The Penn State Summer Field School in Geosciences has been hampered by travel restrictions over the last two years due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and we were unable to travel out to the intermontane Rocky Mountains familiar to many recent alumni.
Nevertheless, in summer 2021, we incorporated new field exercises in the Appalachians along a transect from upstate New York, across the Valley and Ridge province of Pennsylvania, to the Piedmont province of Maryland. These field trips supplemented a set of virtual exercises developed over the past two years in response to the pandemic. By integrating geologic datasets—geochronology, paleomagnetism, isotopic data—with virtual field trips in Google Earth, the students applied many of the principles they learned in the core of our undergraduate curriculum. Along the way, they also honed their skills in using GIS and other software tools used by professional geologists.
The first half of field camp, taught by Erin DiMaggio and Roman DiBiase, began with virtual exercises that involved mapping, stratigraphic analysis, and cross section construction in the Bighorn Basin. Another virtual exercise explored the tectonic and glacial geomorphology of Jackson Hole at the foot of the Teton Range, building on field data collected during previous class trips. There were two local field exercises in central Pennsylvania, and the course culminated in a camping trip to the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, with exercises focused on the stratigraphy of middle Paleozoic and Quaternary landscape evolution.
Don Fisher, Andy Smye, Maureen Feineman, and Jesse Reimink taught the second half of field camp. It included virtual exercises related to metamorphism in the Western Alps; the structural, volcanic, and thermal history of the Pioneer core complex region in Idaho; cross section construction in the Sevier overthrust belt; and the isotopic systems of the Western Cordillera.
Field exercises included the stratigraphic record of the Taconic orogeny and the metamorphic and geomorphic history of Great Falls and the Maryland Piedmont region—with a guest appearance from Professor Emeritus Rudy Slingerland and Columbia Professor Terry Plank.
Next year, with Penn State now back to in-person teaching, we intend to return to a field-based course in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah. Many of our efforts over the last two years with GIS and new datasets will be used to enrich these field exercises.