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Claire Williams ’25 conducted research earlier this summer with Visiting Assistant Professor of Geosciences Kris Kusnerik and Andrew Fredericks ’25 on the Wakulla River in Florida.

The mantra “study what you love” encourages students to venture into previously unfamiliar fields. Bria Dox ’22, for example, took advantage of Hamilton’s academic diversity to discover her passions for mineralogy and volcanology. This summer, she dove deeper into these fields through a geoscience research project, analyzing the mineral chemistry of rocks from Oregon’s Sand Mountain volcanic field.

Lucas Mangold, a rising senior from Greenwich, Conn., is spending the first weeks of summer break getting an early start on his thesis research. A geosciences major, he is analyzing local microspherules under the guidance of Professor of Geosciences Dave Bailey.

From mapping lava on Mount Ngauruhoe to studying rock formations on the Kaikoura Peninsula, Drew Castronovo ’19 spent his summer on the move.

His research project was meaningful in and of itself — investigating high salt levels in wells not far from campus. But Chris Klein ’18 also gained experience in handling the unexpected, as in, “What else can we try to figure this out?”

Drew Castronovo ’19 hopes to travel one day to many of the world’s major volcanoes such as Fuji, Kilimanjaro, Pinatubo, Colima and Kiluaea. This summer he is tackling one that is just a little closer to the ground.

A photo from the Desert Eyes Project appears on the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of International Science and Engineering Website banner. The photo, part of a rotating series, shows Barbara Tewksbury, the Upson Chair for Public Discourse and professor of geosciences, and Claire Sayler ’12 doing fieldwork in Egypt.

While thousands of scientific articles are published annually, relatively few attract the attention of the general public. The gap between what is understood by scientists and what is common knowledge to the public is the focus of a research project being undertaken by Mary Langworthy ’17 in a project titled “Where Geology Meets Literature: A Spatiotemporal Analysis of Science Writing,” funded through the Emerson Foundation.

Hannah Wagner ’15 presented a poster titled “Rusophycus in the Herkimer Formation Building Materials on the Hamilton College Campus” at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America - Northeastern Section. The conference was held in Bretton Woods, N.H., on March 23-25 and the technical program consisted of symposia, theme and general sessions, arranged in oral and poster format.

Hannah G. Haskell ’15 presented a poster titled “Beach Erosion and Restoration at Cape May Point, New Jersey” at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America - Northeastern Section.