Rocking her senior year

Halle ('16) studied an active volcano and worked with some of the top geologists in the country. 

 

It’s mid-summer. Mount Shasta’s snow-covered peaks in sunny northern California rise before the Franklin & Marshall student-faculty research team. They work around this active volcano to map igneous flows and study molten materials just beneath the earth.

“This project deals with a lot of chemical analyses and interpretation of how magmatic bodies are interacting under the surface. I find that absolutely exhilarating,” said Sam Patzkowsky, a senior geoscience major with an eye on graduate school.

Patzkowksy and senior geoscience major Halle Putera conducted geological fieldwork in the Cascade Mountains of California and Oregon with Stanley Mertzman, the Earl D. Stage and Mary E. Stage Professor of Geosciences.

“Mount Shasta last erupted 300 years ago, and, as people found out, many volcanos have a rhythm,” Mertzman said. “Humans might live 75, 85 years; volcanos have that same kind of rhythm—they may have 100, 200, 300 years between eruptions. But some will go as long as 5,000 to 7,000 years between eruptions. It’s up to scientists to tease out when the next eruption is likely to occur.”

To this end, scientists study the composition of past lava flows and silica found in volcanic rocks, Mertzman said. “The degree of danger, the degree of explosivity to that volcano is directly proportional to that silica content. As the silica content goes up, the viscosity of the magma goes up, which means that it becomes thicker, pastier, more difficult for the effervescent gases to get through the material – and kaboom! – much more explosive.”