Grad News Forum

Born in San Diego, CA, Justin Richardson is a first-year graduate student in Dartmouth’s Earth Sciences department. Describing himself as “the soil man,” Justin’s research examines how toxic metals are transported in upland forest soils. As an undergraduate at University of California, Riverside, Justin worked as a Soil Science Adviser at his campus’s organic community garden, and for the nine months that he has been a member of the Dartmouth graduate community, he has used his knowledge of soils to assist instructors with the educational courses held at the Dartmouth Organic Farm. At the community farm in Southern California and Dartmouth’s Organic Farm, Justin applied his knowledge of sustainable farming methods to control the nutrient levels in each farm’s soil.

Justin’s graduate research builds upon his deep-seated interest in soil science and environmental sustainability. As a graduate student, Justin is researching the ability of soils from different regions of the northeastern United States to retain mercury—a toxic metal released into the atmosphere during coal combustion—and lead—a heavy metal released by automobiles before leaded gasoline was phased out in the 1970s. The organic matter and mineral content present within soils creates a buffer that slows the leeching of these metals into the region’s subterranean aquifers; once in the aquifers, these metals gradually move up the food chain. Though research suggests the lead that enters our waterways is not absorbed by humans, it has been proven that humans absorb mercury through the consumption of predatory fish that feed in contaminated waters.

“Though mercury isn’t good for you, I still enjoy eating locally caught fish,” says Justin. “You just have to watch which species you consume.”

Currently, Justin is examining the heavy-metal retention properties of both the organic matter and mineral content of various soils, which differ greatly from region to region. Comprised primarily of decomposing plant matter, the organic structures of a forest’s floor determines how well it is able to retain metals: in evergreen forests, the carbon structures of the fallen pine needles are relatively stable and are able to hold metals for longer than the carbon structures of the downed leaves in deciduous forests, which fall from the hardwoods of New England each autumn.

The mineral content of a soil is the final buffer that slows the leaching of lead and mercury into the waterways of the Northeast. After passing through the forest floor, different minerals hold toxic metals before they move into the subsoil. Recent studies suggest that the greater the clay content of a soil, the better it is at retaining toxic metals. Currently, Justin is examining the ability of New England’s soils, which vary in their clay content, to retain lead and mercury.

“Although there aren’t that many coal-burning plants in New England, there is a major mercury problem in this area,” says Justin. “The mercury released by coal plants in the midwestern United States travels through the atmosphere, and ends up in our soils.”

This summer, Justin helped teach laboratory sections held at the Dartmouth Organic Farm to the school’s ecological agriculture class. Located three miles up river from Dartmouth’s campus, the Organic farm is an educational facility that teaches students methods for sustainable food production. Unlike the organic community garden Justin worked at as an undergraduate—which is divided into small land plots that students and community members manage independently—Dartmouth’s Organic Farm is not partitioned, which allows for greater control over both the nutrient levels in the soil and the prevention of parasitical crop damage through organic farming methods. Justin explains that this structural feature of Dartmouth’s Organic Farm makes the facility well suited for teaching.

“One thing that’s unique about Dartmouth’s Organic Farm is that the farm is built upon the official ‘Dartmouth series soil,’” explains Justin. “The official soil taxonomic name for many of the low lying areas along the Connecticut River Valley is named after our school, and I think that’s something that Dartmouth students should know.”

To become involved in Dartmouth’s farming community, drop by the organic farm anytime to learn about its seasonal happenings. In the summer, students run a farmstand outside of the Collis Center where they sell fresh produce to the community. If you’re new to horticulture, Dartmouth’s Organic Farm holds “work days” designed to teach students the basics of sustainable farming; the farm also hosts pot-luck dinners on a regular basis for everyone who helps out at the farm.

If you’d like to learn more about Dartmouth’s Organic Farm, or are interested in soil science, it’s easy to spot Justin in Hanover: his NH license plate is “SOILSCI.”

by Wesley Whitaker

Andy Friedland, Professor in the Environmental Studies program at Dartmouth, recently sat down with arts and sciences graduate students to discuss the essential elements of putting together a successful science proposal.

Entitled “Science Proposal Writing,” the workshop session was the first in the several-part series, “Becoming a Faculty Member,” sponsored by the Graduate Office.  Based on his and Provost Carol Folt’s 2009 book, Writing Successful Science Proposals, Friedland’s talk related to the complicated process that nearly all academics must go through: crafting a research proposal.

According to Friedland, the first step to writing a successful proposal is fairly simply: write well.  While there are basic fundamental common factors in all proposals, Friedland stressed that it is essential to look at the specific vernacular unique to each individual scientific field.  This includes identifying and describing the conceptual framework of your project, as well as summarizing the relevant literature and targeting your proposal to your specific audience (i.e., NIH, NSF, EPA, NASA, etc).

Aside from the obvious plus of writing a successful proposal—funding—there is also the added bonus of being able to flesh out potential research topics.  “Writing a proposal forces you to put ideas on paper, formulate them, and let them grow,” Friedland told the crowd of PhD students in attendance, noting that scientists often make major advances while working on the proposals alone.

Noting the current trend towards scientific projects with an interdisciplinary focus, Friedland noted the importance of “thinking big” in the initial stages of working on a proposal.  “It’s important to avoid tunnel vision,” says Freidland.  “Think about how your work might apply to other fields.”

Targeted towards those arts and sciences graduate students who plan on continuing their careers in academia, the “Becoming a Faculty Member” series aims to help graduate students make the transition to professor while allowing Dartmouth faculty to share their strategies and tips for navigating the path to ‘becoming faculty.’  Those students who attend all of the workshops in the series will receive a certificate of completion.

The next session, “Finding Funding,” takes place Wednesday, January 18^th, at 12pm.  Hosted by Brian Pogue, Dean of Graduate Studies and Professor of Engineering at Thayer School, the session will highlight the various funding sources that graduate students, postdocs, and assistant professors can access at the beginning of their research careers.

The “Mentoring and Advising” session will take place on Wednesday, January 25^th, at 12 pm, and will feature Dartmouth faculty members who have won the Graduate Student Mentoring Award discussing their own unique approaches to mentorship.  To sign up for this session, click HERE.  To sign up for “Lab Management” on Monday, January 30th, at 12pm, sign up HERE.

Getting ready for a day of snowmobiling! From left: Dartmouth College graduate student Thomas Overly, CH2MHill-supplied mountaineer and all-around awesome guy Galen Dossin, and Dartmouth College graduate student Gifford Wong.

As graduate students, we all share this singular pursuit, this unabashed chase of scholastic glory. We all enjoy the burden of late nights glazed with copious amounts of caffeine and buoyed by an endless sea of scientific papers. We all enjoy the bucolic wonders of Hanover and the Upper Valley, the unrelenting, yet rewarding, joys of being a graduate student at Dartmouth College. If you’re reading this, I imagine you are, like me, toiling away at some novel and intractable question while balancing the rest of your life. Not easy, but we’re all getting by. So what happens when, in the midst of this sometimes-stultifying stupor, you find yourself on the front-end of a 40-day traverse of the Greenland Ice Sheet?

Buy sunscreen!

That’s what I did when I found myself days away from joining the 2011 Greenland Inland Traverse (GrIT). GrIT, conceived primarily as an overland supply run for the year-round science station at Summit Camp located on top of the ice sheet, recently became open to the idea of supporting science. The first leg of the journey is a flight from Baltimore, Maryland, to Thule Air Base on the northwest coast of Greenland. Thule Air Base is the US Armed Forces’ northernmost installation, located 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle, and serves as the home base and garage for GrIT, a joint operation involving the National Science Foundation (NSF), the US Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) and CH2M Hill Polar Services.

Sun setting behind one of our Case Quad-tracks.

Professor Robert Hawley, in the Department of Earth Sciences, originally proposed the idea of pairing science with this traverse. He passed this tremendous field opportunity to two of his current graduate students—Thomas Overly and Gifford Wong (yours truly). This traverse was so tremendous   because it provided a (relatively) comfortable platform on which to perform ground truthing studies, it was an opportunity to revisit science sites along a route that was first visited in the 1950s by Carl Benson, a CRREL-based researcher, and it lead to a wealth of data for his lab group to sift through for the next couple years.

But that’s not all. Nearly everyone enjoys fantastic, and sometimes far-flung, field adventures. For me, the thing that made this past field season so special was the traverse itself. It is the journey that is interesting. I’ve been fortunate to participate in polar science before (McMurdo Station, West Antarctica, Summit Station, and Byrd Surface Camp), but I’ve never had to drive there. I’ve never had to submit myself to 1400 miles worth of ice sheet whimsy. I’ve never had so much of my livelihood rely on what continually seemed like never-long-enough days. And, I’ve never had the fortune to be surrounded by so much serenity. Perhaps my favorite moments, outside of the general tomfoolery that emerges when 6 young-at-heart individuals combine for 40 days of toil and effort, were those spent with my own thoughts as we bounded across the endless ice sheet like a small convoy of ships crossing an endless sea, buoyed by thousands of years worth of snow and ice all waiting to tell their stories.

The traverse train trundling along in front of some mountains at GPS waypoint B11A.

This story starts out, however, as a pseudo-survival guide for any would-be ice sheet traveler. If you’re contemplating such a trip, I imagine most of the obvious concerns have already been addressed, such as packing a lot of high-calorie food or outfitting yourself with plenty of puffy and warm clothing. Like this summer’s list of things to do in Hanover, I present, in no particular order, my top 5 things to think about when traversing an ice sheet:

1) Be prepared to be cold. Not surprising, but it bears repeating.

2) Be patient. This goes along with the cold component, but hardly anything happens quickly when you’re waddling around in 8 layers of clothing. Seriously.

3) Try not to sweat. This pairs well with the patience thing, for if you do sweat you’ll definitely feel the cold.

4) Eat! You’re essentially stoking your internal caloric heater with food, so eat often. Besides, when else can you indulge in over 4000 calories a day and lose weight!

5) If there’s a plane, get on it. As much as I love the ice sheet, there truly is no place like home. I spent an extra 7 days in Greenland because I did not get on a plane. Silly.

And sunscreen? That ranks right up there with oxygen and a -40 sleeping bag!

by Gifford Wong
PhD Candidate, Earth Sciences

In honor of the upcoming Graduate Appreciation Week, the Graduate News Forum will be highlighting the recipients of the 2010 Graduate Alumni Research Awards throughout the week.  Applications for the 2011 Graduate Alumni Research Awards are due on May 5th.

Measuring Osmium Drainage to Understand Rock-Weathering Processes

My research uses radiogenic-isotope geochemistry to understand elemental cycling and rock-weathering processes on the North Island of New Zealand. The two main objectives of my research are to quantify how much osmium (element number 76) is draining from the island and identify what the isotopic composition of the waters are, and to explore the osmium isotope system as a proxy for rock-weathering processes. Different rock types release different amounts and varying isotopic compositions of osmium into water, and therefore this isotope system may provide quantitative insights into weathering processes in New Zealand and around the world. The Graduate Alumni Research Award helped me to meet these objectives by providing funding for my trip to New Zealand this past summer to collect water samples.

Learn more about the Graduate Alumni Research Awards here.

By Timothy Blazina

This year was quite eventful for the Department of Earth Sciences.  We were shocked by the untimely death of James Scott.  James’ PhD student Derek Smith is now working with Marilyn Fogel at the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC. We graduated six students in the last year—one PhD and five MS’s—and welcomed nine new graduate students.  The graduated students are now working in the industry or studying for higher degrees at other universities.

Brian Dade recently replaced Carl Renshaw as chair of the department.  Carl is the Principal Investigator on a $2.5 million NSF grant that will fund an educational outreach program, in which Dartmouth graduate students will educate local middle school students in science, technology, engineering and math.

Bob Hawley’s glaciology group has grown considerably this year.  In addition to a new Post Doc (Eric Lutz), there are two new graduate students: Thomas Overly (PhD, IGERT Fellow) and Blaine Morriss (MS).  Thus far, Bob’s group has garnered over $1 million in external support.  Last summer, Bob, Gifford Wong (PhD, IGERT Fellow), and Zoe Courville (UNH Post Doc) traveled to Summit Camp, Greenland, to procure a 100m ice core as well as conduct several snowpit studies.  This summer, the glaciology group will be working on six concurrent, externally-funded projects, which will take six Dartmouth grad students and faculty to Greenland this summer to undertake three independent field campaigns.  Gifford, who recently returned from an austral summer abroad, also participated in drilling the longest American ice core (3331 meters!) while working on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide Ice Core Project.

Meredith Kelly’s research group is comprised of four graduate students who use exposure age dating and lake sediment records to understand past climate changes.  Meredith was recently awarded an NSF Paleo Perspectives on Climate Change grant to study the mechanisms of climate change in the southern tropical and mid-latitude Andes during the Holocene.  Justin Stroup (PhD) and Sam Beal (PhD) organized and led a research expedition to map glacial geology, collect boulder samples, and obtain lake sediment cores near Quelccaya Ice Cap, Peru. Laura Levy (PhD, IGERT fellow) conducted a successful field season to East Greenland in September, and she has since been analyzing boulder samples and lake sediment cores. Tom Baker (MS) will travel to Thunder Bay, Ontario this spring to collect boulder samples that he will use to study the eastward drainage of glacial Lake Agassiz.

Xiahong Feng’s stable isotope group admitted two PhD students, Alex Lauder and Ben Kopec, under the IGERT program.  The group is using stable isotopes of precipitation to study the impact of sea-ice change on both ocean-surface evaporation and land precipitation in the Arctic under the newly-launched Isotopic Investigation of Sea Ice and Precipitation in the Arctic Climate System (iisPACS) project, jointly led by Professors Feng and Posmentier, of Dartmouth College, and Jeff Burkhart, of the Norwegian Institute for Air Research.  Alex and Ben will travel to Greenland this summer through the NSF-sponsored IGERT fellowship program.  They will measure the isotopic composition of vapor over diverse bodies of water and sample lake water for later isotopic analysis.  Thirty degrees further west, Kelly Everhart is planning to finish her Masters project, which characterizes the extent to which sea ice modifies the isotopic composition of precipitation landing on the North Slope of Alaska, early this summer.

Mukul Sharma’s radiogenic isotope lab group admitted two new PhD students, Hannah Hallock and Kelly Landau.  Two old hands in the lab, Tim Blazina, MS, and Yingzhe Wu, MS, will be presenting their work in the AGU fall meeting.  Tim has done extensive field work on New Zealand’s North Island where he is studying chemical weathering.  Yingzhe has been studying the origin of the magnetic spherules at the Younger Dryas boundary, a period of intense climate change that coincided with the disappearance of the Clovis people and mega-fauna of North America.

The fluvial geomorphology group, under the auspices of Carl Renshaw, Brian Dade and Frank Magilligan, admitted one new student, Eirik Buraas.  He will investigate the effect of dams on New England rivers.  John Gartner, a third-year PhD student, was recently awarded two grants.  The NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant will help support his research on dam removal and sediment transport, and a National Center for Airborne Laser Altimetry Seed Grant allows repeat LiDAR data at one dam removal. This spring, Nathan Hamm will defend his dissertation on fine sediment dynamics in stream beds.

In other news, Jennifer Bailard just finished another successful field season in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica.  Rachel Neurath is nearing completion of her MS thesis on soil carbon cycling in harvested and old growth forests, and Jie Yang is gearing up for his PhD on heavy metal contamination.

By John Gartner, Sam Beal, Kelly Everhart, Gifford Wong, and Mukul Sharma.

Photo: Dartmouth graduate students Gifford Wong (PhD, Earth Sciences), Lauren Culler (PhD, EEB) and Simone Whitecloud (PhD, EEB) during their IGERT trip to Greenland.