September 29, 2016
The following post is part five of a seven-part series where JSG grad students reveal what they were up to over summer break. Enjoy!
Summer at the Jackson School is a pretty unique time for graduate students. It is my first summer here as a Master’s student and I’ve started to notice the relative emptiness of the building after a busy school year. Most grad students make the most of the extra time that they have by doing field work, starting an internship, or sticking around Austin and doing research. Alongside an awesome field experience in California, sitting behind a computer comprised the bulk of my research. As disenchanting as that sounds, I’ve been having a fun time.
A lot of what I do as a computational geoscientist is make pretty looking plots, making it seem as if I’m doing stuff that’s way more impressive than it actually is. For me, these plots deal with understanding how water flows and stable isotopes are transported in the shallow crust in response to a magmatic intrusion. The objective of my research is to determine the mechanisms, be it physical or chemical, that most control fluid flow and stable isotope transport during the formation of a particular type of rocks called skarns. The Sierra Nevada of California has some pretty spectacular exposures of skarns (see picture below) so I was lucky enough to go out there this summer to collect some rocks for analysis. Using facilities on campus, I’m now measuring their stable isotope signatures in order to determine the fluid sources that were involved in the formation of these rocks. I find it so cool that I can use two totally different techniques – numerical modeling and analytical geochemistry – to address the same problems. I’ve learned a lot in the process but it is great knowing that I’m only scratching the surface.
But honestly, I’ve spent most of my time this summer trying to figure out how to efficiently get the coffee from the 2nd floor copy room of EPS to my 5th floor office in JGB without spilling it. As much as I love going to Pangea Cafe in JGB, I find myself more often than not making the trip to the 2nd floor of EPS for the free stuff. Fortunately, I recently moved offices to 3rd floor of EPS so now I only have one flight of stairs to battle on trips for my lifeblood. This may seem unimportant but I know there’s at least one of you out there who can relate with me on this struggle.
