I was on the decorations committee for the M-Day parade.  We decided that this year, our float theme was going to be “BrontoFear and the Mad Scientists,” in contrast to the M-Day parade theme “Superheros.”

We got together around one o’clock to decorate the float.  There was Evan Doughty,  Zach Heher,  [...]]]> By Montana Mraz

I was on the decorations committee for the M-Day parade.  We decided that this year, our float theme was going to be “BrontoFear and the Mad Scientists,” in contrast to the M-Day parade theme “Superheros.”

We got together around one o’clock to decorate the float.  There was Evan Doughty,  Zach Heher,  Lainie Fike,  Darrin Pagnac,  Sally Shelton,  Sam Cohen,  Michelle Pinsdorf (who came up with the parade idea),  Stevie Holmes,  Tim Vancrey,  Shawn Peters,  and I.  Utilizing a combination of old tablecloths, lots of tape, and many pins we made the mask, leg bands and the epic cape.  Pat Monaco showed up and offered someone to wear her outfit, which was a Sparklesaurus outfit.  Zach offered to wear the outfit.  We all dressed up as mad scientists.  I dressed as a “mad, broke Soviet Russian scientist.”  We had Mr. Cohen drive us to the parade.

We got lost on the way there, but we finally made it to the starting point of the parade and some time to spare.  Then we found out that we won “Most Humorous Award”, which is pretty awesome.  We rode on the float throwing candy, waving at people, and Darrin scaring all of the little kids.  We had a lot of fun and as a member of Paleo Club I would recommend to be active and attend all of the events that Paleo Club has to offer.

The Paleo Club was awarded one of only four grants given by the Paleontological Society this year to support Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education. The club will use the funds for the development of new teaching kits, an exciting opportunity for both students and community members. In the past, [...]]]> Written by Stevie Holmes

The Paleo Club was awarded one of only four grants given by the Paleontological Society this year to support Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education. The club will use the funds for the development of new teaching kits, an exciting opportunity for both students and community members. In the past, Paleo Club members have taken the kits into classrooms to present to elementary and middle school students. With the new materials, teachers will be able to check the kits out from the museum to present to their students, allowing them to tailor the lesson plans to suit their needs and to meet state standards.

Club members will be creating the kits over the course of the fall semester. The main goal of the kits is to allow students of all ages to experience earth science in a way they would not typically be able in the classroom. Having all of the information and materials centralized in one place also ensures that any club member will be able to go on a classroom visit and engage kids in hands-on learning.

A small team began the grant-writing process for several different funding opportunities at the beginning of this year, developing detailed budgets and lesson plans. It has been a long road, but meeting kids and seeing them excited about learning is inspiring. We’re proud of everyone who contributed to the project this far, and we’re looking forward to being able to get the new material out into the classrooms.

Look for more updates on the teaching kits soon!

We’ll be having a meeting Monday November 8th at 5pm in the PRL Resource Center. We’ll have a special presentation from Dr. Aaron Wood on “Postcranial Functional Morphology of Hyracotherium and Locomotion in the Earliest Horses.” We will also hold a special meeting to discuss the constitution after the presentation is done. We [...]]]> Hello all,

We’ll be having a meeting Monday November 8th at 5pm in the PRL Resource Center. We’ll have a special presentation from Dr. Aaron Wood on “Postcranial Functional Morphology of Hyracotherium and Locomotion in the Earliest Horses.” We will also hold a special meeting to discuss the constitution after the presentation is done. We will have snacks, beverages, and good times had by all. I also ordered our books that everyone voted on. The winner were: 1st place is Long/ The Rise of the Fishes 2nd ed. 2nd is Ungar/ Mammal teeth: origin, evolution and Diversity, 3rd to finish up is Feldhamer/ Mammalogy: Adaptation, Diversity, Ecology, 3rd ed. The grand total was $201.10 after tax.

Thank you to all who voted and contributed thoughts, and have a great week!

Hope to see you soon!

Katie (my research partner) and I are planning to submit our abstract to GSA in Denver and present our poster. What’s interesting is that our final product is not related to [...]]]> Well, the summer has gone incredibly fast. The program is over, everyone has headed home, and most of the participants are sending out abstracts.

Katie (my research partner) and I are planning to submit our abstract to GSA in Denver and present our poster. What’s interesting is that our final product is not related to most of the rest of the summer’s work.

We used the spectrofluorophotometer to analyze pH buffers (used for instrument calibration) for fluorescence. One of the lab’s clients asked about the fluorescent characteristics of the dyes used to color the buffers for ease of identification. We found a couple of instances where the dyes in the buffers share fluorescent characteristics with common tracers. While the concentrations were not high enough to make a false positive field test likely, there is a potential for dye receptors to be contaminated, especially in situations where all of the tracing equipment is kept close. The lab is fortunate to have lots of space at its disposal, so the potential for contamination is reduced, but smaller labs would benefit from revising their protocol to ensure that none of their supplies come into contact with one another.

The equipment is very sensitive, able to detect dyes in quantities of 0.01μg/L. A reading of ten times the established ‘background’ level for a dye indicates a positive test, and results must be repeated for an overall positive.

The reason this is significant is that many hydrology labs are contracted by industry. If a company needs a trace done to be sure that their waste disposal doesn’t contaminate a local water supply, a false positive conclusion could cost the company millions of dollars to find a town a new water supply. Lab results also have to hold up in court cases.

I’m told hydrologists are passionate about their dye tracing. I can’t say for sure, as I’m not a hydrologist, but this was a pretty spectacular summer. I learned a lot about the geology of the area, speleology, and lab equipment that I never knew existed. I am looking forward to learning more!

Props to the National Science Foundation, Western Kentucky University, and the Hoffman Environmental Research Institute for funding and supporting the REU program.

Everyone enjoy the rest of your summer!

Fortunately (at least for purposes of writing about it) Weeks 3 and 4 yielded nothing to report.

Weeks 5 and 6, however, have been much more interesting.

During Week 5, the week of 28 June, we (my undergrad research buddy [...]]]> Well, my diligence in reporting has taken a serious hit as the summer progresses. Obviously.

Fortunately (at least for purposes of writing about it) Weeks 3 and 4 yielded nothing to report.

Weeks 5 and 6, however, have been much more interesting.

During Week 5, the week of 28 June, we (my undergrad research buddy Katie and I) did some instrument and lab
training, as well as some cave mapping.

The field instruments we used were just small meters for pH and CO2. The Hoffman Environmental
Research Institute Center for Cave and Karst Studies (CCKS) has an ongoing project at the university-owned Crumps
Cave, where a series of waterfalls present. At Waterfall 1, we take samples once a week and test their pH right there. Later, the samples are taken to a USDA lab and analyzed for their bicarbonate ion concentration and turbidity. On the surface, there is a meter that reads the CO2 concentration in the soil. The idea behind doing these things is to learn more about the behavior of water in the epikarst zone.

Later that week, Katie and I, along with speleologists Pat and Jason, went back to Crumps to do some mapping. The cave is very large and pretty straightforward (at least the part we’re concerned with for the moment). We set up a station every 10 feet approximately down the center of the tunnel. Using Disto laser measures, we shot the distance (from eye level) to the ceiling and floor, each of the walls horizontally, and at the points of contact between the walls and ceiling/floor. We also used a compass for orientation and a clinometer to measure the angle of each shot. Back in the lab, we put our information into cave-mapping software and are creating a 3D model of the cave. This is temporarily on hold as staff and grad students scatter for conferences and mapping in other caves.

This week (beginning 5 July), we have been out to the cave twice and worked with a new field fluorometer.

Our first cave day ended in no success. The meter would not cooperate, so we decided to just take a sample and gather information back in the lab. However, we ended up with the wrong key, so no samples either. (I thought it was funny; my grad student supervisor did not. Until later.)

Our next attempt was much more successful, although the gate system at Crumps is practically impossible even with the correct key. À la Boondock Saints, you really do always need rope!

Today, we calibrated the field fluorometer, affectionately known as the Schneggometer after its designer. Easier said than done, really. We calibrated it for dye tracers uranine and rhodamine, but were still having troubles with tinopal (an optical brightener) and turbidity after six hours, so we thought it best to save those for next week.

So on the table for next week is finishing calibrating the Schneggometer, learning how to use the spectrofluorophotometer, and a presentation to the other REU members and professors. It’s a lot of fun and I am definitely learning a lot!

I should be able to add some pictures to next week’s report, so be patient with me. I hope everyone is having a great summer!

We started in a food service elevator– one of the cave tours includes an underground dinner. Descending about 100 feet into a manmade [...]]]> This weekend, our research group went on a little private cave tour to parts of the cave that are no longer open to the public through some early 1900s trails and tubes.

We started in a food service elevator– one of the cave tours includes an underground dinner. Descending about 100 feet into a manmade shaft, we emerged in the Snowball Room, a cave so called because of the gypsum blossoms covering the ceiling and walls.  Dr. Groves (my research advisor) led us for a while down a tourist path. From there, it was the usual scuffling and sliding, punctuated by our wade through a subterranean creek and a couple crawls through unmarked tunnels. It was very exciting and a lot of fun, but caving is better done than retold (I highly recommend it!). Unfortunately, the vast majority of my pictures didn’t turn out, as caves have a tendency to be dark.

Even more unfortunately, I haven’t been able to actually start my project yet, as the university lost a LOT of field equipment (data loggers, etc) to the flooding a few weeks ago in the area. Hopefully at the end of this week, I’ll be starting some lab work, mixing up dye tracers and things of that nature.

I did learn that at least part of my work will be at a university-owned test cave near Bowling Green, which is useful because it allows researchers to study karst environments and the effects of land use without damaging the Mammoth Cave System (or filling out paperwork that would come with testing at the park).

In the meantime, I’m becoming well-studied in cave geology, and I’m looking forward to finding at least a little bit of trouble to get into!

The stage was set for the cave network about 350 million years ago. At that time, the area was ten degrees south of the equator and submerged beneath a warm, shallow sea, where sediments accumulated for 70 million years. [...]]]> Mammoth Cave National Park is located just off Interstate 65 approximately 90 miles north of Nashville.

The stage was set for the cave network about 350 million years ago. At that time, the area was ten degrees south of the equator and submerged beneath a warm, shallow sea, where sediments accumulated for 70 million years. The result is 1200-1400 feet of limestone overlain by sandstone and shale, which was deposited around 300 million years ago by a river flowing into the ocean from the north. Twenty million years later, as sea levels dropped and the continent began to rise. Deformations in the crust resulted in fissures in the limestone.

Fast-forward to the middle Pliocene. On the ‘Pennyroyal Plateau,’ a plain filled with sinkholes, water seeped through the limestone and eventually undercut the sandstone, forming an intricate underground river system. The water continues to dissolve the limestone, deepening the cave network. Today, of course, the caves we see nearer the surface are the oldest, while the new caves form deeper beneath the surface.

The series of 8 projects, hosted at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, tie in chemistry, biology, meteorology, and geology. The projects are funded by a National Science Foundation grant. I’ll be working with Dr. Chris Groves on landscape/atmosphere carbon interactions in carbonic rock karst areas.

“The upper Green River watershed contains well-developed karst landscapes underlain by relatively pure carbonate rocks of the Mississippian aged St. Louis, Ste. Genevieve, and Girkin Limestones (Brown and Lambert, 1963; McGrain and Currens, 1978; Palmer, 1981; White and White, 1981).  As in other carbonate rock regions on the continents, mineral dissolution processes create an atmospheric carbon sink (e.g. Ludwig et al. 1998; Telmer and Veizer, 1999; Groves and Meiman, 2001, 2002; Ridgeway and Edwards, 2007).  In these processes atmospheric carbon ends up as dissolved inorganic carbon, primarily as bicarbonate, that flows to the oceans.  In large-scale models this has been assumed to be approximately equal to an oceanic source from carbonate mineral precipitation in the oceans, with the result that these processes have received less detailed attention than other aspects of the global carbon cycle.  Groves and Meiman (2001, 2002) developed methods to improve field-based estimates of this sink using a mass balance approach applicable to carbonate rock regions on the continents, with detailed results suggesting that details of the geochemical processes and magnitude of the sink are a function of geochemical environment.  Of particular importance identified in the work are non-CO2-derived acid sources, due to detailed mechanisms of these acids on the kinetics of limestone and dolomite dissolution (e.g. Plummer et al. 1978, Herman 1982; Busenberg and Plummer, 1982). These are significant in the Upper Green River Watershed where sustained rainfall pH’s are typically less than 4.5 as a result of sulfuric acid from regional coal combustion.  Using existing field research sites and monitoring infrastructure under a variety of hydrogeologic environments (see Groves and Meiman (2005) and Groves et al. (2005) for descriptions) we will work with REU students to continue development of field-calibrated mathematical models to better understand these geochemical relations and their impact on carbon cycling in the Green River Watershed and beyond.  Specifically, students will receive training and participate in field water sampling, implementation of digital data logging of hydrochemical data, and quantitative analysis of these data using geochemical modeling.   The basis and evolving research question driving this work is to better quantify the carbonate mineral atmospheric carbon sink in the upper Green River basin.” (from the program Web site, below)

(More information on all the projects and the complete REU program at WKU can be found at http://www.wku.edu/watershed/, and mine is project 8.)

While I haven’t officially gotten my hands dirty yet, some preliminary exploration at the park has revealed that it is, indeed, all it’s cracked up to be, without even going into the caves.

A short hike from the visitor’s center takes you to the mouth of the River Styx. Waterways in the area flow down through the limestone into the caves and emerge at the mouth of a large (and very enticing) cavern. From there, the Styx flows into the Green River.

Throughout the park, weather-polished limestones lie among the dense vegetation.

The mouths of unexplored, closed-to-the-public  caves tease visitors. (Fortunately, we will not be members of the public next weekend!)

Mammoth Cave is really any scientist’s paradise:

“In addition to being the world’s longest known cave, it contains a clear and complete record of geomorphic and climatic changes over the past 10 million to 20 million years, the most diverse cave ecosystem in the world and the greatest variety of sulfate minerals of any cave.” ohranger.com/mammoth-cave/geology