Introducing Summer 2012: Part 1, Mongolia Fieldwork
Armchair mountaineering has fully entered the digital age. Slow and cumbersome updates from wild places are now a thing of the past now that blogging and satellite communications have entered the mainstream. So, if you’re looking to travel vicariously to some wild places this summer, you’ve come to the right place.
Part 1: Mongolia Paleoclimate Field Research
This summer, I will return to Mongolia for three and a half weeks for part of my PhD research to develop records of central Asian climate over the past 70 million years. Along with researchers from Stanford University and Rocky Mountain College, I will collect carbonate and clay minerals from sedimentary rocks. These minerals contain oxygen and hydrogen whose oxygen and hydrogen isotopic compositions reflect ancient climate. With samples from the Gobi Desert of southern Mongolia and Khovd Province in the far western part of the country, we can reconstruct climatic and topographic change in central Asia.A Google map of our proposed trip is below. For more on this project and other components of my PhD, visit the Research section of this site.
View
in a larger map
