For many college students, "spring break" means traveling south. For Emily Backman, it means traveling to the deep South -- as in "fly to Chile, then take a ship south." It means Antarctica.
A self-proclaimed "science nerd," Emily was reading about cutting-edge Antarctic research in Discover magazine when she was just a high school senior. "At the time, Hamilton was my first-choice college," she said, "so I was incredibly excited to see that Eugene Domack, one of the leading Antarctic researchers, was a Hamilton professor! I knew I wanted to study with him."
The rest, as they say, is "history."
Today, Professor Domack is Emily's advisor, and Emily is one of the Hamilton geologists (students and faculty members) who travel to Antarctica, where the study of sea floor sediments -- layered by millions of years of glacial melt -- can lead to a better understanding of global climate change. "Our research focuses on the composition and architecture of sediment drifts, which can provide us with historical, geologic data about climate and ocean changes," she said.
During a National Science Foundation-funded trip to Antarctica (her first of two), Emily and the other researchers discovered an important, new sediment drift on which Emily is now focusing her research. Dubbed the "Vega Drift," this body is likely the largest of its kind on the Antarctic Shelf.
"Although the Vega Drift is, ultimately, just another piece in the puzzle of climate research, it's especially interesting to us because of its size and location," she said. "It's likely that it could provide new evidence of climate changes that impacted the Antarctic region." Because the Vega Drift has just recently been discovered, researchers can't collect sediment samples accurately until they have adequate maps of the drift. That's where Emily's project comes in: "Using bathymetric readings and seismic lines, I'm making my own map of the drift," she said.
That mapping project recently sent Emily to San Francisco, where she presented her findings at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting. For Emily, the whole experience has been full of "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunities. "Not only is Professor Domack an extremely important mind in his field, but he gave me the chance to conduct real, significant research," she said. "I really value the education that Hamilton has given me."
