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Past and present
by Erin Davidson and Jackie Couillard
Whether they were listening to loons while writing up labs or looking out on miles of striped hills and inferring a geologic history from the color patterns while eating lunch on the highest peak to be found, the more than 50 geoscience students who attended field camps during summer 1997 immersed themselves in understanding their natural surroundings on some of the most exotic "fieldtrips" ever required for graduation.
1997 field camp participants watched as a well was constructed and tested near Itasca, MN, collected seismic data along roads in the University's Rosemount Research Area, or mapped Frying Pan Gulch in Montana, depending on the camp they attended.
A field camp is primarily an outdoor summer-session class aimed at giving students a hands-on learning experience. At these camps, students are graded on a series of projects, assignments, and, often, reports.
The department of Geology and Geophysics requires geology and geophysics students to take two field camps to graduate whil geo-engineers take at least one. The field camp options for summer sessions in 1997 included introductory field camp, hydrogeology field camp, and a newly-created geophysics field camp.
Beyond the currently-offered geology field camps, IT has a long history with such classes. As far back as 1920, civil engineering students took surveying and mapping as a summer field camp through the University.
Professor emeritus Miles Kersten helped teach the surveying camp from the '50s through the early '60s, when it was cut from the program. Kersten had attended surveying camp at Cass Lake, MN as an undergraduate at the University.
"In those days, practically all civil engineering schools had summer surveying camps," said Kersten. But times changed, he pointed out, and the surveying camp was a casualty of an overall movement in the '60s to reduce the a mount of time needed to graduate from the University with a Civil engineering degree from five years and more than 200 credits to four years and 180 credits.
Still, Kersten reminisces about the class. "You went out in the field and you did stream gauging, lake sounding, surveying work, railroad work, mapping work, highway location and star shots at night and sun shots during the day," he said. And he said he thinks the civil engineering field camp provided students with camraderie and the chance to see large, hands-on projects to completion that students today might not get in their other classes. He believes that the projects and camaraderie at the civil engineering camps was a memorable part of college for those who experienced it.
"The students remembered the summer camps probably as well as anything at the University," Kersten said.
Jason Erickson, a senior in geology and geo-engineering at the University, echoed Kersten from a current student's perspective. "Th e [introductory] Montana field camp was probably the best class I've ever taken at the University," he said.
Like Erickson, Sarah Smith also went on the introductory geology field camp during 1997 in Montana. "It was nice to get the field experience because now I sit in the classroom and they talk about something, and I have a mental picture of what I saw in the field," she said.
Gunther Kletetschka, a teaching assistant for the field camp, held near Dillon, MT, said that part of the value of the field camps is that students learn to deduce the geologic history of a region when they see rocks in their natural environment. Students identify the rocks they see and have to find out why those rocks are found in certain places in structures. And, all the while, students at the camp eat, sleep and study in the breathtaking Montana wilderness.
They rise at about 7:00 am for breakfast and start their field work at about 8:00 am. Then they hike to the outcrops of rock they wish to inspect for their assignments and stop amid the rocks for lunch. Often, they will also climb to the highest point they can find to get a better understanding of the spatial arrangement of the rock formations around them. Breakfast and dinner are prepared in the woods by a hired cook. Camp participants use chemical bathrooms or pit toilets and shower two to four times a week in town. And, though the field work each day is officially done at about 5 pm, students have the option to use a study tent with a lamp powered by a generator when they wish to begin work on their maps and cross-sections or just play a game of cards. Field camps are structured in the same manner as classes.
Instructors take the students on "tours" of good outcrops of various rock formations in the region so that students can learn to recognize the formations when they see them in a less ideal setting. The students take notes in field books so they can refer to this knowledge later because it is another building block toward the later projects in the class.
The first mapping assignment students receive lasts only a few days in a simple sedimentary rock environment. Students work in groups to map the area and turn in a geological map and cross-section of the area individually. The map and cross-section can be thought of as diagrams of the different materials and formations on and under the surface, respectively. During the mapping assignment students have to figure out why certain layers of rocks are in different positions. Students have to measure the three-dimensional orientation of sedimentary layers. This enables them to recover an end product of enormous deformation that to ok place during the geological history. "It's like solving a mystery," said Kletetschka.
As students progress, the professor and teaching assistants add complications to the assignments. For the first complication they chose areas with igneous rocks and metamorphic rocks. The second complication is to assign a more deformed area. The last complication is to assign an area with vegetation coverage. These complications challenge students and make them aware that not every are has simple or well-exposed geology.
Erickson said of the last project, "I think I got an appreciation of the difficulty and complexity of interpreting the geology of the site." Smith elaborated on the Block Mountain area, the last site, by saying that it included folds, faults, anticlines, synclines, and "a mishmash of stuff."
Val Chandler, of the Minnesota Geological Survey assisted with the geophysics and hydrogeology camps this past summer. For the first two days of the Hydrogeology camp, students were housed at the University. After that, they moved to the University's Biological and Forestry Field Station in Itaska Park, MN. Their field work took place 30 miles away on the Interdisclipinary Research Initiative Site. This site has over 100 observation wells, climatological stations, and stream and lake gauge stations over an eight-lake watershed.
This was the third time the camp was offered, and it cost about $1,200 for Minnesota-resident undergraduates. This cost included housing, food, and transportation but not the initial four days of housing and food at the University.
The camp was designed to teach students how to solve hydrogeological problems by collection and analyzing hydrogeologic and chemical field data. Students also learned exploration geology, which is the use of physics and physical phenomena to study or make guesses about geology at depth. Students used seismic refraction to estimate the depth of the water table. They also used res istivity, an electrical method that can be used to identify layers of rock soil, or sediment based on how well earth materials conduct electricity. For example, one can determine whether the material is clay or sand.
This past summer was the first year for the geophysics camp. It was held primarily in Rosemount, MN, for three weeks. Camp participants conducted their field research at Rosemount Research Facility, an old army ordinance area from World War II. Their assignments ranged from taking gravity measurements along a roadside in St. Paul in an effort to find a buried tunnel to looking for buried construction materials in an airfield at Rosemount Research facility with a two-person electromagnetic setup, where one person got to wear what resembles a futuristic hoop skirt.
Students used seismic methods, refraction and reflection, electrical resistivity, magnetics and gravity methods to gain data for their reports in the geophysics field camp. They examined depth to b edrock with resistivity and looked for a change in velocity on seismograms to indicate a new layer of a different sort of rock in the subsurface. They also used gravity, magnetic methods to locate possible faults in the bedrock. "This is a great exercise for students to learn to locate things," said Chandler of the geophysics field camp.
Kletetschka said field camps are good for students with different learning styles, pointing out that not all students learn best through textbooks. He says that some students are better at hands-on learning, and field camps allow those students a chance to excel. Kletetschka, now a graduate student in geophysics, was a student more than once at a field camp. He enjoyed the introductory geology camp immensely and wanted to attend another camp.
"It's a blast," said Kletetschka. Attending field camps was his motivation in becoming a teaching assistant at the Geology camp this past summer, he said.
Chandler and Kleteschka both see field camp as beneficial to geoscience students. "For natural sciences, it is crucial to see this first hand," explains Chandler. But field camps might not be necessary for all disciplines at the University, he said. In geology, he explained, one can read about faults, but when one actually sees a fault, it is a different world. "You can tell someone about something, but it's more effective to take them out and show them how it's used," Chandler said.
While civil engineers can survey an area on campus, there are too few clear-cut, instructive sites to run geology field camps on campus, and, with three or more instructors per course, it might be prohibitively difficult to try and coordinate everyone's schedule duiring the school year, even if there were suitable sites around the Twin Ci ties. Clearly, experiences like digging a well in the hydrogeology field camp would be frowned upon on campus.
"We couldn't just dig wells here. ... No one would appreciate that," said Erickson, who also attended the hydrogeology field camp.
So University students in the geosciences forego or cut back on the time they spend at summer jobs for educational benefit.
Chandler said that money was a factor considered for the location of the hydrogeology camp. Because it was held in-state, it was more affordable for students. "This decision was made to help students who work in the summer," said Chandler. Chandler said that students could commute to camp and work in the evenings at their jobs and still be able to earn summer money. The same held true for the geophysics camp.
Field camps have become an important part of some IT students' academic careers. The camps tax a student's ability to earn money over the summer, but both students and faculty seem to agree th at the educational benefits are worth it. It appears that field camps offered through the department of geology and geophysics are here to stay and benefit students in all the ways that civil engineering field camps once did.
