the Great Salt Lake has a lot of salt in it. I wanted to find a spot in the Great Salt Lake that had mostly soil without the sand and rocks everywhere. I decided to go ten out further every time to get a sample so that I could get a variety of samples. I started at the edge of the water and ended when I was up in the grass area.

Samples #
Description

1
Was the softest soil sample and had the least amount of rocks in it.

2
Pretty much the same as sample 1 with its characteristics.

3
Had some small clumps in it

4
Had a lot of clumps in it and there were some rocks in it

5
Had a lot of rocks in it and the soil was darker than the rest of the other soil samples

From these soil samples, you could see the different characteristics of the soil samples. As you would go further down to get samples, the soil would start to clump together, there were more rocks and the soil coloring went from light to dark.

Research question
· Determining how the salt levels change as you get further away from the Great Salt Lake?
· How much will each sample take of the silver nitrate to titrate the solutions

Methodology
The dependent variable in this internal assessment is how much of the silver nitrate solution does it take for it to change colors when you titrate the 5 samples each 3 times. The independent variable of the internal assessment is using 3 drops of the indicator potassium chromate in each titration, using 2 ounces of each soil sample and using 5.0 M of each of the samples.
A control variable is that I will titrate each sample 3 separate times to get a total of 15 titrations. I titrate each sample 3 times so that I could get consistent readings.

Raw data
Sample number
How many times needed to titrate

1
1

2
1

3
2

4
2

5
3

When I began my procedure, I put 2 ounces of soil in a beaker and then put 100mL of water into the beaker, then I stir it. When I filtered each of the 5 samples I use the diagram that is above. For samples 1 and 2 it only needed to be filter once. When I filtered out samples 3 and 4, it had to be done twice because those 2 samples had a lot more sediments then sample 1 and 2. For the last sample which was more out in the grass area took 3 times to filter it out because it had a lot more sediments then all of the samples.
Sample number
Titration 1
Titration 2
Titration 3

1
6.4-9.1
9.1-12.3
12.3-14.6

2
14.6-16.9
16.9-19.5
19.5-22.4

3
22.4-25.2
25.2-28.2
28.2-31.2

4
31.2-33.6
33.6-35.6
35.6-37.6

5
37.6-39.2
39.2-40.0
40.0-49.0

To start, I filled a burette with 50.00 mL + or – 0.01 with silver nitrate.

I ended up starting at 6.4 and use all of it up to 49.0. To make silver nitrate, we used (0.5 mol) *(.250 dm squared) which equals .125, then times .125 by the molar mass which is 169.82 to get 21.2275 grams. From that point, we were able to make the solution of silver nitrate.

Processed data

In this titration, potassium chromate was used for the indicator. There were 3 drops of indicator each time a titration was done. The potassium chromate was made by (250 mL) *(0.1 dm squared) which equals 0.0050, then times 0.0050 by the molar mass which is 194.19 grams. But we doubled it since we change to 100 mL which made it equal 1.942 grams.

Sample number

Titration 1

Titration 2

Titration 3

1

2.7

3.2

2.3

2

2.3

2.6

2.9

3

2.8

3.0

3.0

4

2.4

2.0

2.0

5

1.6

0.8

0.9

As you can see from this diagram, this is what you want to happen when you do the titrations.

From the data table, we can see that the closer the number to zero means it has least amount of salt because it took less silver nitrate for the titration to end. Sample 3 had the most salt which was 30 feet from the Great Salt Lake. Sample 1 and 2 were the next two that had a lot of salt. Sample 5 which was the last sample and in the grass area had the least amount of salt.

Conclusion

With all of the data that I have you can clearly see that as you go out further out from the Great Salt Lake the salt levels decreased due to the different sediments in the samples as you get further along. The Great Salt Lake is one of the saltiest lakes because the lower the lake level, the saltier the lake gets. The Great Salt is getting lower and lower each year which is causing more salt in it because there isn’t enough water for the salt to dissolve. There are strengths and weakness of this experiment. One of the strengths of this experiment is that it is a great environment idea that help with the future of the Great Salt Lake. But a weakness of this experiment is that there could have been more data involved. Maybe time someone could get water samples as well, or they could try multiple locations of the Great Salt Lake rather than just one location like I did. An methodological issue could have been by filtering the samples a different

amount of time, that could have affected how fast the titration lasted.