The Penn State Geosciences Field Camp completed a successful six-week trip to the intermountain west in summer 2023, with twenty-nine students departing State College in June for a tour of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah before returning to Pennsylvania.
Assistant Research Professor Erin DiMaggio led the first exercise studying late Cretaceous sediments at Elk Basin from the base camp of the Yellowstone Bighorn Research Association in Red Lodge, Montana. The students then investigated the Quaternary history of Jackson Hole, Wyoming with Associate Professor Roman DiBiase.
Professor Don Fisher and Associate Research Professor Maureen Feineman guided the students through mapping the Challis Volcanic Series at the Wildhorse site in Idaho. And with a record Utah snowpack lingering into July, Assistant Professor Max Lloyd and Professor Kevin Furlong introduced students to exercises focused on the record of the Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth event exposed at Antelope Island and deformation along the Wasatch Fault. Also joining the group was postdoc Leila Joyce Seals, who is developing a contextual co-curriculum to support diversity, equity, and inclusion in geosciences.
The 2023 co-curriculum included historical information about the Field Camp study areas and field journaling in which students described their place-based observations of the American West. The graduate teaching assistants for this course, Rory Changleng, Brandon Fong, Kate Grosswiler, Sarah Jonathan, Kate Meyers, and Leah Youngquist, were instrumental to its educational and logistical success. As part of ongoing efforts to make Field Camp more accessible, in 2024 we are transitioning from six weeks in the summer to a four-week summer course supplemented with a new 2-credit class in the spring semester.