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David Sunderlin, assistant professor of geology and environmental geosciences, will spend the summer on an expedition in the northern part of Denali National Park in Alaska to research the rocks of the Late Cretaceous period. Eric Ricci ’08 (Staten Island, N.Y.), a geology major, will accompany Sunderlin on the trip through mid July.
Sunderlin has received a Discover Denali Research Fellowship from the Denali Education Center and Denali National Park and Preserve, which will help fund the trip. The Murie Science and Learning Center also is offering support. The fellowship also will fund Ricci’s independent study project on the topic with Sunderlin.
“This fellowship advances both research goals in my laboratory and my undergraduate field geology education goals,” Sunderlin says. “My primary research program focuses on terrestrial ecosystem structure and change over time-scales of millions of years, since before the dinosaurs, through their dominance in the Mesozoic Era, and into more recent history of the last 65 million years of geologic time.”
Sunderlin and Ricci hope to produce the first detailed look at the forest structure that existed in this part of Alaska as the age of dinosaurs waned in the Late Cretaceous Period. They will search for clues about the climatic and ecological conditions at the time.
Sunderlin believes the fellowship is an excellent chance for Ricci to get valuable hands-on experience that will tie his classroom knowledge to actual geological practice.
“Educationally, this is a tremendous opportunity to provide instruction in classical field geology to undergraduate students at Lafayette,” he says. “The best geologists are those who have seen the most rocks, and this will certainly be an experience that puts all the classroom and lab work into practice. Eric will be gathering original data alongside me in the field. Many of the places we will be visiting have never been studied at all, and though this brand of science tests hypotheses like most other scientific endeavors, it is also something of an adventure.”
During their summer trip, Sunderlin and Ricci will measure the vertical succession of sedimentary beds, describe the ancient environments they represent, and collect fossils of plant leaves, wood, and seeds.
“Our days in the field will be long,” Sunderlin says. “The sun stays out quite late at high latitudes in the summer. The rock unit we will be investigating has produced evidence of dinosaurs in the form of fossil trackways, so we will be keeping an eye out for them as well. Tony Fiorillo, curator of paleontology at the Dallas Museum of Natural History, and his research team will continue their work this summer on these trackways. Merging their study, our study, and other work by colleagues at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, we’ll get a really integrated idea of what the area that is now Denali National Park and Preserve was actually like 70 million years ago.”
The work Sunderlin and Ricci conduct through the fellowship will be another case study of the interplay of evolution and environment in Sunderlin’s larger research program. Sunderlin has conducted previous research on questions of high-latitude ecosystem structure and fossil plants in Alaska and Greenland.
“Plants are sorted across the Earth according to environmental conditions,” he explains. “They also evolve over millions of years and this is, in part, in response to environmental pressures. The deep history of plants is doubly interesting when we consider when new forms of plants originate and also where that actually occurs.”
Sunderlin expects the summer expedition will yield numerous photographs and teaching ideas that will enhance his courses Paleobiology; Dinosaurs, Darwin, and Deep Time; and Modern and Ancient Depositional Environments.
Through the fellowship, Sunderlin also will present a formal lecture at the Denali Education Center and contribute to the educational offerings of the Murie Science and Learning Center, which was established in the spirit of the National Resources Challenge, a National Park Service initiative to increase research and education efforts in U.S. national parks.
Sunderlin has participated in research projects in Greenland, Russia, Nebraska, Colorado, Long Island Sound in Connecticut, and elsewhere in Alaska. He has authored or coauthored articles in Teconics, Lethaia, American Midland Naturalist, Geotimes, and a Geological Society of America special paper.
He is a member of Geological Society of America, Paleontological Society, Palaeontological Association, Society for Sedimentary Geology, Botanical Society of America, National Association of Geoscience Teachers, and The Nature Conservancy.
Sunderlin earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and his B.A. from Colgate University.