Outreach Fall 2010

Pictured is the Hands on Sequence Stratigraphy Kit created

Enjoying the kit at the  VT Mineral Show.

This semester, in addition to social networking tools (Facebook, Blogspot, etc.) a new outreach medium was created. I designed and constructed a hands on learning kit for the project.  A small backdrop of the Po Plain Project is included. The public gets to mimic the process of sorting through material and debris to find “shells”. The importance of sorting is also explained in the activity. The outreach activity was performed at a Mineral Show that was held in the Museum of Geosciences, a VT residence hall, as well a community recreation center in Southwest Virginia (Danville). This activity serves as an outreach tool that also can be used on various other projects, so the community can get a hands-on visual experience for larger and more complex projects. On future projects, a kit of this nature can be used, for it can help simplify the complexities of intricate projects, and further help these ideas be presented to the public.

Research Fall 2010

Intern, Ceseley Haynes, sorting through samples

This semester has in fact been a busy one for the project. The blog wasn't utilized as much as last semester, but in the future can be a key component in communication between the Italy and Virginia Tech site. While last semester was a semester of organization, this semester was used to sort through many of the samples that were sent over to VT. A lot more samples were sent this semester, which means that a lot of samples had to be sorted through before data analysis could take place. I helped sort through these samples. Overall, I individually processed 12 core samples. Sorting involved filtering through sand, dirt, and other debris to retrieve fauna (gastropods,bivalves,etc.).

Pictured is an example of a drillhole

These samples were also measured and weighed as well as sorted for drillholes. The drillholes were noted, because this in fact can tell us whether predation has taken place.

Thsis semester was crucial in the advancement of the project. After the sorting process takes place, results can be produced from data analysis. There have been a few tentative results produced as of now.

New Semester

After a productive summer of data collection, we are back for a new semester. Our undergraduate intern has returned to help us with data collection and with museum outreach. This year we have added a member to our group. We have a geology student who is looking to specialize in paleontolgoy. He has been very beneficial in helping us with our data collection. Beyond data collection, he has his own project where he will be conducting a size frequency analysis of the species from this project. He will see how mass relates to valve size. He will also determine if valve size varies with depth, time, or between different environments.

We have nearly completed sorting our ninth core. We have two abstracts submitted for presentations to the Geological Society of America Annual Conference in Denver. It should be a great semester.

Moving along...

Well, we have the taxonomy for a couple of cores completed. We are already starting to compile the data and discussing how to go about the statistical analyses. Things are moving along rapidly. And now that the semester is almost over and campus will start to calm down, things for this project will start to move even faster. One of us students (either Jackie or me...or perhaps both of us) will be presenting a talk on the Po Plains at GSA. And it appears as though we will have plenty to talk about.

Here I'm at Virginia Tech.

Thank you very much to everyone. I got VT safe and sound after 24hour travel around several airports in USA. I'm happy to be back here and start this wonderful project

Cheers

Daniele Scarponi

Extra Geology--Iceland Volcano!

Daniele's arrival was delayed by the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano on April 15, two days before he was scheduled to fly over to the U.S. The eruption shut down flights from Italy for days as the ash cloud spread across Europe and might have caused jet engines to fail. Not a good time to fly!

Happily, Daniele was able to get a flight out later and arrived here Tuesday April 20th.

We are looking forward to working with him on identification of the many shells that Jackie, Troy, and Ceseley have sorted out of the samples, and then some analysis of paleoenvironments and other research while he is here. It will be great to get his input on some of our outreach plans also.

Sorting

After Jackie returned from her trip to Italy, she taught me how to sort through the shells, so we could later identify them properly, I manually sift through the shells and debris, and collect the fauna, that are not broken. For the bivalves, I have to make sure there is a henge visible in order for them to be valuable for research. Cephlapods and gastropod shells must have a visible point on them as well, if this is broken, it will be harder to identify them later therefore these specimens are not collected. After each sample is sifted through. They are put in small boxes, labeled with the same specimen number that were on the outside of each envelope the sample came in. This is a tedious process. I was also made aware that Daniele will be arriving from Italy tomorrow. Pictures will be posted shortly.

Specimens and Lab in Bologna

This is the new lab that I worked in separating Gastropods and Bivalves and then identifying species for each sample. To the right on the table is where I separated Gastropods and Bivalves by hand and I used the microscope to go through the sample to find small/tiny shells that I missed. Then after I would use the microscope to identify species and count the number of species in a sample. In a sample of 100 shells, it would take me 30 minutes to accomplish this process.

The lab used to be located in this room to the left and below. But on March 25 I came to the lab in the morning and saw that the roof had collapsed. Specifically on top of our specimens! Below is where I had put the separated samples and this is where the majority of the roof had fallen. Some samples were destroyed (three) but I managed

to recover most of them.

Here is an example of the samples separated into Gastropod and Bivalve. Inside the paper bags is the individual sample from a certain well depth that was sampled every 5-10 cm increments.

Heleobia/Ventrosia stagnorum is a common gastropod species found in lagoonal environments in the Po Plain.

Abra segmentum is a very common bivalve occurring in lagoonal settings. They are very delicate and it is very rare to find them as whole shells, usually they are found as unique fragments.

Lentidium mediterraneum is the most abundant and common bivalve in open marine inner/outer shelf environments. They are very tiny, but are robust and whole shells are easy to recover. Within one sample, 1,000s can be found, which makes counting them a pain.

Checking for Drillholes

On Monday, Troy and I looked at a collection of the samples under a microscope. We searched for drillholes in the shells. This was somewhat tedious, and less were found than I actually expected. In a couple of days we will be measuring these shells and possibly the actual size of the drilholes. Pictures will be posted soon.

First Day in Italy

Today is my first official day in Bologna, Italy working with Daniele on our project. I arrived yesterday in the morning, but since most of the day was spent driving from Milan to Bologna (thank you Daniele for picking me up!) I consider today to be my first day of work on the Po Plain Project in Italy.

Today Daniele and I worked on potential parameters/characters we want to focus on for the project. This is probably the most important and hardest part of the project because once we decide on what parameters to look at, we are stuck. We cannot go back and remeasure or reanalyze a shell because its way too difficult. So it is important to make sure we cover everything we can think of, but at the same time make sure we don't cover too much and make processing each core a tedious task.

So when processing the samples, we are going to focus on autoecology, body size, taphonomy, and drill holes. These cores are going to come from core transects parallel and perpendicular to the adriatic coastline to capture the lagoonal setting during the last interglacial. Daniele and I are hoping for me to process at least 2 cores during this visit, but there are many many more left.

Hopefully for my next post, I will show some pictures of Bologna, the lab, my methods, and maybe some fossils.

Some Samples Are In

On Monday, Troy showed me some samples of the shells. I was in amazement. Although the graduate students reminded me constantly they would be small. I was thinking about quarter size or so, but the shells were even smaller! The shells were the size of fingernails. I think learning to name and identify the samples will be interesting.

Website

OK. We have access to the website for this project. The website is www.poplain.geos.vt.edu . I loaded stuff up there including a "webpage" and set it to allow all viewers to read it, but I'm still having problems actually seeing a website. It still says I have to log in to view. Obviuosly we don't want the public to have to log in, so I'm still trying to figure it out. That has been my morning. Once I can see what it looks like, I can start actually putting something together with links and images.

What Exactly is Sequence Stratigraphy ?

I met with Jackie on Monday, Feb 22  to discuss different ideas about developing different 3D Models for the sequence stratigraphy exhibit as well as the website. I am still learning some of the more broad geological terms. I found the way Jackie explained most of the concepts to me very easy to understand. This seemingly may mean that this will get across well to the public. 


Jackie drew a stratigraphy figure on paper, and then related the layers to different fauna. There was also a sea level chart, explaining the sea level in relation to the stratigraphy figure. And she agreed that she would put explanations next to it. I found this very helpful, visually as well as concept-wise. 


I think the point of Sequence Stratigraphy will need to be highly described to the public in detail. Because a person with no background knowledge on this  topic would be lost. So far, I have understood sequence stratigraphy to be the study of the layers of Earth. These layers of the Earth can tell stories. Different fauna found in the different layers can tell a story of age as well as natural events and disasters. These layers could also help people be able to find natural resources as well. I have understood this much so far. I think these are interesting points, and can help the public get interested in the topic, because it's just not about determining different layers, it's much more than that. 

Samples

Yesterday we received samples from Daniele. Thanks Daniele! Troy and I went through the samples and separated the localities from each other and put each sample in its own box. I know this is a small step, but it is better to combat the whole project one step at a time.

When we opened the box, it was a surprise to see how little the shells are, I knew that they were small from what Mike was telling me. But I still did not fully comprehend that till today. Its amazing that Daniele sorted all these shells and I cannot wait to do this in 2 weeks. Troy and I decided on what parts of the project we want to work on, once we saw the shells. Troy has decided to work on drilling predation mainly because he has never done that before. I am trying to decide still on taphonomy and body mass. Both need to be analyzed, but trying to determine which one I want to work on is still hard to determine. I have never done either, but I am leaning towards body mass. I feel the questions we could answer focusing on that sound really interesting to me.

I wrote up the part of the website that we are working on for this portion of the project. The introduction, about the po plain, and sequence stratigraphy. Hopefully Troy will be able to upload it to the website soon. As long as we can access it!

But now we have something for Ceseley to work on and to look at the research side of the project. I hope that someone takes charge in showing her while I'm gone.

Meeting and Miscellaneous, February 24, 2010

My name is Troy and I’m one of the paleontology graduate students involved with the Po Plains project. This is my first time writing a blog, so I’m not entirely sure what to write about. We had a meeting this morning to discuss the direction of our outreach for this project, with social networking being a large part of it (considering the vast number of people with whom you can get in touch). Unfortunately, I’m a little out of my area of understanding.

We are about to enter the third month of the project, and I’m worried that we are still waiting on our samples. We are putting the website together now, since we don’t need any samples for it. I know our intern is really excited about the fossils, and I hope that we get them before she loses interest. I won’t be the primary graduate student on this project until next semester, but I’m already concerned that we are running out of time. I’ve been in school long enough to know how quickly semesters pass.

Po Plain Reflection February 18, 2010

I attended the Conference on Higher Education Pedagogy (=teaching) and went to a session on internships that gave me a good framework we can use for this project.

I will send a copy of the internship plan to the project team for their reactions and suggestions. I think this will give us a good way to organize our approach. We are all struggling a little as we are trying to start so many things at once, but I am starting to see what some benchmarks and deliverables can be.

I also see the value of articulating our goals and referring back to them. We have actually accomplished quite a bit in the past month--despite the SNOW!

Starting Off

I am the graduate assistant for the Po Plain study working between the research and outreach aspect of the project. I have been working with Ceseley (STEM intern) on how to communicate the research aspect of the Po Plain Project via a website to communicate paleontology and sequence stratigraphy to the public.

Meetings with Ceseley are going very well, I always feel I talk her ear off, but I think she understands more of what we are doing and why we feel it is important. Recently, I have mainly just talked about the research aspect and tried to give her a story type explanation of the interactions and interworkings of the Po Plain. I really wanted to give her some excitement about the project and understand that from just one shell you can tell a whole story about it and that it is really interesting. I hope I have at least made her excited about this project, but with me not having much to give her so far, I hope it all works out.

I have written half of the website for the project so far and I feel it is going well. I am trying to write sections for the website describing the project, the research aspect, sequence stratigraphy, paleontology, and quantitative methods. It is slightly overwhelming, but I got to do it.

Po Plain Reflection January 2010

We kicked off the STEM Education and Public Outreach (EPO) component of Dr. Kovalewki's Po Plain NSF Research project at the beginning of the 2010 spring semester.

By working with our partner over in Multicultural Programs we hired an undergraduate intern who will work with us, Ceseley. She is a Biology major, so first off we need to start building her understanding of the background geosciences information for her to be able to help us with the "Communicating STEM with the Public" aspect of this project. She will also be working on some of the research after our samples arrive in March.

Jackie, one of the Graduate Assistants on the project is doing a great job of helping translate complex geo concepts. She said this is helpful to her just in communicating about the science. She is really taking seriously the concept of mentoring.

I had the idea to get Ceseley to help us with social networking like Facebook and Blogspot to start out. The Geos Outreach program hasn't done that yet although I have colleagues who have encouraged it (thanks Beth and Denny!). Turns out this may be a really good idea. It is easy for her! But because I am not in that world yet it has been really hard for me to imagine how to even get started. I am SO EXCITED to be able to have this opportunity to move forward with these communication technologies!

One of the educational tools I really believe in and try to build into all my work is reflection. I have tried to encourage it with students and colleagues, but now it looks like using blogs we can actually make it pretty easy for everyone to document the various viewpoints that are working on our EPO.

Reflections of the First Month on the Job

I was hired as an undergraduate intern to work with Dr. Michal Kowalewski on his Po Plain Project, as well as to help with outreach projects in regards to the Museum of Geosciences on campus. These projects will help allow the community what the Geology Department has to offer.

Since I'm a Biological Sciences major, there's a gap between the sciences, and therefore I need a broad overview of different terms and generalizations. Llyn, the Geosciences Outreach Coordinator and Jackie, the graduate student assigned to this project have helped me to get a basic understanding.

I've also been helping the museum work on broadening their horizons, by get more in touch with social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs.

When I think about Geology, personally I think about geologists communicating with other geologists. These social tools could hopefully help change this, by communicating this science with the community in a way that all would understand.

With almost a month into the internship, I can see that the job will definitely be a learning experience for me as well as the Geology Department.