Rob ran a class long exercise in creating multiplots of sediment cell count data. Sediment cores are taken from under the bottom of the ocean and scientists count the number of cells present at interesting depths into the sediment. The number of single-celled organisms in the dataset we used are in the billions per meter cubed. The variety in number of cell counts helps scientists estimate the total mass of living material in the planet. Much is studied of life above ground and a fair amount is studied within water. But, estimates of the amount of life in the soils and sediments continues to be refined through such techniques.

First Rob led a do-it-yourself activity for creating five different scatter plots of the data:

And then Rob led an exercise in adding error bars around each value based on the variance found in the data: