Geosciences in the Field

What I try to tell young people is that if you come together with a mission, and its grounded with love and a sense of community, you can make the impossible possible.   – Rep. John Lewis
Just a few hours west of Starkville, MS, you can find the westernmost evidence of an episode of mountain building that occurred over 200 million years ago. The Sequatchie Anticline, partially eroded between 10 and 20 million years ago, represents the bowing and bending of ancient limestones and shales. These rocks would have formed in marine environments, only to be moved and bent by the crushing forces of two tectonic plates colliding during the Alleghany orogeny. It’s a wild story. Telling it pushes our undergraduates to think back millions of years, imagine a different world, and use evidence left at the surface today to illustrate what has now been eroded.
Students taking Structural Geology (GG 4413) conduct fieldwork in Blount County, Alabama to reconstruct the Sequatchie Anticline. They collect information about the rocks that are left behind, sketching outcrops and recording the orientations or tilts of these rocks on maps. Knowing where and how much the rocks are bent helps the students estimate where the rocks are missing and how the missing rock would have been oriented. The students construct 2D views into the landscape called “cross sections”, and like slicing into a cake to reveal layers, these cross sections show bends and breaks in the rocks hidden underground. Constructing these cross sections is difficult (and may at first feel impossible), but when students work together, they accomplish their goals.
Fieldwork in the geosciences is about more than science. Our students build a sense of community by cooking together, camping, and watching out for each other in the field. Students studying the Sequatchie Anticline camp at Rickwood Caverns State Park, where they can fossil hunt together and admire the Bangor Limestone before a meal by the campfire.