Marissa in the field!

To go along with my posts about reading related to the history of women in field work, I also plan to post about my own experiences doing field work and relate them to the history I am exploring. I did some field work back in January in California for my senior thesis, and I spent all of last semester doing field work on a tall ship in the equatorial Pacific through SEA Semester. Unfortunately, I hadn't started this blog then and I wasn't actively thinking of how to blog about the experience in a historical context (although class S-232 did keep a daily blog about our adventures, which you can read here). 


But! I have two new and very exciting field opportunities to write about coming up, and I hope to post about them here, with pictures! First, I will be going to California over spring break to take a field course but also to continue my senior thesis field work. My project is a combination of mapping and geochronology in the Resting Spring Range, three ranges east from Death Valley. The goal of this research is to constrain the timing of faulting by dating tilted volcanic units and use this timing to distinguish between possible mechanisms of extension. Here is an image of a really famous outcrop at Resting Spring Pass, part of my field site:

Outcrop at Resting Spring Pass.

Second, I met with my summer research adviser at Princeton this weekend, Professor Danny Sigman, and there is a good chance that I will be going to the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences for a few weeks this summer to conduct a study on live foraminifera in the water column. Maybe I could do some side research about the history of field-based science in Bermuda while I'm there? Fingers crossed!