I have always had fond memories of
the beach. The breezes, the sunshine and the sand between my toes have always
been a part of my life. I was largely raised in the Sunshine State-- Florida.
As a child my parents would take my siblings and I on excursions to beaches all
over the state, sometimes for just a day, other times for weeks. Being on the
coast reminds me of those places and how amazing they are, and sets the stage
for new experiences, new memorable times. And so, I love the beach. What better
way to intermingle both my love of these locations and my
educational/professional goals then to study barrier islands, aka-- big
beaches.
To
properly understand the geomorphology of any barrier island complex, you have
to start at the bottom and work your way up, and by bottom I mean up to 10
meters below that sand that lies beneath my feet. But getting at sand that deep
isn’t easy and maintaining the important aggradational structures can be even
harder. We use a Vibracore.
A vibracore works
essentially like pulling your straw out of your soda with your finger on top--
the soda in the straw stays in the straw as no air can rush in to fill the
space. We use a really big, metal pipe (straw) with a vibrating head to sink it
deep into the core of the barrier island. Then we yank it out, cut it open and
eagerly examine the record of barrier island development presented to us.
The relative
frequency of sand grain sizes found in the core are just as important to this
record as are the structures. So, after field work actually taking the cores
from the island is completed, I take pictures and describe the structures I see
in them, as well as sieving through countless samples to separate and
differentiate between the grain sizes taken at strategic points to garner a more
complete history of the island.
I
plan to work in the petroleum industry upon graduation from George Mason and as
the largest, terrestrial, oil reserves have been found and tapped, the industry
has shifted a major focus to prospecting efforts in the marine realm. Large
slides of sediment from the land into the ocean can trap a large amount of
biological material in a literal heat engine, compressing, cooking and
producing the oil that world runs on. Barrier islands do not hold oil reserves
as they do not remain stationary over long periods of time (geologic time),
however the study of these are similar in many ways to the study of seafloor
oil reservoirs. And lets be honest, I get to work on the beach, and an office
like that is hard to beat.
