Hey there! My name is Baron Hoffmeister and I am a graduating senior at the University of South Florida. I am pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental science with a minor in geology. I have always been drawn to the outdoors, and extremely curious about nature and how things work. When I decided to attend college I knew that I wanted to study something related to science. I decided to pursue environmental science as I became extremely interested in climate change and resource management. In my junior semester at USF, I went on my first geology field trip to Fort de Soto Park in St. Petersburg, Florida. This was for USF’s Sedimentary Environments course and the goal of the trip was to study common sedimentary structures associated with barrier island formations. On this field-trip, we explored the barrier islands that make up Fort de Soto park and in several locations took pound core samples and dug trenches. In figure 1 you can observe some of the pound core samples taken from various parts of Fort De Soto Park. This is one of many useful methods that sedimentologists use to understand depositional history within a small region. This hands-on field experience left an impact on me and I immediately fell in love with geology. I was so far along in my environmental science program that it didn’t make sense to switch majors, so I chose to pick up a minor in geology instead. Fortunately, the majority of the geology courses I have taken all allowed me to take trips and participate in fieldwork relating to the courses. Most importantly, each of my professors expresses such a profound passion for geology that it is infectious and this has been instrumental in my admiration for geology.
Pound core samples from Fort De Soto Park in St. Petersburg, FL.
My favorite part about being a scientist is that it allows me to spend time outdoors learning about the environment and the process that takes place that shapes the world we live in. This has always driven my passion for science and has carried over into my personal life. Any opportunity that I can find to go and explore nature I jump at. Figure 2 is a photo from my last trip to Colorado where I had the chance to explore the Calhan Paint Mines and study the large clay deposits in this region. It was very cold and windy that day. I believe with the windchill the temperature that day was in single digits. There was also a brief snow shower that rolled through and covered the entire park in a fresh layer of snow while we were there. After living in Florida for the past five years it was nice to finally see some snow again!
Currently, I am interning for a contract management group before I apply to graduate school for sedimentary geology to start in the Fall of 2021. I am interested in studying sedimentary geology and its relation to paleoclimate. Specifically, I am interested in how past climates have affected the rates of sedimentation and carbon cycling. I want to use this information to understand how current climate change patterns affect carbon cycling and sedimentation throughout the world. Science communication is critical for sharing ideas, research, and for education, but it is also crucial for being a great scientist. That’s why I have decided to write for Time Scavengers. I am excited about this learning process and the opportunity to educate others about geology, and understanding climate change!
I would tell any aspiring scientist to work hard and pursue an education, even if it is through your own efforts and experience.
Mckenna here- This post will show you the geology of the Mount Rogers Formation and Virginia Creeper Trail on a recent field trip I took to Virginia!
Day 1
Image 1. Our professor leading us to a geology lookout point on the way to Abingdon to see an outcrop (visible rock formation).
On October 10th of 2019, my Mineralogy, Petrology, and Geochemistry class went on a 4 day field trip to Abingdon, Virginia. Imagine this: it’s October. You love fall but you’ve lived in Florida your whole life, and you finally get to wear all the winter clothes you bought for no apparent reason. Considering these facts, my excitement for the trip was through the roof. After a 14 hour ride in a van with 10 other people and frequent restroom stops (much to the dismay of my professor) we finally arrived in Abingdon, Virginia to the joys of leaves turning colors and a crisp feeling in the air. A van full of (mostly) Florida-born students seeing fall leaves for what was probably the first time was a van full of amazement and pure excitement. It sounds silly, but it was really wholesome seeing how giddy everyone got just by seeing some colorful trees (me included). We got to our hotel and prepared for the next day spent in the field.
Day 2
Image 2. Rhyolite at Mt. Rogers with visible high silica flow banding (lava flow)
We woke up early in the morning and were able to enjoy a delightful breakfast made by the hotel to kick start our day. I packed my lunch and snacks and put on layers of clothes to be ready for any weather. I put on my new wool socks from the outlet store and old hiking boots that seemed structurally sound at the time (important to note for later). On our way to Mount Rogers in Damascus, Virginia we happened to take a road conveniently coined “The Twist”. As a long term participant in unwillingly becoming motion sick in situations such as going down one of the curviest roads in Virginia, I wasn’t thrilled. Luckily, I knew mountain roads could be bad so I packed some Dramamine which I made sure I took every time we got in the van from then on.
Once we got to Mount Rogers my friend and I immediately had to use the bathroom which in this case, was wherever you felt like the trees concealed you enough. They don’t really mention this too much for field trips/field camps but bring toilet paper!! It will make your life a lot easier. After this venture, we were soon on the hunt for rhyolite. Rhyolite is a type of rock that my professor has talked a lot about and I had heard from other students that it is mostly what you will be seeing on the Virginia trip. It is a type of igneous rock that has a very high silica content so it is considered felsic (which is usually light colored). Rhyolite is made up of the minerals quartz, and plagioclase with smaller amounts of hornblende and biotite.
The upper part of the Mount Rogers Formation consists mostly of rhyolite which we have, thanks to the continental rifting that occurred around 750 mya. The volcanoes that were once present here erupted and the igneous rock formed from the lava flow.
Figure 1. Formation of rift valley in Mt. Rogers (From Radford)
We used our rock hammers that you can see in Image 2 to break off bits of Rhyolite and observe them under our handheld lenses. Through these lenses, we could (almost) easily identify the minerals present in our rock samples.
Stop after stop, we observed more rhyolite. It became quite easy to answer our professor’s questions as to what type of rock we were looking at; the answer was usually “Whitetop Rhyolite”. There were, however, different types of rocks as we descended down the side of the mountain: buzzard rock and cranberry gneiss.
Image 3. Buzzard rockImage 4. Cranberry gneiss
After we were finished at our first destination, we drove off to Grayson Highlands State Park. Here we observed more outcrops of rhyolite with a new fun bonus: tiny horses. Apparently, these tiny horses were let loose here in the late 20th century to control the growth of brush in the park. Now, there are around 150 of them that live in the park and are considered wild. While the park discourages petting the horse, you are able to get a cool selfie with them!
Image 5. Selfie with tiny horse in Grayson Highlands State Park
At the state park , there were lots and lots of giant rocks to climb on which everyone seemed to enjoy doing. So, while climbing the rocks, we were also observing and identifying them so it was a great combination. I was taking the liberty to climb almost every rock I saw and everything was going great for the time being. At one rock, I decided I wanted some pictures, for the memories! Mid mini photo shoot, I realized that the sole of my hiking boot had come clean off. Luckily, TWO very prepared people in my class happened to have waterproof adhesive tape and offered for me to use it to fix my boots. I was so thankful (and impressed that they had it in the first place) for the tape and used it to wrap my sole back to my boot and reinforce my second one because I noticed that the sole was starting to come off. The taped boots almost got me through to the end of the second day but I had to do some careful, soleless walking to get back to the van. I was able to go to the store near our hotel to get some replacement boots for the third, and final day in the field.
Image 6. Realization of broken bootImage 7. The final product of taped boots
Day 3
Image 8. Shale sample taken from outcrop along the Virginia Creeper Trail
The last day in the field was spent at the Virginia Creeper Trail in Damascus, Virginia. This specific trail serves almost entirely as a 34 mile cycling trail; by almost entirely, I mean entirely a cycling trail with the exception of a class full of geology students. Our day consisted of identifying rock types in outcrops along the trail and receiving a wide range of looks from cyclists passing by as our lookouts at the front and back yelled out for us to get out of the way. We walked around 1.5 miles of the trail, all while taking notes and pictures while our professor and teaching assistants were explaining each outcrop. Once we reached a certain point, our professor informed us that they would be leaving to get the vans and we would be walking back the way we came plus a half mile or so and identifying each outcrop while counting our steps and noting our bearings. So we measured our strides and got into groups to commence the journey. The goal of this was to eventually be able to create a map of our own that indicated each outcrop type and where they were on the path we took.
Image 9. Mudstone displaying “varves”, which are a seasonal bedding pattern that develops in high latitude lakes. The thicker deposits develop in the summer and the thinner ones develop in the winter (please ignore my nailpolish-it is not a good idea to paint your nails before a geology trip).
This all sounds relatively simple, right? The answer is well, not really. The entire venture took around 4 or 5 hours and honestly made some people a little grumpy. I was happy though, because among the rhyolites and basalts, we were also able to see some really cool sedimentary rocks. Along the way we saw some awesome shale (Image 8) which we were told had some fossils in it if you looked hard enough. Of course, being interested in sedimentary geology I would’ve stayed forever chipping away at the shale to find a fossil but we were quickly ushered along by one of our professors. Shale is a type of sedimentary rock that is formed from packed silt or clay and easily separates into sheets. This type of rock is formed under gentle pressure and heat which allows organic material to be preserved easier as opposed to igneous or metamorphic rocks. As we continued along the trail we also saw mudstones and sandstones, diamictites, and conglomerates. After reaching the end of our journey, my group might have gone a little overboard and recorded 51 different outcrops. The outcrops we recorded could be reduced to: basalt, rhyolite, diamictite, conglomerate, sandstone/mudstone, and shale. The last field day was now concluded with tired feet but happy hearts as we listened to Fleetwood Mac in the van on the way back to the hotel.
Image 10. Diamictite (type of conglomerate) with poorly sorted grains suspended in a clay matrix. This specific rock was likely created by glacial activity and/or volcanic activity.
Day 4
We had a very early morning, skipped the hotel breakfast (they put out fruit and pastries for us though), and piled into the vans for a long journey back to Tampa, Florida. This trip was everything I had hoped it would be and made me fall in love with geology even more than I already was! I hope to go on many more adventures like this in the future.
Bonus images of cool finds:
Image 11. Swallowtail feldspar (basalt) contains epidote and quartz. Lava cooled very quickly which caused rapid crystallizationImage 12. Rhyolite with pyrite (fool’s gold) clasts visible under hand lens
If you’ve been following Time Scavengers, you may have seen the paleo news posts that my students have written, which have been great! This post is a summary post about what I learned and what my students learned throughout the course of this project. I teach an upper- level class for geoscience majors at The University of South Florida called paleontology and stratigraphy. When I was designing what the course would look like, I tried to think about the skills I most wanted my students to have upon leaving. As most of my students in my classes won’t become paleontologists— they’ll go into a wide variety of science jobs— I wanted to find skills that will help them, no matter where they go. A lot of the things I want them to learn are already skills emphasized in a lot of college classes, including the ones I teach— critical thinking, evidence- based arguments, hypothesis testing, and other things. But one thing that I value a lot in science is the ability to communicate clearly with anyone, not just scientists.
The talks, seminars, and papers that I see and read and resonate with most are those that are easily accessible. It’s hard to get engaged and get excited about a topic (even something in my field!) if I have to continuously stop and think about what the person might be trying to say— I think most people would probably feel the same. I wanted my students to practice explaining scientific concepts in a way that anyone who wanted to read it would understand, so that when they wrote papers, presented research talks, talked to future clients, or even chatted with people about their science in cabs or at family gatherings, they could remember how to break down complicated concepts in an effective way without removing the main points of the science.
Example of the graphics made to showcase the USF Paleo/Strat student work. These were shared on the Time Scavengers social media channels.
Students chose a recently published paper of their own interest and wrote a draft of their summary. Then, they had a chance to learn a bit more about the peer review process scientists go through (check out more on how peer review and publishing works here) by trading drafts with a partner and reviewing their work for clarity, accuracy, and grammar. I made final suggestions as the editor. Finally, the posts were published on this site! You can read all of my excellent students’ work here: USF Paleo/Strat
Students really seemed to enjoy this project, so much so that I had an idea for this spring and summer: to get students involved in a long term project to develop their scientific communication skills. Over the next few months, you’ll start seeing posts from my students who are writing a series of blogs and paper summaries as they work to develop their scientific communication skills. If you haven’t yet had a chance to meet Kailey, Lisette, Baron, or Mckenna, check out their bios now!
Standing outside of NASA Ames, where Lisette worked in aiding the lunar landing mission!
What is your favorite part of being a scientist?
Ever since I was very young, I’ve always had a fascination with geology. In elementary school, I would tout around my battered copy of the Smithsonian handbook on rocks and minerals and take notes in my “research journal”. Rocks littered every available surface of my room, and my ears always perked up when we finally reached the Earth Science section of our science classes. What’s cooler than learning about Earth’s layers and how volcanoes form? During field trips, I would sometimes get separated from the group, too mesmerized by rocks that I found on the ground. Even with all these signs, it wasn’t until the end of my first year in university that I realized that I could become a geologist and work with rocks for a career.
I started off in a field that I was pressured into but that I had no passion for. How could I miss geology as a career option? For many years prior, every geologist that I encountered in my textbooks were white men. While I was working on one of my assignments, I looked over to see what my friend was working on. The assignment was to use Steno’s Laws of Stratigraphy to determine what order the rock layers were deposited. I thought the assignment was fascinating while my friend looked at me with a strange face. They told me about their professor, Dr. Sheffield, and how passionate she was for geology and all the amazing fieldwork she’s done throughout her career. This was a mindblowing moment for me: it was the first time I learned about a female geologist. That same day, I went to the student affairs office and changed my major to Geology.
From that day forward, I got to experience first hand what a difference doing what you love made in one’s life. My favorite part of being a scientist is simply that there’s always more to learn. Every single day, I wake up incredibly excited to go to class and learn about minerals, volcanoes, and paleobiology. I still remember being in my old major looking wistfully at the Mineralogy class on the USF course inventory. I’m forever grateful that now, that’s what I study all the time! I look over my room and now there are textbooks on planetary volcanism, astrobiology, and sedimentology that join the rocks scattered on various surfaces. Sometimes, I feel like I never really changed from that child who loved rocks: now, I’m just working to be able to collect rocks for the rest of my life.
What do you do?
Right now, I’m studying geology and astronomy at the University of South Florida. My future goals are to get accepted into a PhD program for planetary science, and then hopefully work on the research team that analyzes samples from the surface of Mars and become a curator at a natural history museum!
Most of the research I do works towards uncovering the geologic past of celestial objects. It’s the perfect overlap between my two favorite subjects: geology and astronomy! Last summer, I conducted research about Martian ice caps at Brown University through the Leadership Alliance – an awesome program aimed at increasing diversity in STEM (read my Time Scavengers post about it here!). I also interned at NASA, where I helped write the code of a navigation program that would assist scientists locate ideal landing areas on the Moon. This upcoming summer, I’m really excited to be working with the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History on analyzing meteoritic samples collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. The samples collected contain information on the earliest history of our solar system! I’m using my time in undergraduate studies to get a clearer idea of what branch of planetary science I’d like to delve into in graduate school.
Volunteering as a mentor for NCAS (NASA’s Community College Aerospace Scholars).
How does your research contribute to the understanding of climate change and the betterment of society in general?
I believe research in the planetary sciences helps humanity as a whole by illuminating our role in the universe. By addressing the questions of the universe, the answers to our day to day problems become clearer through perspective. It’s easier to plot out humanity’s destiny and how to build a better society for everyone by figuring out where we came from and how the universe around us is changing. This is particularly important when considering the future of humans in space. Being able to find geologic analogs of celestial terrain (like the Martian surface) on Earth will help us decide which crops and structures work best for the Martian environment. As we continue exploring the universe, it’s important to keep in mind universal codes of safety, planetary preservation, and anti-imperialism in order to avoid harming the new environments we enter.
What methods do you use to engage your audience and community? What have you found to be the best way to communicate science?
One of the first pieces of advice that one of my mentors, Dr. Mustard, bestowed onto me was that “science is never done in a vacuum”. Collecting scientific data is an incredibly exciting part of research, but it’s also essential to communicate your findings with others to increase scientific literacy and humanity’s pool of knowledge. Science is all about sharing what you’ve learned and what you’ve experienced. It is much more rewarding involving different perspectives and helping everyone feel included. Through my officer positions at two clubs at USF, the Geology Club and the Contemporary Art Museum Club, I promote the importance of STEAM and interdisciplinary research. I believe one of the keys to successful science communication is to express why one’s excited about the topic and to make it relatable to what others are interested in. I’m really excited to join Time Scavengers as a science communications intern in order to hone in on this essential skill and become a better scientist overall.
Standing at the base of the 40 foot radio telescope at Green Bank Observatory!
What advice do you have for aspiring scientists?
My advice would be to just take a moment and think about what you really want from life. I’ve spent countless years just trying to follow what others expected me to do that I never really thought about what I wanted to be. Following the path others decide for you is no way to live your life. You’re the one who will have to live out your career path, so choose one you’re passionate in! There’s definitely space for you! There is such a wide range of fields, from studying bugs to glaciers, you deserve to make your mark the way that you want to.
Finding where you belong is essential to unlocking the zeal that will pull you through obstacles and challenges. Prior to joining the geology department, I was a very shy and reserved person. However, my passion for geology and astronomy (and the endless kindness from geologists) gave me the courage to overcome my anxieties and become resilient in the face of adversity. I transformed from a quiet and socially anxious person into the president of my university’s Geology Club and founder of USF’s Society of Women in Space Exploration Chapter. Openly doing what you love will also surround you with like-minded individuals that are the key to building a good support group! My favorite part about becoming a geologist would definitely be being able to network and meet others who are just as passionate about rocks as I am. It’s exhilarating, being friends with geologists and gathering around in the parking lot of a Waffle House to examine an outcrop. The feeling of togetherness is unmatched.
The 2020 Pilot Virtual Internship Program in Science Communication was spearheaded by Committee Chair, Sarah Sheffield with assistance from Adriane Lam and Jen Bauer. The program was intended to provide students with a required internship prior to graduation as many programs had been canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This program was approximately 5 weeks long and the interns were expected to produce 10 blog posts each.
This program was tagged and collated as USF Intern.
