A core skill of any geologist, creating a geologic map is like describing a whole iceberg by examining its tip.
First, the geologist has to observe and record above-ground clues — various types of rock and their ages; different faults and folds, and sometimes conflicting evidence of other geologic forces and stresses below ground. Then, the task is to render that three-dimensional data into two dimensions, on a piece of paper.
Especially for the younger students, the mapping projects proved to be Maine-granite hard.
“We didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
At one point during his and his partner’s mapping project at Craters of the Moon, a national monument and preserve in southeastern Idaho known for its volcanic geology, “we didn’t know what the hell was going on,” says Sam Rickerich ’18, a geology and mathematics major from York, Maine.
In the case of the Bates trip, the observations and mapping were all done by hand using protractors, rulers, and colored pencils. While digital mapping is becoming the norm in geology, there’s value in old-school methods, which the professors chose partly due to limited Internet connectivity and partly because “we really want them to focus on seeing the geology and putting it down by hand into their notebooks,” Dyk Eusden says.
Geology major Ian Hillenbrand ’17 of Terrace Park, Ohio, says that recording field observations by hand, “instead of just waiting to put it onto a computer later,” forces you to be “more aware of your location, to be more responsible for your personal data-taking. And it’s a more tactile, direct experience. Your observation goes straight from what you see to a piece of paper.”
Feeling so lost was “hard but good.”
Hazel Cashman ’18, an anthropology and geology double major from Bellingham, Wash., recalled creating her map of Craters of the Moon. While she wasn’t staring at a blank page, she also wasn’t looking at a complete map, either. “I was drawing it and thinking how it could be totally wrong, but I had no idea how to make it correct.”
Feeling so lost was “hard but good” because “a lot of times in school we know exactly what’s expected, which is not necessarily how it is in the real world.”
Indeed, mapping at Craters of the Moon flummoxed many of the students. Sam Rickerich’s moment of what-the-hell confusion came from seeing “basaltic magma, big flows, and cinder cones, and trying to figure out the relationship between all of them.”
“I got to understand a place in a really intimate and complete way.”
Jake Atwood says that heading into the barren, vast landscape of Craters of the Moon with his partner to record his observations was like being in the Hunger Games, “where it was just me and a partner kind of wandering, figuring it out.”
Their final map had 18 different units and 20 different symbols to indicate the different amounts and types of rocks of different ages. “It felt like we’d really accomplished something,” Atwood says. “I got to understand a place in a really intimate and complete way that I’d never been able to [get] from just living in a place.”
“It’s one thing to see a map and to read a map,” says Geneviève Robert. “It’s a whole other thing to create a map yourself. You really appreciate what you’ve created, from a blank page, with your sweat, colored pencils, and a ruler.”