Geology major Helen Whitty '18 received a Dean’s Office Funding Award to travel to Denver, Colo., where she presented her research at the Geological Society of America’s annual conference in late September.
Helen explains that the project, titled “Testing Kinematic Models of Deformation Sequence in the Bear Valley Strip Mine, East-Central Pennsylvania: a Fault Kinematic and Anisotropy of Magnetic Susceptibility (AMS) Analysis,” falls under the umbrella of structural geology.
"The field of structural geology involves utilizing the resources that are at our disposal to make inferences about what is happening to the rocks and regions we're interested in," says Helen. "Structural geologists make observations about rock strain, and then use those observations to determine details of the stress field in which the rock was deformed."
Helen's research from the Bear Valley Strip Mine is an ancillary project to a larger endeavor that Helen has been working on with Weil.
The main project, for which Weil received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation, focuses on the tectonic and deformation history of mountains in Argentina.
Dean’s Office Funding Awards grant undergraduates up to $450 to support scholarly projects, faculty-mentored research, and travel to academic conferences.