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>> DR. BILL HART: I'm Bill Hart, department chair in the Department of Geology here at
Miami University. I'm also the director of the Geology Field Station, based out of Timberline
Ranch in Dubois, Wyoming. Dubois is in the Wind River Basin in Wyoming.
The field station has been operating for 64 consecutive years, as of the summer of 2010,
this coming summer. And what we do at the field station is it serves as a capstone geology
course. We run a number of courses from the field station, but the primary course is our
capstone geology field course. In that course, students learn a variety of techniques. They
build on their experiences in coursework back here during in their major in geology.
And we do a lot of traveling. As I said, we're based out of Timberline Ranch, but for the
first two weeks we're actually on the road, camping and really learning about the geology
of the northern US Cordillera, in other words the Rocky Mountains. We actually go out and
learn about volcanic processes out in the Snake River Plain. We go to Craters of the
Moon National Monument. We then go on to Yellowstone National Park and look at the classic super-volcano
issues that we hear on the news about Yellowstone. And then we head north along basically the
Rocky Mountain front, looking at a variety of sort of classic geologic locations where
we actually get into how mountains form, folding and thrust faulting, and all the processes
that form mountains, such as the Rocky Mountains. And, in fact, we end up in Banff, in Canada,
and look at really classic locations that many of the textbooks have been written on
in terms of mountain-forming processes.
And then we head on back to Dubois, Wyoming, where we spend three weeks based out of the
ranch. By that time, the students are really ready to back to, even though they're rustic,
cabins that have actual bathrooms and meals cooked for them rather than camping out for
the two weeks. And while we're there, the students are working on mapping projects where
they're actually being asked to go out and construct geologic maps of a variety of different
locations nearby the ranch.
And the students work in teams of anywhere from two to three, which is partly for safety
issues but also so they can bounce ideas off of one another. The mapping projects are a
classic way of thinking about how do you really think creatively and think critically about
solving a problem. You're put out there in a field locality. You're put in a field setting
that has inherent difficulties - weather, wildlife, terrain, all those things - and
you're also being asked to interpret the geology as you do that. So, having field partners
to help both in the logistics as well as bouncing ideas off of is a very valuable experience,
and the students really enjoy that. Day in and day out, it's a fairly standard routine.
We get up. We're out in the field. We're leaving the ranch by 8:00 in the morning. We're usually
back by about 5:00, 5:30 in the evening, and then the evening session runs as late as it
needs for the students to actually complete their work.
So, what the students really get out of this is something that historically has been part
of geology curricula nationwide for well over a hundred years, I would say. It's this ability
to take and interpret real-life situations — and there's no better place to do that
than out in the field for a geologist. And the mapping skills that the students learn,
along with a lot of the other skills that they learn, whether they ever use them directly
to make geologic maps in graduate school or in a job, they've learned a lot of other very
important aspects of how to interpret information and how to work with people. And all those
things are very critical to wherever they're going to go with their career, whether it's
graduate school or industries like oil and gas or the environmental industry.