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Geology major Nancy Parker ’09 (Mystic, Conn.) spent a month in Alaska studying the 55 million-year-old Chickaloon Formation with David Sunderlin, assistant professor of geology and environmental geosciences. Parker is also a member of the women’s tennis team.
In many places geology research can be done at any time of the year, but in Alaska, summer time is the only possible season to conduct paleontology research. Summer in Alaska is great though, not only does the daily high reach a comfortable 58 degrees with a constant forecast for refreshing rain, but it is also light 20 hours out of the day. Adapting to the strange weather and camping literally next to the work site for four weeks took research to a whole new level.
This July, I worked with Lafayette Professor David Sunderlin, Professor Chris Williams from Franklin & Marshall College, and six other students from around the country studying the Chickaloon Formation, a 55 million-year-old sequence of sedimentary rocks in the Matanuska Valley. The Matanuska Valley is located in southeast Alaska, about an hour north of Anchorage. The project was funded through the Keck Geology Consortium, an organization dedicated to undergraduate research. Each field research day was spent on the outcrop taking samples, studying stratigraphic sequences, searching for fossils, and working as a team to construct the geologic history of the area.
For nearly every day of the fieldwork, we would wake to the sound of raindrops on our tent meaning that working on the rocks wouldn’t be possible so we spent our time searching for bits of fossilized amber in the shale slope next to our tents. Being at our work site all day every day was an experience that I’ll never forget. Learning to cook over a fire and showering only once every four days only begin to describe the adjustments that we made to camp life. Working and living with the most low key, easygoing, and hardworking people made it really fun.
Each student left Alaska with a self-designed project well under way that they will work on and complete for the annual Keck Consortium Symposium in April, 2009. Some of the projects include working on fossilized wood, fossilized gastropods (snails), and studying leaf margins and the distribution of genera with the overall goal being gaining an understanding of paleoenvironmental conditions in an ancient warmer Alaska.
I will be working on extracting cuticle from Metasequoia leaf fossils (a type of redwood; each leaf is composed of tiny needles) and examining them for a glimpse at carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere 55 million years ago. From the study of our field site, we will have a better understanding of the geologic history of the area. Alaska is a place where, geologically, there are still many unanswered questions and, with the data we collected, we hope to answer several of them.